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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3314 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Combining the Culture War drinking thread and the weekly What Are You Reading fun thread, what are you drinking this week?

As a big bourbon fan, I'd never quite hit on a Scotch that really got me excited, but I admittedly hadn't tried that many, so I grabbed a bottle of Abelour A'bunadh this week and it really is fantastic stuff. The sherry aging is very prominent, but stops short of being oversweet, leaving tons of fruitiness and a bit of a dark chocolate finish.

On the beer end, I've laid off my usual affinity for huge barrel-aged stouts and big NEIPAs to try to cut a few calories out, instead opting for some classic Guinness Extra Stout and Founders All Day IPA. They're both... fine. I like them just fine, but I miss the sugar bomb beers.

I've been obsessed with a juicy pale ale called Ambush the last few months, to the point that I always get excited when I see it on draught or in cans.

https://troublebrewing.ie/beers/ambush/

I'll occasionally have a liquor at bedtime. A local absinthe or a scotch.

Last purchase was a bottle of Evan Williams 100 proof. It's a nice cheap bourbon, good for being your mixer or sipped neat.

Wait, you can just easily make this?

I gave up alcohol for Lent but I'm starting a batch of beer this weekend that should be ready the day after Easter.

Congratulations, I will forever envision you as a jolly monk with a habit and tonsure. Let us know how it turned out!

...and now I've decided on an avatar

The usual. By that I mean regular beer aka Miller High Life, Coors Banquet, Pabst, etc. It's not that I don't like imports and craft beers, it's just that I drink almost every day and they're too idiosyncratic and expensive to really work as daily drivers. I also like to keep a ton of it in my car so that when I'm skiing or whatever I always have beer I can offer everyone freely without them feeling bad about taking as much as they want. I honestly think that if these weren't mass-market American beers but some special variety brewed by Czech monks beer snobs would rave about their crisp and refreshing taste.

While we're on the subject—as a Wisconsinite I assume you can give me a satisfactory answer to this—what the hell happened to Leinenkugel's? When I was in college and craft beer was mostly mediocre, a friend of mine would regularly bring in cases of the Creamy Dark and Red Lager back from Chicago and they were both excellent. Then you could get it in Pennsylvania and it was great. Then they started selling fruity stuff, which okay, fine. Then it got hard to find. Then you could only get the Red Lager if you bought a variety pack. Then they discontinued it altogether. The situation got so dire that my brother and I went to the local master distributor to see if he could order it specially for us. Now it seems the only stuff of theirs I can find around here is all fruity stuff. I was at a pizza place Sunday and saw they had a Lemon Haze which I wanted to try because I like hazys, but was told it had been replaced with a peach sour. Okay, I like sours, let's give this one a go. It wasn't a sour. It tasted like Leinie regular (which I can't get around here for some reason) with peach flavor. I'm really disappointed that a company that once made a quality product has let itself slide so far.

PBR is like the final boss of cultural baggage attached to something that's just good on its own merits.

Bud or Blue Moon all the way. Coors is terrible and Miller isn't much better.

Used to work with a Wisconsinite who was also disappointed with Leinie but raved about Spotted Cow.

Am Sconnie, can confirm Spotted Cow is delightful and inexpensive, and remains my go-to bar beer. I've also been drinking brandy and bitters toddies when there's a chill, and High Life remains the ultimate lawnmower (or, as is the case, snow shoveling) beer. Also been drinking some homemade hard cider, which is ludicrously easy to home brew compared to beer.

Honestly, as one who drinks a ton of mass-market beer, Bud is about on the same level as Coors Banquet, Molson Canadian and Miller High Life. MGD is indistinguishable from High Life but slightly more expensive so there's no reason to buy it. The next tier includes Pabst, Iron City, Stoney's, Labatt Blue, Molson Golden, Lion's Head, Straub. then there's the specialty tier, beers that aren't particularly cheap but have some kind of off-flavor that make them bad: Michelob, Rolling Rock, Stroh's, Genessee. Then there are beers that are straight-up bad: Carling Black Label (except when it's a buck at 123 Pleasant St. in Morgantown), Red Dog (RIP), Coors Extra Gold, Keystone, Schlitz (though that may have changed), Yuengling Premium (not the lager, which is too different to qualify for this list). Then there are beers that I'm afraid to try: Milwaukee's Best, Natural, American. Then there are the special cases: Duquesne and Hamm's have unique flavors that aren't necessarily unpleasant but that you can get sick of rather quickly. Old Milwaukee exists in some limbo where it isn't as bad as it seems like it should be.

By most "objective" measures typical West Coast IPAs should rank near the bottom; they're usually excessively bitter, with a cloying cough-syrupy sweetness underlying them. Yet this has become the beer snob beer par excellence, mainly because local craft breweries that don't quite know what they're doing yet can take advantage of the large margin of error something that hoppy provides and get started pretty quickly. MOst of the issues with mass-market beers come from the fact that all of them use a healthy amount of adjuncts to keep costs down. I've had craft versions of these beers from local breweries (shout out to Exile in Des Moines for offering the best example) and there is a significant improvement. The problem is that you still have to pay craft prices for these beers because they're brewed in small batches, which makes it difficult for them to occupy the same cultural position as High Life or something similar. If only a large brewery were to make a premium product without adjuncts and sell it for a few dollars more than the mainstream brands... which would create a new product that nobody wants because both the style and the concept of a mass market beer are anathema to beer snobs. I remember when something like Sam Adams was considered a premium product that most restaurants wouldn't have. Now, nobody seems to think there's anything particularly wrong with it, but no one is going out of their way to say it's a great beer. Same with Magic Hat. Same with Killian's. Even Yuengling Lager (which isn't the original Yuengling but a '90s innovation meant to latch on to the Sam Adams trend of brewing better beer) doesn't have the cachet it once had since they expanded their distribution beyond a few select markets; it used to be impossible to get in West Virginia and Ohio, even though they border Pennsylvania. Anyway, my overall point is that perception has a lot more to do with things than beer snobs want to admit. A craft beer usually has to be pretty bad before anyone wants to admit that it sucks. And no one will admit that some German Brewery that's been around since 1485 or whatever is actually sub par. The West Coast IPA model should theoretically be great for a mass market beer, because the flavor masking nature of heavy hop use would make it easy for them to get away with using a ton of adjuncts. But there's no market for a mass-market, low-cost IPA, because the people who drink IPAs will never drink a low-cost, mass-market beer.

Also, if there are German(or Czech, or Polish, or whatever) beers out there that are objectively better and cheaper than the American mass-market stuff then let me know what it is. Keep in mind that I'm used to paying about $20-$25 for a 30-rack of cans, and Pabst is usually on sale for $15.99, so it would have to compete with that to be truly worth it, though I don't mind paying more.

Depressingly, the Leinenkugel's disaster is what "success" looks like. They were long ago purchased by Miller, who got to work on trying to make the brand more profitable. They repeatedly tried to go national, nothing really stuck, until they started in with the shandies and had immediately commercial success. It's really unfortunate, like you said, their old school beers are actually pretty solid representatives of their styles and aren't really all that common on the market these days. The sugar bombs sell though, so pretty much everything they make is soda with a slight beer spin to it.

I still buy Leinies original when I can get it, but yeah since the sale they've mostly been focused on seasonal varieties. The lemon Summer Shandy was a big hit in that series, and led to them making loads of other fruity beers. Can't blame them too much, light lager is a crowded market.

However it goes back some ways. I remember drinking a pitcher of Berry Weiss circa 2002 or so because it was on special, regretting it more and more with each sip. Finished the whole pitcher though.

My bourbon of choice recently has been Old Forester, the basic 86 proof usually and the 1897 when I want something more complex.

I like Ardbeg 10 for Scotch when I drink it. It has a good smokiness but a much cleaner flavor than the other heavily peated single malts I've tried.

Got a bottle of Licor 43 as basically a gag gift, but I've been genuinely enjoying it on the rocks as a nightcap.

Very sweet, but once you get past that it has a rather unique and interesting flavor.

I'm on a dry month, alas. Planning on getting some nice scotch once we hit a milestone at my startup though.

Any recs from scotch drinkers here?

I second the recommendation for Aberlour "A'bunadh," with the caveat that it's bottled at cask strength (over 60% ABV iirc) and can be pretty harsh without water or ice. Here are a few other whiskies I've enjoyed over the past year or so:

Port Charlotte "Heavily Peated" 10 - This Islay is probably my current favorite whisky, and it's comparable in price to the 10-year offerings from Ardbeg and Laphraoig. The smoke is assertive, but not overpowering; as you gradually acclimate to it, the underlying sweetness and complexity becomes more accessible. I've found notes of marzipan, cookie dough, and citrus alongside funkier flavors like seaweed and clay.

Bunnahabhain 12 - An unpeated Islay whisky. One of the most unique whiskies I've tasted, with notes of red apples, tobacco, leather, milk chocolate and musty old books. Another, very different, unpeated Islay worth trying is Bruichladdich's "The Classic Laddie," a salty, cereal, honeyed dram with "bass notes" of raisin and tennis ball rubber.

Kilchoman "Sanaig" - I remember being struck by how rich and intense the smell of this whisky was the moment I opened the bottle. A thick layer of nutty smoke over sweet cut grass notes--it makes me think of a big barn full of hay.

Arran 10 - Hits the palate with a simple, classic butterscotch flavor, but soon develops into bold fruit notes, mainly peaches and tropical fruits, before finishing dry and woody. Very impressive and complex for a 10-year-old unpeated whisky.

Highland Park Cask Strength - Like the A'bunadh, this is over 60% and is not at all "smooth." But underneath the ethanol burn there are intense and interesting floral and mineral notes with a background of tangy, fusile smokiness like a freshly-burnt-out match. The ornate bottle design may or may not appeal to you--I think it's well-executed, even though Highland Park's "Viking" branding generally makes me roll my eyes.

Other good choices include Ardbeg "Uigeadail," Ledaig 10, Laphraoig Cask Strength, Benriach "The Smoky Twelve," and blended malts like Johnny Walker Green Label and anything by Compass Box.

Also, before you spend big bucks on scotch (or any spirit), it pays to invest in appropriate glassware. Tumblers are fine if you only drink with ice, but most single malts are made to be drunk near room temperature. A tulip-shaped glass like a glencairn or snifter is ideal; fill the glass up to its widest point, to expose the highest possible surface area of the spirit to the air inside the glass. This intensifies the aroma, which is just as important as the taste for appreciating whisky. Roll the liquor around the glass before nosing so the "legs" stick to the sides of the glass, further increasing the exposed surface area. With the right glass you can savor a whisky for ten or fifteen minutes before you've even tasted it.

I like islay scotch (they're kind of like bbq sauce made with 100 year old tonic medicines). The big ones are Laphroaig and Ardbeg; their 10 years are both good entry points if you want to try.

What are you looking for in a scotch?

No idea? I like macallans.

Macallan is a sherry-casked Speyside, so you might try one in the same category, like Aberlour. If you want to branch out a little bit from there, go with something from Dahlwinnie or Glenfarclas.

You might also consider looking around for a whiskey bar. Most decent ones will do flights to let you get a good sense of what you might like.

Edit: I should clarify these aren't "high-end" or expensive scotches but they are pretty accessible if you're not a regular Scotch drinker and I think they're both great value for the money, Glenfarclas in particular.

Thanks, yeah an expensive or high-end scotch would probably be wasted on me at the moment.

Maybe, but not necessarily! I know the bourbon world much better than the scotch world, but for what it's worth, the difference between really good stuff and mid-tier stuff is often pretty obvious without having any particular background expertise. I'm more than happy to share my favorite bourbons that I have on the shelf with friends that are newer whiskey than me, with only a couple bottles being reserved for special occasions. On that note, if you have any friends that are into whiskey (or whisky), that's certainly the cheapest way to try a few things and most of them will be happy to share with someone that is interested in learning more.

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