February 14, 2007

So I reached a monumental rating on the beer site by rating my 500th beer. Its a cool achievement for a beer geek like myself, but more importantly I wanted to do something special for the rating. I drank a Westvleteren 8, a beer that is rather difficult to come by. Why you ask, well let me give a little background:

The Westvleteren beers are brewed by the Abbey of Saint Sixtus in the Westvleteren region of Belgium. The Abbey makes Trappist beers or those made by Trappist monks. Of the world's 171 Trappist monasteries, seven produce beer (six in Belgium and one in The Netherlands). These seven breweries are authorized to label their beers with the Authentic Trappist Product logo that indicates a compliance to various rules edicted by the International Trappist Association (mainly that the beer be brewed within the walls of a Trappist monastry and the profits go toward assistance and not economic gain).

Of all the Trappist breweries, St. Sixtus produces the smallest amount and also produces by some to be the worldest best beers. These beers are not supposed to be sold outside of the Abbey, but I obviuosly did not travel to Belgium to pick up this bottle. I came across this bottle through some fun beer hunting.

Now back to the point, this bottle, with which I celebrated my 500th rating was about 5.5 years old. As expected it aged wonderfully, but if you want to see exactly what I thought you are going to have to go read the rating.

February 4, 2007

I think this is a good time to discuss Samuel Adams, not the patriot but the beer company (actually its the Boston Beer Company that makes the Samuel Adams line of beers, as well as a few other labels). Nice little story of the brewery, started by Jim Koch (pronounced Cook, don't know why, damn crazy New Englanders). The story goes that in 1984 Jim Koch brewed the first Samuel Adams Boston Lager in his kitchen using his grandfathers recipe and to sell it bar to bar. Just some cynicism here, first of the beer is a lager meaning that it uses bottom fermenting yeast, which almost always requires cold fermention. It also means this type of beer almost always needs to be cold conditioned. Basically, this means that to make a beer like the Sam Adams Boston Lager would require more time and resources than most small start up breweries can afford. But whatever, its just a story now, similar to the Clydesdales of Budweiser, a bit of truth mixed with a lot of commercialism. But in general the Boston Beer Company produces different styles of beer, promotes beer knowledge, and supports the beer movement. While most of their product is underwhelming, they have produced some very interesting and innovative beers that no other company of their size can boast. For example, they have made the one of the strongest beers in the world, Utopias, an uncarbonated, 25% alcohol beast that runs well over $100 a bottle. I compared it to cheap cognac but it is still a very nice accomplishment. Outside of that, they recently held a nationwide homebrew competition of which the winners' recipes were reproduced by Sam Adams and released in special six packs. Two national winner and one comanpy winner each made a beer. This really is a cool thing for a company to do. So if you want to see my opinion on the beers, you got to check out my ratings.