Back from the third Beer Gazetteer class. The guest in the hotseat today was Brian O’Reilly of Sly Fox Brewhouse & Eatery of Phoenixville, PA. There wasn’t a particular method to the madness in the sense of lines of beers or anything so after a brief intro I’ll start talking about the beers/lecture. We sampled 8 beers, 4 of them I liked a lot the others were types of beers I’m not usually happy with so no surprise I wasn’t terribly fond of these examples. The IPA, a style which I’m usually a fan, was a bit over the top, but it wasn’t there standard IPA so I’m not sure what that means.

Started with the Pikeland-Pils. More or less your standard pilsner. It was unfiltered which is odd but not much turbidity to begin with so not a lot of change. I generally feel like this style of beer reminds me of soap suds and is generally why some people refer to beer as suds. Obviously not a fan and this example didn’t change that.

Second beer was the Royal Weisse. This is what I look for when I order a hefe-weissen, it had the spicy clove, banana thing going for it. Very yummy. For the homebrewers: brewed with 52% wheat and hefe-weissen yeast. It was of course unfiltered with a turbidness that I expect from a weisse beer. This was very good and it was one of the beers I finished. I think it was my favorite beer of the tasting. First admission of possibly illegal activity happened here. It seems that that the yeast was first imported from Germany but now they have a friend who works in big pharma as a microbiologist or similar and he uses his labs/facilities to store and propagate this strain of yeast. When bosses start asking questions apparently beer bribes have taken care of that to date.

Third beer was Savannah Maibock. The name of this beer changes each year, it is named after the goat that won last years goat race. So it seams the brewpub has an annual festival in the beginning of May and part of is a goat race. It’s been suggested that we need to mark this in our calendars to make sure we can see the goat race live and perhaps we need to enter a goat, or sell goats at the door so other people could enter them. Anyway this was probably my second favorite beer of the tasting. I don’t really have much in the way of notes. I think I was too busy drinking this beer. You’ll have to trust me that it was good without me being able to invoke critic like words about it. I finished this beer as well. This was also the second admission of possible illegal activity. Apparently during the festival they sell a single batch of ice bock. Essentially freeze a good chunk of the water out of the beer concentrating the flavor/alcohol. No one is sure about the legality of this on a commercial scale.

Fourth beer was Progress IPA. No one at my table was terribly impressed by this beer. It was too bitter without even a nod to balance, but it does have an interesting story. So it seems this beers is made with exclusively progress hops. It is one of 8 IPA they make/made with only one kind of hop. In December they blended them into what they call the Odesy IPA. Conceptually pretty interesting implementation wise I’d go for a Dogfish head instead.

Fifth beer was Black Raspberry Wheat. This is a basic cool-aide beer. The fruit overtakes everything. I, like most people I know, don’t really like this sort of cool-aide style. I like fruit in my beer but it should be just tinged. You should notice the flavor complexity but you should have to work at it to figure out what it is if you didn’t already know. Anyway I hardly touched this beer for the above reasons, but if you care this beer weighed in at 8% alcohol, they add about a pound of pureed fruit for every gallon of beer. It is based off an American wheat beer. A style I haven’t found very prevalent in recent years.

Sixth beer was Renard D’or. The name means golden fox and beer is essentially a begian-style golden ale. It had Coriander seeds and about 7% sugar. The sugar pushes up the alcohol without adding body density. This was probably a fine example, but not really a style I’m too fond.

Seventh beer was a Rauch Bier. I’m not sure I’ve encountered the style before but it was pretty good. It was made with 80% beachwood kilned malt giving it a strong smoked flavor. In a beer tasting sense it had a certain bacony flavor to it. I suspect this beer isn’t for everyone but it was pretty good. In all likely hood originally all beer had this smoked flavor to it to some degree or another since all malt was originally kilned over smoking wood. Any pretty good but maybe too flavorful for a session beer.

Last was O’Reilly’s Stout. You can debate the hubris of naming a beer after yourself. A decent if not too imaginative example of the style. It’s nitrogen gassed a comes across a bit too bitter at first drink you quickly adjust and it is pretty good. It has just 3.8% alcohol and is a bit thin making it a pretty good session beer. I finished this one off no problem.

Just a last word about Brian. He was a decent speaker but his style seemed a bit hesitent/nervous but I don’t know if there was anything real about that or just how he spoke.

Any way I’m out. Have some good beer.