Hallertau ‘Minimus’

November 18, 2010 Phil Leave a comment

A common complaint of mine is that overstrong beers are too much in fashion (or habit), and that midstrength, sessionable numbers are sadly neglected by the local brewing scene. Granted, the stalwart exception to that trend is the utterly bloody marvellous Emerson’s Bookbinder, but still; more options is more good.

A smattering of other sessionable goodies have shown up over the years¹ but none so face-meltingly awesome, if you ask me, as Hallertau’s ‘Minimus’. (The name comes from its over-strength IPA sibling, ‘Maximus Humulus Lupulus’.) We had it last summer, motored through it in short order, and continually begged Steve for some more. It’s just lovely; either a very pale pale ale or a massively-hopped golden ale, and is totally sessionable at 3.8% — a statistically-insignificant nudge stronger than Bookbinder, it makes for an awesome summer counterpart to that wonderful stuff. Fresh, light but stonkingly flavourful, it has both thirst-quenching zip and interest-keeping yum in healthy quantities, appropriately hitting some Maximus-esque hop notes quite heavily. Its second incarnation, which came with a ludicrously-beautiful tap badge, is billed as a “Breakfast Pale Ale” — but even if that is a stretch, it’s not by very much.

Speaking of the badge — which is done in bas relief, and goes wonderfully with Hallertau’s gorgeous pseudo-classical rebranding — I actually had to re-scan this Diary entry to capture the amendment I had to make to note that some complete fuckpants stole it, one busy night. If you’re thinking — as I briefly was, I’ll admit — “hey, fair play, that is pretty cool; you don’t secure it well, you’re asking for it to be stolen”, I should add that they also stole all the other badges from that bank of taps, so their haul includes such pieces of naff as a Tiger and an Export Gold badge, I believe. So I doubt they’re some over-keen beer souvenier collector with whom I might sympathise — well, would sympathise, would consider being, even. More just a random fuckpants, as I say.

Verbatim: Hallertau ‘Minimus’ 18/11/10 3.8% back on tap @ work, with a gorgeous new bas-relief sculpted tap badge. Hallertau’s pseudo-classical branding overhaul is awesomely done. And this stuff is lovely. The world needs more good midstrength. It especially needs midstrength this freaking good. [30/11/10: The badge got stolen!]

1: A few with their own Diary entries, even, but there’s still quite a backlog of historical things in the Not Uploaded Yet pile. Apologies.

Actual Diary entries, Rambles and rants

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

November 15, 2010 Phil 8 Comments

I’m not going to get properly into the whole “grey market” (or “gray market”, if you’re American) debate here. I’m sure I will do so more fully at a later time, when it inevitably flares up again. I’m actually pretty sympathetic to both sides — which is rare.

My own particular concerns are these:

“Grey market” strikes me as an unfair term, which loads the dice against the “unofficial” importers, since it carries its connotations of being kinda black market — but grey market imports are legal.¹ It certainly doesn’t seem like a neutral term that both sides would use, so it’s probably not a good phrase for commentators to go on using as a label for the debate.
The quality concern should be paramount, but I often get the suspicion that it’s used as window-dressing for a more knee-jerkish desire for good old-fashioned control.² The opposition to parallel importing often seems oddly dogmatic — I just can’t imagine some of the most-vocal opponents actually changing their tune and make an exception were some perfect, quality-guaranteeing dream importer to emerge.
And finally, I’m just not invested enough in this debate to become someone’s martyr. I don’t see the “anti-grey” side as being so obviously right that I’d be willing to join a boycott and deprive myself the change to try something I might never otherwise be able to sample. Yes, yes, I know there may be quality issues — but I’m accustomed to navigating them with everything else as well and can accomodate those possibilities as part of the tasting experience.

Anyway: Sierra Nevada’s Pale Ale, on tap in the Little Country. This is a “grey market” import, in case you were wondering why I went for a spin along that particular tangent — it was basically a “test keg”, actually, to see if kegs of Sierra Nevada would start heading this way just like bottles have been for a good few months now.

I thought it travelled very well, though some local Beer Folk seemed to bubble towards the opinion that it’d been beaten up a bit — I suspect an element of that was the somewhat regrettable pack mentality that sets in when someone “noteworthy” makes an early pronouncement (negative or positive), with maybe also a touch of that phenomenon where it becomes moderately fashionable to knock something once it reaches a certain level of success. In the main, it went down a treat; we blammed through that pilot keg in very short order (possibly helped too much by me, on one particular night).

The only let-down was that we didn’t make enough of a fuss about it, and I don’t even really know why we didn’t. It turned out that we actually tapped our keg — the very first in the country — on the actual goddamn thirtieth birthday of the beer. How neat is that? And it was totally accidental, weirdly. I tried to lobby for the awesomely-ostentatious oversized tap handle to be installed, too. The reasoning was that one big silly handle would look out of place among all the normals — but surely that’s precisely why you do it. Sigh. That said, Peter’s note on the blackboard — written “in Californian” — was awesome.

Verbatim: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale! 15/11/10 apparently the first keg to make it to the Little Country. A bit of a travel test, after which it may become a fixture on tap here @ work. Some of the Beer Snobs have already yeah-yeah-ed themselves into agreeing that it hasn’t travelled well. I say nonsense; is lovely. Maybe, maybe slightly muted. But still its delicious self. I suspect people are confusing it with its gruntier relatives.

— and then a lot / too many more the next night. I discovered that the 15th is the brewdate Birthday; so we tapped ours on its 30th! Worth celebrating, so we did.

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale on tap — Diary II entry #35.1, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

1: Greg Koch, one of the founders of the Stone brewery, made a spectacularly arse-faced appearance on the RealBeer.co.nz forum in which he characterised a parallel import of his beer as “black market” and “illegal” several times in a short span. That lost him a lot of my sympathy, and it was very hard not to read his comments without uncharitably starting to think they were decidedly sour grapes, given that they were spurred by a negative comment about his beer. Illegality is a serious accusation to fling at someone so casually — even if there’s a question of whether one of the middlemen had broken a no-exporting deal, that’d just be an issue of breach of contract, not the proper breach of statute that his terminology and outrage imply.
2: To return to Greg Koch (from footnote 1), he quite-casually throws around the phrase “fresh-and-as-intended, or not at all”, which does set me wondering just where he wants to get off that train; what else gets smuggled into “as intended”? I really hope he took Stu’s quoted song lyrics to heart, and calmed down a bit.

Actual Diary entries, Rambles and rants

Emerson’s Brewers’ Reserve: ‘Grace Jones’ Porter

November 10, 2010 Phil Leave a comment

Diary II entry #34, Emerson's 'Grace Jones'

The Emerson’s brewers are here doing their own version of the Barry White joke I made in reference to their Oatmeal Stout. Not that I’m claiming credit, of course. But it’s nice to have a “thinking alike” moment now and then.

Much like the recent Southern Clam Stout, ‘Grace’ does make for another worthy successor to ‘Barry’ — especially given the texture-smoothifying oats they’ve used here (which were obviously also in the Oatmeal Stout, hence the name). They cite the Anchor Porter as an inspiriation, implying higher-than-usual levels of hops which showed up, to me, as a nicely ‘zingy’ edge around all that delicious chocolate flavour.

I do like Emerson’s London Porter a lot, but also wish they’d put something like this into permanent production — it’d be nice to have a bigger, ‘stoutier’ option on the roster, too. Which does of course bring up the question of stout versus porter, since here’s me saying that this is ‘stouty’. I’d just been reading Martyn Cornell’s masterful mythbusting post on the topic, so it was on my mind and lead to an oddly-heated discussion with some of the Beer Nerds. Myself, I’m perfectly happy with the realisation that a lot of what we Nerds have in our heads about the ‘classic styles’ is alarmingly-modern, actually, and pretty much entirely non-historical. That’s not a big deal; the terms are still useful enough — and this happens to our entire language anyway, all the time. I don’t really see why some people get bent out of shape and spend their time so passionately reifying descriptions that were always pretty loose and negotiable.

You can still be grumpy — and believe me, I am — about egregiously silly unilateral attempts to lock up or modify bits of the beer-related lexicon — he says, looking at you, D.B., and your nonsense-faced defence of the ‘Radler’ trademark you know damn well you should never have applied for, nor been granted — without turning into a total anorak who fights for hard-and-fast distinctions where there needn’t be any.

Verbatim: Emerson’s Brewers’ Reserve: Grace Jones 10/11/10 guest @ MH 6% The Beer Club folks had this, and I scandalised them with the thought (from Zythophile) that there just isn’t a principled stout / porter distinction. They got oddly mad + defensive. Anyhow, I’d had this at Nerding one night a few weeks ago; we all liked it then, but I didn’t diarise it. Is lovely. Very dark, with ruby highlights. Apparently inspired by Fullers & Anchor porters. Pretty worthy, really. Massively chocolatey, smooth (oats!), but with a nice zingy edge.

Actual Diary entries

West Coast Brewing Pale Ale

November 1, 2010 Phil Leave a comment

My friends and I became very fond of the West Coast beers when we stopped for a night in the tiny town of Blackball, and had more than a few at the ‘Hilton’. Their lager and dark are certainly nothing socks-knocking in craft beer terms, but they’re well made, tasty, and acquired a lot of ‘bonus points’ from the situation and setting, of course. This happens a lot with beer, sociable thing that it is.

Years later, the brewery did a bit of a share float to raise money for some expansion plans. My friends who’d been there at the Hilton — who all have day jobs and who all earn, you know, actual money — bought in. Then it seemed a bit odd that I, as the Beer Nerd, wasn’t in on it, too. So I bought one share off one of them, for the princely sum of 31¢.

So this is how much of a stickler I am for some sort of ‘journalistic’ integrity in beer writing. I have thirty-one cents in a brewery and feel obliged to say so. It drives me bonkers that this basic impulse to declare conflicts of interest isn’t much shared. I can think of several instances of people writing professionally about a brewery or a beer without divulging such probably-pertinent facts as close friendships, occasional employment, or other such potential or actual conflicts. It’s something I’ll have to make more of a stink about sometime soon, and then maybe just start naming names and ‘outing’ the offenders.

Anyway, West Coast recently hired a new junior brewer, and one of his first tasks was to take a crack at a pale ale. I think they did pretty admirably; it’s not overwhelming, but not all pale ale needs to be, and given the ‘pitch’ of their other beers, this will make for a nice little stepping stone without freaking out their core customers. It’s quite moreishly sharp and citrussy, though some Nerdier people did pick out some faulty flavours kicking around in there, too — but this is a first batch, and they do have some seriously-refined brewers’ palates, rather sensitive to these things.

Verbatim: West Coast Pale Ale 1/11/10 on tap @ MH ?% I feel I have to declare my official conflict of interest, in that I’m the smallest shareholder of West Coast Brewery. Got to know Darryl, the bosses’ son a bit over the years, and he mentioned this was headed our way when he was here at Festival time. It’s pretty damn nice; not aggressive, but more in the Creatures / Croucher mold — the sharpish, in a nice way. Very citrussy, but not one-note. Slightly hazy, nicely tart + refreshing + moreish. I had some of this here on Hallowe’en Eve, when we all dressed up; but I was in no state to make a proper note, then. So I had this while watching the Zombie Episode of Community. Neat.

Actual Diary entries

Croucher Pale Ale

October 30, 2010 Phil Leave a comment

Saturday brought an end to my Hamilton Expedition, but did compensate me with a lovely drive home down State Highway 4 — I decided I’d done SH1 too often, so thought I’d go around the other side of the Lake. And when I got home, I had a house full of people getting ready for a day-early dose of Hallowe’en craziness.

Peter and I were relatively-lazy with our Hallowe’ening (though him much moreso than me), so we had a bit of time to kill and therefore a beer. We’re both big fans of Croucher’s Pale and I found the new bigger 500ml bottles up the road at Regional. They’re now also brewing at Steam in Auckland, which gives them some extra capacity with which to meet their (deservedly) increasing demand and have a crack at some export markets. These bottles are labelled up ready for the U.S., and I was chuffed to see that Paul’s original (and accurate) tasting note of “delicious burps” has been left intact.

And the beer is just as good as it ever was. Possibly a tad better, if anything. If I had to pin down a difference, I think the fresh, fruity (Cascadey) hops are even more present in the aroma than they were last time I had one. It’s a delicious beer, and was just what I needed.

It deserves to do well overseas, and I think it (and the Pilsner) are a good bet. Exporting to places like the U.S. from little old New Zealand is a tricky proposition. Tuatara took a crack at it a little while ago with their IPA, which I thought was vaguely mad — would the Americans really go for such a relatively-sedate take on the style, given their hop-mad craft beer sensibilities? And Tuatara had their U.S.-labeled beers around a time when they were already stretched to capacity and seemed to be sacrificing conditioning time to meet local demand. Don’t get me wrong, I like their IPA, but it just didn’t seem like the right beer or the right time. Croucher’s more-individual Pale and Pils could well be a better fit.

Verbatim: Croucher Pale Ale 30/10/10 500ml ÷ 2 w/ Peter $6 from Regional 5% At my house after a long drive back down SH4, and while the girls are upstairs getting all Hallowe’en’ed. Apparently production has shifted to Steam, possibly after Kaimai re-took their kit. They’re bottling for the US market now, too. And more power to them. The awesome original “delicious burps!” tasting note has survived, and the beer hasn’t changed much — if at all, for the better. Lush, fruity, yum. Bigger fresh-Cascadey nose, perhaps.

Actual Diary entries

Gouden Carolus ‘Hopsinjoor’

October 29, 2010 Phil 2 Comments

An evening of pub-hopping and beer-having had made Kirsten and I rather peckish, so we backtracked a little up Hood Street to a place called Gothenburg, which had caught our eye on our way to House. She picked the food, and I took about ten times as long to pick the beers.

I had missed this ‘Hopsinjoor’ when we had a few bottles at work — we presumably got them from the same place the restaurant did; local (to Hamilton, that is) beer importers Beer Store — so leapt at the chance to have one. Kirsten herself had never had the Westmalle Tripel, and I thought both would go well with the prawns, calamari and anchovy pizza we’d ordered. And go well they did, indeed. I feel I deserve some Beer Matching points for that, but really the bulk of the credit goes to the restaurant for their insanely yumtastic food, and to these rather clever breweries.

The ‘Hopsinjoor’, as the name begins to give away, is a hoppier-than-usual Belgian ale, which has considerable zing thereby added to the nicely dry, complex goodness that is a well-made pale golden strong ale of its type. Trading a few sips for a side-by-side comparison, the extra angles of flavour become really apparent.

Verbatim: Gouden Carolus ‘Hopsinjoor’ 27/10/10 330ml 8% $14 @ Gothenburg, Hamilton. This place for dinner, and drinks took longer to decide on; I’m guessing that Beer Store are largely to credit for the impressive, Belgian-stuffed beer list. We had this one at work a while ago, but I missed out. It’s a cloudy, pale straw. Big, yeasty nose; not a lot of hops present until you get to the face. There, they give a nice zingy bitterness that is welcome + unusual. Kirsten had the Westmalle Tripel and both have gone ludicrously well with the insanely tasty prawns, calamari + anchovy pizza we went for. Civilised.

Actual Diary entries, Location notes

House on Hood, and House / Croucher ‘Mighty’ Golden Ale

October 29, 2010 Phil 1 Comment

Hamilton really does get a bad rap. Frequently from me, I’ll freely admit. It just has this big, flat, sprawling bland black hole kind of a feel to it — especially when you’re trying to get through it on your way somewhere else.

But there were increasing rumours of Good Pub To Be Had in the City, and so I seized the chance for a roadtrip up to visit a friend and conduct some “research”. Kirsten and I had a nice little wander through town, stopping at several suprisingly-civilised (but non-amazing) places on our way here, to the reputedly-lovely House on Hood.

It’s a charming little place, really; the decor is comfortably cute and quirky but not overdone, and the atmosphere seems pretty relaxed. The beer selection is pretty damn good — I really want to say especially for Hamilton, but that would just seem like lingering bigotry, after this opinion-changing night out — and the list has helpful notes, some of which are summarised and repeated on a handy Big Board for the tap selection. I got the distinct feeling that Nerds would be welcome and wanna-be Nerds would be well helped. I met the owner, and he definitely seemed to have his head screwed-on right; beer is a thing for civilised enjoyment, not for wankery.

And… the Croucher brewery made them a golden. I do loves my golden ale, I do, so that felt particularly welcoming. House fell into the easy and often-done trap of describing it as a lager-ale hybrid, which is a strange combination of kinda getting across the right idea and kinda missing the point entirely — but you get used to that, as a fan of the style, and I suppose it would work to pique the curiosity. Anyway, descriptions aside, it’s lovely. Light and quaffable and refreshing and different enough to be interesting, and fairly sessionable too, at 4.1%. All in all, a damn good idea for an own-brand offering from a place like this — “house beers” are utterly bleh all too often, even when you find them at otherwise-genuinely-lovely places like Betty’s here in Wellington.

Verbatim: House / Croucher ‘Mighty’ Golden Ale 29/10/10 4.1% $8.30 @ House on Hood. Had a few decent little pubs here in the Tron before making our way here — just nice, nothing special. This place looks lovely. Nicely shambling slightly-kitsch interior. Quite a diverse crowd. And Croucher made them a golden! Tasting notes on the wall are a bit limp (“cross between lager + ale”…) but still. It’s proper Golden — light + pretty lovely. When the notebook + camera came out, Kirsten pretended not to know me. Understandable. I borrowed the beer list + met Nathan, the owner; all the right ideas about enthusiasm for good beer while avoiding over-done wankery.

Actual Diary entries

Emerson’s ‘Southern Clam’ Stout

October 23, 2010 Phil Leave a comment

This must be a pretty-damn-rare example of the Emerson’s brewers following, rather than leading. You just couldn’t say that this wasn’t knowingly made in homage to Three Boys’ ludicrously masterful Oyster Stout.¹ The comparisons are as inevitable as they are apt, and the thing about Imitation’s place on the Sincerity Scale of Flattery Analysis comes immediately to mind.

It’s properly huge and rich and coffee-ish, and the briny / salt air accompaniment just touches things off perfectly, just as it does with the Oyster Stout — or with posh, rock-salt-topped chocolates. If there’s a difference, though I didn’t side-by-side them, I might say that this is ‘livelier’ in the carbonation and thereby body, but it’s still very Barry White.

Verbatim: Emerson’s ‘Southern Clam’ Stout 23/10/10 500ml $8? from Regional 6% The label actually says “Warning: contains shellfish”. The smell is gorgeous. Rich + coffeeish, with that salt-air hint. The inevitable comparison will be to the (awesome) Three Boys Oyster Stout, but you know the thing about imitation + sincere flattery, right? Quite impressive, really. Hugh flavour; a body full of chocolate with that same saltiness just blamming it up a notch like it does with the Oyster, or with posh chocolates. Possibly a touch ‘livelier’ than Oyster, but still very Barry White.

1: I definitely have at least one diary entry and photo for this lovely stuff; I just haven’t gotten around to uploading them, yet. Sincere apologies. But meanwhile, your homework assignment is to note it on your list of Must Haves. Unless you’re a vegetarian or something. It does have actual oysters in there. So put it on your Must Have If Ever I Deconvert list, or something.

Actual Diary entries

Mikkeller ‘10’

October 23, 2010 Phil Leave a comment

Mikkeller is a wonderfully-mad roving brewer. He’s Danish, but this beer is properly tagged as ‘from Belgium’ — he brews all over the place, the absolute reigning rockstar of collaborations and experiments and (more than occasionally) ludicrously whacked-out beers.

As an exploration / demonstration of the individual character of different hop varieties, he did a ten-member series of single-hopped IPAs, each using an identical base recipe and just one cultivar for its bittering and aroma to really show it off. And then — because, frankly, why the hell not? — he made a 10-hopped IPA with that same base and a bit of everything.

Tasi, one of our regulars and a bartender at Hashigo, kindly gave me a bottle, the mad rainbowy design of which has a section of each of the single-coloured labels from the earlier series — like a tolerable version of that absurd EU “barcode” flag proposal. The colour of the beer itself was gorgeous, and you’d have to assume that was true of the ‘singles’, too — the nose, however, was naturally something else entirely with a hell of a lot going on. The masterstroke was just that, though. It’s very easy to overdo things, with beer, and this could’ve easily tasted like the sound of a jazz band falling down a flight of stairs, if you’ll excuse my recurring synesthesia. But it absolutely didn’t; it had balance, and style, instead.

Verbatim: Mikkeller ‘10’ 23/10/10 gift from Tasi + the peeps @ Hashigo 330ml ÷ 2 w/ Scotty, who has revived that black + red shirt we all like so much. 6.9% Really pretty peachy hazy appearance, in a madly colourful bottle, presumably echoing all of the ‘1’ releases at once. (These were a series of single-hopped beers; this has all ten at once.) A suitably complex nose, but not the cacophony it might easily have fallen into. Easily avoids that jazz-band-falling-down-stairs problem of overdoing things. Nothing really stands out individually against the crowd, but that’s probably the point.

Actual Diary entries

Stoke ‘Gold’ & ‘Amber’

October 20, 2010 Phil 22 Comments

When Lion bought out the Mac’s brewery (to be their pseudo-craft brand, parallel with DB’s acquisition of Monteiths for same), they didn’t really do much with the original site. Unlike their rivals, they never pretended that the beers were still coming from the formerly-independent source — so there was no need to maintain a potemkin brewery like DB did in Greymouth.

So when the relevant contractual restrictions lapsed, younger members of Terry McCashin’s family¹ (the patriarch himself still having restraints of trade against him as part of the sale having retired²) re-took the premises and slowly resumed work. They put out a thoroughly yawn-worthy (if you’re me, at least) range of flavoured vodkas (fairly shamelessly aping the 42 Below range), and then some alarmingly-decent ciders under the ‘Rochdale’ name.

Then, at last, came the ‘Stoke’ beers. Which turned out a genuine let-down. Maybe the ironic problem is that they’ve too-faithfully gone back to their roots — the brewing scene has massively moved on since Mac’s gained their fame, deserved at the time as it was.

But that wouldn’t account for the distinctly unwelcome faulty / unfermented remnants-y flavours that made their way out of these beers, as I tried them one night with two fairly like-minded regulars after we all did a training session for a charity-thing I’m involved with. Wafts of dodgy budget homebrew helper come and go with odd and alarming randomness, leaving neither beer with much chance to endear themselves.

And the brandwank is just lazy and boring and awful, too. The beers are uninformatively marketed as ‘Gold’, ‘Amber’ and ‘Dark’. Despite being willing to mumble-mumble past such actually-relevant and potentially-interesting questions such as “what style were you going for?” and “what varieties of ingredients did you chose?” — not addressing such matters in the label text — they took the time to trademark “Paleo Water” and harp on about how the water they use is 14,000 years old.³ I’m not alone in saying that the insight this sort of thing gives into a brewery’s priorities is a bit worrying. It’s definitely time to worry less about the ‘brand’, and to worry more (that is to say, at all) about making the beers not naff.

Diary II entry #27, Stoke 'Gold' and 'Amber'

Verbatim: Stoke ‘Gold’ & ‘Amber’ 20/10/10 freebies from Savior, w/ Steph & Johnny after we did Kaibosh volunteer training. These things really aren’t doing so well. The marketing is just odd; playing up ‘Paleo’™ water for no reason, but equivocating like a crazy-person on actual style, even down to lager v ale. They do both smell distinctly of unfermenteds; like when you open a can of homebrew-helper. There’s a distinct metal zing to each of these, too. Some sips are decent, some are simply rank.

1: Wait. Why the hell does Mac’s have an ‘a’, but McCashin doesn’t? Er, other than the one it does have. You know what I mean.
2: (Edited 15 January 2010.) I was misinformed. Terry’s retired, which makes perfect sense, if you take the time to do the math on how old he is now. Thanks to Emma McCashin for the correction. For a reply to the rest of her comment, see below.
3: Firstly, who cares? Secondly, water is water is water. If it’s pure, being older won’t change it a damn. Thirdly, they can’t decide — with their website fighting their label — whether they want to say “Paleo” or “Palaeo”. Fourthly, the Paleolithic covers about two and a half million years, making the term an odd fit and a bit much of a reach. Fifthly, the vodka they make is ‘26,000’ and named so because of the supposed age of the water involved — which is it? Or are they plumbing seperate irrelevantly-old aquifers? Are they brewers and distillers, or oddly-obsessed geologists? And lastly, who the fuck cares?

Beer Diary

Hallertau ‘Minimus’

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

Emerson’s Brewers’ Reserve: ‘Grace Jones’ Porter

West Coast Brewing Pale Ale

Croucher Pale Ale

Gouden Carolus ‘Hopsinjoor’

House on Hood, and House / Croucher ‘Mighty’ Golden Ale

Emerson’s ‘Southern Clam’ Stout

Mikkeller ‘10’

Stoke ‘Gold’ & ‘Amber’

Tastings and ramblings and whatnot