A Hopgasm in my mouth

5 Seasons Hopgasm IPA

5 Seasons Hopgasm IPA

I hit up 5 Seasons Brewing Prado location for dinner the other night and got to sip on a great IPA. Their house brewed IPA is called Hopgasm. It is a big IPA that is mellow on the bitterness and it can easily be sipped or slammed depending on your mood. It was Memorial Day weekend and the pigs were rolling deep in my neck of the woods so I chose the former drinking method. The brew pub has a good selection of beers brewed in-house as well as a couple of other craft brews on tap from time to time; but I am usually stuck on the Hopgasm because it is so tasty. For dinner I had the Ropa Vieja which is a marinated skirt steak with vegetables and avocado/lime mashed potatoes. The whole meal was great (probably the 3rd time I’ve had it) and I love the mashed potatoes so much that I have made them at home (I added some fresh jalapenos to mine). If you are looking for some good brews and a solid meal head on down to 5 Seasons Brewing. Oh and try the beer cheese soup too!

Burnt Hickory – Inaugural Wednesday Tasting

Burnt Hickory Wednesday Draft List

Burnt Hickory Wednesday Draft List

BHB kicked my ass and I liked it. What a great way to start off Wednesday brewery tours and tastings. Burnt Hickory has been rocking very successful Saturday tastings for a while  now and this past Wednesday was the first weekday tasting event. Many good people showed up to support the brewery and to drink heady beverages. The line up was great, not a beer on there that I wouldn’t want to drown my pallet with. A few beer highlights where, well, all of them. SERIOUSLY. You gotta make it to a tasting and try them all. They are all Big Beers but don’t be scared cause they are tasty. I’m a huge IPA fan and I post about them a lot so let me tell you about something different for a change. Fighting Bishop is a beast of a Belgian style tripel; brewed with green peppercorns this beer has a wonderful complexity of spice, citrus, and fruit flavors. It is a big ass tripel that goes down way to easy. Think a high-gravity summer time poolside slam it down in the heat goodness kinda beer (that all makes sense in my head).

Burnt Hickory Bottle Teaser

A selection of BHB beers bottled up to make you jealous that you can’t take them home with you yet.

If you happened past the bar you may have noticed the line up of Burnt Hickory beers all bottled up. This was just a nice “teaser” line up of beers that you can not take home with you unless you find a growler store selling BHB beers on draft. Hopefully one day in the not so distant future we will all be able to have a line up of BHB beers like this in our fridges. One of the best parts of the day was the brewery tour hosted by head brewer Will. He was an entertaining and informative tour guide that at the end of the tour was kind enough to share one of my favorites with all the tour patrons… Noggin Knocker! Fuck yeah! This is currently my favorite beer. It is DAMN good. Here is a picture from my point of view.

Burnt Hickory Noggin Knocker

A little Noggin Knocker in my glass. Careful, it’ll get ya!

So that glass right there made my day. Maybe it’ll make yours too, you’ll have to head to the brewery to find out! Burnt Hickory does tours and tasting Wednesdays and Saturdays. To be sure they are doing a tour on the day you want to go check out the breweries Facebook page.

Surfs Up

Port Board Meeting

Port Board Meeting

A perfect beer for a rainy day. Port Brewing‘ s Board Meeting Brown Ale is a medium bodied dark brown ale full of chocolaty goodness. It looks more like a stout than a brown ale but doesn’t have a stouts full body. With one whiff it is very apparent that this beer is brewed with coffee and cocoa nibs. The coffee lends a nice roast to the beer but the chocolate is really the star of the show here. The more the beer warmed the more it tasted like a glass of rich and dark melted chocolate. I enjoyed this brew on a cool, dark and stormy day yesterday and it was quite fitting for the occasion. I will be hunting down another bottle of this beer very soon.

The Last Minute

Stone Enjoy By: 5.17.13

Stone Enjoy By: 5.17.13

I couldn’t let this beer sit in my fridge any longer. Yesterday I came home from work, opened my fridge and was accosted by this beer that refused to let me walk away until I consumed it! I have been thoroughly enjoying the “Enjoy By” series from Stone Brewing Company. These big bad double IPA’s are meant to be consumed fresh and have a recommended drinking date that is about a month after the beer has been bottled. These beers do not make it to every market that Stone serves so if you see one sitting on your local retailers shelf feel lucky and pick one up. Here in Georgia we have had the benefit of receiving a couple of the beers from this series. This particular version of Enjoy By had a great combination of pine and citrus going on in the nose and palate. Man it was tasty. I wish they would release one of these beers for every single day of the year. I would love the obligation of having to drink one every day.

Grow your own!

Cascade Hops

Cascade Hops

The hops are all finally sprouting. I have been growing two of these plants for three seasons now and they luckily keep coming back each year. My hops are grown in containers since I currently have no yard; before winter they are cut down and brought inside to hibernate with out freezing. It still surprises me when they actually show back up each spring. My two older plants are Chinook and Cascade and they grow completely differently. The Chinook is a thicker vined plant with large broad leaves that get as big as my hand and it grows relentlessly. The Cascade plant grows thin delicate vines with small leaves that don’t get much bigger than a couple of inches across. I am interested to see how the new plant Columbus does. In addition to the hops at my place I’ve got a few rhizomes growing up at friends houses in the area. Hopefully I’ll be brewing a fresh hop beer with locally grown hops come fall. I’ll post more pictures as they grow. BTW, you can still find hop rhizomes online for purchase so it is not to late to grow them this year.

Chinook Hops

Chinook Hops

Columbus Hops

Columbus Hops

 

Another Double? Why not.

Founders Double Trouble IIPA

Founders Double Trouble IIPA

IPA’s and IIPA’s rock. That’s a fact. So I thought I’d pop up another one that you should be drinking right now. Founders Double Trouble is a crisp and easy drinking IIPA. This brew smells and tastes wonderful. When you pour it up you get a nose full of grapefruity goodness. The flavor follows up with more of the same but with a bit of tropical/mangoishness (yep, mangoishness is a word) to it. It is a smooth DIPA. It should be on the shelves of your local beer store so you should head on down there when you are done reading this sentence.

Mountain Top Treats

Oscar Blues Gubna at Big Frog Mountain

This tasty treat was enjoyed on top of a mountain.

I love beer. Oh, and the woods too! A couple of friends and I did a mid week backpacking trip last week and we made sure to haul along some good beers to enjoy fireside. Our little trek covered some miles through the mountains of Georgia and Tennessee and we ended up atop Big Frog Mountian.

Among the many beers that weighed me down on the hike one of my favorites was Gubna by Oskar Blues Brewery. This is a robust Double IPA that is tucked away nicely in a can for convenient transportation. Some people might refer to this beer as an “Onion Bomb” and I would be one of those people. But I mean that in a good way! This beer has a nice dank & oniony hop profile going on and I love it. It is refreshing but with some meat to it.  It  may sound intimidating or gross with my description but it’s fucking tasty so stop being a wuss and pick up a 4-pack.

Myli-dog guarding a Sierra Nevada

Beer break on Hemp Top Mtn.

And what ever you do, don’t touch my dogs beer. Cheers. PACK IT IN, PACK IT OUT!

Hate to see you go but I love to taste you leave.

Bells HopSlam

My last lonely bottle pre-consumption and excretion.

MMMmmm… Everyone loves a Hopslam. This big ass double IPA is brewed with some honey that knocks down the bitterness and adds the tiniest bit of honey flavor. The brew drips of hoppy citrus and pine flavors. It’s one of those beers that are becoming a pain in the ass to get your hands on(I’m looking at you KBS) with the craft beer scene blowing up the way it is. Maybe im just greedy for wanting to stock pile cases of this heady brew. Alas, I have finished my last bottle of Hopslam and have already donated its processed remnants to the sewer system, lucky sewer, I’m sure it still tastes of hoppy honey goodness on the way out. Any who, this is a beer that I’m sure you have heard of and that you definitely need to taste. It is one of those beers that has become a living legend and is highly sought after. This is a once a year release that comes out around Jan/Feb each year. BUT! It is American Craft Beer Week this week so you just might be able to find it on draft at an event near you! There is hope! If you run accross it in ATL please drop me a line so I can pour it in my face hole. This is one of those rare beers that actually lives up to the hype that it is surrounded by. It is a bucket list beer. You should be drinking one right now.

I’ve got a six pack of the Mondays.

A balanced IPA from Monday Night Brewing Company.

A balanced IPA from Monday Night Brewing.

Monday Night Brewing has been contract brewing for a while and now just started brewing and bottling at their NEW facility in Atlanta, GA. One of the three flag ship beers they produce is the Eye Patch IPA. It is a balanced(slightly malt forward) IPA with a spicy and mildly citrus hop profile. The bottles that I tried seemed to be heavy on the carbonation compared to their draft counter part.

Destroyed in April

A few highlights of the destruction that happened in April.