Real FURKIN Ale
There is one important thing you should know about my experience during J-Ryan’s “Friday the Firkinteenth.” Five of my undergraduate roommates were up visiting. The pictures below should demonstrate our relationship. Most of them are more interested in alcohol than they are beer. I’m sure we could have given a nice group review of Busch after that weekend. Unfortunately this also meant that I could not concentrate as much as I could on the more 15 cask conditions ales that I tasted on Saturday. I was taking some notes, and I did rate all that I tasted out of four stars but I did not get to sit down and write some reviews right after the event like a good blogger. After arriving at J-Ryans at 11am and drinking there until around 2ish I continued to drink all day until I ended up at Harry’s on the Hill where the selection of short skirts was much wider than the selection drafts. The point is I couldn’t exactly remember everything that I tasted.
I did learn that a cask-conditioned ale does not mean a better ale. Warmer less carbonated beer is going to lack some of the pleasant characteristics of cold draft beer and also I remember a lot of them had a lot of residual sugars (which isn’t always a bad thing). In my opinion IPAs are not suited for cask conditioning. Carbonation and the cold temperate fully brings out the hop profile. If you manage to get a good head on a cask beer, than the aroma can be better than draft, as was the case with the cask Ithaca’s Flower Power (granted that already has one of the best aromas of any IPA I have tried). I have had the Three Heads Coffee Porter on draft and I can say for sure that it was worse from the cask. The bitter/sweetness coffeeness just wasn’t there. I gave it one star.
Besides the Coffee Porter, the less hoped ales were generally the best. Stone’s Arrogant Bastard and McNeill’s Dark Angel Imperial Stout were very good and if anyone from Middle Ages is reading this, I can only imagine that a Double Wench would have been AWESOME on cask but I can never get a hold of that stuff! The best, or at least the most memorable, was Moylan’s Kilt Lifter. It was the only one that I gave 4 stars. As you can see in the pic below, it was NUTTY! It really did have the aroma, front and after taste of boiled peanuts, which increased as I drank. This is obviously a result of the malt but I don’t know the fancy beer reviewer’s word for this flavor.
I also remember that the Lagunitas Undercover Ale was very good, but I don’t remember why… I remember it being very sweet.
In unrelated news, I got a 22 of Harpoon’s Island Creek Oyster Stout. It was a good stout, but not very complex and not much aroma. My problem with it was that there was virtually no hints of the supposed “mineral flavors of… oysters”. Granted I did not expect a strong oyster taste or flavor in a beer but I did expect something unexpected. That’s why I bought it! They say “brewed with oysters” so I assume that the little guys went right in the boil. I wonder, if you clean the shellfish really well, could you just toss them in the fermentor and “dry fish” the beer? This might give it a bit more of an aroma… Anyways we have an idea for a stout that’s gonna blow this right out of the tidal pool! But I cant say what yet!
Lolerskates,
Jason
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