Tastings From the Hotel

My fiance and I are in Tazewell, VA...or thereabouts, this weekend for a wedding.  On the way up, I knew I would be spending time alone in the hotel, so I stopped and grabbed some new beers that I had not tasted before.  I thought "Hey...why not taste some beers and talk about them!"  I stopped in Abingdon, VA at the Food City and made a mix pack.  I will post as I drink to let you know how it's going...

5:20 PM - First up is Molson XXX.  My exposure to Molson was several years ago and is the only ice beer (Molson Ice) that I will put to my lips.  The XXX version is a "Super Premium Beer" according to the label.  The beer is very "beer" colored.  By that I mean it is like dark urine.  The smell is negligible, which is strange.  You can smell Molson Ice for miles.  To be perfectly honest, there is very little taste!  There is no hoppy bitterness or even really a caramel or coffee taste to it.  Imagine if you will that you took dirty water and mixed it with Michelob Light.  I think you have Molson XXX.  Let me choke this down and I will be back with the next, hopefully better offering.  Beer Advocate gives it a C-...I give it a full on F.

6:30 PM - Next up is Pyramid Thunderhead IPA.  It is "bursting with hops"!  The smell has a nice hoppy aroma.  It has a nice carbonation to the taste and a very good bite from the hops.  I wouldn't say its as good as an IPA like the 60 Minute IPA from Dogfish Head.  But it is a tasty beverage with just the right amount of tangy aftertaste from the hops to make it crisp.  The aftertaste stays around, and that may be the down point.  The aftertaste is piney.  Like drinking a tea made with pine needles.  Beer Advocate gives it a B.  I am good with that.

7:20 PM - This could be the last one...we will see.  I just realized that the Pyramid offering was > 6% as well.  This offering is Starr Hill Amber Ale.  Starr Hill is based in Charlotesville, VA, so this seems to be a local flavor.  I have another Starr Hill beer as well, but this one looked more appealing.  Not sure how or why, but it did.  The beer is a coppery color with a reddish brown tone.  There is a malty, nearly sweet but not quite, smell to the beer.  Nice carbonation and a good malt flavor.  A small hoppy aftertaste hits when you swallow.  Overall a pretty good taste.  Nothing truly "out there", but definitely worth a six pack purchase.  Beer Advocate gives it a B, I would go B+ based on future drinkability.  Of the three so far, this is the one I think I will buy on the way home.  UPDATE:  7:35 - This one is drinking much faster than the others.

That's all for tonight.  I may be back tomorrow evening for a bit.  If not, I have tastings of New Belgium upcoming!

Thursday Update

Not that there will always be a Thursday Update, but it seemed like a good day to post something and to give a state of this young union. I have added links to the right of beer sites I go to, some that I just stole from other sites that looked good and then of some breweries that I happen to like. I am currently in love with the Pisgah Brewery, so they get a mention along with some other great breweries from the area and not from the area. I have done some housekeeping with the site. I hope the theme is acceptable to your eyes cause I am not sure I will change it again for a while. While I know CSS and XML to some degree, I do not know the Blogger template system and just don't feel like learning it in order to come up with a custom design. If anyone out there wants to, let me know!

Here are some ideas for posts I have coming. Let me know which ones you want first and I will try to prioritize them:

Summer Beers - What Do Tou Drink When It's Hotter Than the Devil's Drawers Outside?
Favorite Wheat Beers
Session Beers - What You Drink When You're Sitting at a Bar For More Than an Hour
Germans and Beer - A Look At Octoberfest
Belgians and Beer - A Multi-part Study of the Monasteries and The Beer I Love To Drink
Americans and Beer - Why Budweiser Is The King of Beers, Even If I Hate It
__________ and Beer: I want to do Canada after I cover the previous 3, but you get the point.

I also want to do monthly things like "Brewery of the Month" and "Style of the Month". We will work on that stuff going forward.

What do you want to read about? What can we feature for you?

Thought This Was Relevant...

more graph humor and song chart memes

My Name is Rich...

...and I like beer. I appreciate Ern getting me in on this. I am a very very amateur beer connoisseur, but I do like talking about beer. As long as we aren't talking "Bud" or some crappy liquid being passed off as beer.

Tomorrow, I will try to run down my favorite beers to drink when I am broker than MC Hammer after his latest album tanks and his wife leaves him.

Beers for Review

I have in my dark little garage a box. This box is a special box. Within it lies some beer that I have been saving. I tend to do this every now and again and I save it for sharing with my friends OR for just a special occasion. Currently, I am saving it for a beer tasting I am planning.

The last beer tasting went off great until someone pulled out the mead! Ha Ha. Good times were had by all, and if I heard correctly, so were hangovers. Mead, as beautiful and wonderful as it is, packs quite a punch after tasting Belgian beers all night. That was in December...it has been 6 months and that is too long to go without a beer gathering with the guys.

On my list of beers being stored, I have:

Pisgah Summer Solstice - A wonderful Belgian style beer made in NC and organic to boot.
Maredsou 8 - A Belgian dubel. Tasty and warm.
Maredsou 10 - A Belgian tripel. One of my top 3 favorite Belgian beers.

Not to mention, last week I bottled the first of my Frisky Valley Wheat. It may suck, but we will try it anyway. It will be 2 weeks bottle conditioned at that point, so hopefully it will be good.

I look forward to this next beer tasting. I hope to post thoughts about each beer after we have the tasting.

Welcome to Beercentric

beer:
1.

• A fermented alcoholic beverage brewed from malt and flavored with hops.
• A fermented beverage brewed by traditional methods that is then dealcoholized so that the finished product contains no more than 0.5 percent alcohol.
• A carbonated beverage produced by a method in which the fermentation process is either circumvented or altered, resulting in a finished product having an alcohol content of no more than 0.01 percent.

2. A beverage made from extracts of roots and plants: birch beer.
3. A serving of one of these beverages.

cen-tric:
1. Situated at or near the center; central.
2. Having a center.
3. Of or relating to diatoms of the class Centrales, distinguished by there radially symmetrical form.

beer-cen-tric:
A site about beer!

I am going to be up front and honest right here and now. I, and the people I ask to post here, are not elite beer people who know how to accurately grade a brew and specifically hit on the characteristics that will make the beer snob in all of us go "wha?". I am, however, a normal guy who likes to try new beers, likes to brew a small batch every now and again and loves to go on a beer hunting expedition when gas prices allow. I love the adventure of trying a new brew or an old brew that I haven't had before.

People ask me what I like and I simple say "Everything!". While that isn't necessarily the case, I do like a full rounded amount of beers whether they be cheap or expensive, light or dark OR good or bad in the popular opinion. Its simple. I taste beer, I write about it here. My hope is to do a common guy's look at what beer means to just an average dude who likes a little more than he can get at the local grocer. There are only a few rules:

1. These are opinions and not the law. Drink what you like and enjoy!
2. Budweiser is not to be mentioned unless they come up with a new recipe that does not include lime, clamato or ice.

Thats it! Drink and enjoy and don't talk about Bud. It's simple! :) Right?