Societe Brewing Company The Butcher

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Every Man's IPA, The Butcher, The Dandy, tiramisu

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Societe Brewing Company. Ever since I met Travis [Smith] and Doug [Constantiner] I knew they’d be making great beer. I’ve slowly sampled my way through all of their available beers (well, except for the new Every Man’s IPA they released this week that is). They have a handful of IPAs — five now by my count, and another four more non-IPAs, three of which are Belgian style beers. I enjoy all of their beers, though I certainly have my favorites (I’m looking at you The Dandy) but it was The Butcher that I had been wanting to try for a while now, but it had alluded me until recently.

It’s been on tap quite a bit, I’ve had a few chances to try it, but The Butcher is a roughly 10% ABV Imperial Stout that I just couldn’t bring myself to order when it’s close to 90 degrees outside. But thankfully it was on the menu, paired with dessert, at The Grill at The Lodge at Torrey Pines beer dinner with Societe Brewing Company and Rough Draft Brewing Company. Dinner took place outside, not far from the coast so by the time dessert rolled around some fog was in the air and the temperature had dropped below 80, making The Butcher more desirable.

The beer was paired with Tiramisu, which had been soaked in The Butcher to add some beer flavor. The pairing wasn’t perfect in my opinion (though no one was complaining, me included). The dessert was sweet, I didn’t really get much flavor from the beer in the Tiramisu, which contrasted pretty drastically with the deliciously roasty beer.

And how big and roasty it is. With all the roastiness it’s reminiscent of coffee and dark chocolate. It’s full and rich but it’s 10% ABV doesn’t show.

With weather like this I’m not sure when I’ll choose to enjoy The Butcher again, but come cooler weather The Butcher will be hard to beat. And while I haven’t heard that they have any specific plans, I imagine some day they’ll put some of The Butcher in some sort of old spirits barrels and it will only get better with age.

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Cigar City Brewing Cucumber Saison

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cigar city, Cigar City Cucumber Saison, Rare Beer Club

Cigar City Cucumber Saison with an Armenian cucumber in my garden

I’ve been slightly obsessed with cucumber’s lately, mostly the process of fermenting them into sour pickles. So I was pretty bummed when I heard about Cigar City Brewing’s Cucumber Saison. Not because I didn’t like the idea behind it, but because Cigar City isn’t distributed in California so I thought I’d never get to try it. Cue a backyard BBQ and a friend with a Rare Beer Club membership. So a big thanks to Ken for sharing this with me, otherwise I probably won’t have gotten a chance to try it.

I’m sure I’ve said this about other beers before, but this time it could just be the one: This seems like the perfect summer beer. Saisons are already great beers for long hot days, but the added cucumber here just makes it that much more refreshing. Sitting around drinking it the idea of aging came up. Maybe, just maybe Cigar City threw some bugs in, so that that what is now a bottle of fresh Cucumber Saison may start to develop some sour pickle-like flavors after a bit of aging.

Stone Brewing Co. Announces New 4-Packs

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Oaked Arrogant Bastard, Stone Brewing Co. 4-packs, Stone Ruination IPA, stone sublimely self-righteous ale

Stone Brewing Co. this week announced that they would be releasing Stone Sublimely Self-Righteous Ale, their Black IPA previously limited to draft and 22oz bottles in 12oz 4-packs. They will also be transitioning Stone Ruination IPA and OAKED Arrogant Bastard from 12oz 6-packs to 12oz 4-packs.

It will be nice to have the 8.7% ABV Sublimely Self-Righteous available in 12oz bottles for those times you don’t want or need to drink an entire 22oz. And personally I think that removing two bottles and dropping the price a bit from Oaked Arrogant Bastard and Ruination should help with sticker shock as well a bit. Speaking of price, Stone tells me price per bottle for Ruination and Oaked Arrogant Bastard isn’t changing.

As you’ve probably noticed beer prices tend fluctuate from store to store, I’ve seen the 6-packs going for anywhere from $15 to as high as $16.50 which works out to $2.50-$2.75 per 12 ounce bottle. Keeping the price per bottle the same would equate to $10 or $11 4-packs, which sounds about right as Stone PR Specialist Sabrina LoPiccolo said in an email that they should retail for the same price as 6-packs of Stone Pale Ale, Stone IPA and Stone Levitation Ale, commonly between $10 and $11.

(As an aside, does this mean that if a particular store charges more for say Stone IPA 6-packs than they do for Levitation Al 6-packs they’re just making more profit on the IPA?)

Ruination and Sublimely Self-Righteous Ale will continue to be available 22oz bombers as well, but in my mind look much less attractive price-wise now. I don’t know that I’ve ever bought a 6-pack of Ruination, but I’ve picked up plenty of 22oz bottles of it over the years. But the 4-pack, at a lower cost per ounce and in smaller servings seems like a much better way to go. It’s far easier to drink two 12oz bottles than it is to only drink half a bomber depending on your mood.

4-packs for Sublimely Self-Righteous should be hitting shelves very soon (if not already) and the 6-packs of Ruination and Oaked AB will be coming out as current 6-pack inventory runs out. Which means if you’re still seeing 6-packs a few months from now you might want to take a good look at the date stamps on the bottles.

Alpine Beer Company/New Belgium Super India Pale Ale

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lips of faith, Super India Pale Ale

As a San Diego hophead I recognize that Alpine Beer Co. makes some of the best IPA’s in the world. Despite how infrequently Alpine’s beers show up at local bars and bottle shops, we’re pretty damn spoiled with the fact that the brewery is a short 30 minute drive from San Diego, where we can buy bottles and fill growlers five days a week.

Alpine has extremely limited distribution outside of their own brewery and pub, I’ve heard there are a few shops in the LA area that occasionally get Alpine’s beer (legitimately from an actual distributor, there are many more shops around the state that buy beer at Alpine and then resell it, a process frowned upon by the brewery) but for the most part if you want to drink Alpine’s beers you have to be in San Diego (and maybe even drive up to Alpine). The fact that their beer is so good, and so hard to come by outside of our small corner of the country has caused quite a bit of demand amongst beer geeks out there. Demand that just cannot be filled by Alpine’s rather small brewery.

So when I learned that Alpine Beer Co.’s Pat and Shawn Mcilhenney were headed to Fort Collins to brew an Alpine style Double IPA in collaboration with New Belgium Brewing Company I was certainly excited for the beer itself, but recognized this might be a much bigger deal to those folks within New Belgium’s wide distribution area but outside of Southern California. A whole lot of people are about to be exposed to Alpine Beer Company, many probably for the first time. Thankfully Super India Pale Ale is superb beer and even though it wasn’t brewed in Alpine, CA it’s well deserving of having Alpine’s name attached to it.

I picked up a bottle of Super IPA at Bine and Vine (which I hadn’t been to in a month or so, I have to say it’s looking pretty nice in there) last night for $6.99, I think I saw them tweet that they’re now sold out but are expecting more next week. New Belgium brewed a lot of this beer, 1400 barrels according to one of Alpine’s past email newsletters, which they state is almost equal to Alpine Beer Co.’s entire annual production, but demand is expectantly high. It’s all over town, but may take a bit of searching to find, especially at some of the more popular beer spots.

Super IPA is everything you would expect from an Alpine IPA, big and hoppy. Without having drank the two side by side (so this may not be an accurate comparison) it reminded me a bit of a bigger version of Duet. Quite a bit of citrus and pine hop flavors supported by a malt backbone that doesn’t get in the way of the hops. It comes in at 9% ABV but it’s not overly sweet or too boozy. Super IPA is delicious, but I don’t know that it’s any better than other Alpine IPAs/Double IPAs (in fact my tastebuds are still loyal to Nelson). So while I hope to drink a few more of these while they’re around, once this one-off beer is gone I’ll go back to drinking Nelson, Duet and Pure Hoppiness and have no complaints. But for those beer drinkers that aren’t as lucky to be able to pick up beer’s from Alpine regularly, this is indeed a special treat.

And as a side note, I think this might be one of the coolest beer bottles I’ve ever bought. I don’t save too many bottles, but this one is a keeper.