Tröegs Craft Brewery's "Troegenator Doublebock"

Yes, I do think the one I tried yesterday was skunked, hence the odd scent and flavor. Because this doublebock actually doesn't have the weird taste that many bocks have. It's a little plain, flavorwise. And it's a little rough around the edges. But it's a decent strong beer. Probably not one I'm going to buy again, but knowing that this company makes decent beer means that I'm probably going to buy another one of the Dream Weavers to try again.

This is a strong one, fairly dark tasting for a bock and it weighs in at 8.2% alcohol.

I have to say though, the face that I had trouble telling the difference between a beer with an odd flavor vs. a slightly skunked beer does say a lot about some of the beers I've had in the past before I started reviewing.

Tröegs Craft Brewery's "Dream Weaver unfiltered wheat beer"

Oddly enough, I bought this because it's getting hot outside and I figured this would be a nice cold wheat beer for a hot day, and I also bought their double bock.

When I first smelled and tasted this one, I had to double check to make sure I hadn't grabbed the wrong one. It smelled like a bock. It tasted like a bock. Now I'm really curious to know what their bock tastes like.

Now that I've drunk a little farther, I'm wondering if that smell/flavor is actually more like a bock, or maybe the bottle is just a little skunked. Huh. Not a good sign if I have to debate which one it is. It does have more than just a bit of a spicy/tingly taste to it, which normally would be very good. But with a slightly skunky taste to it, not so much.

I may have just gotten a bad bottle, so I might buy another next time I'm out just to check on that. But for now I'm not that impressed. The spices get a big thumbs up, the beer base itself not so much.

Flying Dog's 'Snake Dog IPA'

Jungly hops smell at first. Not as powerful as the Loose Cannon, but not too far behind.

It tastes much darker than an IPA normally does. I kind of want to pour it out just to see what color it actually is. As far as the taste goes, it almost seems like a milder version of the Black Cannon. If the Black Cannon beer tasted like a jungle, this one tastes more like a north american deciduous forest, with a few sprigs of pine here and there. It doesn't quite have the earthy flavor that I described in my Black Cannon review, but there is definitely a bit of nature trapped in this bottle. Bitter, but tasty as hell. There's a reason I keep comparing it to the two 'cannon' IPAs from Heavy Seas brewing company. It's almost like a midway point between the two. It has the darker flavor of the Black Cannon, while still remaining an actual pale ale.

The bitterness in this one is cumulative. It builds up as you drink it, as if the aftertaste from each swig never really goes completely away. I don't know if I could drink more than one or two of these.

Like the other Flying Dog bottles, it's got the weird artwork. A strange chimera paces across the bottle. Its secondary head looks dazed and confused, and its tail appears to have some kind of strange rattle or perhaps a caterpillar on the end instead of the traditional chimera snake headed tail. The face in the front stares blankly ahead.

Or maybe I'm reading too much into a few extra lines and circles, and the 'face' in the front is simply a backwards bending gigantic snake neck that leads to the creature's actual head, which loops around its body to peer out from its side. And the strange end to its tail might just by stylized tail fluff.

Sam Adams Black Lager

From the smell, I'm guessing this is another one of those where I'll take a sip and say "This is a very nice chocolate stout. Weird that it's not a stout." Strong chocolaty scent on this one.

But on the first sip I was proven wrong. Unlike the 'Edmund Fitzgerald porter' that I mentioned a while back, this one is very much a lager first and a dark chocolaty beer second. I'm not usually a huge lager fan, but if there were more like this one out there I might change my tune.

The aftertaste and smell are still very dark and chocolaty, even a third of the way into the bottle. It's almost deceptive, every time I raise the bottle up to take a swig I get that scent and expect a chocolate stout. And instead get a nice dark lager, with a strong chocolate and dark beer aftertaste. There's a hint of spiciness on the tongue as you hold it in your mouth, and it continues to tingle for a moment afterward. I don't think I would have noticed the caramel malt taste on my own, but after reading it on the label I'm picking it up a bit. The chocolate malt overpowers it quite a bit though, so I'm not sure how much of that is my own suggestibility vs. my taste buds.

This one's definitely a swing and a hit from Sam Adams, as so many of their beers have been for me in the past.

Great Lakes brewing company - Commodore Perry IPA short review

It has that nice, interesting hoppyness that most of the IPAs I've written about have. Not quite the overpower jungle scent of the Loose Cannon, but a very similar scent.

The taste is much milder than the scent. The bitterness and taste of the hops is certainly present, but not overpowering. This one's also a bit stronger as far as alcohol content goes than I expected, 7.5%.

This one isn't particularly complex, but it is pretty damn good. If you're a hop lover and you want an interesting set of hops, this is a good one to try. But there isn't much else to it.

Xingu black beer - short review

I'd never heard of this one, so I figured I'd try it. It's imported from Brazil, but beyond that the label says very little. In fact, the label has very little. It looks like they're going for a kind of 'ooh, look at me. I'm totally enigmatic.' look for the beer.

The smell is a very nondescript one. Smells like a dark ale, nothing in particular beyond that. Hints of the usual chocolaty and other flavors that tend to crop up in darker beers.

It's got all the weight and flavor of a good dark beer, but it's lacking the kind of oomph that most of the stronger darker beers have. Not bad, but I don't think I'll be buying any six packs of it anytime soon.

Flying Dog's 'Road Dog Porter' - Good beer, no shit

I normally don't feel the need to sniff a beer too often, but for some reason with a name like 'flying dog', I felt the need to sniff the bottle's bunghole a couple of times until I got familiar with the scent.

Oddly enough, it had a different scent each time. The first whiff, all I got was a nice brown beer scent. If it didn't say Porter on the label, I wouldn't have known. The second whiff I got a bit of hops and other things. It wasn't until the third sniff that I thought, "Oh yes, that is a porter all right."

I took a sip. It went down easy. Too easy. I'd been hoping to get a good taste before it went down, but it's like this beer had a mind of its own. It's like this thing has a mind of its own. "Hold on one damn minute!" I said. "I can't review you if you won't hold still." The bottle puckered up with me while I tried to down another swig. Now that I've gotten a feel for how this beer behaves, I think I'm starting to tame it. The flavors are starting to settle down for a little bit in my mouth before they run further into me, kamikaze style. It's not your typical dark, deep, bitter porter. This one's milder in those respects, but more flavorful. It takes a little while for the flavors to kick in though, so this is one that you might want to nurse for a while. But the longer you nurse it, the more bitter it gets. It's like the hops slowly coat your mouth while you're distracted by the beer running down your throat.

Most porters that I've tried are either chocolate stouts wearing porter clothing, or a cold, dark, strong beer that'll fill you up and keep you warm on a cold winter's night. This one is neither, although I suspect it can pull off the second role if it wants to. It's a tricky little brew. Versatile. Creative. I don't trust it.

But I like it.

I'm really not sure what I expected out of this one. I've heard good things about this company, but I've never tried this one before and anything else I've had by them was so long ago that I can barely remember it.

The artwork on this thing is weird. Not like 'I'm trying to be quirky and gimmicky' weird, no, it's more like 'I'm trying to combine the grittiness of 80s schlock cinema with the trippiness of 60s and 70s schlock avant garde and throw in a dash of 90s grunge while we're at it'. This bottle art is an approximation of four decades worth of drug use, and it's made now in the 2010s. A part of me wonders when the illustration was done, and if it was done in the 90s, or if it predicted the 90s grunge movement.

I suspect they were trying to be quirky and gimmicky too. But that's why they hired the artist they did. Ralph Steadman is the artist, and he's best known for doing illustrations for Hunter S. Thompson. And that was a man who knew his mind-altering substances.

But all labels aside, this is good beer. No shit. Not the best porter I've ever had, but the best one I've had that wasn't trying too hard to be dark and strong.

Southern Tier brewing company's 'Phin & Matt's Extraordinary Ale'

This is another one of those 'more hops is better' type small brews. It advertises three kinds of hops and three kinds of malts. The smell is pretty much straight hops.

The taste is quite different from the typical 'more hops is better' beers though. This is the kind of thing that I like. The hops are there to balance out the rest of the beer. The malts add an interesting set of flavors, none of them strong enough to overpower the other two. I'm not even sure what kinds, but I suspect that each of the malts has been toasted differently to help add different flavors to each. The hops are present, but they don't add much power to the taste until the aftertaste. I can't differentiate between the three different kinds of hops, I'm not THAT much of a dedicated snob.

Yet.

But whatever flavors they impart, like the malts none of the flavors overpower the others.

This is a good small brew. They're not trying too hard to be the hoppiest or the strongest, they're just trying to make a good, well balanced beer. And they succeeded. I give this one a definite thumbs up, and it may just convert a hop over-enthusiast into someone who can appreciate a beer that has a lot of hops, but uses them to balance the flavor rather than overpower it.