The Beer Retard - I Fought the 120 and the 120 Won

I know, I know...I said I needed to write every day and haven't done it. I'll go ahead and blame it on a ridiculous night out on Tuesday with a couple guys from Brouwer's. We started things off at Brouwer's with both the draft and bottled versions of Deviation. Deliciously sour stuff as expected. Then we moved on to Über for the 120 Minute IPA, the Port Shark Attack Imperial Red and tastes of a bunch of other stuff including Chateau Jiahu and some dark beer with a raven on the label. Finally, my dumb ass ignored whatever part of my brain knew I should go home and kept the evening going with more beers at Stumbling Monk.

Needless to say, I felt like freeze-dried dog shit on Wednesday morning. Any time you drink from 4pm-midnight and throw in 10 ounces of a 20% beer in the midst of it all, you're going to pay the price. I suffered through work, had no beer on Wednesday and slept for 10 hours that night. My liver and kidneys seem to be back on track now. I gingerly dipped my toes back into the beer waters last night with a can of the Oskar Blues Gordon at dinner.

This weekend marks the start of the Coopers Alehouse IPA Fest. There's not a lot out there on this one. The only information I could gather is that they're going to have over 40 IPAs (some rare and hard to find) rotated in over the course of the next three weeks. During the fest, they'll have some special tastings and events and, if it's like last year, they'll have samplers available. I was hoping to do an extensive preview of this on Metroblogging Seattle, but the email I sent to the folks at Coopers has gone unanswered. Guess I'll have to go down there and check things out.

Oh, in case you're wondering what I thought of the Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA, I'll say that I'm glad I got a chance to try it on tap. I wasn't crapping myself over it, but it was good. On the plus side, the smell of hops in the beer was amazing. Not quite as huffable as Pliny the Younger or Hop Crisis, but there was a lot of good hop aroma there. Unfortunately, the hops promised in the smell didn't come through as much in the flavor. As I'd heard and read, this beer is ridiculously sweet. The sweetness is as intense, maybe even more intense, than most barleywines. I wouldn't necessarily say cloying...thick and syrupy might be more accurate. This isn't surprising since the malt has to be dialed up considerably to make a 20% beer drinkable. That was actually the most impressive thing about this beer--the drinkability. There wasn't much of any alcohol burn as this went down. But man, with all the sweetness and the overall potency of the beer, a little went a long way (and I had more than a little). It's not something I feel I'll ever need to drink again...