Wednesday Beer Share

Once again I took the PATCO out to the wilds of NJ (okay it was only Collingswood but going to NJ is scary) to share some beer with my buddy Craig. He had just spent some time in Florida visiting Cigar City to buy some Hunahpu's, their crazy imperial stout, and I picked up a Midnight Sun Arctic Devil, a barrel aged barleywine, when in San Francisco.

We decided to start with the Cigar City Hunahpu's. This is aged on cacao nibs, ancho and pasilla chili peppers, cinnamon, and madagascar vanilla beans. As I said, pretty crazy.

Midnight Sun Obliteration VIII

While I have a few things to write about after our trip to San Francisco, I'm feeling too lazy right now so I'm just going to talk about one of the individual beers I drank over the trip: Midnight Sun Obliteration VIII, a double IPA.

Citrus in the nose but it was pretty mild. Some maltiness and some bitterness followed with a tiny hint of the same citrus. Continued that way without much deviation. Nothing real special here though it wasn't bad. Unfortunately there was no date marking on it as far as I could tell so it's impossible to know the age on it to know if it was brighter fresh. Probably didn't help that we worked through a growler of Pliny the Elder the day before either. Oh well.

Pumpkins on Christmas

Yeah, maybe having Pumpkin beers on Christmas seems odd, but we were having a pretty faithful Thanksgiving meal so why not Pumpkins? Besides, the two I decided to open aren't your average pumpkin beers anyway

The first I opened was Midnight Sun Treat, an imperial porter made with cocoa nibs, pumpkin, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg.

Sharing is Awesome

My buddy Craig was opening some of his bottles that were suspected of being infected (Abyss '09 apparently smells like metal and tastes like death at this point) and came across his '09 Portsmouth Kate the Great.  If you don't know (which I guess most of you don't), Kate the Great is an imperial stout made once a year by the Portsmouth brewpub in New Hampshire.  They produce around 900 bottles which get snapped up immediately.  Before this year, the line generally started forming some time in the middle of the night.  Given they release the bottles in the middle of winter, those people are freaking crazy.  And probably still cold.  This year they did some bizarre lottery ticket thing so it was all a crapshoot.  Less freezing, more gnashing of teeth about how life is unfair.  All this boils down to is that Kate the Great is nearly impossible to get and Craig is awesome for sharing it with me.