A look at the 1st Annual Summer Beer Tasting and Pool Party.....

Setting up....

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of co-hosting a beer tasting party. For almost a year now, our friend Daniell (my latest guest contributor by the way....) and I have been talking about having a beer tasting party. Well, this past weekend, we finally pulled the trigger on it, and got it done! Being late June, we figured we would also make it a pool party. Being a pool party, I figured summer beer would be the way to go (the pool part never really materialized, since it was 118 degrees that day, no one wanted to go outside in the pool). It was held at the home of Daniell and her husband Bobby (awesome hosts, thank you!). It had everything you would like in a summer pool party tasting! A taco bar, with everything, chicken, beer, pico de gello, ceviche, beans, cheese, tortilla chips, you name it.

Our "Beer 101" display

We even had a sort of "Beer 101" display on a table, with a collection of various beer glasses, with explanations of what styles go with which glass, and why. Even a verity of loose leaf hops, for party goers to smell, and experience.
After some discussion, we figured, rather then have a sort of formal tasting, we would have a blind tasting, and make a contest out of it. We decided to have everyone bring their favorite summer brew, to enter into a blind tasting! Everyone would try each beer that was brought, blindly, and rate them all, and vote on their favorite one. The person that brought the top vote getter, won a prize (a beer glass set!).

Hops!!

OK, I will admit, I really had no idea what to expect. I knew most of the people that RSVP'ed, but not well enough to guess what they might bring for a beer. I was afraid we would end up with a dozen entries of Summer Shandy, a few Sam Adam's Summer Ales, and maybe, if we were lucky, a Mr Pineapple or two.
Again, I had no idea what to expect, but I can tell you, I was SO pleasantly surprised! Not only were there far more people there then I was expecting (so much more in fact, we had to totally change the way we conducted the tasting at the last minute) In fact, of the 19 entries we had, only one Summer Shandy, and the only duplicate, was Mr Pineapple, but lucky, one was a growler, and one was in cans, so we were able to distinguish them from each other. Here is a list of the beers entered and tasted.....

1. Bells Oberon (that was my entry!)
2. San Tan's Mr Pineapple in a growler (that was Mrs Czar's)
3. San Adams Summer Ale
4. Wasatch Summerbrue
5. Breckenridge Vanilla Porter
6. Laughing Dog's Huckleberry Cream Ale
7. Unita Hoo Doo
8. Sudwerk Hefeweizen
9. Stone's Arrogant Bastard
10. Anderson Valleys Summer Solstice
11. Maui Brewing's Bikini Blonde Ale
12. Sam Adams Double Agent IPL
13. Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy 
14. Iron Horse's Irish Death
15. Maui Mana Wheat
16. Iron Horse's High Five Hefe
17. Mr Pineapple (in a can)
18. Iron Horse's Double Rainbow
19. Shock Top

I have to say, I have always been a HUGE fan of blind tastings. When preconception and bias is totally removed from the experience, and all you are going on is appearance, smell, and taste, the results can be surprising. I must say, it was also fun, listening to the comments made about the beers people were drinking, not knowing what they were drinking at all. Some people didn't care much for the beers they brought, others ended up loving beers they would normally have turned their noses up to. Its funny, I am not sure anyone ended up voting for the beer they brought! Sadly, no one voted for my beloved Oberon, but in reading the notes, most people at least enjoyed it!

In the end, the hands down favorite of the evening surprised me somewhat. Not because it wasn't a "good beer", its in fact one of my favorite's actually, but rather because it was by no means what I would call a "summer beer", but Breckenridge Brewing's Vanilla Porter was a hands down favorite. In fact, the only other beers to get more then two votes, were Laughing Dogs Huckleberry Cream Ale (that got 3 votes) and Mr Pineapple (from the growler) got 2..

Cheers!

All in all, it was a great time! I want to send out my sincere gratitude to all of you that attended, for making this evening such a great time. Not only do I hope you had just half as much fun as I did, if you did, you had a great time, but I hope you leanred even just a little something about beer that you didn't know when you got there!

I also want to thank my wife, for all her help and support (and patience) going into this party. Most of all, I want to thank Bobby and Daniell for not only opening up your home to all of us, but for putting forth so much effort to make sure everyone there had a great time, and maybe even learned a few things.

If you were there, and have some comments or suggestions as to how to make our next party even better, either comment below, or email me at thebeerczar@gmail.com, I really would love to hear all comments, good or bad, its only going to help the next time!

If you would like to see all the photos from that day, you can check out the album on my Facebook page here, and please, while you are there, if you haven't "liked" my page, please go ahead and do so!

Keep an eye out for an invitation to the next one!

Thanks again to everyone, it was awesome, so, as I always say....

Until next time

Bottoms up my friends!

The Beer Czar

Fruit Beers, Are they all bad???

OK, lately I’ve been thinking I need to break out of my comfort zone, and stretch my interests and outlooks a bit. In all aspects of my life, not just beer. This however, being a beer blog, I figure I will keep the content to mostly beer related topics.

That being said, there is one area of the beer world I don’t really enjoy, at least I haven’t yet, and that is fruit beer. Now, this may have to do with the sort of philosophical aspect of adding fruit to beer. I am somewhat of a purest with a lot of things. I drink my coffee black, I don’t add sauce to a lot of things etc. I like to taste what I am eating, if I have to pile a ton of crap on top of something, or in something to enjoy it, well, that to me means I don’t like it in the first place, so why bother. Of course, something’s just go better when paired up with something. I mean, I’m not going to sit down and eat a bowl of just pasta. Also, sometimes adding additional flavors or something to whatever it is you are enjoying, makes it all that much more enjoyable. I don’t think anyone would argue vanilla ice cream doesn’t taste good, but add chocolate sauce, or hot fudge, you see what I am getting at.


So, I use to think, if you have to add fruit to beer to make it taste good, then the beer doesn’t taste good to being with, and you should try to make the beer better, without hiding behind some fruit. However, now, I think this is short sighted and frankly a stupid way of thinking. If you can take a great beer, and by adding flavor, whatever that flavor may be, and make it even better, or at least equally enjoyable, I see no harm in that, and fact, only expands our opportunities to enjoy as much out of beer as we can. After I thought about it, I recall having some AMAZING pumpkin flavored beer. Four Peaks Pumpkin Porter and BJ’s Pumpkin Ale come to mind.

So, with a new attitude, and renewed outlook on life (at least small aspects of), I decided to break out of paradigm, and jump into something up until now, had limited and not very good opinions of. So, I grabbed a verity of fruit beers from my local Total Wine, and my wife and I sat down one evening, opened our minds, and prepared to enjoy a verity of fruit beers I had selected. Here are my thoughts on the 6 beers we tried; in the order we tried them.

Orange Blossom Ale, Indian Wells Brewing Company, Inyokern, California (abv ?)

It started off pretty good. Poured it out, looked a sort of golden, hazy, orange color, as one would expect from an orange flavored beer. The smell made me nervous. Kind of smelled like someone poured Sunkist orange soda and cheap beer all over the kitchen floor, and left it there on the hottest day of the year. The taste actually wasn’t as bad as I was expecting from the smell. The problem was, there was very little flavor at all. Like someone took the aforementioned Sunkist soda, watered it down 50/50 with tap water, then mixed it with the aforementioned cheap beer at about a 70/30 ratio. Very watery taste, not good, not good at all, OK, NEXT!

Watermelon Ale, from The Phoenix Ale Brewery, Phoenix, AZ (4.8% Abv)

I checked this one out on beer advocate, and was surprised it rated so high. There are limited reviews, by all scored it in the high 3’s, even 4’s (out of 5). I scored it a 2.65. I liked the idea of this beer, I just think the follow through was lacking. Not many flavors at all, some watermelon flavor, but light, which is fine, but there aren’t a lot of other flavors to back it up. Sort of like a light lager, with some watermelon flavor. Pretty unexciting, this tasting is not off to a good start!

Festina Peche, Dogfish Head, Milton De (abv 4.5%)

OK, we’re getting better. This isn’t what you would expect from a typical fruit beer. It’s not “fruity” or overly sweet. In fact, this is more sour, but in a good way. The peach flavor is there, tart and easy to detect, but not pronounced. This is a refreshing beer. I actually liked this one a quite a bit. OK, so maybe these fruit beers aren’t so bad!

Summer Shandy, Leinenkugel Brewing Company Chippewa Falls, WI (abv 4.2%)

If you want to know what this beer tastes like, all you have to do is this. Wash your dishes with some dollar store lemon scented dish soap. When you are down, take the dirty dish water, and mix it say, 60/40 with any cheap beer, doesn’t matter what kind, Bud Light, Molson, Colt 45, something like that. That will give you a pretty good idea of what this abomination tastes like. Now, let me say this, I like Leinenkugels, quite a bit in fact. I have had some great beer by them (Big Eddy RIS is awesome!), but man, what the hell were they thinking? This just might be the second worst beer I have ever tasted (Bud Light Chaldea still holds that dubious distinction). OK, so my faith in Fruit beers has been shaken back to reality.

Wild Raspberry Ale, Great Divide Brewing, Denver Co, ( abv 5.6%)

OK, this one wasn’t too bad. Then again, I could have been drinking 3 day old milk and enjoyed it after that last beer. However, this one was decent, not what I would consider great, but I enjoyed it. It poured a sort of ruby/purple color, which interested me. Smelled like raspberry jam mixed with beer. The taste was good, I was little disappointed it didn’t have a stronger flavor. Both the raspberry and beer flavors were muted, someone lacking. It was an enjoyable beer, but again, not something I would say was great. Very middle of the road.

Wild Blueberry Ale, Sea Dog, Bangor Maine (abv 4.6%)

OK, maybe I am partial to all things Maine (it’s my home state), maybe it’s because blueberries are one of my favorite fruits, or maybe it’s because this one was just good. I enjoyed it. Of all the beers we tried, this one had the most “beer” flavor. This one actually tasted like it was actually brewed WITH blueberries. The rest of them (with the exception of the Festina Peache) tasted like beer that had fruit flavor added as an afterthought. The blueberry was very noticeable, in both the aroma, and the taste. It had a real ripe, fresh quality to it as well. Very enjoyable!



OK, so, what did I learn from this exercise in “life course deviation”?

1.) Its fun and exciting to try new things. I mean, I’m not ready to head to a nude beach, or attend an Art Film Festival, but you know what I mean.

2.) Not all fruit beer is bad!

3.) If the label said “Summer Shandy”, just drink some watery lemon dish soap, and save yourself a hangover.



I can say, with the exception of Summer Shandy, and Orange Blossom, I would drink all these beers again. I may not seek them out, or pay for them, but when handed a Watermelon Ale, or Blueberry Ale, I will gladly accept it with graciousness, and appreciation, and drink it. Its summer, and what better time to enjoy a beer with a little fruit! So, I would suggest, take a little time out of your busy summer schedule, and schedule an evening or two to enjoy one or two fruity beers. You may find one you like!

If you have a fruit beer you like, and you think I might enjoy, by all means, let me know, and I will give it a try. If I can’t get it in Arizona, and you really want me to try one, let me know, I’ll drop you my address, and you can send it to me, and I will happily send you a fine Arizona beer in return for your efforts.



Bottoms up my friends

The Beer Czar