A couple of reviews

Well, word got around about me reviewing a few beers and someone asked me if I would review a beer for them. Me being the helpful guy I am decided to take them up on their offer and do a review, plus it was another excuse to drink beer (c’mon did you really think I would miss the opportunity to drink a beer?).

So it turns out that my buddy Dinker wanted me to review Blue Moon’s 2009 Grand Cru. He said that he had had other Grand Cru beers before but he wanted to know what I thought of this one. So I made my run to Wegman’s with the specific goal of buying a bottle of Blue Moon’s 2009 Grand Cru.

  Now, I think that just about everyone has had a Blue Moon. It is a typical Belgian White style ale, normally served with a slice of orange in the pint glass. It really is a decent beer if you like wheat beers. So I was interested in the term “Grand Cru”, in wine it is used in France and has a legal issue tied to it. Only wines that come from vineyards that have the legal distinction as Grand Cru vineyards can be called Grand Cru and it means that the wines are of the highest quality. So was it the same with Grand Cru beers, as it turns out not even close. Here in the US any brewer can call a beer Grand Cru, but it typically is saved for special edition, big beers or beers that were brewed for a special occasion. So from the bottle of Blue Moon, it says that this 2009 Grand Cru was a small batch of carefully crafted beer that was brewed to drink on New Year’s Eve to ring in 2010. Well, whatever, all I knew was I was going to drink it. So here goes:

It poured really well and produced a clean bright white head. It turns out that there was more in the bottle than my glass could hold so I had two servings. As you can see the from the initial pour the beer was straw colored and hazy, which is typical for a wheat beer. The initial aroma was true to the bottle description, I smelled both citrus, probably orange, and coriander. Now Lauren laughed at me when I told her I could smell the coriander, she just didn’t see how I could pick it out. But if you have ever used coriander and you crushed it, it has a very unique smell and it is easily recognizable. But anyway the taste was pretty comparable of the regular Blue Moon, I didn’t really see a huge difference between the “Grand Cru” and the regular stuff.  It had that normal “wheaty” mouthfeel and hints of citrus on the palate, it wasn’t until I got to the second that I noticed a difference. As I poured the rest into the glass I noticed that the beer went from hazy to almost downright chunky with bits of who knows what floating in it. Now this little bit of trub is nothing to be afraid of I thought. In bottle conditioned beers its normal to have some sediment that gets mixed up and makes the remnants of the bottle cloudy but this was pretty chunky, but hell beer is beer and it can’t go to waste, so I drank it. It had a different taste than the initial beer, it was more citrusy almost tangy. The acidity seemed to hit the tongue and not let go. So while I finished the beer, I figured that I would give the Grand Cru another shot and when I do I’ll try to gently invert the bottle to mix some of that sediment into suspension and drink it like that. It is my guess that the bottle sat so long on the shelf that the sediment settled out and that is why the last of the beer was so chunky.

Review #2 – Black Sheep Ale

As I was looking for the Blue Moon Grand Cru, I noticed this bottle of Black Sheep Ale from Yorkshire.

It had a simplistic label, but there is something to be said about a simple clean label. A few other shots of the label:

  It poured well, no excessively foaming, it produced a slightly off white head that was creamy, almost like the head on a Boddington’s Pub Ale. It was slighlty hazy and caramel in color. The aroma was clean, it really didn’t have any distinct aromas. Nothing really jumped out at me, it just smelled clean if you know what I mean. However, the flavor was different. It had some tastes of caramel, that were followed by more bready, biscuity type flavors. It had a nice crisp dry finish that left me reaching for another sip. Before I knew it, the glass was empty. I would definitely buy this beer again. It was well worth the $4.59 I paid for it.

So go out and grab a few pints of these or something else and let me know what you think. Prost!