I did about the same thing with my first smoked. It was an alaskan brew I tried at a brewfest and I thought it was horrible.
I suggest you try and get ahold of a Stone Brewing Smoked Porter before you totally make up your mind on the style though.
http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/147/90

Harpoon Winter Warmer has a pleasant bite.

The Sam Winter Lager is tasty as well. On that note, bed.

edit: the Sam's creates a beautiful pour. I spent too much time framing and not enough clicking so the head has deflated a little, but this is what it looks like:

Tried a Three Floyd's Gumballhead tonight; it's a red wheat beer. *Very* tasty, like everything else I've had from that brewery. If you don't like hops, you won't like it - there's a lot in there. Pretty classic wheat beer in terms of flavor, nice aroma, good citrusy taste to it. Probably hard to find outside of the Midwest (the brewery is in Muenster, Indiana - right by exciting and beautiful Gary!) but worth it if you come across it.

I've been lusting after their Dark Lord for a while now. I think that some year I will see a roadtrip to the brewery for its release...

Tried (Bierra) Moretti last night at a local Italian restaurant. Good, definitely drinkable, but nothing special. Just an average pilsener that happens to go pretty well with a woodfired margherita pizza.

Got a six pack of Chicago-based Two Brothers Dog Days; it's a summer lager.

It's pretty decent; nothing special, nothing notable, just a decent lager beer. No major flaws, but no major benefits.

Sam Adams makes a brewers patriot collection 4 pack. It's all based on colonial era recipes and contains a ginger ale, porter, root beer and dark wheat beer. It's $10 for four 12 ounce bottles, but they're really very interesting beers (make no mistake, the ginger ale is ginger ALE and the root beer is root BEER). Of the bunch, the ginger ale and the dark wheat were both outstanding, the porter was very interesting and root beer was poured down the sink. I inspected the porter and I've never seen so much suspended particulate in anything I've drank, hefeweizen's included. It was quite good, though. The root beer was just too much... something. Something bad. I don't remember what (it's been a week or two), but I just couldn't do it. Too much root and not enough beer, even if the alcohol content suggested otherwise. The ginger ale was smooth and vaguely gingery and very good. The dark wheat was strikingly similar to modern wheat beers. Of the 4, I'd buy the dark wheat as a 6 pack if they'd only market it that way and I'd drink the ginger ale on occasion. The porter was good, but I'd get Fuller's instead.

Chunky beers are my favorites. In my opinion filtering is one of those innovations that should have been avoided by beer manufacturers. It's grain fermented by trillions of microscopic organisms, you're not supposed to be able to see through it damnit.

Those beers all sound good. I haven't seen that set around, but I'll keep an eye out and grab it if I see it.

Sounds like you should have lived in the middle ages. Daily ration for workers and soldiers was about 5 litres of unfiltered beer.

I'm amazed any buildings made in the middle ages are still standing. Considering how drunk the builders were.

Didn't the Romans historically scorn beer and prefer wine? Any history majors on here in need of a thesis topic?

Yeah, crazy Romans.

Ancient Greeks had the idea that wine was a divine drink, so they preferred wine over beer. And whatever the Greeks did, Romans wanted to do too, only better. You can still see the effect Romans had. The area that was Roman Empire is still mostly known for it's wines, not beers. I mean, have you ever heard of Italian, French, Spanish, Portugese or Greek beer ?-) I was sailing in Greece last year, and the only beers you could find on the most remote islands was beers like carlsberg or heineken. Seems like Kaubel found some Italian one, but that has to be an exception.

Seriously -- Heineken and Amstel Light are basically the official beers of Greece. They're everywhere, from the biggest Athens tourist trap to the smallest Aegean hole in the wall. You could do worse, granted, but it's kind of silly given how much good beer they could be importing from within the EU. :(

Tis the season for new and exciting beers, but Zena really doesn't like my current choice all that much.


Here's what it looks like in the glass:


It's a fairly solid ale, very smooth with subtle spices and a nice hoppy aftertaste. The smoothness combined with the aftertaste threw me for a bit. It's not quite Irish Red territory, but it's bordering on it.

That reminds me of the near-disaster of the past world cup, where Budweiser attempted to purchase exclusive beer rights at all of the stadiums. The german's threatened to boycott the cup. Smart people.

From what I've heard through the grapevine, drunkenness was a pretty common state of being for people in the middle ages in general. Until a certain point they hadn't yet really realized that boiling water gets rid of harmful stuff, and so water in general was seen as something that could cause cholera and a whole host of other diseases. Alcohol served as a disinfectant in these drinks, although it probably kept life nasty, brutish, and short in other respects.

I'm sure that the perpetual drunken haze also kept down every feudal lord's favorite thing--the organized rebellion. According to Firefly (I'm sorry, my history is picked up by odds and ends :)), the ancient Egyptians also used to give their slaves a sort of beery mixture to eat/drink. Kept the Jews enslaved for a good long while. 8)

Anyway, back into lurking for me, I'm no beer connoiseur.

Ugh, sucks... Well no, I'm kinda jealous, I can not count the number of times I have gone to a baseball(hockey/football/insert other arena type event) game to find that the regular beer was Bud, the 'premium' beer was Miller, the beers were at least $6 - $10 bucks a cup, and peanuts were 5 bucks for a 1/2 lb bag. I have been moved close to tears at times.

At least at -most- restaurants the selections are a thousand times better or I would probably never eat out.

I'm going to the local brew shop today... a brew shop is like a beer shop, but only if you're willing to do some work and wait a month... to talk to a more experienced brewer (and to get some more ingredients) about my first batch of homebrew. It's a honey brown ale and it didn't quite turn out. Since it was my first batch I didn't cool it enough before I pitched my yeast. I blame that on Papazian partially since he doesn't write much about chilling and on my wife partially since she was rushing me to go eat lunch. So I pitched my yeast while the wort was much too much warm and 48 hours later I didn't have fermentation. This seemed very strange, so I went to the brew shop, talked to the experienced brewer and pitched another packet of yeast. Fermentation picked up quickly and everything went along its merry way. Two weeks later I bottled and a week after that (last night) I tried a bottle. As soon as I opened the bottle it started to foam over. I poured a glass and half the glass was head. I let it settle down and poured the rest and tried it. It had a sharp, bitter taste that definitely doesn't belong in a brown ale. My current hypothesis based on some homebrewer's faqs is too much yeast. I pitched the extra package and I think it may have been too much. My best solution is to let it condition longer (much longer, possibly) and hope the sharpness tones down, but I really don't know if that will work. Any other homebrewers have any thoughts or advice?

In commercial news, I had the New Belgium 2 degrees brew last night, also. It was bad, but I wasn't a fan. I very likely was tainted by the homebrew I had, but it seemed hoppier than I like. I would have liked it far more if I had a pile of gingerbread cookies to go with it, I think.

I've never heard of problems with too much yeast. You do realize, I hope, that the tiny amount of yeast you pitch (even if you pitch ten or so doses) pales in comparison to the amount those little fungi create on their own once they get going? The only way to get too much yeast in the bottle is to actually bottle it during active fermentation, before the thing's settled at all. In that case I'd call you lucky to have no bottle bombs.

Bitterness is generally an issue with one of two things: Malt/grain used an hops. If you had two doses of hops ("flavor" and "aroma" in most recipes) and added them earlier than necessary, those aroma hops went straight to the bitter stage. The easiest way to have this happen is waiting on your batch to cool via ambient temperature, which is why I recommend a wort cooler or simply pouring the wort over some ice. Freeze a gallon jug of distilled water and then cut the jug off the chunk of ice, since bottled distilled water is pretty much devoid of everything (though ice cubes in the store should be equally sterile).

Your understanding of Medieval history differs from mine, and I've studied with medieval historians and archaeologists. It's true that wine/beer/mead was safer than the water in most locations. It's also true that alcohol was a much more common thing socially speaking. But to say everyone was wandering around in a constant (or frequent) drunken stupor is exaggerating.

Anyone who's spent time in a more drink-friendly culture (we Americans are pretty prudish really) can attest that their liver quickly adjusts to a higher intake. People were used to constant consumption of alcoholic beverages, and without a spike of intake they really didn't notice it at all.

Besides, people did drink water in the Middle Ages. If they didn't there would be no reports of cholera et al. during that time. It was so widespread because many people drank plain water, or watered their wine to stretch it. (Or to make it palatable; wine in Roman times was the strength of modern-day whiskey and Romans considered people who didn't water their wine (e.g. the Celts) to be barbarians. The Celts also painted themselves blue and ran into battle wearing naught but a sword, so that might have had something to do with being called barbarians as well. Then again the Celts didn't have vomitoria so one might consider the whole era something of a wash from a civilization perspective.)

While I concede the majority of my point on the grounds of greater erudition (I'm no history major), I'd like to defend at least some part of it. If what I wrote implies stupor, then I misphrased what I wanted to say. However, the limits of the human body are, well, limited, and it's not an unreasonable conclusion that drunkenness on such a diet was more prevalent than it is on a more moderate intake of alcohol.

I'm Russian. ;) Yes, a higher intake will raise your tolerance, but it will not raise it indefinitely. If it did, alcholism would not be such a problem in Russia. Oh, and you Americans aren't as prudish with regards to alcohol consumption as you think. :) The whole "drinking without food" thing is looked at askance by more Russians I know than Americans.

Can't argue that. :)

The excess yeast is just what I read on a FAQ today. Another theory was that the grains were steeped with too much water, at least according to the troubleshooting chart at byo.com. I'll just let it sit another two weeks and see how it turns out.

I'm sitting right in the entrance to AQ40 waiting on a raid to start and sipping a glass of Winter's Bourbon Cask Ale. It's surprising drinkable and actually has some interesting toffee and vanilla flavors going. It's quite possibly the best Anheuser Busch product I've ever had.

I just had a friend ask if Big Rock Breweries was a micro brewery? Anyone outside of Alberta hear of them?
I love a pint of Grasshopper Wheat Ale Draught. Some people say it needs lemon but I perfer without.

The people at one liquor store here in town tried to convince me to buy some, saying it was selling like mad and they were surprised they still had some in stock. I sensed a crappy sales pitch and decided it was against my principles as a self-proclaimed Beer Snob to support any beer made by AB or any other mass market, American crap beer shill.