mxleader on 30/7/2022 at 03:36
Let's talk about amber ales, barleywines, brown ales, IPA's, porters, stouts and all the new post-modern hipster trash canned in cans with wallpaper labels.
I started drinking microbrew amber, porter, stout, brown, red and barleywine ales in the 1990's when micro-beers started showing up in grocery stores and pubs in the US. I've even brewed some which took a few years to age to a drinkable state. This one pictured I picked up a couple of months ago hidden on a shelf at a local beer shop that has lots of cool hard to find drinkables. I have a couple of whisky barrel aged ales from the UK that are like a barleywine, and very good, but are not, so I don't age those beyond what they've already been aged.
Inline Image:
https://i.imgur.com/EaGe9UF.jpg
Tocky on 30/7/2022 at 06:23
I like Chimay. I hear they are undergoing a supply problem of not enough Trappist monks to make it and who can blame them? Who the fuck wants to forgo an actual life in favor of religious bullshit? I also like Samuel Adams ale. But Yuengling is my favorite. It's best if aged for five years at room temp and then dumped in a kiddy pool of ice in the middle of summer. But who does that on purpose? Mostly I drink wine. Cheap Sunset Blush or Lambrusco. Sometimes Moscow Mules or spiced rum or Scotch or just Jack and coke. There is a drink called the Travis McGee made with Boodles gin and vermouth and sherry which tastes like aftershave but in a good way that is quite lovely. The funniest ale was one from Senoia, Georgia called Turtle head ale. It was based on an episode of Walking Dead where a character ate a tortoise head. It wasn't bad at all. I drink everywhere I go. I'm a fuckin drunk. But contained to times when it does not interfere with work and supporting family. Or driving. Otherwise I'm a connoisseur of shitface.
Ooooo and Capital City Ale but you can only get that one place. Guess where.
Harvester on 30/7/2022 at 11:24
Quote Posted by Tocky
I like Chimay. I hear they are undergoing a supply problem of not enough Trappist monks to make it and who can blame them? Who the fuck wants to forgo an actual life in favor of religious bullshit?
If they are dead set on only employing actual monks for their brewery, that might cause supply problems. Monks are getting older, and the influx of new monks is slow. However, larger abbey-based breweries like Leffe, Affligem and La Trappe treat their companies like a commercial enterprise where you don't have to be a monk to work at the brewery. My guess is they don't even require their employees to be religious. At the supermarkets I go to their beers are always in stock. But yeah, if for some reason you require that only monks can brew your beer, that might become more and more problematic in the future since their numbers are dwindling.
And with that, I've already named some of the beers I like, like Leffe Blond and Tripel, and Affligem Double. I also like Gouden Carolus, they have a strong whiskey infused beer that's great. Also La Chouffe and Westmalle beers, good stuff. As you can tell I have a preference for abbey beers, like blondes, doubles, triples, quadruples. I know IPAs are big nowadays but I'm not that much of a fan, I don't really like the bitter taste many of them have.
EDIT: I've checked, and Leffe has been taken over by Anhauser Busch (and anyone can work there), and with La Trappe the brewing still happens 'under supervision and responsibility' of the monks, that implies to me that the actual day-to-day work of brewing the beer is not done by monks anymore.
mxleader on 30/7/2022 at 16:00
Quote:
Tocky
I like Chimay.
I'll have to buy some. I remember drinking Chimay about thirty years ago and don't really remember what it's like.
Quote:
If they are dead set on only employing actual monks for their brewery, that might cause supply problems. Monks are getting older, and the influx of new monks is slow. However, larger abbey-based breweries like Leffe, Affligem and La Trappe treat their companies like a commercial enterprise where you don't have to be a monk to work at the brewery. My guess is they don't even require their employees to be religious.
Somehow as I get older I feel like brewing beer at a abbey seems like a great lifestyle ... Run around in dark robes all day, sample ales, eat cheese, garden, read and not talk to people. I used to brew homebrew for about ten years so I have a basic understanding of the brewing process albeit on a five gallon scale.
mxleader on 7/8/2022 at 06:09
This little barley wine gem from J.W. Lees is pretty expensive at $9.99 USD but is pretty amazing to sip.
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Inline Image:
https://i.imgur.com/qsALxY0.jpg[/IMG]
PigLick on 7/8/2022 at 11:40
that looks nice, 10.5 abv damn. That shit can get you fucked up.
mxleader on 7/8/2022 at 14:54
The ABV may be high but a 9.3 oz. bottle at $9.99 isn't really a chugging kind of beer. It's more of a slow sipping kind like a good single malt scotch whisky.
mxleader on 16/8/2022 at 05:22
Does anyone in here drink anymore?
demagogue on 16/8/2022 at 06:47
Sitting at the cafe right now, drinking an ice coffee, listening to some smooth bossa nova and posting here.
I honestly can't remember the last time I drank alcohol, come to think of it. Having covid-related surprise heart trouble right at the start of 2020 I think played a big role, because I didn't know what was safe and what wasn't, nobody did!, so I was extra paranoid. And once you're off the stuff, it's actually kind of hard to just start up again, I mean even having the occassions to drink any more.
My favorite thing to drink a few years ago was black umeshu, which I think is umeshu inflused with brown sugar and which you could mix with coffee or milk or cream pretty well, but it mysteriously disappeared from the market, it's been impossible to find, and I never did find a good replacement that checked all of its boxes. I guess it works like Kahlúa or liquors like it, but it's its own thing.
...
Edit: People here can be fanatical about scotch whisky. E.g., Suntory bought Jim Beam. Reminds me that I think Yamaha bought Gretsch guitars; similar kind of vibe. There are these aficianodo fetishes Japanese salarymen pick up where people are stupidly obsessive about very particular brands and will drop obscene amounts of money for, e..g, in this case a single bottle, while glibly ignorant of the underlying history or culture of the thing, but I guess that's another discussion.
Speaking of which though, drinking culture is a really special thing here. It's kind of built into the work culture, because it has a strict formality to it. So the way people in an organization can talk openly with each other is to have regular mandated drinking parties where it's important you at least act like you're getting stupid drunk because it gives you plausible deniability for saying what needs to be said without being responsible for it. That's just one layer in a bigger story though. Long before you're at that stage, you've been going to nomihodai in your booths with your band, your kohais and sempais following these almost religious-like social rituals, which morphs into the work culture.
It's so different from how I understood the role of drinking, I kind of never understood or got into what was going on or why.
In the West, I think the importance of drinking is you disarm yourself with your mates. There's some kind of trust thing going on, like I can trust the guy I regularly go out drinking with. There is a culture of expat drinking all over Asia too (and I imagine any expat community), but the issue there is that Japan has a really high expat turnover rate, and one can only go through all the initiation rites so many times...
I don't know if I have a point. Drinking is really wrapped up with culture in a way I wouldn't have predicted back when it was just the thing we did on weekends without thinking about it much.
PigLick on 16/8/2022 at 09:10
Is there a problem with alcoholism in Japan like there is in Western countries? I mean like large amounts of medical care is due to alcohol related issues, diabetes, kidney and liver problems, mental health.
and also, is there any other kind of bossa nova but smooth.