The Pineapple Plunge: Topanga Blonde Ale by Big Lug Brewing

Sadly we didn't get a hotel downtown for Gencon. Instead we were out in the boonies by the airport. The past few years we've stayed downtown and I would make a stop at a Big Red Liquors to find some Hoosier beer to bring home. Since I had no interest in schlepping beer around for 12-14 hours, I settled for a small beer outlet in a gas station near our hotel. Aside from a ton of Sun King, the selection of Indiana brews was rather small.

There were a lot of IPAs and American light lagers which I think says something about the state of craft brewing these days. I settled on Topanga, a hoppy blonde ale, by Indianapolis' Big Lug Brewing. And I did so with trepidation.

"Hoppy". My fear was this was just going to be another Hawaiian Punch beer but hope spring eternal and I gave the Big Lugs the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it would have more Noble tasting hops applied with a heavier hand than normal. Or perhaps it would have fruity hops but not that much fruity hops. Or a nice mix. Or just be drinkable.

Topanga was very hazy and deep yellow, but not the gold you see in the photo, at the wide part of the glass but was a light yellow at a narrower part. At the bottom of my snifter I saw dark flakes. Uff da. The head was a lovely loose, white layer of foam that disappeared quickly. There were some bubbles to see through the haze. Taking a sniff, my fears came true. It was really, really fruity with pineapple at the front which was backed by a general tropical fruitiness including hints of citrus.

Apprehensively I took a sip. Light body, not much fizz. Pineapple plus that general tropical fruitiness and a touch of pine. A fair bit of honeyed sweetness. My nightmare had come true.

This was not my kind of beer and it ended up going down the drain. 

It was like someone had poured me a bowl of cereal that was half Froot Loops and half Trix. Then, instead of milk, they topped it off with Hawaiian Punch Pineapple Plunge. I don't doubt that someone out in the world finds this dystopian breakfast to be temptingly delicious but that person is not me.

Since I don't have much to say about this beer beyond I did not like it at all, I will note that I got together earlier this week with a friend that works at Karben4 Brewing here in Madison. He told me that K4 had merged with Young Blood Beer Co., also of Madison. That I hadn't heard this was probably due to a couple of things: 1) I don't pay strict attention to local beer news and 2) the news wasn't widely reported as beer news is in decline.

Robin Shepard's beer coverage at Isthmus ended with Covid but eventually returned, albeit sporadically. He's been more active lately - perhaps he can be now that he's done with his book. Is the Beer Baron column in the Wisconsin State Journal around? I thought it ended last year.

Beer consumption is down and craft beer isn't a hip, cool cultural phenomenon anymore, I guess.

Speaking of Robin Shepard, in his latest column he sings the praises of Delta Beer Lab's Salty Dog, a "grand" Gose. I had one recently at Atwood Music Hall and can report it's 8% and tastes like the Dead Sea. Salt licks at Farm and Fleet are less salty. I think I got high blood pressure from drinking it. I doubt there was even a nanoparticle of coriander in it.  You'd need a forest of coriander to produce enough seeds to cut through the salinity.

Now, Delta's unadulterated Gose is great and I give AMH credit for carrying whatever version of Delta's Gose they happen to offer. But this...this is not for me.

Soon I will start drinking Oktoberfests (that have been sitting around since July) and a pumpkin beer or two. Before that, however, I shall be sampling the ciders and brews of England. Hopefully Manchester has some good breweries.

The Unbearable Sweetness of Ambers: R and J's Rowdy Raccoon by Young Blood Beer Co.

This is another brew that I first encountered sometime in the summer, I do believe, and got lost in the divorce shuffle. 

Young Blood Beer Co. is one of my least favorite breweries in Madison as their portfolio is 99.9% fruity this and pastry that. Reading their beer lists is like reading a menu that consists of nothing but Hawaiian Punch and Hostess snack cakes. There seems to be little more than gimmickry at work here of the most vicious kind.

"Fruit Punch Sour with Lemon, Passion Fruit, Orange & Guava"

"Fruit Punch Sour with Winter Melon, Passion Fruit, Orange & Guava"

blah blah blah

 

I found their helles to be tasty but pilsner-like and their smoked porter to be not bad. Despite never having considered going to their outpost on North Street despite not living far from it, I still try their beer tasting beers if I find something appealing at the liquor store and such was the case this past summer when I discovered that they had brewed a lager with my favorite grain, rye - R and J's Rowdy Raccoon.

 

For all the gimmicks Young Blood employs, this beer sure looked mighty fine. A loose tan head shrank while sitting atop several ounces of gorgeous beer. It was a beautiful amber hue and clear to boot. Many a bubble was to be seen inside the glass. Taking a whiff, my nose caught, disappointingly but not unexpectedly, caramel. Plus black pepper and grass. It reminded me a bit of Eliot Ness from Great Lakes.

 

While I do not seek to have the taste of caramel banished from beer, American brewers are almost unable to produce a brew that isn't yellow or black that isn't a Werther's candy in liquid form. It is weird. When I was in England back in September, I sampled a few amber ales and the caramel taste ranged from little to none. These were not sweet beers.

 

I don't know what English brewers and their maltsters do. Perhaps they take sacks of Maris Otter out to Stonehenge and perform some druidic voodoo on them, reading profane passages from a Barclay Perkins grimoire. Whatever diablerie they practice, English brewers manage to make amber ales that don't taste like candy.

 

So this stuff looked wonderful but had a prominent caramel aroma. But that didn't necessarily consign it to the candy bin. I hoped.

 

My first sip was fizzy heaven and then came the bready sweetness followed by caramel. Underneath those bubbles was a very smooth beer. It also had a savory/bready taste that I presumed was the rye. Oh, and there was a dash of cubeb or Grains of Paradise in there too.

 

The sweetness lingered on the finish but a modicum of spicy hops eventually crept in. Bitterness was medium and dryness a bit less.

 

Despite a near optimal level of fizziness, this beer was a bit too sweet. It never tasted cloying but I wished that it had leaned towards the breadier with less Werther's. Perhaps keeping it more on syrupy side kept the A.B.V. at a moderate 5.2%. The hops and rye were tasty, though.

 

Junk food pairing: This lager pairs well with pretzels, especially Snyder's Jalapeño Pieces. The spiciness tempers the sweetness of the beer and adds a complementary zing to the rye.

Come on, people now, Smile on your porter: Perpetually Electrified by Young Blood Beer Company

Everybody get together
Try to drink smoke beer right now

Last summer Young Blood Beer Company announced they'd be opening a brewery over here on the east side of Madison on Stoughton Road just south of Buckeye Road. The announcement was quickly followed by the caveat that there would be no tasting room nor beer garden at the brewery. This news was met with loud groans that reverberated throughout the Elvehjem neighborhood from Cuco's Mexican Restaurant who were briefly excited at the prospect of hordes of hungry drunks only a block or so away.

And so, while a new Young Blood drinking establishment did not emerge, it seems that you can quaff their brews more readily at home as this brewery has greatly expanded their ability to put cans of beer on store shelves. Well, it seems like it to me, anyway, when I go to liquor stores.

I was writing about a beer from the shiny new Starkweather Brewing Company yesterday and came across a quote from their co-owner and brewmaster, Peter Schroder during my extensive research: "We’re not the young hipsters just doing sours." This sums up my impressions of Young Blood fairly well. Not that they only make sours, but their portfolio has a lot of fruited sours in addition to other trendy brews like pastry stouts and IPAs. So I was happy to find out that they had brewed a smoked porter.

With the fate of Karben4's smoked porter, Night Call, unclear (see here), another such beer seemed in order. I don't see Alaskan Smoked Porter around much and so perhaps Perpetually Electrified could take the edge off of Night Call's demise, should it come, and help fill the smoked porter gap. Alaskan Smoked Porter is brewed with malt smoked over alder wood flames and I don't know what Karben4 uses/used for Night Call. Young Blood went alt Schule and used beechwood smoked malt for Perpetually Electrified which is the traditional choice for German rauchbier.

I did my level best to get the fizz flowing with my pour and it paid off in spades with a big, tan head of loose foam on top of beer so dark and impervious to light that H.P. Lovecraft would have heartily approved. When my eyes were finally able to penetrate the Stygian gloom in my glass, I saw a liquid of a deep brown hue, with a faint red tint. As best I could ascertain, it was clear. The beer smelled of a curious combination of the sweet and the smokey. First, there was a scent like raisin which was followed by one of what I think of as pan-berry. Not any one particular berry, just berries generally. A little honeyed sweetness rounded out that element. Next I found a little coffee underneath a moderately smokey scent.

Despite the big head, my tongue tasted a less than large amount of fizziness. That generic berry flavor came first on my initial sip followed by a goodly dose of smoke. The restrained carbonation made for a rather smooth mouthfeel. After swallowing, some sweetness lingered until coffee flavors took over. A herbal hoppy taste soon followed giving a mild bitterness and just a touch of dryness.

This beer was...not bad. With American porters, I expect the emphasis to be on coffee, bitter chocolate, and that fuliginous flavor from black patent malt or whatever grain yields that ashy kind of taste and for fruity elements to be in the background. Perpetually Electrified seems to have that reversed, not unlike a recent Baltic porter. "Maybe it's meant to be more of an English porter," I figured. But I'd expect an English version to be less fruity and more nutty and earthy tasting. Or am I wrong on that? Now I am going to have to seek out a porter from its homeland for comparison.

Perhaps the relative strengths of the flavors has to do with the fact that this is a big porter. It is 8.1% A.B.V., after all. Regardless, I wish the fruity flavors had more of a supporting role here. On the other hand, I really enjoyed the smoke flavor. It wasn't as strong as that of a Schlenkerla rauchbier, but it wasn't just a wallflower either. Hopefully the folks at Young Blood will try this brew again but tweak the formula.

Junk food pairing: hearty, smokey beers pair well with meat so a bag of Old Dutch's Ripples BBQ Pulled Pork Wrap potato chips is the way to go.

Swank and Hoppy Vibes: Bathtub Bier by Young Blood Beer Co.

Whenever I'm at the store and see cans of Young Blood Beer Co. beer, I can't help but think of Jack and Jim Youngblood, the unrelated defensive end and linebacker, respectively, who played for the Rams in the 1970s. I saw their football cards just too many times as a kid not to have that surname etched into my memories. It is also the case that, when I see cans of Young Blood Beer Co. beer, I tend to see lots of fruited sours and IPAs and lactose and guava – every trendy style and additive is represented. These are beers that I have no interest in drinking, alas. However, I recently came across the brew formerly known as Shower Bier, a Munich Helles they have concocted for people like me. Bathtub Bier is the new name because the former one was already taken by some brewery out east that apparently had a litigious streak and so the name was changed to another bathroom fixture. (I think a brown ale called "Bidet Bier" should be next.)

I was hesitant to try this beer, to be honest. If a brewery cranks out mostly IPAs and fruited sours, I tend to have little faith in their ability to brew lagers. Earlier this year I remarked to a friend who works in the brewing industry that I’d had a Spaten Hell for the first time in ages and that it was remarkably tasty. He replied to the effect of, "Well, no shit. They’ve been brewing it for 100+ years. They’ve got the process down, they’ve got a house yeast strain they know inside and out, and so on. It had better be good." Which is why I avoid the lagers from haze factories that let a beer mature in cold temperatures only slightly more frequently than the appearance of Halley’s Comet. I just have to question if they know what they’re doing with so little practice apparent to me.

Last year, for instance, I noticed a rye lager of some kind on the shelves from Drekker Brewing. All I’d ever seen by them up to that point were milkshake this and slushie that. I love rye lagers but they’re as scarce as hen’s teeth. In the end, though, I passed on this rare brew. I was not inclined to spend $16 on a 4-pack by a brewery that had, as far as I could tell, never brewed a lager in its life. Hell, it’d probably have traces of passion fruit in it, I reasoned. Another factor was, quite frankly, that I did not want to give my money to them. They’re a foreign brewery (out of Fargo, North Dakota) that helps clog the shelves at my local bottle shop with beer I consider to be a novelty, at best. I simply do not want to be party to the Hazy Milkshake Slushie Industrial Complex. (And while I generally have good will towards men and women and the rest of humanity, there is surely a special place in Hades for people who make exploding cans of fruit beer and blame the customer.)

Young Blood got a pass because A) they’re local and B) I was able to buy a single can instead of investing in a 4-pack. In addition, I’d heard generally good things about them and there are exceptions to every rule, after all.

When I read the label, my heart sank. Well, just a tiny bit because beer labels really shouldn’t be a source of distress. It read, in part, "…with a slightly bready malt background." Huh? I thought the whole point of a Munich style Helles Lager was that the bready malt part was in the foreground. Imagine reading the label of a hazy/juicy/NE IPA that read, "…with faint notes of guava, passion fruit, and mango in the background." Odd.

Bathub Bier looks really nice. It is a brilliant light yellow (unlike my photograph) and my glass had a big, lovely, white head on it. The bier was a tad hazy (chill haze?) but I could still see bubbles inside running ever upwards. I was surprised at how unsmelly it was. Maybe it wasn't very fresh – there was no date on the can. (It did, however, have "DANK AND DRIPPY VIBES" printed on the bottom.) I couldn't smell anything when the glass was waved in close proximity to my nose and I had to stick it up close. When I did, I caught a nice bready aroma accompanied by some grassy hops scents and a slight citrus something. Either this beer was lacking in the aroma department or my nose was having on off day.

Things got better on the tongue as I found a nice, light body and that the label did not lie. It had a delicate breadiness to it with more herbal and spicy hop flavors on top giving a moderate bitterness. It was clean and crisp and had a nice firm fizz to it which really hit the spot one summer day. The finish was on the dry side with the hops getting spicier and the fizz ably assisting.

It seems weird to me that a Helles would have so little malt flavor. This tasted much more like a German pils with its malty background and largely Noble hop flavors more to the fore. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed this bier but calling it a Helles just isn't right in my book.

Junk food pairing: Pair Bathtub Bier with a bag of Vegan Rob's Brussels Sprouts Puffs. The sorghum will make up for the lack of malt and the delicate green vegetable flavor complements the bier's hoppiness well.