Yea Modern Times is the best brewery for sure. Wish I had a job there haha. I don’t get out much but I’m able to find their IPAs around town super super fresh so I love their limited release stuff. Even their year round beers are great like if I went to a restaurant that wasn’t hardcore craft beer centric but they had orderville or blazing world on tap I know I was going to be ok.
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I very rarely drink beers anymore. But decided today to stop in the local packy and try something new. Since it’s starting to get colder here I decided on this guy. I have no idea how I use to drink these all the time.
I don’t taste any fire, it’s velvety and super flavorful. A definite dessert beer.
just to give some more background, this dude didn’t really give a fuck, he did shit like this all the time. His parents owned like a billion acres of timber, dude would do “jobs” like this in between stints of being a ski bum. He wasn’t a total slacker, though, he had a MPMM from Yale and a JD, though he never practiced. Mostly he just wanted to play Warhammer 40k.
He must have been just a level 1 because starting with level 2 properly opening and serving is part of the curriculum. Level 1 doesn’t carry much weight in the industry. (So I’ve been told - I have no personal experience.)
Fwiw this was 25 years ago
no ted talk, but i don’t really enjoy the super sweet stouts that are gaining popularity. otoh i didn’t like IPA’s once and now it’s all i drink.
That’s awesome. I grew up and lived most of my life on the western coast of Norway. My dad brews beer every Christmas, making the maltøl mentioned in the article.
In addition to the farmhouse brewing, a bunch of micro breweries have popped up everywhere around Norway in the last couple of decades. I had a beer simply named Kveik a few years ago from a small brewery. It was good enough that the name stuck, from tasting it once and knowing nothing about where the name came from.
I now live in the bay area, and I’ve been to Almanac several times without knowing the small connection it has to home. I was supposed to go home to Norway this summer, but with the madness of COVID I had to postpone the trip. I really hope they have some Kveik beer in their assortment still, so I can have a little taste of home. I will probably stop by tomorrow to find out!
This article really made my day. Thank you so much for posting!
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again i have no idea how to take good pictures of the beer i’m drinking
mosaic and amarillo hops, 45 ibus, canned on 9/8, yummm
the funniest thing happened to me while i was buying this. the guy in front of me was a weird guy who was buying and claiming a bunch of scratchers, and as i was leaving he handed me a $5 scratcher and i took it out to my car and scratched it and it looked like i won $3 so i took it back inside and it was a $20 winner, and i tried to buy the guy a $5 scratcher but he wouldn’t accept and told me to pay it forward so when i went and picked up my mexican food i bought a side of chips and guac and told them to give it to whoever came in next
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It’s funny, these experiments are near universally done on wine because people who aren’t wine snobs love to be like “ha, see, it’s all bullshit”. All of this stuff applies to food and drink in general as well as much else. Putting food colouring in puddings changes the perceived flavour. Paying more for food makes it taste better. People can’t tell the difference between like chicken and pork if they can’t see what they’re eating, etc etc. People will not accept news stories with headlines like “the idea of better and worse food is bullshit” as we all know that’s not true, so that’s not how those results are presented, that’s just how they’re presented when it comes to wine.
With wine it’s compounded by the fact that a lot of casual drinkers don’t actually want to drink the kind of wines that are priced highly, just like people who aren’t into weird flavours don’t necessarily want to eat caviar and swallow’s nest soup. In fact, one study of 6,000 blind tastings with amateurs concluded that the relationship between price and enjoyment is small and negative, which doesn’t surprise me at all. The #1 thing which predicts enjoyment of wine among casual drinkers is whether it has a little residual sugar.
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This isn’t true with respect to organic food. There’s a vibrant market for stories about how those hippies are stupidly overpaying for organic food for no reason.
Yeah, it’s similar.
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Definitely recommend doing some blind tastings on your liquor of choice. Can be fun and a good way to figure out what you actually prefer.
What always gets me on these experiments is why people take the leap from price making a difference in perceived enjoyment of the same wine (which makes sense) to, “there is no difference between cheap wine and expensive wine”.
Wine can be expensive for a lot of different reasons which have little to do with the actual quality. But, very generally, more expensive wines are more expensive because the best fruit from the best locations is expensive. (And also because new wood barrels are expensive.)
A great wine cannot be made from subpar fruit. And great fruit cannot be made into a cheap wine unless the wine maker wants to go broke. (And cheap wine cannot use new wood for every batch, for the same reason.)
Like with most anything, there are exceptions to the above generalizations.
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Obviously one of the exceptions.
I love that it says on the label that it’s 100% grape. Good to know!
And I actually do legitimately like Carlo Rossi wines, particularly the Burgundy and Paisono. I know they’re Not Actually good wines but shit, I don’t know Miles, tastes pretty good to me. Like, I’ve had $20 wines, $60 wines, $150 wines. Is the $150 wine better than the Carlo Rossi? Yes, of course, much better. Really good. But a 4 liter jug of Rossi costs like 16 dollars. That’s three bucks a bottle! Is the $150 wine fifty times better than the Rossi? Not usually, most nights the Rossi will do just fine.
And I also live by the dictum of don’t cook with any wine you won’t drink, but, uh, took that in a different direction than most folks.
Ultimately, all that matters is if you like it.
As for me, there are plenty of wines in the $15-25 range that I think are very good, and I happily drink them all the time. Below $15 and it gets hard for me to find stuff I like, but not impossible. There are also expensive wines that I don’t like because I don’t like the style. (Caymus is one of those for me. All smooth and jammy with nothing interesting going on imo.)
Yeah I generally buy cheap wine and expensive scotch
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I drink mostly bourbon and rye, but I occasionally like a Spyside scotch. On my last trip to the liquor store,I bought this and have really been enjoying it:
It’s a non-smoky, single-malt that is fairly sweet on the tongue due to being stored in both bourbon and sherry casks.
They also make a “Land Cask” that I hear is very smokey.
Anyone else drink much bourbon in here? The market in bourbon has been wild for a few years now and is reaching the point of absurdity.
Basically anything that isn’t mass produced gets scooped up by people with ins with retail stores and then resold on the underground secondary market at wildly inflated prices.
A couple of my favorite go to bottles that aren’t impossible to find.
Elijah Craig Small Batch Barrel Proof
EH Taylor Small Batch
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