2018 Bourbon County Reserve - aged in 12 year old Elijah Craig bourbon barrels
I bought this for myself and put it in my own stocking which surprised my wife lol. This is my second favorite beer ever and two years old it’s just as good. It just clicks with me. Good amount of barrel heat still, it’s thick but not syrupy, dark chocolate finish. Still has some sweetness to it as well. It covers all bases for me. Incredibly balanced. (Thankfully I bought two more my wife doesn’t know about that are waiting downstairs )
Had a glass of 2011 EMH Black Cat Napa Cab with a ribeye at dinner. Rest of the bottle (or whatever my wife doesn’t drink) is waiting until after I drive my dad home.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a martini, but I’m sure I would love it. On the rare occasions that I smoke it usually ends with me sitting by the fridge eating a whole jar of olives.
I wish I could ship you a couple but I can’t find the martini adapter for my computer… Let me know if you’re ever in the Seattle area and I’ll shake some up for you.
I know I effin love 'em, but I’ve found that they’re a pretty polarizing drink. Obviously, you have to like gin, for one, and also they’re pretty much straight liquor so they seem “strong” to people who don’t drink much.
I mentioned this before but I highly recommend pairing them with oysters on the half shell. So good.
pleased with myself for timing my NYE perfectly, and by that i mean “getting drunk and passing out early enough to wake up for the bowls.” last night’s selection, which has been my go-to favorite recently:
A 2014 bottle of lambic that I think is very likely the bottle I was going to open on Election Night 2016, until things started going south.
I was a little worried by the gross stuff under the cap:
but obviously the bottle was full of carbonation. Tasted fine, too, with the apricot being pretty faint. Ultimately, though, it was too sour for me to want to finish the entire bottle. I capped it with a champagne stopper after drinking maybe half of it.
I just need to realize that I enjoy straight geuze much more than fruited lambic, AND straight geuze is much easier and cheaper to get! Yet I still get excited when I see fruited lambic because it’s rarer and I can’t help acting like a trophy hunter sometimes.
Then I wanted to move on to something big, so I opened a 2015 Bourbon County Stout. This was the year of the infected bottles, and I got refunds for most of the ones I bought. But this bottle wasn’t from one of the infected dates, and tasted fine.
And… the bad news is that I seem to have largely lost my taste for stouts and/or high ABV beers. There was absolutely nothing wrong with this bottle, but I just wasn’t enjoying it. And that’s been my experience with a lot of stouts lately. This is the glass as it existed this morning:
A few years ago I got pretty sick of overly-fancy beers myself and switched back to drinking a bunch of simple stuff-- pilsners mostly, other lagers from time to time, a dunkel in the winter, stuff like that. I’ll still have something fancy once in a while, but for the most part, I’m kinda like, when I want a beer I want it to taste like a beer. If I want something that tastes like fruits and chocolate I’ll make a cocktail.
It depends. I almost never decant a pinot noir. I decant almost all other varieties if the bottle is old, but that is just to pour it off the sediment. I’ll decant young bottles (including pinot noir) for from 1 to 6 hours if necessary, but mostly I don’t open young bottles.
I also sometimes decant white wines if I think they need some air to improve.
I could have an idea from either experience or from reviews that the bottle likely needs more time (i.e. - I’m opening it early) and/or I taste it and it seems too tight or “closed up”. Or if there are some off odors decanting it might help them blow off. If I do decant a white its usually for 30 to 60 minutes, never hours like a red.
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