Sly Fox Gold Rush and Cigar City Maduro

This will be a double beer post since I'm a little backed up with notes right now.  Need to get these two down as I have some super exciting events coming up this weekend.  Really cool stuff, but first two normal beer posts.

To start with, Sly Fox Gold Rush Lager, a Steam Beer.

Obviously, we picked up a growler of it when we visited the brewery over the weekend which means it was a beer that Jo liked.  For those that like beer but not the crazy stuff, this would be a good choice.  It smelled malty and sweet like a lager as expected.  Some sweetness, some maltiness, no bitterness at all in the flavors.  Very well balanced beer, quite enjoyable and easy to drink.  Great choice for relaxing in the afternoon.

Later in the week, I opened a bottle of Cigar City Maduro Brown, an American Brown Ale.

Cigar City is a brewery out of Tampa, Florida.  It makes some awesome beers, but right now only a few are available in Philly although I'm sure Bella Vista is working hard to get more here.  Getting back to the Maduro, I'll warn you now I'm going to use the word roasted quite a lot in this post.  I'd try to avoid it, but I have 3 lines of notes and used it 3 times so I'm sort of screwed.  I could consult a thesaurus but it's a blog not a novel so deal with my repetitiveness.  The smell was roasty but not too strong.  Flavor had a little sweetness, but once again the roasted malts came to the forefront and left their mark.  Aftertaste was also, surprise surprise, quite roasty.  There wasn't any bitterness in it and I thought it was closer to a porter than anything, but regardless I enjoyed it quite a lot.  So there we go.  I used roasted three times in three sentences.  Go out and try the beer and let me know if I'm wrong.

So yeah that's my current backlog (sort of.  I drank a Coronado Islander IPA today and it was good but I'm not going to post about it any more than this.)  Look for some cool stuff from the coming weekend although I know everyone will just read it Monday morning when they get to work.  And, sorry Jeff, they are probably going to be long posts.