Brewery: Natty Greene's Brewing Co.

Where: Greensboro, North Carolina

Beer: Guilford Golden Ale

Style: American Blonde Ale

IBU:N/A

ABV: 3.8%

Here's another excellent example of a good American Blonde Ale.  This is my first sampling of anything from Natty Greene's Brewing Company on this blog, but I think this is an excellent starter.  I love blonde ales, and this one is no exception.  This beer poured with a light golden color and a reasonably foamy head.  The beer has a slightly richer body than most of the blondes I have tried, which may result from the use of Maris Otter pale malt in the recipe.  Breaking from the tradition of most American Blonde Ales, this beer is made with East Kent Goldings hops instead of the standard fare of Cascade or Centennial hops that many would expect of this style.  At 3.8% ABV, it also fits the "lawnmower beer" category quite nicely.  You can sip on this stuff all day long without becoming incapacitated in the least :)  My only disappointment is that their website doesn't go into any detail about their beers.  Maybe in the future...

Brewery: Terrapin Beer Company
Where: Athens, GA
Beer: Terrapin Golden Ale
Style: American Blonde Ale
IBU: 21
ABV: 5.3%

Here's another excellent session beer for an all-afternoon binge on a hot summer day...  Terrapin Beer Company's Golden Ale is a light-bodied ale that is just running over with flavor and refreshing crispness that goes perfect with a sunny 90° afternoon in August.  This beer pours with a rich golden color and a thick foamy head that hangs around for a long time.  There is very little hop presence in the nose but its nearly perfectly balanced with the malt, letting the sweetness of the Munich and Vienna malts show through nicely.  I'm a big fan of this beer style, even though it's not really a favorite of most hardcore home brewers and micro/craft beer aficionados that I know.  It's a simple beer without a lot of frills, but they just taste great!

Brewery: Homebrewed
Where: Hickory, North Carolina
Beer: Vienna Blonde
Style: American Blonde Ale
IBU: 18
ABV: 4.25%

This is a beer that I have been working on for a while.  It is version 2 of my ESYFB (Extra Special Yellow Fizzy Beer) that I brewed last summer.  This beer has the color profile that I was looking for and since my brewing process is dialed in a little tighter now, everything about this beer came out where I wanted it to.  This beer has place and purpose in my home brewery.  The Vienna Blonde Ale is built on a grain bill of Pale, Vienna, Crystal, and Carapils malts with a very small addition of flaked oats.  The hop bill on this recipe is very light.  It starts with some centennial for bittering and then finishes with Cascade for flavor and aroma.  This beer is a 'light' beer by homebrewing standards.  It has a very nice balance between malts and hops and actually leans towards the side of malty sweetness. 

I brew this beer for two reasons.  I enjoy drinking it myself, and it's what I consider to be a 'session beer.'  A session beer is one that you can consume all afternoon without fears of losing control.  It's lower alcohol content makes it less problematic in the area of intoxication.  The other reason I brew it is because it's a fantastic beer to have on hand when introducing someone to homebrewed beers.  I believe that a lot of beer drinkers get introduced to homebrews in a negative manner.  Most homebrewers that I know tend to make two types of beers.  One type is the 'let's see how many hops I can stuff in this beer' and the other is 'how high can my alcohol content be' brews.  There is also the combination of the two.  There are some extremely FANTASTIC beers that come out of these ideas, don't get me wrong, but these beers are harder to use to introduce new people who are used to the BudMillerCoors genre to the idea of drinking homebrewed beer.

The Vienna Blonde is one of the primary beers I hand someone in this situation.  I don't think I have had anyone spit one of these out yet.  I can't say that much for some of the other beers I have made.  Think of it in terms of feeding a baby.  We don't feed them chili made with habanero peppers to start with.  We let them build up a taste for things by starting them out on mashed cereals that are bland and less flavorful. 

I have two more homebrews labeled and ready for the tasting queue.  We'll be looking at the Yellowjacket Hefeweizen and the Chocolate Oatmeal Stout in the very near future...

Tonya and I went to the World Market in Mooresville yesterday afternoon, so I picked up another obligatory mixed sixer (plus a bomber of Coney Island Freaktoberfest that we will get to shortly) for the tasting regimen. 

Today's sample is the Blonde Ale from Carolina Beer Company in Mooresville, North Carolina.  As you can see from the photo, this beer poured with a beautiful golden blonde color with a nice thick head on top.  The aroma that followed had a light sweetness of malt and a faint floral presence, but not overpowering.  It definitely has a crisp bite on the tougue, and it serves well right out of the refrigerator.  I think this beer has one of the more perfect hop and malt balances for a beer of this style as well.  It's a fantastic brew for a summertime cooler.  It rings in at 5% ABV, which is only slightly higher than I would personally prefer a beer in this style, but it's definitely a keeper.  I find this beer on tap occasionally at my local brew pub as well, which is nice! 

This is beer #99 in the quest to 100.  #100 is staring me in the face, so I'll toss it in the fridge and we'll crack it open sometime in the next couple days.  After we hit the 100 mark, I'm planning to make a top 10 list of my 10 favorites from the first 100 beers.  We'll see how that goes as well...

Here's another beer that I picked up from Gail's Hops and Grapes recently as I started collecting some of the fall seasonals for tasting.  There is definitely one thing I need to keep in mind about New Belgium Brewing in Ft. Collins, Colorado.  They are definitely outside of the box.  What you might expect from the isn't always, or usually, what you will get.  I like this beer, but I'm going to whine a little about it as well...

This beer poured a beautiful golden color as possibly anticipated by the Golden Ale on the label.  The head was nice and foamy and left a fantastic lacing on the glass.  The lacing was pretty enough that I almost wanted to make a photo of that...  The hop presence in this beer is duly noted by the name of the beer and the flavor and aroma that arises from this glass.  This beer has a rather light and crisp body which is representative of some of my favorite summertime drinks, but the hop bill here creates something rather delicious and new.  From the bottle:

Five hops and four malts make HOPTOBER Golden Ale a veritable cornucopia of the earth.  Pale and wheat malt are mashed with rye and oats to create a medium bodied ale with a cream mouth feel.  Centennial, Cascade, Sterling, Willamette, and Clacier hops form a bonfire of citrus notes, fruity cheers and a bold finale.

I can't really argue with any of that.  This is an excellent beer at 40 IBU and 6.0% ABV.  My bitch with this beer is simply that it ain't what I was lookin' for.  I only wish they had named this beer something else.  Any beer name that contains, alludes to, or summons the idea of the month of October in its name must contain caramel and toasted malt notes with medium to heavy body and an amber to orange hue and minimal hop notes ;)  I think New Belgium's offering could very appropriately be named "Harvest Ale" or something along those lines...

Maybe I'm just getting to be old enough that change isn't something I can deal with as easily :)

Here's one of my recent home brewing projects for review. This beer is my "ESYFB" which is a simple blonde ale. ESYFB stands for "Extra Special Yellow Fizzy Beer". Yellow Fizzy Beer is terminology that a lot of homebrew and micro/craft beer drinkers like to use when discussing beers from the BudMillerCoors family of beers.  I added the "Extra Special" to denote that this is a home brewed product.  My objective with this beer was exactly what you might think.  I was trying to replicate the light color and light body of the BudMillerCoors beers but produce a flavor and feel that makes it 'Extra Special' in nature.  My main objectives for making a beer like this is just to see if I could pull it off and also to have some beer on hand for friends and family who aren't used to drinking heavier bodied and fuller flavored home brews.  How did I do?  Let's see...

This beer, as you can see from the photo, poured with a golden orange color with a thick head.  My color objective wasn't exactly where I wanted it to be.  I wanted this beer to be a lot lighter yellow color.  The beer is also cloudy from a chill haze, which is a result of not being able to cool the beer quickly enough during the brewing process.  The haze (cloudiness) doesn't have any affect on the flavor though.  The color is darker than I expected because the mash tun I used (this was the first time I had used this equipment) produced an efficiency much higher than I expected, which also caused me to produce an alcohol level higher than I had originally planned for.  This beer came out at 5.5% ABV instead of my target 4.25%.  Problem?  Not really :)  This beer has the light body and crisp flavor that I was shooting for.  I'm very happy with that aspect of it.  It has a low hop presence of approximately 19 IBU which helps keep the malty sweetness of this beer dominant in its character.  The hops I chose for this particular brew provide a citrus mouth presence with a very slight citrus aroma. 

I plan to perfect this beer, because it's one that I want to keep on hand at all times, and I'll probably brew it more than once a year for that very reason.  My next batch will have some adjustments made that will lower the alcohol content just a little and clean up the chill haze to make a very nice looking beer in the glass.  I'll also hit the color

This beer was my second all-grain batch.  I'm letting my first all-grain batch sit just a little longer before I put it on the reviewing block.  I have been dipping into it and I'm waiting for it to age just a little more before I put it in the spotlight :)

It sucks when I get really busy at work. I'm not sure why, but when those times come around, I tend to drink less beer rather than more.  I had a very long week and I didn't try any new beers at all.  So tonight, I'm having a White Wolf Golden Ale from Wolf Beer Company in Wilmington, North Carolina.  I picked up this bottle at the World Market as part of a mixed sixer a couple weeks ago, so I chilled it and gave it a pour.  As noted by the beer's name, it poured a very rich golden color with a thick foamy head.  The beer has a nice clean and crisp flavor with a light to medium body.  It has a delicious malty sweetness with what seems to be a mild taste and aroma of citrus.  I had never heard of this brewing company before, but since it's a North Carolina shop I had to give it a try and I'm glad I did. 

This isn't the ONLY beer I have had in the last week.  I'll have to admit that I had one last night as well.  I cracked the top on one of my Blone Ales that I brewed most recently.  I just wanted to see how it was progressing because I thought it might just be near ready, and I was right.  The flavor was fantastic.  The head and head retention were both up to snuff, but the carbonation hasn't quite finished up yet.  It's almost there, but it needs a little more time in the bottle.  Oh... I also had two sampler glasses of beer on Thursday from Starr Brewing during a tasting at Gail's Hops and Grapes.  I tried their Barvarian Hefe and their Stout.  The Hefe was really nice.  I can't quite comment on the stout yet.  I think I would need to work my way through a whole bottle of a beer like that to give any decent feedback on it.  It did have a very nice roasted flavor though...

Until next time...

I went up to Gail's Hops and Grapes this afternoon to pick up a couple sixers to cover me for the weekend since my homebrew stash is getting rather low. I decided to try out a couple new summer seasonals beginning with New Belgium Brewing's Skinny Dip Beer. 

As I was reading the label on the Skinny Dip, I saw something that really struck me as being odd in the beer world.  This beer is labeled as a summer seasonal brew which traditionally means you have a lighter bodied beer that is a little lower than normal in alcohol and normally seasoned with a hint of fruit.  This beer, however, plainly stated "full-bodied."  That comment made me curious, so I decided to give it a try.

Skinny Dip pours with a rich golden color and a nice foamy head that sticks around in a thinner form for the entire glass.  This is a sweet malty beer with some noticeable hop presence, but the kaffir lime comes through in the aroma a little more than in the flavor, but it does show a presence.  My opinion of the body of this brew is not quite "full" but a little more on the medium side.  At 4.2% ABV, this beer is what I like to call a summer quaffer or even a lawnmower beer.  You can work this brew all afternoon without getting too sloshed to do anything else ;)

I'm still looking forward to brewing my own 'summer quaffer' on Sunday afternoon...

This is my second sampling of the four different Great Divide Brewing Company beers I purchased in an assorted 12-pack.  The head on this beer was rather explosive when I poured it, and it's not a thick and creamy head at all.  It's more of a soft drink type head that subsides rather quickly.  From the bottle:

Brewed with rice and barley malts, Samurai is an easy drinking, unfiltered ale that changes the status quo for unfiltered beers.  The addition of rice gives Samurai a crisp, refreshing and clean taste.  This is definitely not your everyday unfiltered beer.

Hmmm... Maybe it's not an everyday unfiltered beer.  At best, I would call it an every other day unfiltered beer.  This brew did not impress me very much.  I could probably be beaten in public for saying this, but rice is what makes Budweiser what it is :) 

This beer is for the SBB crowd (something besides Budweiser).  It's mildly different and those who drink fancy imports like Heineken and Foster's can have this beer and not feel left out when everyone else is drinking home brew and great micro/craft beers.