Sometimes you don’t want all the trappings of an extravagant dinner, with carefully orchestrated service and silver changes after every course.  Sometimes, it’s important to just have some straight forward take-out from the local taqueria, and use it as an opportunity to drink some fun beers. With this attitude in mind, Brian (of Red White and Brew fame) and I set about to drink some beers, play some Wii, and eat some mexican food. Even obsessive beer drinkers and food snobs need a night off once in a while. It just happens that a night off includes some pretty amazing (and less amazing) beers.

To open our palates up, we started with a bottle of homebrew, the first to be opened from a new batch.

Not to shabby.  This chocolate stout, blended with some brew club barley wine need some more time in the bottle. It’s got a noticeable alcoholic heat in the nose, but a  nicely balanceddark malt character and chocolate flavor that clearly speaks to the Hershey’s chocolate cocoa used to brew it.  It is bone dry and a bit thin, but the carbonation is spot on (I’m good and paranoid about carbonation now.)  Palates awakened, we started working on the bag of beer that Brian had brought along.

This bottles of Nøgne Ø Dugges Sahti is described as “A special twist on the Finnish style Sahti, brewed at Nøgne Ø in cooperation between Dugges Brewery, Sweden, and Nøgne Ø of Norway. Brewed with rye and wheat, sea wormwood from the Swedish archipelago, juniper twigs from the Norwegian forests, honey from heather flowers in Telemark and three selected yeast strains from Belgium, Germany and Britain, and of course, some malt and hops too.”

Things got off to a rocky start from the beginning. After opening, it immediately began to foam out of the bottle.  Obsessive blogger photography ensued.

And now, courtesy of Brian, a very special video review!  This video was recorded after several failed attempts to make a video review.

Brian is much more diplomatic that me.  I found the beer verging on undrinkable.  At first, all I tasted was honey, but as the overwhelming honey faded, it finished with a juniper inflected bitterness that felt deeply astringent.  After no much sweetness, I found it needing a big ol handful of west coast hops to try to balance things out. Following this beer it was time to run down 24th street to find some dinner.

Mmmmm… Alambras. Carne asada, cooked with bacon and bell peppers, served with the usual fixings and corn tortillas. What beer can stand up to this taqueria feast?

Damnation 23.  Actually it’s Damnation 46, since it’s the second batch of 23, done on the 46th batch of Damnation. According to Vinnie: “We turned our regular Damnation recipe into a Tripel. It is bittered with Tomahawk and has Sterling and Cascade in the mid-boil and finish. The beer was then aged on new American oak chips for two to three weeks.”  Brian’s first comment was just how oak-y it really is.  I noticed the stone fruit characters and spicy undertones.  What a great beer – it poured crystal clear, with a lighter shade that doesn’t betray just how much flavor is contained in a glass.  This particular bottles turns out to have enjoyed quite the beer blogger journey.  It was given to me by Brewed for Thought, then I opened it for the Craft Beer Examiner.

What beer could Brian possibly produce to top this?  What majestic piece of hand crafted brewing magic would he produce to finish this meal?

Under the light our paused Wii game, we “enjoyed” a Michelob special edition cherry lager.  This beer carefully balanced Robitussin with, well, come to think of it, there were no other flavors present.  It was pretty much just Robitussin all the way through, including that special unnatural chemical character and sickly sweet burning sensations. Even after all of the other high ABV beers we enjoyed through the evening, this masterpiece went unfinished.  Brian, thanks for sharing this winner with me.

And a final note to Michelob’s marketing department: shaping your beer like an anal probe or soviet nuclear weapon is bad.  Putting the same screw tops you use for your forties – that’s worse.

Tags: brian yaeger, damnation 23, homebrew, Russian River

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Taste Test. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.