Every once in a while Ms Cocktail will bring me back something from the store with this blog in mind. The other day, what she brings back is a bottle from the Harpoon 100 Barrel Series. Now I hadn’t heard about this before so I went to the Harpoon web site and found this tidbit of information:

The Harpoon 100 Barrel Series is a return to our brewing roots. We call it the 100 Barrel Series because that’s exactly what it is— one-of-a-kind limited batch creations fashioned by a Harpoon brewer. Every couple of months a different Harpoon brewer will choose a style, develop a recipe, and brew the beer—from selecting the ingredients to the final filtration. You will find that brewer’s signature on each bottle of beer from their batch. So if you like the beer, you’ll know who to thank.

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For those of you that don’t know, scrimshaw is an art form that was practiced by sailors on whale boats back in the 19th century. These whaling trips could take up to three years and while they out to sea, the sailors would pass the time by practicing this art. They would take ivory from whales or walrus and etch designs on to the surface. Some of these have become quite valuable and collectable over the years.

While it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least to find a New England beer named for this art form, I did find it a touch out of place that a California brewery named a beer after it. After all, the whaling industry was centered out of New Bedford, Massachusetts and the boats being pulled around by a harpooned whale was called a Nantucket sleigh ride. In spite of this geographic disconnect in the name, I’ve found that Scrimshaw is a pretty decent beer.

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OK, I’ll admit that I had to go look up what braggot meant. It is certainly not a word that you come across every day. What I found is that braggot is a cross between mead and ale with at least 50 % of the fermentable sugars coming from honey. Well that explains a lot, especially as I found that the scent and flavor of honey was well represented in the Widmer Brothers, Brother’s Reserve Series Prickly Pear Braggot.

This is a light brew that tastes and feels more like a beer than a mead. It has a nice light goldenrod color and a very white, medium density head that rapidly vanishes. There was no lacing present at all. On the nose you get a scent of honey and a background of malty sweetness. There are no hops to speak of in the aroma. On the tongue you get honey up front carried along by a bit of earthiness in the mid palate. It finishes with a light, almost ephemeral note of fruit. There is bit of fizzy carbonation that completes the picture being painted on your tongue.

All in all this is an excellent brew. It is a pretty big beer, weighing in at 10% ABV but it is not really notable in the nose or on the palate. It is light enough that you could drink more than one of these but since they come in a 22 oz bottle, I think doubling up would lead to trouble down the road. A most excellent endeavor by the Brothers Widmer.

Ok, so I got suckered by the marketing. I think I’ve mentioned before that this can happen to me. There I  was walking through the local megamart, which by the way is the place where beer is purchased in Virginia, (as a side note to the offshoot to the conversation, there could be a whole study as to where, when and why beer can be purchased, never mind wine and hard alcohol. It varies by state and in some cases, by county or parish. This leads to exceptionally convoluted laws regarding alcohol that makes doing business in teh alcohol almost impossible in some cases.) when i saw this creepy looking guy on the label of a bottle and the name Hobgoblin scrawled across the top. I was sold.

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For those that don’t know me or haven’t figured it out yet, I’m a Dead Head. Yup, I spent many of my impressionable years following the band around going to far too many shows and generally having the time of my life. I continue to research the complexities of the music from the Grateful Dead and continue to find new and wondrous things in the small little details of what they accomplished.

All this means is that I’m still a sucker for when I see someone that uses something from the band in a commercial venture. Some are overt, some are subtle but they somehow always get me. This beer is no different. I saw the label, read Dark Starr, had to have it. So that is the story about how this brew made it into my home.

It doesn’t hurt that this beer is from Charlottesville, VA, only a couple of hours from where I live. So that gives it the extra whammy of being a local beer for me. This also means that I was rather excited about trying it. I enjoy stouts at the right time and place, but I don’t go crazy for them. So finding one that can fill a niche for me is a very cool and groovy thing.

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A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I used to be the owner of a homebrew supply shop. It was a nice little retail shop situated in the heart of downtown Willimantic, CT and it was called the Natchaug Brewery. At one point I had grand plans of opening an actual brewery, hence the name. Along those lines, I spent a lot of time actually making beer. One of the finest I ever crafted was a coffee stout that is still mentioned by those that had tasted it, some twenty years later.

The secret to this brew was that there was actual coffee in the stout and that the flavors melded perfectly. While I may have been way ahead of the curve, there are some fine examples of coffee and beer mixtures out in the market today and I was introduced to one awhile back by my good friend Lucas. It is called the Pipeline Porter from the Kona Brewing Company in Kona, Hawaii.

To give you an idea of how good I think this brew is, I’ve been trying to do a review of it since before Christmas. The only problem is that every time I bought some to do a review, it would somehow disappear before I could actually do a tasting of it. So, I finally managed to purchase some at a time when I was drinking some other stuff and managed to stash away a couple of bottles for this express purpose.

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As most of you know, the Northern Virginia/Washington, D.C. area has been slammed with several snowfalls that have virtually crippled this area. A week later and we are still trying to dig out from under the mess that Mother Nature (MN) left us. We were pretty well prepared for this type of thing having grown up in Connecticut and spending time in Central Pennsylvania, we’re very accustomed to heavy snowfalls and the associated hunkering down and the subsequent digging out.

While we were picking up those last minute things at the local megamart to tide us over during the last blast from MN, Ms Cocktail spied something on the shelf of the beer aisle and brought it to my attention. It was a beer from the New Holland Brewery called Cabin Fever. She said that if there was ever a beer calling out to us, this was the one. I heartily agreed, knowing that being cooped up in my house for over a week would certainly lead to a case of Cabin Fever.

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It was a very different time and place when I grew up. In some ways things were more conservative, but in other ways, things were much more liberal. Take alcohol for example. The legal drinking age when I grew up was still 18. Since I was graced with an abundance of testosterone at a relatively young age, that meant I had the full on, Ron Jeremy style mustache by the time I was 15 years old. That also meant that by this age I could walk into a local package store and buy a 6 pack or two. Well, that was if you knew the right ones to walk in to.

Be that as it may, it was apparent (at least to me) very early on that I wasn’t like everyone else. I mean, this being the late 70’s and all, who else would walk into a package store (that’s what they call liquor stores in Connecticut) and buy Guinness Stout to bring to a high school party over at Fortin’s Pond? All part of the master plan you see. Because with Guinness being twice as expensive as the standard Bud or Miller and their associated ilk (light beers were around but so wasn’t generic Beer in a black and white can and let’s not forget the famous Billy Beer named after President Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy) I figured that the majority of the package store owners wouldn’t card me as I wasn’t buying the cheap stuff. Hey, it worked, what can I say.

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Today it is cold, well, cold for Virginia at least. We have a rather large (again, by Virginia standards) winter storm bearing down on us so that means stocking up on items designed to help me through the cold winter snow. I’ve got extra bottles of cognac, brandy and bourbon laid up and my wine rack is full. The only thing left to do is to load the beer fridge with…well…beer.

With that thought in mind, I’ve once again been sampling beers that I think would tend towards a more winterish theme. By that, I mean heavier beers with higher alcohol content. Also while I really like American IPAs, even the imperials and doubles, I find that those that come across very hoppy with what I like to call a “green” flavor, (piney or citrusy, not young) do not help me warm up that much during the cold weather. I like things darker and thicker during this time of the year. This includes the Belgian style ales.

With that thought in mind, I collected a dubbel and a tripel from Westmalle brewery in Belgium. These are traditional ales brewed by the monks of the Trappist Monastery of Westmalle. They are unfiltered ale and so have a layer of yeast at the bottom of the bottle. Now, let’s look a bit more closely at the dubbel.

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Sometimes what at first blush seems like a great idea, doesn’t turn out so well in the end. Trust me, I ought to know, I’ve had a ton of them. Being a guy, these ideas usually involve a 6 pack and a power tool. Thankfully, I still have all my important pieces still attached in the appropriate places. So in addition to being a schemer, I can also identify these types of ideas when I see one.

Take an offering from the Mikkeller brewery for instance. Now, Mikkeller is a small brewery only recently opened (2006) in Denmark. It was started by two home brewers that quickly scaled up to national and then international scope. Their “mission statement” or at least what I can discern as one, comes from their web page and states:

“The brewery want to challenge the Danes’ taste buds with intense taste adventures, and some of the inspiration is found on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean where the American breweries aren’t afraid to play and break all the rules.”

And in three short years they have compiled quite a list of brews that they make, including seasonal Christmas brews. However, today, we are going to talk about one specific brew they make, the Stateside IPA.

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