Recents.
Notch - Valley Malt BSA
Valley Malt is where I aim to get my malts, once I get a mill and a better scale. They're the local outfit in western MA who get New England grown organic grains and do their own malting, which is pretty incredible considering nobody else in the US (that I know of) is doing malting but the Big 3 in the midwest. Anywho, this was labeled as a farmhouse, but really didn't taste like it. I got the wheat/barley mixture, the sunny color and cloudy body, but the yeast didn't have much belgian to it, and the hops didn't taste like nobles. In fact it was incredibly lemony, which I would swear is a result of using Sorachi Ace hops, except that they're expensive and so people who use them usually advertise it, which Notch doesn't here. But damn, it had a strongly lemony and almost astringent flavor, just a little past the Good mark and veering into Too Much territory. A light wheaty body and a big Lemon Pith bitter smack. Weird, not quite right. Oh well. The malt was great.
Brother Thelonius
I donno if I'm just harder to please now after Belgian Night, but this was not really all that great for me. A good beer for sure, but not what I'd go for when I want a big belgian caramel bomb. Nothing about it stopped me and made me pay attention, which might speak more to my ability to guzzle 10% abv beers these days than it does to the quality of
this one.
Backlash - Famine (a single malt/hop Tripel)
So this was interesting. Somehow it didn't hit me as incredibly belgian while I was drinking it, but sniffing the bottle afterwards it smelled dead-nuts right. I think I drank it too cold. So they did what I did with my barleywine (currently in a barrel), which is to go for a single kind of malt and a single kind of hop, which does limit the complexity you can get somewhat. They've made up for it with some spicing (coriander and orange zest I think), and good hops can have a LOT of complex higher alcohol flavors when you treat them right (citrus, pine, flowers, berries), so I like the idea of trying out simple recipes and doing them well, because the results are almost always surprising. It's so tempting to think that big complex beers can only become so but virtue of having 45 ingredients. So when you make something with 1 malt, 1 hop, 1 kind of yeast, and water (and in this case some spices I guess), it's nice to see how deep and interesting beer still is. As for THIS beer, I didn't fall in love but I give them a lot of credit for originality and balls. I like the artwork and theme, I liked the beer, and I like the strategy behind it.
Wormtown - IPA
Another local aiming for the higher end of the market. Don't LOVE the marketing, but I don't hate it either. The beer was pretty good actually. I suspect I'd rate this very highly in a blind taste test. It was a snappy, rounded, full caramel IPA. Nothing to fault here. I think I liked the other one of theirs I had a while back. -shrug-
Caracole - Troublette
My birthday dinner was accompanied by this bottle (and a pint of something else that was local and delicious, a scotch ale of some sort whose maker now escapes me). Holy shit, this renewed my faith in the belgians. It's like 5% or so, it isn't a "big" anything, but there is something absolutely magical and balanced about it that makes you realize that a lot of the local imitators are doing a decent job but are not the real thing. There's still a difference. Wheaty, complex, VERY nicely balanced between sweet and bitter, just about as perfect a dinner beer as I could have asked for.
