Beer Tasting 5

I've been lax in having my friends over for some simple sharing of beers so I made up for it last week. If you're interested, you can read about the first four at these links: one, two, three, four. For those that are new to my beer tastings, the basic idea is I invite some friends over and they all bring something they've wanted to try or just something they find on the shelf and then we share them. Pretty simple. Sometimes people choose beers based on the label, some times they actually want to try something specific, and sometimes it's their homebrew. Really, it's just an excuse to get together and make some of my friends try new things. Heck, my friend Jeff picked up a bottle at the Sam Adams brewery in anticipation of one of these nights. It's nice to know I have an affect. Hmm, effect? Affect? I probably should just use a different word. Oh well. (edit: My wife has informed me it's effect. So grammar issue solved.)

Here's the first set of bottles we opened. Really like the barrel structure of the Samuel Adams bottle on the right.

Pete Michel's Hefeweizen

Pete gave me a bottle of his hefeweizen the last time he was over here back in October and I finally got around to drinking it.  Luckily it's been in the refrigerator since he left it here (I mean since he gave it to me...) so I figured it would have held up pretty well and I was correct as it was quite good.

Great banana aroma to it.  I'm guessing he used some sort of German yeast to get that as it's a basic aroma in that style.  First sip followed with bananas, some sweetness and a sugary ending.  Flavors continue in the same basic form throughout the rest of it.  Pete had told me he wasn't that impressed with it, but either 3 more months in the bottle made it much better or he's minimizing his skill.  Very tasty and seemingly representative of the style.  Nice job Pete.

Beer Tasting

I had some friends over on Friday night for a beer tasting.  I got 3 bottles for it and everyone else brought 1 or 2 big bottles (except 1 guy who brought 4, 2 commercial and 2 homebrew.)  I thought it would be a fun way for all of us to try things we either don't usually drink or can't drink alone because the bottle is too strong.  I've had a bottle in my fridge for 2+ months because of that issue.  I took some notes and tried to get pictures of all of them but missed 2.

By the end, we finished 12 bottles.  I'll go through the first six and then the last six just to split up the post a bit.