Every year a few new beer styles get added to the Brewers Association’s guidebook. These are usually just minor offshoots of long-held, already-existing styles. The black IPA was added in 2010; wild beer in 2014. The modernized gose made the list just last year. And by next year, we could very well see a new category: the milkshake ale.

It’s not just some clever name. These are hoppy beers, usually IPAs, with lactose sugar added to them in order to help produce a thick, milky, sweet and often fruity beer that, well, somewhat resembles a classic milkshake.

If there’s a Thomas Edison when it comes to this new style, it would be Jean Broillet IV, owner and brewmaster at Tired Hands Brewing Company. In March of 2015, Broillet teamed with the inventive Swedish brewery Omnipollo to produce something they called Milkshake IPA. (Omnipollo had produced a “Smoothie” IPA the previous year.) The seven percent ABV beer was brewed with oats and lactose sugar to create an initial heft. Then, wheat flour and 50 pounds of pectin-rich green apple puree were added. (Pectin causes an intense, almost gel-like thickening within beer—an effect most brewers try to avoid lest they accidentally make a can of jam.)

Post-fermentation, the brewers also added strawberries, another high-pectin fruit, followed by vanilla beans and a dry-hopping of Mosaic and Citra, two particularly fruity varietals that Broillet jokes are the Staples “Easy Button” of hops, due to their ease of enjoyment. The resulting beer, with it’s so-called “perma–pectin haze,” was an immediate hit.

This new style for Tired Hands, the Milkshake IPA, originated with a pointed insult from someone quite prominent in the beer industry. In January, Jason Alström, co-founder of BeerAdvocate, had visited Tired Hands’ Ardmore, Pennsylvania, café for some food and drink. Later that night, he reviewed Broillet’s HopHands, an unfiltered pale ale that is one of the brewery’s most notable offerings. Scoring it a meager 64 out of 100, Alström wrote: “Not feeling it with this brew, extremely cloudy and a mess to say the least…Milkshake beers are not a trend or acceptable with traditional or even modern styles…No excuses. [sic]”

“I thought it was a strange way for someone to represent a beer that is pretty fucking badass and well-liked. It felt very vindictive,” Broillet explains, telling me that he always liked Alström, for what it’s worth. “I wanted to turn that negativity into positivity. We call it ‘Milkshake’ to no small degree because of that silly, very childish reaction [from Alström].”

If “milkshake” had until then been a somewhat derisive term of art for particularly thick, New England-/Northeastern-style IPAs or pale ales—most geeks now call these beers “hazy” or “juicy”—the nomenclature had now been co-opted in the positive by Broillet.

You Don’t Hate IPAs, You Just Think You Do

The IPA, a generously hopped style of pale ale that has become synonymous with craft beer, has become the the whipping boy of many who are still scarred by the "bitter is better" era of craft brewing. But IPA as a style has never been more diverse. Aaron Goldfarb on why IPA haters don't actually hate IPA.

Read On →

Soon he had an entire line of Milkshake IPAs—by my count, 22 in total—each with a different fruit added. He’s done everything from a Blackberry Milkshake to a Double Watermelon Milkshake to a Zucchini Bread Milkshake.

While Broillet has undoubtedly popularized the moniker, he isn’t the first brewer to produce a beer with “milkshake” in the name (it’s common for big, bold adjunct-laden stouts) or even the first to add lactose sugar to an IPA. 3 Floyds Brewing Company, in Munster, Indiana, a Chicago suburb, may have actually been the first to add lactose sugar to an IPA when they released their Apocalypse Cow in 2008. While the decision was revolutionary (almost the entire history of brewing, lactose has mostly been used in milk stouts), the beer failed to change the brewing landscape.

However, Broillet’s decision to not just add lactose, but the “comforting” (as he calls it) flavors of oats, apple puree, vanilla and fruit, did. “It’s a childish whimsy that I appreciate [about the beers],” Augie Carton noted when Broillet was a guest on his Steal This Beer podcast.

He should know; he, too, has played around with childhood flavors at his Carton Brewing, most notably with GORP, a trail mix-inspired beer. There are many others playing in this arena—like Florida’s Funky Buddha Brewery, who’ve found great success with beers like Orange Creamsicle Imperial Stout, French Toast Double Brown and No Crusts, a PB&J-esque brown ale. Broillet has also played with other nostalgic flavors, citing TacoHands—an IPA brewed with tortilla chips—as an early foray into trying something different with “culinary” IPAs.

Nowadays, there are enough kid-inspired beers to warrant their own category. But so far, none of these aforementioned beers have created quite the level of buzz that the Tired Hands Milkshake IPAs have. It was practically inevitable that others would run with the style.

This past summer, Seattle’s Urban Family Brewing Co. released Limesicle Milkshake Ale, which features 200 pounds of zested and juiced lime per batch with, of course, lactose sugar. Andy Gundel, the brewery’s director of operations, says that Urban Family loved the other milkshake IPAs out there and was inspired to create a limited release of their own.

“We tried to put our own twist on ours,” he notes, and, indeed, Limesicle is a little more zesty, a little thinner and a little less viscous than Tired Hands’ offerings. “They are super fun to make, and people seem to really enjoy it.”

Chicago has also really taken to milkshake beers of late, though they refer to them less appetizingly as “lactose IPAs,” perhaps a nod to nearby 3 Floyds. Crown Brewing makes Tree Frog IPA, matching Simcoe, Mosaic, Citra and Amarillo hops with lactose. Meanwhile, just north of the city, Mikerphone Brewing has Vinyl Frontier, a lactose double IPA with no fruit added, though it’s super tropical thanks to the use of El Dorado hops. Then, Corridor makes Wizard Fight, a lactose IPA, to which they add even more creaminess to by exclusively releasing the beer nitrogenated.

Foreign breweries have also taken to the style. Australian breweries Moon Dog and Beer DeLuxe teamed up recently for Splice of Heaven, a pineapple IPA that they explain has been “ice creamified” via lactose. And earlier this month, fellow Aussie breweries, Newstead and BrewCult, teamed up to make Milk and Two Pineapples, described as transforming “what should have been a solid American IPA, into a gloop of sweetness with lactose and pineapple juice.” Likewise, Denmark’s Alefarm Brewing cut right to the chase in releasing their Kindred Spirits Lactose IPA earlier in the summer.

So now that the style has spread worldwide, are milkshake IPAs, or lactose IPAs if you must, soon to be an officially designated BJCP style? “It’s a fun, simple and cool idea,” says Broillet. “I really wouldn’t be surprised if it snowballs.”

A pedantic specificity is something that excites beer geeks. Was this dry-hopped with Galaxy or Citra? Are these malts two-row or crystal? And I can tell there’s Brett in this beer, but are there any other wild yeasts or bacteria? That’s why I’ve always found it so odd how inexact brewers can be when it comes to their barrel treatments. Most beers today are simply “bourbon barrel-aged” (unless you somehow scored a highly-marketable Pappy barrel). Even more nettlesome is this emerging breed of wine barrel-aged beers, which are so often labeled as simply “aged in red wine barrels” or “aged in white wine barrels.”

There are thousands of types of wine around the world, from bracingly mineral chardonnay from Chablis to tropical sauvignon blanc from New Zealand and peppery, floral syrah from the northern Rhône to bombastic cabernet sauvignons from Napa Valley. I wanted to explore what the barrels that once held these specific wines did to beers aged in them. Did they actually taste like the wines the barrels once held? Or was there really no need to label a beer as “merlot” barrel-aged? Perhaps merely noting “red wine” was good enough?

“Our goal with our wine barrel-aged beer is to promote the actual wine character to add to the already complex flavors and aromas in the beer,” Brian Nelson, the head brewer at Hardywood Park Craft Brewery told me. “We looked for fresh wine barrels that complement the style of beer that we want to age.”

Unlike whiskey barrels, whose boozy contents kill off wild bacteria like Lactobacillus and Pediococcus, emptied wine barrels are often a breeding ground for them. It’s no wonder most wine barrel-aged beers end up becoming saisons, wild ales and other, often high-acid styles perfect for a wine lover’s palate.

Not surprisingly, American brewing’s earliest forays into wine barrel-aging started where many of the used barrels actually come from: California wine country. The first brewery to really commit to wine barrel-aging was Sonoma County’s Russian River Brewing Company, which was, at one time, a part of Korbel Champagne Cellars. When he took over as the brewmaster in 1997, Vinnie Cilurzo almost immediately began making and releasing a series of heavily wine-influenced beers, like Temptation (chardonnay barrels), Supplication (pinot noir) and Consecration (cabernet sauvignon). Today, many breweries in wine regions, like Paso Robles’ Firestone Walker, have likewise found great success in taking their area’s spent wine barrels and filling them with beer.

Over on the East Coast, Richmond’s Hardywood is right in the midst of several Virginia AVAs and receives barrels from the nearby Winery at Bull Run. But unlike most of the aforementioned breweries that use the bacteria remaining in the wood, Nelson steams his “fresh-dumped” barrels, which allows him to create beers that soak up the wine’s flavors without turning sour. Hardywood makes a rich, imperial stout called Ruse, aged in three different full-bodied red wine barrels, and a Belgian tripel, Vinalia Urbana, whose fruity, yeasty profile melds beautifully with the kiwi and honeysuckle flavors the spent sauvignon blanc barrels (from Napa’s Stag’s Leap) lend the beer.

“In that respect,” Nelson notes, “[these beers] create an opportunity for the wine enthusiast to be introduced into the craft beer world.”

In order to see what wine barrel-aging does to beers and whether specific wine barrels actually matter, we blind-tasted two dozen of them, trying to focus mostly on those that call out a specific variety or origin for their wine barrels. For the tasting, I was joined by PUNCH’s Editor in Chief, Talia Baiocchi; Associate Editor, Lizzie Munro; Managing Editor, Bianca Prum; Assistant Editor, Chloe Frechette; and Social Media Editor, Allison Hamlin. Unsurprisingly, we found that, in general, the barrel-aging of these beers added a creamier texture, but also a notable tannin character, lending a textural complexity that felt akin to wine. And some of the beers were not only aged in wine barrels, but also were fermented with grape must, which took the “wine-y” character to another level and made it far easier for us to drill down the variety used. Below are our five favorites.

Five Wine Barrel-Aged Beers to Try

The Bruery Rue Sans | 12.5 percent ABV
This Orange County brewery has an entire offshoot—Terreux—devoted to farmhouse ales, mainly of the wine barrel-aged variety. Rue Sans takes a sour rye ale and infuses it with roussanne grapes from Santa Barbara Highlands Vineyard, then blends it with another sour rye beer before aging it in white wine barrels for nearly a year. The result evokes the style of buttery chardonnay once synonymous with California in the early aughts: slightly nutty and fruity with a distinct buttered popcorn flavor, all backed up by tangy acidity; it ticks all of the “guilty pleasure” boxes for the wine nerds.

Goose Island Gillian | 9.5 percent ABV
Goose Island as a whole performed admirably in our tasting, with our panel picking several of their “Sour Sister” beers, including Halia, Juliet and Madame Rose. But Gillian, a farmhouse ale aged in white wine barrels with white pepper, strawberries and honey added, stood out. Widely available in a way most wine barrel-aged beers are not, the beautiful, bright orange, hazy beer has a cheesy funk on the nose alongside fresh strawberries, apricots, a touch of oak and Szechuan peppercorn.

Threes Brewing Eternal Return: Chardonnay | 9 percent ABV
Gewürztraminer was the panel’s first thought upon sipping this delightful offering from the new-ish Brooklyn brewpub. Eternal Return, the brewery’s first attempt at a wine barrel-aged sour is a deceptively simple, floral and fruity (think honeysuckle blossom and white peach) Brett beer aged with chardonnay must in oak barrels. Brewer Greg Doroski has since released two Eternal Return variants with raspberries and cherries added, both also stellar.

Firestone Walker Feral Vinifera | 9.7 percent ABV
A highly aromatic wild ale that, no surprise, uses must from sauvignon blanc, chenin blanc and muscat grapes. That blend helps ferment the wheat-based beer, which is further aged in French oak wine barrels alongside the brewer’s proprietary wild yeast and bacteria. The resulting beer is delicate and tropical with a hit of funk on the nose, and a leanness and acidity that makes it imminently drinkable, even at this ABV.

BFM Abbaye de Saint Bon-Chien | 11 percent ABV
Long a “desert island” beer for me, I was pleasantly surprised that the group blindly picked this as one of our favorites. This Swiss bière de garde is full of a balsamic tartness on the outset that leads into layer after layer of complex flavors (boullion, soy sauce, dried red fruit) with a velvety mouthfeel and gently sour finish. Not only aged in a blend of wine casks (including merlot, pinot noir and cabernet), the beer was also fermented using wine yeast.

My first year out of college, in 2001, I was a clueless 22-year-old living in Hoboken, New Jersey. On Saturday nights my roommate, Kevin, and I would take the PATH train to 14th Street to “pre-game” at Markt. Duvel was our beer of choice; we’d pound snifters of the Belgian strong pale ale before heading off to meet friends at some crummy Meatpacking District nightclub where we’d proceed to drink well vodka-tonics and flounder with women. Those Duvels were always, in retrospect, the best part of the night.

Back then (and unbeknownst to me), Duvel was considered the fourth best beer in the entire world on Beer Advocate’s “Top Beers” list, something you can still access courtesy of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

Today, however, Duvel doesn’t even graze the “Top Beers” list. While it’s still well-regarded, by now its acclaim has been buried under a dogpile of state-of-the-art hoppy pale ales, imperial stouts and fruited sour ales. In fact, in the years since I started considering myself a “beer geek” (and the term became part of the lexicon), the craft beer industry has shape-shifted remarkably, especially among the cognoscenti. But how, exactly?

The Wayback Machine is a remarkable tool for measuring trends. Examining these lists—the earliest available dating to December 5, 2001—you can actually see how stylistic diversity faded into a monoculture of IPA obsession, how the beer geeks came to think it impossible that a “top” beer could be readily available at a local market and how beers produced in limited supply from cult breweries in off-the-beaten-path towns came to ultimately rule the roost.

ESB to IPA

Back in December of 2001, Storm King Stout from Victory Brewing Co. was the No. 1 beer in the world. Storm King Stout is a non-barrel-aged, sub-ten-percent-ABV stout that can be had for $9.99 (for an entire four-pack) at just about any supermarket on the Eastern Seaboard. But in 2001, Storm King Stout was ahead of its time—a then-sophisticated modern stout with a noticeable hop presence and a robust, coffee-like intensity. In that same year, Beer Advocate co-founder Jason Alstrom even noted on his site that Storm King was “not just one of the greatest Imperial Stouts but . . . one of the greatest beers in the world. As close to perfection as you can get.” To most beer geeks today, it’s laughable to even consider the beer cracking the top 100.

Even more startling about the 2001 list is the sheer number of styles represented in the top 20, many of which are practically endangered among beer geeks today. The No. 3 beer in the world was a doppelbock (Brauerei Aying’s Celebrator), an old-fashioned dark lager style you’d be hard-pressed to find at any hip beer bar today. At No. 5 was a Belgian-style strong ale via Quebec (Unibroue Don de Dieu) a dubbel (Chimay Red); in the teens, there were a couple of low-ABV oatmeal stouts (Rogue Shakespeare Stout at No. 11, Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout at No. 13) and an ESB (Fuller’s ESB) at No. 14. If you’re a 20-something American beer drinker, you’ve probably never even heard of an ESB. Nowadays, the “Extra Special Bitter”—a low-ABV, balanced English ale—and these other styles are nowhere to be found in the top 250.

So what currently dominates the top 250? IPAs, imperial stouts and sour ales. While in 2001, a only one IPA made the top-20 list—Otter Creek Hop Ottin’ at No. 20—today they account for 96 slots in the top 250 (24 IPAs, 61 double IPAs and 11 hop bombs like 3 Floyds Zombie Dust and Trillium Double Dry Hopped Fort Point Pale Ale, which are “pale ales” in name only). Of the remaining slots, 81 are imperial stouts (including the top three spots) and 26 are sour ales (34 if you include saisons).

What do these all have in common? Extreme flavors. It’s often easier to gravitate to a teeth-rattling IPA or cake-like stout than to see the beauty in a flawless ESB or delicate kölsch. And, it turns out, it’s easier to assume a beer you truly had to slave to acquire is better than one you can buy at any grocery store.

The Rise of Rarity

In April of 2010, I traveled down to Munster with a few beer bloggers I’d never met IRL for Dark Lord Day, 3 Floyds’ annual release of their then-vaunted imperial stout. The first batch of Dark Lord was brewed in late 2002 as a tap-only offering. Its recipe may sound pedestrian in 2016, but, back then, a 13-percent-ABV, Russian-style imperial stout brewed with Mexican vanilla beans, Indian sugar and coffee was sui generis, even if rumors swirled that the first batch used Starbucks. It was an immediate sensation among the few locals who got to try it. In April 2004, 3 Floyds bottled Dark Lord—dipping the bottlenecks in a gorgeous red wax—and by August 15 it was the No. 1 beer in the world.

Dark Lord changed everything. If you look at the top 50 from April 1, 2004—the final list the Wayback Machine archives before the Dark Lord era begins—you’ll see a list composed mostly of easily accessible beers. Good stuff like Bell’s Two Hearted Ale and Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale, but then, as now, these were beers that could be found in your supermarket.

By August 28, 2005, the top 100 list had become a compendium of early “whales.” The No. 1 beer in the world was Trappist Westvleteren 12, a label-less, Belgian quadruple one could only access by calling a usually-busy hotline to make an appointment to line up at a country monastery in Vleteren, Belgium, on an assigned weekday. No. 2 was Kuhnhenn’s Raspberry Eisbock, only available at the Michigan brewery and comically expensive for the time ($10 per 6.3-ounce bottle). Dark Lord had settled in firmly at No. 3, while the fourth spot was owned by Russian River’s Pliny the Younger, a triple IPA available exclusively on tap in select West Coast bars during a single week in February.

This marks the beginning of the rarity era: When people began lining up for beers and then immediately trading most of them across the country for other rare beers that other people had lined up for. Compare a video from the first Dark Lord Day in 2005, to one from last year. The first shows a few dozen dudes quietly hanging out in a garage; the latter looks like an all-day music festival, complete with metal barriers and security.

No beer better represented this new rarity paradigm than Westvleteren 12, which would have a stranglehold on the No. 1 slot for much of the next decade. That ended on December 12, 2012, when the Saint-Sixtus Abbey, desperate for a little cash flow to repair and renovate their monastery, decided to release “Westy 12” for the first time on American soil. That one-time-only release injected 90,000 bottles into 22 U.S. states. It also prompted the beer to drop out of the top ten.

Back in 2010, when I attended my first dark Lord Day, it was difficult, but accomplishable, to drink the whole top 100 (I made it up to 99 at one point). However, Dark Lord was already becoming passé by then, having slipped to No. 12. Online commenters would claim the stout was suddenly tasting “soy sauce-y” and falling off in quality, but its recipe hadn’t changed. What had changed, however, was Dark Lord’s release size, which jumped from a few hundred to nearly 30,000 bottles per year.

The greatness of rare beer became self-fulfilling. Drive all the way across the country to Munster, Indiana, or queue up for hours in Vermont to land some Heady Topper, and how could the resulting beer not be stellar? Fetishization quickly became a fast-track to the top.

Meanwhile, once-celebrated pioneers like Sierra Nevada, New Belgium, Dogfish Head, Victory, Ommegang, Brooklyn, Rogue and dozens of other top-50 craft breweries don’t have a single beer in the top 250 any more. And if you brought, say, Ommegang Hennepin (No. 2 in 2001), Rogue Shakespeare Stout (No. 4 in 2002) or Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout (No. 25 in 2004) to a bottle share these days, you’d be laughed out of the room. Yet those are still good, if not great beers. The problem is their breweries are too big and the beers too commonplace. Bluntly put: There’s nothing “cool” about them—no remote brewery to travel to, no can release to line up for, no rarely-seen, iconoclastic brewer to idolize.

So where do we go from here? The idea of standing in lines every weekend, FedEx-ing cans and bottles back and forth, talking my wife into vacationing in Decorah, Iowa, is not something I want to do any more. Even if I did, many of these beers have simply become too hard to acquire. Today’s top ten includes beers like Toppling Goliath’s KBBS, which is released in 500-bottle quantities once a year or so, involves winning an online lottery and currently sells for around $1500 on the black market. Is it great? Sure, probably, who knows—you’ll never try it.

That’s OK, though, because history shows that by this time next year, many of the current “great” beers will be forgotten, and new ones, from new breweries, will have replaced them. And five years from now, today’s most sought-after breweries, like Tree House and Trillium, might be getting the same cruel treatment Victory and Rogue receive from beer geeks. As for me, I’ve realized that after a decade-plus of chasing the hottest new beer, nothing has tasted quite as good as that first Duvel.

The post When Did Rarity Start to Equal Greatness in Beer? appeared first on PUNCH.

New York’s Suarez Family Brewery might be America’s best brewery you don’t know about just yet. And why would you? They aren’t bottling or canning anything that’s blowing up the online trade forums and they aren’t cranking out of-the-moment IPAs or decadent barrel-aged stouts. In fact, though he has bonafides from Hill Farmstead, where he was once an assistant brewer, Dan Suarez’s specialty is in what he calls “little” beers—farmhouse ales, crispy pale ales and unfiltered pilsners.

Earlier this fall I spent a weekend exploring the Hudson Valley’s emerging beer scene, throwing back hoppy ales at Industrial Arts and hazy juice bombs at Sloop, but the single beer that impressed me the most was Suarez’s Palatine Pils. A simple German pilsner, it was classic in style—a see-through yellow body topped by a creamy head, bright and grassy on the nose with a bread-y body leading into a crisp, clean finish. It was as good as any pilsner I’ve had in Bohemia, the birthplace of the old-fashioned style.

“We decided to make pilsners [and other lager beers] one of our main focuses at our brewery simply because they are some of our favorite beers to drink and we don’t think there are enough good examples out there in the world,” Suarez tells me. “Too often, lagers are poorly-brewed, stale or just generally unrepresented in today’s beer market.”

After years of brewers trying to cram as many flavorful ingredients as they could into a single beer, it was only natural that the other shoe would eventually drop. Perhaps it’s finally time to return to a more stripped-down style. And no other style says stripped-down quite like pilsner.

The blonde-ish, then-cave-aged lager was first pioneered in the town of Pilsen, which, at the time, was part of the Austrian Empire. Due to its clarity and simplicity, it’s long been argued it’s harder to brew a perfect pilsner than, say, a great vanilla bean- and cocoa nib-infused, rum-barrel-aged imperial stout. With a boozy, sweet, ingredient-packed beer you can cover up any flaws, but a delicate pilsner—low in alcohol, typically made of only the four most basic beer ingredients—bares it all. It’s one beer style that stands naked, waiting to be judged.

“It’s hard to brew a subtle beer that comes across as tasty, complex and ripe with texture,” says Suarez. That is why he strictly brews unfiltered pilsners; filtering, he says, strips out not just yeast and proteins, but also the beautiful flavors and aromas. “It’s true what some people say: there aren’t any strong flavors to hide behind [with a pilsner], and your process has to be on point. The margin for error is razor-thin.”

That’s seemingly why so many fly-by-night breweries leave pilsners to the Pilsner Urquells and Weihenstephaners of the world, who have been perfecting the style for longer than Anheuser-Busch has been a company. Thankfully, though, a new wave of Americans have recently begun experimenting with the style. While some, like Suarez and Threes Brewing, have hewn closely to the traditional pilsner profile, others, like Mikkeller, have “Americanized” it, mostly by pumping up the hop profile. There’s a place for them both, even as we enter the colder days of the year.

In order to examine a beer style that is so often drunk in large quantities without any time for careful consideration, we blind-tasted 30 pilsners from across the globe. For the tasting, I was joined by PUNCH’s Editor in Chief, Talia Baiocchi; Managing Editor, Bianca Prum; Assistant Editor, Chloe Frechette; Social Media Editor, Allison Hamlin; and Contributing Editor, Megan Krigbaum. We tackled classic pilsners from the Czech Republic and Germany, their ersatz stateside counterparts, hopped-up revisions of the style (the less successful versions drinking like pale ales in disguise) and even a couple of Danish gypsy brews. With such subtlety and minor variance between good, great and even awful pilsners, this was surely our toughest tasting yet.

The post Why It’s Time to Reconsider the Pilsner appeared first on PUNCH.

When you get married, you register for a lot of stupid shit. That’s why I currently own a cast iron tortilla press, a stainless steel turkey lifter, some five-blade herb shears and a silicone honey dipper. One of the more aspirant items I registered for was a crystal decanter, imagining at the time that I’d fill it with good Scotch and keep it on a cart in my office to serve visitors.

Instead, for the first year, it remained completely empty, gathering dust and cat hair. But recently I began to use it as a sort of whiskey waste bin. Whenever I had a few ounces left in a bottle and wanted to clear shelf space, I’d pour it into the decanter. I was, it turns out, inadvertently creating my very own “infinity bottle”—a personal history blend that’s become all the rage among whiskey nerds.

The infinity bottle (or “fractional bottle” or “living bottle”) seems to have first entered prominence courtesy of a 2012 video by popular whiskey YouTuber Ralfy Mitchell. In his thick brogue, he rhetorically asks viewers, “How can you create something which is 100 percent uniquely yours? That is part of your whiskey or spirit drinking history? That becomes, in fact, a family heirloom in time?”

His answer is what he calls a “solera bottle,” likening his experiment to the world of sherry, in which casks are fractionally blended over time via the solera system in order to create consistency. Using an empty bottle from WhiskyBlender, Mitchell affixed a label to the back in order to keep a running tally of each new whiskey he added, and when. An infinity bottle, he says, can create “a taste that you just can’t buy,” one worth far more than what he paid for the component whiskeys. He also imagines a world where children inherit their parents’ or grandparents’ solera bottle started decades before.

Helmut Barro, a German cocktail blogger, was inspired by Mitchell. His infinity bottle began in 2015 with some Four Roses Yellow Label followed by Ben Bracken 12 Year Single Malt Scotch, then Rittenhouse Rye.

“I began to appreciate the work of professional blenders and how difficult it is to keep up a continuous taste experience for a customer,” he explains. “With each new addition [to my infinity bottle], the taste actually changes—sometimes to the good, sometimes to the weird.”

Some people, like Mitchell, are methodical about how they build their bottles, tweaking and testing before adding each new pour. Others choose to live dangerously, tossing the final ounces of any and every bottle into their mix, just to see what happens.

“The flavor changes pretty heavily over the years,” notes Reddit user “robotsongs” (he asked that I not use his real name), who pours a shot of every single malt he’s ever purchased into a Balvenie bottle that’s had its label removed and an infinity symbol painted on the front—courtesy his wife’s gold glitter nail polish. “Sometimes it’s unfocused and fuzzy, sometimes it’s goddamn on point. But no one will ever try that bottle besides me and my friends and it’s a fun and easy project.”

Most all discussion of infinity bottles today is relegated to online message boards, mainly Reddit, under discussion topics like:

• “Recommendation for a starter solera?”
• “Infinity bottle – do’s and don’ts”
• “Infinity bottles…your thoughts/experiences”

According to most posters, the rules of infinity bottles are yours to write. Some people think you should only use the same style of whiskey—that is, if you start with a bourbon, stick to mixing it with other bourbons. Others, myself included, believe that mixing and matching—throwing bourbon, rye, Japanese whisky and Scotch all in the same bottle—is what makes these infinities interesting.

“I keep records of each mix because they are never quite what I expect,” explains another forum poster from Wisconsin. “Wasmund’s [a Virginia whiskey] and Ardbeg taste like bubblegum.”

Though whiskey—if not Scotch—is most frequently used, it’s not the only spirit that’s been subject to the infinity treatment. In fact, many believe Cognac is actually best for infinity purposes. And experiments with both rum and gin have popped up in these message board discussions.

Beyond of the confines of Reddit, the infinity bottle has become something of a handshake among acquainted whiskey enthusiasts. Offering a taste from one’s very own infinity blend is a gesture of hospitality that’s more personal than pouring out, say, a taste of Yamazaki 18 or Pappy. After all, a geek’s most cherished bottle is often his or her own blend. “I must confess I am a bit afraid to add other spirits to my rather long-running whiskey solera, as I don’t want to ruin it,” says Barro. “I’m emotionally attached to it by now.”

The post How the Infinity Bottle Became a Whiskey Nerd Obsession appeared first on PUNCH.

Every February for the last three years, Chicago has played host to the beer world’s most niche festival. A partnership between World Barista Champion Stephen Morrissey and beer industry impresario Michael Kiser, Uppers & Downers, as it’s cheekily called, is an all coffee beer festival. This year, paying guests can attend one of two Saturday afternoon sessions where they will have unlimited access to single-origin coffees, cold brew, coffee cocktails and, most importantly, 20 experimental coffee beers made specifically for the event.

There have always been beers that tasted like coffee, but for most of brewing history, that was because these beers—usually stouts and porters—were made with roasted malts. As anyone who’s ever drank a Guinness knows, dark roasts often express themselves with espresso-like notes. But adding actual coffee to beer is something else entirely.

Coffee-infused beer has been discussed in homebrewing circles as early as 1991, when a coffee beer recipe appeared in Charlie Papazian’s The New Complete Joy of Homebrewing (he recommended adding freshly ground beans in the final five minutes of the brewing process). But the first commercial appearance of coffee beer is generally attributed to New Glarus’s Coffee Stout. Launched in 1994, it caused a bit of a kerfuffle with the ATF, who claimed it was illegal to add caffeine to packaged alcohol.

Fast-forward a decade and geeks were lining up to nab the then-No. 1 beer in the world, 3 Floyds Dark Lord, which featured Mexican vanilla, Indian sugar and Intelligentsia Coffee’s Black Cat espresso. Pretty soon nearly every brewery would have a big, bold imperial stout packed with a local roaster’s coffee on offer. Brewers have now moved beyond the coffee stout.

“Coffee beers have undergone a bit of a renaissance,” wrote Michael Kiser, introducing the first Uppers & Downers event in 2013. “While the porters and stouts that define this style have been tweaked, refined and nearly perfected, others have branched out into new styles, techniques and coffees to try and find new territory in the brew.”

Today, nearly every style has been paired with coffee. No longer is it just dark roasts with dark beer; these days, you’re just as likely to see fruity, citrusy, lightly roasted beans matched to lighter beers. In fact, many modern coffee beers are less about smacking you over the head with dark-roasted coffee than trying to seamlessly integrate it into the brew, using the coffee variety’s unique aromas and flavors for added complexity. But, as we found out, it’s a tricky balancing act.

For the tasting, I was joined by PUNCH’s Editor in Chief, Talia Baiocchi; Managing Editor, Bianca Prum; Associate Editor, Lizzie Munro; and Assistant Editor, Chloe Frechette. We tasted 25 beers—coffee blonde ales, saisons, IPAs, brown ales, a sour and, of course, plenty of stouts and porters, many of which were additionally barrel-aged. Below are our top picks in the category.

The post Is There Such a Thing As Too Much Coffee Beer? appeared first on PUNCH.

With the right search terms, you can find the video on YouTube. Standing in a small bathroom, some jackass in a skuzzy white undershirt takes a clear bottle of piss-yellow beer and decants it into a Corona-branded shaker pint. As the bottle empties, a middle finger-sized chili pepper plops out into the foam. Reluctantly, the young man takes a sip of the beer. He then immediately begins spitting up into the nearby toilet as his cameraman explodes with laughter.

That jackass was me.

It was the late aughts and I’d developed a weird fascination with trying the so-called worst beers on planet Earth—and having friends film my reactions. I’m not talking Natty Light or Milwaukee’s Best, but Bud Light Chelada and Mama Mia Pizza Beer. The lowest-rated beer of them all, and my white whale of awfulness, was something called Crazy Ed’s Cave Creek Chili Beer. It was, at the time, the lowest-rated beer on BeerAdvocate with a 1.69 star average; RateBeer scored it a perfect zero. And it was, and still is, the worst beer I’ve ever tasted.

“I thought, ‘Boy, did we make a big mistake,’” Ed Chilleen told Food Network in a 2000 segment of Extreme Cuisine, “because people would take a drink of it and they would go, ‘Oooooh, man, that’s the worst stuff I’ve ever had in my life!’”

A successful restaurateur and bar owner who had dubbed himself “Crazy Ed,” Chilleen opened Arizona’s second microbrewery in 1989 in the basement of his Satisfied Frog restaurant. Based in the small Phoenix exurb of Cave Creek, business at Black Mountain Brewing Co. rode the nation’s early clamoring for anything microbrewed. Chilleen originally made his bones with Black Mountain Gold lager and Frog Light until the fortuitous day when a local Mexican restaurant owner asked him to make a custom spicy beer.

“I thought about that for awhile—hmmm, maybe I could drop a chili pepper in, like the worm in a mezcal bottle,” Chilleen tells me over the phone. “On my way home, I stopped off at a supermarket and started looking for peppers. My criteria was only that it would fit in a bottle. A jalapeño wouldn’t fit. A serrano would. So I bought a can of those.”

At the time, Chilleen had a no-nonsense German brewmaster named Eric Schaltz. “‘What do you want me to do with those?’ he scoffed at me. Traditional Germans. You don’t do anything to their beer.” Chilleen told Schaltz to wash the peppers off and drop them into whatever beer he was bottling the next day, just to see what would happen. After a week, they had a tasting among friends. The beer was undrinkable.

“We had more remarks about the idea than the beer though. That’s what really drove this whole thing,” says Chilleen. “Nobody had ever done that before. And, everyone agreed, this was a great idea.”

Well, not everyone.

Roger Ebert once said it’s easier to write a bad review than a good one; Crazy Ed’s Cave Creek Chili Beer could turn anyone into a Shakespearian scribe. “Past experience and a few bumper stickers have led me to believe that beer is liquid proof that the gods want us to be happy. Oh, how I have been living in naivety!” wrote the Phoenix New Times’ Jonathan McNamara in his 2008 review. The online user reviews were even more brutal: “Definitely worth trying. Once. In a darkened room. With no witnesses,” wrote one BeerAdvocate commenter. “Looks like urine. Smells like stagnant urine. Tastes like burning,” wrote another. “[This] should be sold at Spencer’s Gifts.” “An excellent beer to get back at an enemy.” “Solo la compraría como suvenir.” (“I would only buy it as a souvenir.”) You get the idea.

It also turns out I’m not the only joker to have filmed himself chugging Chili Beer. There are dozens of YouTube videos, the most-viewed among them titled, simply, “Cave Creek Chili Beer Challenge *Vomit Alert*”

Even Chilleen didn’t seem to particularly like the beer, telling me, “I couldn’t drink a six-pack of it.” How, then, in a cut-throat beer market where once-beloved beers routinely die off with little ceremony, has Chili Beer stood the test of time?

At the beer’s first national appearance at Chicago’s National Restaurant Association Show, in 1992, most people would come by Chilleen’s booth, take a sip, “… and they’d tell me, ‘Ugh, that’s terrible.’ But two out of ten loved it. If there had been crowdfunding sites in those days, I would have probably raised $20 million,” he speculates. “I had more people wanting [to invest in the beer] than you would imagine.”

Before the beer’s debut, Chilleen had already spent a year trying to figure out how to make it stable so the pepper didn’t react negatively, working with Texas A&M capsicum expert “Dr. Pepper” on the task. Once the beer was made available to national and international distributors, they quickly sold through the tiny brewery’s entire capacity. “We couldn’t bottle it fast enough,” Chilleen tells me. So he had to make a deal with bigger breweries to handle the bottling, but few of them could quite manage the peppers. “All union guys,” says Chilleen of Minnesota Brewing Company, the first to take over production. “Reminded me off that old I Love Lucy episode with the chocolates.”

Chilleen eventually began buying peppers in Mexico, shipping them across the border, hand-dropping them in the bottles off-premises and then shipping the bottles to the contract breweries to be filled with beer. The logistics were adding $3 to $4 per case to his cost. By the turn of the millennium, he’d realized that it’d be more cost effective to just move production to Mexico. Chilleen then teamed up with Mexico’s Cervecería Mexicana and significantly increased production. Before long, he was selling hundreds of thousands of cases of Chili Beer per year in 32 states and internationally.

Several years later, Chilleen ran into some legal issues (“a bunch of circumstances,” he writes on his blog). Sales of Chili Beer had begun to decline, too, and as the aughts came to a close, he was shipping less than 50,000 cases per year. But the Chili Beer was still profitable, and attracted an offer from Grupo Modelo, who bought the brand in 2008. “It didn’t make me rich. But it made me some money,” he says of the deal.

Chilleen remained a spokesman for a couple years, until they renamed the beer Original C Cave Creek Chili Beer – Cerveza Con Chili. But like Famous Amos and Chef Boyardee, Crazy Ed is a man still intrinsically linked to the eponymous product that is no longer his. (In fact, Chilleen still runs the Chili Beer website, which looks like an internet artifact from the year the beer was created.) His beer eventually ended up in the hands of Constellation Brands, who maintains it to this day.

Perhaps Crazy Ed was ahead of his time, foreseeing that gimmicks and novelty would soon define the industry. “When we started, there were no flavored beers out there,” he says. “Now people are making everything flavored.”

At 79 years old, he is still a restless entrepreneur hoping to strike gold. Perhaps with his new restaurant venture in Puerto Peñasco, Mexico; or the anti-aging creams he now sells with his long-time wife, Maria; or his new Crazy Ed’s Chili Beer Hot Sauce. “The guy who invents the next biggest thing may not need it or even want it, but someone else might. You can’t stop. You gotta keep on keeping on,” Chilleen tells me. “Colonel Sanders started in his late 70s. And I still feel like I got a shot at hitting it really, really big.”

The post The Story Behind the World’s Worst Beer appeared first on PUNCH.

I still have the email from late 2008 in my archives: “A friend that now lives in Germany is coming back for the holidays, and told me he has an empty suitcase he is planning to fill with beer for me. He’s asked what I’d like… I told him Westy if he can somehow get it.”

He could. And in the summer of 2009, after months of planning, four dudes met in a midtown Manhattan hotel room to drink Beer Advocate’s then-No. 1 beer in the world, Westvleteren 12, aka “Westy,” alongside other highly regarded Belgian beers of the time, like Rochefort 10 and St. Bernardus Abt 12.

The notion seems comical these days. No one would beg a Europe-bound buddy to bring back Belgian beers—unless they were limited lambics like Cantillon—and a group of beer geeks would never meet in a Courtyard by Marriott to drink some quadrupels. But there was a time, just about a half-decade ago, when European beer still owned beer geek affections.

BeerAdvocate’s Top Beers on Planet Earth from August 28, 2010 lists four Belgians in its top 11, and 17 in its top 100. Only two of those were lambics; the rest were boozy tripels, quads and strong ales, including many beers that are now definitive shelf turds, like Chimay Grande Réserve and Westmalle Trappist Tripel. Additionally, that 2010 list includes four German beers, four English, two Danish and three Canadian.

Today, Westy 12 has plummeted to No. 19 on the Top Beers list, and there’s only three other non-lambic Belgian beers in the top 100. There are no German, English or Canadian beers. There is, however, a single Danish beer: Mikkeller Beer Geek Vanilla Shake (Bourbon Edition), a vanilla bean-infused coffee stout aged in bourbon barrels that is Americanized in both name and profile. It’s a perfect example of what happened as we entered the second decade of the new millennium—old-fashioned European beers very quickly became usurped by these sorts of extreme beers.

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The ’90s and early aughts were about American beer locating flavor—any flavor—after decades of U.S. consumers subsisting on watery macro-swill. This often meant mimicking European styles, which you see in early industry successes like Boston Lager and Allagash White. But the evolving American beer palate began to push the limits of flavor as far as humanly possible, eschewing the simple four-ingredient beers that defined Reinheitsgebot Germany, CAMRA England and monk-brewing Belgium. At the same time, Europe was asleep at the wheel, refusing to buck its longstanding traditions and, in turn, hurting its standing in the American beer geek firmament. (Shockingly, in the if-you-can’t-beat-’em camp, 150-year-old Duvel just announced plans to release a bourbon barrel-aged variant, but it might be too little, too late.)

Why did this change happen in 2010, exactly? Though it’s difficult to point to one event specifically, a few keys things happened around this time. In May of 2010, Hill Farmstead opened in Greensboro Bend, Vermont, creating the model for producing small-batch, world-class beer that could only be acquired by traveling to far-flung lands (Hill Farmstead has a stunning 16 beers in today’s top 250). Just under a year later, in early 2011, The Alchemist (also located in Vermont) began canning Heady Topper, their state-of-the-art IPA; it soon became the new No. 1 beer in the world, dethroning the indomitable Westy. The most popular American beers went from new-world takes on old-world beers—put in European-style corked-and-caged bottles, no less—to pounder cans of hours-fresh IPA.

Finally, on December 12, 2012, Westvleteren 12 was released for the first time in America. People lined up at retailers in 21 states, but in many ways that release was already its death knell, the lines akin to visitors paying final respects to a dead dignitary lying in state.

I remember it well. I avoided the lines at Top Hops on the Lower East Side, as did most of my friends. And when I was eventually gifted a single bottle from that release, I didn’t call any one to meet up and drink the beer in quiet reverence. Instead, I spent the afternoon at a bar in Queens drinking a vertical of rare, adjunct-packed anniversary beers from Stone, a California brewery that had just begun filling up the top 100.

The post The Year European Beer Lost Its Hold on America appeared first on PUNCH.

It used to be breweries would bet everything on a single flagship beer. You said you wanted a Sam Adams, and you meant a Boston Lager. Order a Sierra Nevada, and you expected their Pale Ale. Some people still think Anchor Brewing is actually called “Anchor Steam.”

But the days when brewers would hang their hat on a single offering are over.

The beer geek appetite for novelty and rarity has given way to a limited-release culture that eschews a core lineup of beers, let alone a single flagship. That’s why Other Half released, by my count, 155 different beers last year. And why Washington D.C.’s Bluejacket has produced a remarkable 225 beers in the few years of their existence. Or, why the hot, upstart British brewery, Cloudwater, doesn’t have a single year-round offering.

The flagships of yore—the Stone IPAs, Bell’s Two Hearted Ales and Brooklyn Lagers—can be now be found at most well-stocked supermarkets, ballpark concession stands, Irish pubs or even at the airport. This has become cause for dismissal for most beer geeks. But I still wanted to know, how do these beers stack up years—or even decades—after their respective heydays? Can Dogfish Head 60 Minute still matter, or simply taste good, amid a new paradigm of IPA?

Unlike previous tastings, which generally involved a month of prep, countless emails, phone calls and, more often than not, “knowing a guy,” this tasting’s logistics entailed going to a supermarket the morning-of. But that’s kind of the point; these are the beers that literally anyone can buy, whenever they want, so much so that we take them for granted.

For the tasting, I was joined by PUNCH’s Editor in Chief, Talia Baiocchi; Managing Editor, Bianca Prum; Senior Editor, Lizzie Munro; and Ethan Fixell, a fellow beer writer and beverage educator. We tasted 23 flagship beers blind, from red ales and amber lagers to pale ales and IPAs. Some proved to weather the test of time, while others felt like relics—a taste of history, better left to it.

The post The Ultimate Flagship Beer Showdown appeared first on PUNCH.

Derek called before 7 a.m., waking me up. He was in New Hampshire where it was snowy and freezing. He’d been standing outside, on Market Street in Portsmouth, overnight. He told me they were still a few hours away from opening the brewpub and letting everyone inside. By 10 a.m., though, he was pretty sure he’d have two bottles of Kate the Great.

Kate the who?

There’s no more prominent beer entry for the “Where are they now?” file than Portsmouth Brewery’s Kate the Great, a Russian imperial stout that was Beer Advocate’s No. 3 beer in the world in January of 2008 (courtesy of the Way Back Machine). Today, Kate the Great isn’t just unranked, it literally does not exist, having not been brewed since 2012. Most younger beer drinkers probably haven’t even heard of the once-mighty Kate. The same surely holds true for beers like Surly Darkness (No. 7 in January, 2008), De Struise Black Albert (No. 10), AleSmith Speedway Stout (No. 12) and Stone Imperial Russian Stout (No. 16).

These are just some of the many imperial stouts that time forgot. Why, though, have they been buried by the sands of time?

If 3 Floyds’ Dark Lord (2004) starts the rarity era, it also starts the big, boozy stout era. And while Dark Lord is still pretty famous (if not still critically acclaimed), many other stouts that followed it are mere footnotes, barely remembered except by older beer geeks holding court on their creaky barstools.

That Kate the Great—first released in 2005—was nothing more than a simple, four-ingredient beer. Surly Darkness—first released in 2007—was likewise a four-ingredient stout with its own “day” up in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, where the brewery was located. Ditto Black Albert and Stone Imperial Russian Stout. Speedway was one of the only stouts at the top to add a fifth ingredient: locally roasted coffee.

By contrast, all of the stouts that dominate the top 250 in 2017 are utterly crammed with adjuncts. Out of the 94 stouts or porters that currently occupy the list only one, so far as I can tell, is a simple four-ingredient beer. That’s Everett, a 7.5-percent ABV American porter made using pale, caramel and chocolate malts, Columbus hops, ale yeast and well water. Its brewer, though, is Hill Farmstead, the Vermont brewery often hailed as the best in the entire world. The message is clear: If you’re Hill Farmstead, the geeks might accept something simple and well-crafted, but everyone else best load up their beers with more toppings than a 16 Handles frozen yogurt.

Consider Cigar City’s Hunahpu’s Imperial Stout Double Barrel Aged, the No. 7 beer in the world today, which includes Peruvian cacao nibs, ancho and pasilla chiles, cinnamon and Madagascar vanilla beans and is aged in apple brandy and rum barrels. Or, Founders Canadian Breakfast Stout, brewed with a blend of coffees and “imported” chocolates and aged in bourbon barrels have also aged Michigan maple syrup. Go even further down the list and it looks like a dessert menu at The Cheesecake Factory: coconut, licorice, hazelnuts, cookies, gingerbread, turbinado sugar, Neapolitan ice cream (for real). In about a decade, the archetypal “impressive” stout went from one that had a complexity, built purely on its malts, to one that’s—at the minimum—aged in barrels with an adjunct or two—like current No. 1 beer Toppling Goliath’s Kentucky Brunch Brand Stout, coffee-infused and aged in bourbon barrels.

Though Kate the Great had begun to fall out of favor with the geek elite by 2012—it no longer ranked in the top 100—Portsmouth could have probably continued selling it if the beer’s creator and Portsmouth’s longtime brewmaster, Tod Mott, hadn’t decided to part ways with the brewery. Portsmouth generously let him take his recipes with him, but when Mott’s new spot, Tributary Brewing Co., finally opened in nearby Kittery, Maine, in September of 2014, there was no Kate the Great on the menu. Instead, seven months later, Mott released his new, modernized take on the beer: a Russian imperial stout aged in a variety of apple brandy, port, Islay whisky and rum barrels. Ironically, he called it Mott the Lesser.

The post The Imperial Stouts That Time Forgot appeared first on PUNCH.

To acquire the hottest bottle of bourbon at the moment, you don’t go to a store. You don’t head to a distillery either. You don’t even put your name on some secret list or enter some special lottery. What you do is convince one of your whiskey-collecting Facebook friends to introduce you to a guy named Danny Strongwater (not his real name) from Southern California.

I first became aware of “California Gold” at a private whiskey tasting I attended this past November. All the big bottles were present—the full Van Winkle line, every Buffalo Trace Antique Collection offering, John E. Fitzgerald Very Special Reserve and plenty of well-aged Willett ryes. What wowed everyone most, however, was a squat bottle with a white HP LaserJet label adorned with blurry clipart images of stars and arched olive branches and a sticker on the neck reading “CA Gold.” Extremely rich and complex, California Gold is a secret, homemade blend of commercially released whiskeys that has become an underground sensation.

“Well, it’s not a fair fight!” he tells me over the phone when I reveal what happened at that tasting. “You can’t compare a blend with a single-barrel bourbon from a single mash bill from a single distillery.” Still, Strongwater is perfectly aware that California Gold has been routinely winning taste-offs among whiskey drinkers over the past year.

A collector of high-end bourbons like George T. Stagg and William Larue Weller, Strongwater became enamored with older Willett Family Estate bottlings, loving their deep flavor profile, which is often described as showing singular notes of pine and cherries. Knowing that Willett sourced their older barrels from distilleries like Heaven Hill, he was flummoxed as to why Willett tasted so different. With quality Willett bottles becoming scarce and quite costly on the secondary market, Strongwater wanted to see if he could make his own similar blend that would offer a better “bang for the buck.”

“OK, so what other bourbons do people put out with these flavors. . .and how much would it take of each to show up in the background?” he wondered. “It’s like blending wine.”

It took him six months to figure out a recipe that worked, at first building blends in very minute amounts, measuring precisely. He claims as little as five milliliters of something can make a massive difference in a 750-milliliter bottle.

“That’s where everybody else gets it wrong,” he tells me. “They think they need to do 60/40 blends, or 60/20/20.” He also claims it’s crucial to shake all barrel-proof bottles in order to release all of the char flavor, something few drinkers do.

Amateurs like Strongwater making their own blends is nothing new in the whiskey community. A few years back, Blake Riber got a lot of attention on his Bourbonr blog for “Poor Man’s Pappy,” a supposedly thriftier way to simulate Pappy Van Winkle. Strongwater recently loved someone else’s blend of equal parts Michter’s barrel-proof bourbon and rye, along with Four Roses OBSQ Lincoln Road. And I’ve extensively detailed the emergence of personal infinity bottles. But no blend has garnered quite the underground attention that California Gold has, with serious whiskey geeks clamoring to acquire these uber-limited bottles.

How did it manage to break through?

In the deepest levels of whiskey geekdom, it’s not uncommon for strangers who only know each other online to meet up for a drink when they randomly find themselves in each other’s cities. Strongwater was friendly with a Nashville man with a large, at-home whiskey “reading room” that had become quite well known in the online community. That man has an impressive array of opened bottles—hundreds of Willetts—and is always willing to share with out-of-town visitors for free. Strongwater started sending him rare samples to help him build his library; in the box, he’d always include a small vial of early California Gold batches. Eventually, the Nashville man asked for two full bottles, which he began serving to guests who would visit. Instantly, the word began to spread online.

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“So it became well-known in the community,” Strongwater explains. “And everybody likes to share. Especially something new and unique.”

Everyone who tried California Gold soon wanted to acquire their own bottle. Friendly guy that he is, Strongwater is always willing to accommodate a few random strangers, so long as they have someone to vouch that they intend to drink (and not sell) California Gold. (Strongwater declined to discuss details about how the bottles change hands.)

“It’s really become a pain in the ass, to be quite honest with you,” Strongwater tells me. He’ll make a batch of only five to ten bottles at a time, measuring meticulously. He’s around his 20th batch or so.

Clearly well-versed in other whiskeys on the market, Strongwater doesn’t even think it’s a “fair fight” pitting his California Gold against the big boys in tastings for one key reason: California Gold is whiskey that now has the complexities of a distilled cocktail—one bottled at barrel proof no less (California Gold has tested in the 110 to 125 proof range).

Actually, what Strongwater thinks California Gold most proves is that the big Kentucky distilleries should be collaborating more often, in the same way craft breweries do. Combining yeast strains, mash bills and each distillery’s unique “funk”—that is, the signature, one-of-a-kind notes produced from specific distilleries’ equipment and aging facilities.

“It’s sad multiple distilleries don’t collaborate,” he tells me. “‘Hey, you got this great product with strong barrel char; hey, you got this great syrupy product.’ If they’d just do that, they could really have something special.”

So what exactly is in California Gold’s blend? Strongwater won’t tell, though he hinted that the base is a barrel-proof Buffalo Trace product with strong oak character and that its spicy notes may come from a Four Roses Single Barrel offering. The caramel flavor he gets from another product, the espresso notes from yet another, and so on.

The only one who does know the exact blend is his long-suffering partner, who has the recipe written down somewhere. Strongwater has instructed her to pass it on to a friend of his should he die, so that that person can continue “producing” California Gold. Even so, Strongwater says that one of the components in his blend is not readily available anymore (he’s even scoured Europe looking for it) and, thus, California Gold’s days may be numbered.

“I’ve heard lots of guesses. Lots of people don’t like that I won’t share the recipe. But I don’t want to cause a scene,” Strongwater tells me, having instructed owners of bottles to please not post pictures of it on social media. “People who are just lovers of bourbon, though, they don’t care where it came from or what it is or who made it. It’s so non-commercial, so un-mainstream. What they all tell me is it’s just the best cost, best bourbon there is—period.”

The post How a Homemade Blend Became One of America’s Most Coveted Bourbons appeared first on PUNCH.

I’d taken the first Acela of the day down to Philadelphia and made my way into a line that was winding down South 16th Street, four blocks from the entrance of Monk’s Cafe. By just past noon, three hours later, I finally made it to the door. I paid my $20 cover and was handed a mere six ounces of Pliny the Younger, the famed “triple” IPA from Santa Rosa, California, and one of the few legendary IPAs of yesteryear that remains coveted today.

It was 2016, but it could just as well have been 2005, the year the IPA officially became a sensation. Looking at the January 22, 2005 Top 100 Beers (courtesy of the Wayback Machine), the list includes 16 IPAs or double IPAs. (Today’s list, by contrast, includes a whopping 89 IPAs filling out the top 250 slots.) In 2005, the style was dominated by increasingly bitter “hop bombs,” while today the state-of-the-art hews towards those that are more tropical and juicy. In fact, it could be argued that no beer style has changed more in the last decade than the IPA, even more than the stouts that went from minimalist dark beers to adjunct-laden ice cream floats. 

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By 2005, Russian River’s Vinnie Cilurzo was already an industry legend for his decision to raise both the hoppiness levels and ABV to create the world’s first double IPA while he was at the short-lived Blind Pig Brewing in the mid-1990s. (The 8 percent ABV Pliny the Elder, his more famous DIPA, wouldn’t come until 2003.) But it wasn’t until the first Friday in February, 2005, that the craft beer paradigm would shift, irrevocably. At a boozy 11 percent ABV and packed with citrus-forward hops, Pliny the Younger was an immediate sensation among Sonoma locals. As the Los Angeles Times wrote last year: “It was a revelation at a time when American craft brewing was really beginning to push the boundaries of experimentation and innovation, and sampling Pliny the Younger quickly became a rite of passage for beer aficionados.”

Pliny the Younger’s first release was indeed a revelation. As “Irishsnake” wrote in his 2005 BeerAdvocate review, “[Pliny the Younger] really throws down the gauntlet to other brewers.” The other top breweries of the day accepted the challenge; the IPA quickly went from being hoppy, but generally well-rounded and balanced, to a more-is-more, double-dare of a beer. Likewise, Pliny the Younger’s seasonal, tap-only release decreed that IPAs need no longer be year-round “shelf turds” of indeterminate freshness. The other most-acclaimed IPAs of the mid- to late-aughts were likewise once-a-year (or so) offerings, like Founders’ Devil Dancer and Bell’s Hopslam. The latter, a 10-percent-ABV beer with a label depicting a person being crushed by a giant hop, was soon derisively nicknamed “Hypeslam” for how quickly it sold out.

Today’s top IPAs are even more reliant on hype and ephemerality, though they are often way more accessible in terms of enjoyment than the IPAs of 2005—softly carbonated, pleasantly aromatic, juicy and, importantly, often consumed hours fresh. In fact, I only count a few “shelf” IPAs on the top 250 today, like Lawson’s Finest Sip of Sunshine (No. 29), Grimm’s Afterimage (No. 157), Lumen (No. 175) and Lambo Door (No. 222). Even those typically sell out the day they hit shelves.

Miraculously, the two beers that started it all have managed to stand the test of time, amid a drastic paradigm shift for IPAs. Neither is fruity nor hazy—The Elder is clean and harshly bitter, and The Younger more syrupy than juicy. Both are still quite tasty, but far from groundbreaking in 2017. But there I was, just a year ago, standing in line for Pliny the Younger like it was 2005. What’s my excuse? I wanted to finally taste, for the first time, the beer that made the IPA today’s most important style.

The post The Year the IPA Came to Rule Craft Beer appeared first on PUNCH.

I remember the exact day I realized my favorite beer was no longer cool. I’d carelessly let my wife’s friend choose the bar for the evening. She’d picked one of those mediocre “plastic paddy” Irish pubs that excel in offering weekly trivia nights, SportsCenter on every TV and dirty tap lines. I figured I’d be drinking a few fingers of Jameson at best. But as I entered, I noticed a massive promotional poster, declaring, “We have Bourbon County Stout!” Indeed they did have the bourbon barrel-aged beauty from Goose Island that had held my affection for more than a decade. I ordered one for just five bucks, receiving the imperial stout in a frosty pint glass that may as well have been branded with a logo that read: “passé.”

That’s the thing: Simply tasting great doesn’t necessarily translate to getting tapped into the national zeitgeist. So, what does? Rarity, of course, continues to rule the day among beer geeks. But to really be representative of the current zeitgeist in any meaningful, and quantifiable way, a brewery’s beers have to be available beyond their taproom. Hence, for this exercise in identifying the beers that have become calling cards among the country’s top beer buyers, arbiters of beer cool, like Treehouse or Toppling Goliath, were simply not eligible.

I looked, instead, through dozens of bottle lists at top beer bars and restaurants. Since tap lists change so frequently—almost daily, in fact—bottle lists are the only way to determine what’s being represented with the greatest frequency. I examined places like Gold Star Beer Counter in Brooklyn and Monk’s Café in Philadelphia, Mikkeller Bar in San Francisco and Los Angeles and Brouwer’s Cafe in Seattle, and plenty of spots in between. I also solicited help from Gage Siegel of BeerMenus.com, who was able to examine his company’s internal data to see which breweries were consistently appearing at all the top spots in the major cities.

The breweries that dominate today are typically those from two beer importers and distributors—Shelton Brothers and 12 Percent Imports—which have become like the Michael Ovitz and Jeffrey Katzenberg of the beer world, able to make a brewery’s career by simply having them sign on the dotted line. The list is, unsurprisingly, full of American breweries, specifically those who are pushing the boundaries of flavor and tradition, alongside a few notable foreign entries that have elevated local traditions that have gone a bit stale. Below are the ten breweries that rule today’s beer lists.

Hill Farmstead

The oft-named “World’s Best Brewery” used to only distribute in-state, as brewmaster Shaun Hill is a stickler for freshness. But in the past couple of years he has started sending select beer to notable spots in the New York, Philadelphia and Boston areas. Unlike the rest of the “who’s who,” Hill only allows kegs into distribution, but the presence of his beers was simply too pervasive to ignore. Still, seeing a Hill Farmstead offering on-tap, like the double IPA Society & Solitude #4, still feels like an event. Hill’s beers aren’t equipped with bells and whistles; they are about execution—capable of elevating styles as humdrum as blonde or brown ale into something special, while showing his true brilliance with hoppy beers and farmhouse ales. “The beers are that great,” explains Jon Myerow, co-owner of Tria Taproom, “[but] the demand vastly exceeds the supply.”

Fantôme

Whenever I see Brasserie Fantôme on a bottle list, I immediately know I’m at a great spot. The brainchild of Dany Prignon, a mop-topped madman who, it is said, doesn’t even drink beer, Fantôme breaks all the rules of farmhouse ale—and then breaks some more. While their flagship Fantôme Saison is world-class, it’s their odder offerings that keep getting this Wallonian brewery invited to the prom. Beers like Magic Ghost, brewed with green tea, and the dandelion-infused Pissenlit (literally, “pee in bed”) make their way onto top beer lists, whether that’s Adobe Blues in Staten Island or Washington’s top-notch Brasserie Beck. 

Evil Twin

“I can say that 90 percent of the best craft beer bars carry beer from these breweries at any given time,” Siegel tells me before presenting BeerMenus’ findings, adding, “but it’s not likely it’ll be the same beer from any given brewery at any given time.” This is why it’s remarkable that Evil Twin’s Imperial Biscotti Break appears on 383 different bottle lists, by far the most of any other well-regarded offering. Owner Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø, who also has his own bar Tørst, in Brooklyn, makes the kinds of ingredient-packed, barrel-aged booze bombs that define geeky imperial stout today. (Jarnit-Bjergsø’s “good twin” Mikkel Borg Bjergsø likewise finds his brewery, Mikkeller, on most top bar menus courtesy of his Beer Geek Breakfast stout.)

Cantillon

Even if their lambics have become increasingly rare in the states, the coolest bars and beer stores still manage to occasionally snag a case of Cantillon every now and again. In fact, when Greg Engert opened The Sovereign in early 2016, one of its biggest draws was the good half-dozen Cantillon bottlings on the opening menu, like Fou’ Foune and Lou Pepe Kriek. The Brussels brewery is so cool it even has its own worldwide event, Zwanze Day, where several dozen of the top beer bars pour the exact same Cantillon beer at the exact same time.

Prairie Artisan Ales

This little Tulsa brewery almost immediately garnered worldwide acclaim. Initially famed for founder Chase Healey’s Brett-backed farmhouse ales, their coffee, cacao nib, vanilla bean and ancho chili pepper-packed Prairie BOMB! was BeerMenus’ 2nd-most logged beer at top bars, appearing on 283 lists. Still, as Siegel notes, “It’s ironic to see Prairie top the list(s) because Chase is… a real Red, White & Blue kind of guy; he’s known to take collaborators out fishing or into the wilderness—a contrast to the marble bar tops and cramped spaces where his beer is typically consumed.”

Omnipollo

Omnipollo’s ethos almost sounds like a comedy sketch. The Swedish brewery was started in a bold attempt to combine beer with the world of high art. Karl Grandin’s avant-garde labels (check out Potlatch or Gone) have hung in galleries and museums, while partner Henok Fentie’s recipes are likewise cutting edge, often utilizing weird adjuncts like oats, caramel sauce and even aromatic oils to make his stouts and hoppy ales. In fact, you can trace the “milkshake” craze back to Omnipollo, alongside Tired Hands. Beers like their imperial IPA, Fatamorgana, and the intentionally controversial peanut butter biscuit stout, Yellow Belly, appear frequently on hip beer lists. 

BFM (Brasserie des Franches-Montagnes)

More often seen as a country for reliably good wristwatches, chocolates and tennis players, Switzerland has also managed to produce one of the world’s hottest breweries. “[Brasserie des Franches-Montagnes] looks to transcend style boundaries to create graceful, complex liquids,” explains George Flickinger, a division manager for BFM’s importer, B. United. “This is best encapsulated in their Abbaye de Saint Bon-Chien—a blended, wine-yeast fermented, barrel-aged beer with a beguiling acid signature and flavor profile that it picks up from a plethora of wine and spirits barrels.” B. United has also created the Zymatore Project, which allows them to further age beers from their portfolio in a variety of wine, spirits, mead and sake barrels—which is just another check for the cool box.

Russian River

“Pliny the Elder is the original Double IPA, and the standard to which other DIPAs are compared,” notes Tom Peters of Monk’s Café. “Monk’s sell at least one keg per day.” Meanwhile, once-a-year tappings of Pliny the Younger still draw eager crowds. But even more significant are brewmaster Vinnie Cilurzo’s world-class wine barrel-aged sours. For any bar within Russian River’s limited distribution area—the Bay area, Oregon, Colorado, Philadelphia—to not have Supplication (a pinot noir barrel-aged brown ale) or Consecration (a cabernet sauvignon barrel-aged Belgian dark ale) on their bottle list would be considered a major oversight. Chris Peters of Teresa’s Next Door notes: “[Russian River] will remain cool over time because of Vinnie’s dedication to quality and his desire to discover something different and interesting.”

Holy Mountain

Heavy metal has always had a strange, symbiotic relationship with many craft breweries (see: 3 Floyds and Surly). Mike Murphy and Colin Lenfesty of Holy Mountain are likewise inspired by the dark arts, but you wouldn’t know from their stark white, minimally-designed bottles with simple names like The Goat or The Seer. These beers and others now dominate high-end bottle lists in places like New York and their hometown of Seattle. Like many “of-the-moment” breweries, they have no flagship beers, instead they focus on a variety of mixed-fermentation saisons and wild ales, many brewed using local microflora.

Off Color Brewing

“Off Color is craft beer postmodernism,” says Siegel, noting that they can do a collaboration with a brewery as corporate as MillerCoors and not only does it not hurt their cred—it somehow makes them seem even cooler. (That beer, Eeek!, was a wild yeast-fermented take on Miller High Life.) John Laffler—formerly of Goose Island—specializes in offbeat takes on less-than-sought-after styles like braggot (barley-brewed mead), sahti (a yeasty, juniper berry ale) and gotlandsdricka (smoked rye beer), but he’s also not afraid to make a geek-friendly s’mores stout. Adds Siegel: “Consider it an education to always order whatever you see from them.”

Other Notable Mentions:
Almanac, Anchorage, Cascade, Crooked Stave, Oxbow, Perennial, De Dolle, Jester King, Jolly Pumpkin, The Lost Abbey.

The post Meet the Who’s Who of Beer Cool appeared first on PUNCH.

The town was called Pleasantville, but I was having a pretty unpleasant time. Hungover on a Saturday morning, I wandered through neighborhoods full of McMansions, early morning power-walkers observing me curiously, cyclists in ill-fitting Livestrong gear breezing by. This was before I owned an iPhone; armed only with a Katana flip-phone, I’d written directions on a piece of scrap paper. MapQuest had told me Captain Lawrence Brewing Co. was mere blocks from the Metro-North stop, but I’d clearly taken a wrong turn.

I eventually righted my ship, and by noon I was clad with four bottles of Cuvee de Castleton, not only the first beer I ever stood in line for, but the first sour beer I ever tasted.

Back in 2007, only six so-called “sour” ales placed on BeerAdvocate’s top 100 list (courtesy of the Wayback Machine), including New Belgium’s La Folie at No. 53 and Girardin’s Gueuze 1882 Black Label at No. 99. My first sip of the vinous and tart Cuvee de Castleton, a Belgian golden ale fermented with muscat grapes and aged in wine barrels with Brettanomyces—a word I’d never even heard before then—was a shock.

Before the 2010s, in America, sours were strictly the domain of a few avant-garde breweries like Russian River and The Lost Abbey, who had been inspired by old-timey—but by then mostly-ignored—Belgian lambic-makers like Drie Fonteinen and Cantillon. Because of what it takes to make these beers, they inherently have to be produced in limited quantities. Wild ales and lambics are usually spontaneously fermented in open-air koelschips, or inoculated with captured “wild” yeast, then aged in barrels. And, while “sour” isn’t a flavor profile that necessarily turns people off (see: Sour Patch Kids) the vinegary and acidic sour ales that existed a decade ago were not exactly crowd-pleasing beers. Something had to change, both for geeks and the common man.

I still recall the days—about six or seven years ago—when you could buy Cantillon at Whole Foods. The real geeks had always known about Cantillon, at least since Joel Shelton, of the famed Shelton Brothers importers, had stuffed some bottles in a green duffel bag stowed in his flight’s overhead bin, back around 1993. (“The first taste I had of their Gueuze had the effect of the heavens opening up, with full violin section,” he recently told me.) But Cantillon never quite tipped into the mainstream.

Unlike the IPA-ization of America—which begins with the release of Russian River’s Pliny the Younger in 2005—or the dessert-ifying of imperial stouts—which owes its beginnings to 3 Floyds’ Dark Lord, circa 2004—the “souring” of beer palates in this country doesn’t seem to have one watershed moment that turned the tide. Ultimately, it was the gradual deification of Cantillon that acted as the bellwether for the upcoming sour revolution.

Before 2013, only one Cantillon beer had ever appeared on the Top Beers list: Saint Lamvinus, a limited-edition lambic made from merlot and cabernet franc grapes. In 2013, though, a whopping 11 Cantillon beers suddenly jumped into the top 250—pretty much every single beer the Brussels brewery produced, the vast majority of them packed with fruit, like the apricot-heavy Fou’ Foune (No. 11 in 2013). Cantillon was, in the pop music terms, an “overnight sensation.”

For the less geek-inclined, 2013 also saw the release of a more accessible, canned sour: Westbrook Gose. Westbrook didn’t just bring notice to an archaic German style, it also brought sour beer to the masses, proving that there was a market for sessionable sours. Less aggressive and complex than Cantillon, it was a critical success and a commercial smash. It also didn’t hurt that this type of beer could be quickly soured in the brew kettle, wherein the bacteria Lactobacillus is added to “acidify” the wort; no need for open fermentation or lengthy barrel-aging.

A kettle sour explosion would immediately follow, making way for the success of beers like Peekskill’s Simple Sour and Anderson Valley’s The Kimmie, The Yink, & The Holy Gose (both also released in 2013). A host of new breweries opening that year—from Berkeley’s The Rare Barrel to Firestone Walker spin-off Barrelworks—focused entirely on sour beers. These beers became such a sensation that, by the late summer 2013, even The New Yorker felt the need to explain the trend.

Fast-forward a few years and virtually every brewery has a sour in their portfolio. In fact, eight out of ten breweries I highlighted in my recent “Who’s Who of Beer Cool” specialize in sour, and there are now 35 sour beers in the current BeerAdvocate’s top 250, spanning such styles as American wild ale, lambic, gueuze, Berliner weisse, Flanders red ale and saison.

The post The Year Sour Beer Became a Sensation appeared first on PUNCH.

I spend about 30 minutes flipping through the gallery on my phone. A couple on a date, clad in faux-fur coats, snuggling as they lift clunky glasses made of ice. Two middle-aged women posing in front of a penguin mascot holding an “Eski-Hos” sign. A dude with greying hair, kneeling in front of a block of ice carved like a woman’s topless torso, his face jammed in her frigid nether regions. They only get worse. This is the public photo archive for minus5°, an “ice experience” with locations in New York, Orlando and Las Vegas. It is the world’s biggest chain of ice bars, a silly phenomenon that started in the mid-1990s and, somehow, is only getting stronger today.

“We were traveling in Sweden, cruising along, and we noticed they had these ice hotels,” Noel Bowman tells me. A former venture partner with Outback Steakhouse and developer of the Jimmy Buffett-themed restaurant, Cheeseburger in Paradise, he’s founder and president of minus5°. “They pop up in the middle of winter, you just throw them in a big field and they last until they dissipate,” he says.

What Bowman is referring to is Icehotel, which Yngve Bergqvist started in 1989 in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, north of the Arctic Circle. The original structure was supposed to be a temporary exhibition of Japanese-style ice sculpture, but soon visitors were inquiring about spending the night. Rebuilt each winter, the entire 64,600-square-foot hotel—including the beds—is made from ice pulled from the nearby Torne River. Five years after opening Icehotel, the hotelier partnered with Absolut Vodka for Icebar, the world’s first bar made completely of ice. It was instantly popular.

“The demand is enormous,” explained Bergqvist, upon opening a Stockholm location of Icebar by Icehotel in 2002.

Bergqvist’s Icebar had a certain goofy elegance, like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude funneled through Scandinavian sparseness. Its American copycat, minus5°, meanwhile, is the Fortress of Solitude turned frat house, complete with General Zod and his Kryptonian followers as shot-slamming college bros from Des Moines. Bowman would hardly be offended by the comparison; he’s quite aware of minus5°’s particular brand of appeal.

“It’s mainly a bucket-list spot,” Bowman tells me, referencing his first minus5º bar, which opened in the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino, in 2008. “Some of the locals are like, ‘Ugh, tourist trap.’ But we see them two weeks later with someone visiting them from Iowa.”

Bowman had initially followed a nightclub model in building minus5°, equipping it with a VIP section, bottle service and “super duper” high-end caviar. But business wasn’t so hot. He soon realized that people weren’t inclined to stay awhile—instead, they wanted to put on a parka, do a shotski, dance to Nelly’s Hot in Herre, “have a shit-kicking time” and then move on. Today, the average customer only stays about 30 minutes.

“The first ten minutes is like, ‘Wow, I’m in an ice bar,’ and they touch the ice,” Bowman explains. “The second ten, it’s, ‘Wow, I’m drinking from a glass made of ice.’ The third, it’s, ‘let’s find the photographer, buy a photograph, buy a T-shirt, get on our way.’”

Chill Out at minus5º

At the ice bar, everything—including the one-time-use glasses—are made of ice.

Hidden throughout the ice bar are a number of toy goldfish, installed by the sculptor to entertain kids that visit the bar. (Per the official rules, kids are "cool" before 8 p.m.)

Upon visiting the ice bar, guests can choose between a parka and a knee-length faux fur, available in black or white.

Bottles of liquor, especially vodka, decorate the backbar at minus5º. (Naturally, they are frozen.)

Some bottles are encased in ice, like this bottle of Hpnotiq®, which was installed for a private event held in partnership with the brand.

An ice bar would not be complete without an ice luge. This one, shaped like a boombox, is equipped with a plastic spigot.

Here, the Iceberg cocktail: a mix of citrus vodka, cranberry juice, triple sec and a splash of lime. Hold it with both hands—the ice glasses are slippery.

The entire interior of the bar changes once every three months, but today, the bar is showcasing frozen Warhol prints—like these of Mao Tse Tung.

Not only is the chandelier made of ice, it changes color. Currently, the lights in the bar are tuned to the rainbow setting.

While the guest experience is frivolous, the making of the bar was anything but. Bowman’s team of HVAC engineers spent nearly two years creating a space made of ice walls, ice seats, even ice chandeliers (“It’s not just a big meat freezer”). They even have a resident carver who is constantly “shaping up” the bar, sharpening melting edges and fixing cracks, and even changing the entire interior every three months (a recent Game of Thrones theme proved quite popular). For what it’s worth, Bowman claims the efficiency of his system makes his electric bill cheaper than that at most large restaurants.

As for the beverage “program,” the drinks are vodka-heavy and often tropical in nature, which Bowman claims subliminally makes you feel warmer. There’s the Frosty Mojito, the Piña Colada-esque Iceman and the peach schnapps-packed Snowflake (“a cocktail to remember in a bar you won’t forget” according to the menu). The cocktails come in one-time-use ice glasses sourced from Philadelphia, costing $1.50 a piece. But don’t expect high-end mixology or even shaken drinks, which are too tough for glove-clad bartenders. “Our customers are not looking for Sidecars,” says Bowman, “they’re just getting after it. Just pounding drinks.”

After a flood of television coverage in the late-aughts, people started knocking on Bowman’s door. A second location opened in the nearby Monte Carlo Resort & Casino in 2010. Then, the Hilton wanted one in their flagship property in midtown Manhattan. “I was pretty impressed that, at the same hotel where John Lennon wrote Imagine, they wanted to put an ice bar,” Bowman tells me. He now has four locations and plans to add a fifth, at The Venetian in Las Vegas.

ICEBAR by ICEHOTEL, meanwhile, expanded from Stockholm to London, and other imitators around the world have followed. There’s the ice bar at the Hôtel de Glace in Quebec, Ice Club in Rome, Chill Out Ice Bar in Dubai and 21 Fahrenheit in Mumbai. Not all are successful. Boston’s Ice Frost Loft proved to be a massive flop. As did Czar Ice Bar in Atlanta, which angry Yelpers complained was constantly dripping on them.

“We realized you’re not going to put an ice bar in every city,” Bowman explains. “It works in touristy areas with lots of touristy activities.”

Orlando has become a particularly fertile spot. There’s a minus5° location there (underneath a B.B. King’s Blues Club), which is popular with conventioneers who like utilizing the “Icebreaker” meeting room. There’s also the unaffiliated ICEBAR Orlando, the world’s largest permanent ice bar, with 50,000 visitors a year. It opened in 2008 and has its own sister bar, Fire Lounge, where, post-ICEBAR, you can acquire a thermal cape to warm up, then “dance the night away.”

“We keep it hot and cool,” explains Patz Turner, a retiree who had spent the previous five years living on a cruise ship before she founded ICEBAR Orlando. “There have been quite a few ice bars [to] open and close in America since we started the chilly fun, but we are going strong.”

ICEBAR Orlando is also family friendly, with children allowed to visit before 9 p.m. to try a glass of non-alcoholic Penguin Pizz. Perhaps that’s not surprising. Ice bars are, if anything, dens of childish wonder. They’re the roller coasters of the bar world. And I don’t mean that in a “What a wild ride!” kind of a way. I mean that more in a “You can purchase a cheap cardboard picture of your ‘experience’ for five bucks on your way out the door” kind of way.

As one recent visitor to minus5° noted: “Truthfully there isn’t much to do in the limited space other than pose for pictures.” In the Instagram era, that’s as good an endorsement as any, and one reason why Bowman doesn’t think they’re disappearing anytime soon. Even if you cut the electricity.

“We’ve learned the whole place is just not going to evaporate. You’ll remain 30 degrees for a few days,” Bowman tells me. “It’s fairly idiot proof.”

The post The Ice Bar Cometh, But Why? appeared first on PUNCH.

The Bruery had long declared themselves IPA-free. “I love IPAs,” founder Patrick Rue told OC Weekly in 2011. “They’re successful for a reason, but we don’t make one, and we promised never to make one.” Of course, just this month, after nearly a decade in the business, The Bruery launched a spin-off company, OffShoot Beer Co., for the express purpose of putting IPAs into a can. These unexpected IPA releases, called Fashionably Late and Better Late Than Never, weren’t just any IPAs, though: they were Northeast-style IPAs, a new type of beer that breweries today all but have to produce if they want to stay relevant.

Also known as New England-style IPAs, and henceforth labeled as NEIPAs, they first appeared in the early 2010s, courtesy of breweries in Vermont (The Alchemist, Hill Farmstead, Lawson’s Finest) and then Massachusetts (Tree House, Trillium). Less bitter than the palate wreckers of the aughts, they featured a soft carbonation, hazy appearance, fruity aromatics and a “juicy” flavor profile. This was achieved by utilizing high-protein grains like oats alongside certain yeast strains (one from London is particularly popular) as well as fruit-forward hops like Citra, Mosaic and Galaxy, in addition to a liberal dry-hopping. The latter technique creates intense hop flavors and aromas, but not any additional bitterness. These stood in stark contrast to the West Coast IPA aesthetic: piney, dank and often punishingly bitter. Due to the crowd-pleasing nature of the style, the NEIPA quickly outgrew its birth region, and is now being brewed the country over.

In fact, it’s become virtually impossible to think of any small American brewery not putting NEIPAs in sixteen-ounce “pounder” cans (or Crowlers) and selling them directly out the door as fast as the staff can swipe credit cards. But, as this NEIPA monoculture—or epidemic, if you will—becomes more and more pervasive, it’s getting difficult to differentiate the exemplary from the mediocre cash grabs. So, we set out to see just how many of these NEIPAs manage to stand out from the pack. Stylistically, we were looking for beers that embodied the hallmarks of the style—soft carbonation, juicy drinkability and pure, fresh hop character—but not at the expense of singularity.

For this tasting, I was joined by PUNCH’s Editor in Chief Talia Baiocchi; Senior Editor, Lizzie Munro; Assistant Editor, Chloe Frechette; and Jason Stein, a fellow beer lover and writer for Paste. With many of the top NEIPA-makers releasing several brand-new offerings per week, it’s often a better strategy to focus on identifying the top purveyors of the style, and then buying whatever’s currently fresh from them. Thus, what follows is merely a snapshot culled from a blind tasting of 35 recent NEIPA releases from can, crowler and growler.

Five NEIPAs Worth the Hunt

Proclamation Derivative: Galaxy | 6 percent ABV

While it might be easy to overlook great NEIPAs coming out of, say, Middle America, there are still plenty of breweries being passed over in the style’s place of origin. This Rhode Island brewery topped our tasting with both this beer and their Tendril IPA. Derivative is part of an extra pale ale series in which different hops (Pacific Gem, Nelson Sauvin, etc.) are combined with Amarillo and Citra for the final dry-hopping procedure. This Galaxy version explodes with yellow Starburst on the nose backed by an herbal freshness that recalls mint. A soft yeastiness on the palate is balanced by a pleasant hop sting.

Long Live Beerworks The All Seeing Eye | 8.4 percent ABV

The only other Rhode Island entrant in our tasting also performed admirably. While Providence’s Long Live Beerworks is only a year-and-a-half-old operation, Armando DeDona’s beers show a professionalism and execution often lacking in many other NEIPAs, which can too often feel slap-dash. Big and perhaps a touch maltier than you’d expect from the style, The All Seeing Eye has a condensed Orangesicle creaminess, and is far more drinkable than it should be for the ABV.

Sand City Burning Down the House | 9 percent ABV

Brooklyn and Queens have become one of the country’s epicenters for great NEIPAs, but it was this Long Island brewery that performed best out of all our New York-area entrants. Another bruiser, one panelist said it recalled Kern’s Nectar, texturally. But despite its heft, it manages drinkability (a requisite criteria for us when considering the style) and is kept in balance by a hit of hot pepper.

Final Gravity Sunspots | 7 percent ABV

The great thing about NEIPAs is that they’ve become a great equalizer for smaller breweries—a means of climbing the ranks with a single hot release. None of our tasters were familiar with this Richmond, Virginia, brewery, but why would we be? Original Gravity is a homebrew and winemaking supply store that only jumped into the brewing game in the last year or so with their Final Gravity Brewing Co. This Citra-, Amarillo- and El Dorado-hopped beer was soft and extremely crushable with notes of lime and salt (think, a Margarita), and bracing acidity that made it lighter on its feet than many of the other offerings.

Hill Farmstead Grassroots Legitimacy IPA | 6.7 percent ABV

Of course, NEIPAs aren’t just about advancing the little guy. Sometimes, it’s a chance for the style’s standard-bearers to flex their muscles. While many NEIPA superstars had entrants in this tasting, this Vermont master was the only one that truly excelled—funny, since brewmaster Shaun Hill supposedly doesn’t even like having his IPAs grouped in this niche. While hardly considered one of Hill’s upper-echelon IPAs, this sole Hill Farmstead entrant was far and away the unanimous favorite of the group. The two-day-old growler revealed a Simcoe-hopped beer that was pure in flavor with notes of herbs, fresh citrus and wildflower honey, and a subtle mineral aspect. One taster summed it up best by calling it, simply, “baller.”

The post Navigating Today’s New England-Style IPA Boom appeared first on PUNCH.

In February of 2013, I finally got to visit what had long been the epicenter of the American IPA: San Diego. I pounded fresh pints of Ballast Point Sculpin alongside numerous fish tacos; held up the bars at Hamilton’s, O’Brien’s and Pizza Port; and even drove outside of town to Alpine Beer Company, right on the edge of the Cleveland National Forest. At Alpine, I eagerly tasted through a lineup of hoppy gems like Duet, Nelson and Exponential Hoppiness, while my wife sipped a Diet Coke (someone had to get us home). Their Bad Boy was literally the best IPA I’d ever had up to that point in my life. I remember dreaming of drinking a beer that good back in New York.

Little did I realize, the tide was already turning.

In less than a half-decade, the east coast IPA—more specifically the “Northeast” or “New England-style” IPA—has become the preeminent breed of IPA. While most east coast breweries ipso facto make east coast IPAs, the unique style associated with the right coast—hazy, juicy, barely bitter—has become popular everywhere from Columbus to Portland to San Francisco, Los Angeles and, yes, even San Diego. Meanwhile, one of the top threads on the BeerAdvocate forum is currently titled “Is the West Coast IPA Still Relevant?”, the original poster observing, “I can’t remember the last time I heard someone get jazzed on a West Coast IPA.”

When did this seismic shift take place?

The first American IPAs to breakout were dependent on the piney flavor and intense bitterness that came from “C” varietal hops—Columbus, Cascade, Centennial—born in the Pacific Northwest. The west coast had hometown advantage, so to speak, and the west coast-style IPA became the prototype for the style for over a decade.

Early on, the Midwest produced a few lauded IPAs as well, like Minneapolis Town Hall’s Masala Mama, which hit No. 4 on the BeerAdvocate Top Beers list in 2005, and Three Floyds’ Dreadnaught (Indiana), which hit No. 7 that same year. But, by the end of the aughts, it was a truism that the west coast was where the IPA reached its apex, in beers like Russian River’s Pliny the Elder and AleSmith IPA.

During the second half of the aughts, the east coast was barely a consideration. In fact, February, 2010’s top 100 features 19 IPAs or double IPAs, only one of them from the east coast. That was Delaware’s Dogfish Head and their 90 Minute IPA (at No. 50), pretty much the only east coast IPA that had ever made BeerAdvocate’s list up to that point.

Then Hurricane Irene came in August of 2011, decimating the Bahamas, Brooklyn and tiny Waterbury, Vermont, where a cult brewpub called The Alchemist had stood on Main Street since 2003. His business all but destroyed, owner John Kimmich had no choice but to put 100 percent of his focus behind production of Heady Topper, a sui generis IPA he had just started canning off-premises, at an undamaged cannery down the street. The increased availability of this fruity, hazy beer turned it into a word-of-mouth sensation. By January, 2013, it was the No. 1 beer in the world.

Other breweries quickly followed suit, making these uniquely east coast, Heady-inspired IPAs. There was Lawson’s Finest, also from Vermont, who found success with Double Sunshine (No. 6 in 2014) and eventually their first canned offering, Sip of Sunshine. There was Hill Farmstead, now considered the best brewery in the world, which was more acclaimed for their farmhouse offerings but still able to reel off successful IPAs like Abner (No. 14 in 2014) and Ephraim (No. 27 in 2014).

Navigating Today’s New England-Style IPA Boom

Aaron Goldfarb and a panel of tasters find five standout bottles in a lineup of hazy, juicy New England-style IPAs.

Read On →

East coast IPAs would spread like a wildfire from that Vermont start, first to Maine and Maine Beer Company, who had Dinner (No. 74 in 2014) and Lunch (No. 115 in 2014), onto Massachusetts, which gave us the IPA maestros at Tree House Brewing (est. 2012) and Trillium Brewing (2013). Philadelphia got into fray with Tired Hands in 2012, and Brooklyn got its own cult IPA producer, Other Half, in 2014.

Aslin, The Veil, Bissell Brothers, Foundation, Grimm, SingleCut—these were east coast breweries that made IPAs for people who “hated IPAs.” Their beers didn’t smell like a car’s dangling air freshener; they weren’t teeth-chatteringly bitter either. They were as drinkable as OJ. Suddenly, the west coast-style IPA seemed a whole lot less interesting. In July of 2014, there were exactly 24 west coast and 24 east coast IPAs on the top 250. That was the last time it would even be close. Today’s top 250 shows a whopping 59 of its IPAs residing on the east coast, and a mere 10 from the west coast.

While less than a decade ago, calling an IPA “east coast” was an insult, today it is a matter of course for breweries looking to make their mark with the style. Great Notion (Portland), Monkish (Los Angeles), 18th Street (Chicagoland) Tioga-Sequoia Brewing Co. (Fresno) and many more non-east coast IPAs label their cans, bluntly, “hazy, juicy, NE style.” Even long-time San Diego stalwarts have had to “east coast-ify” their long-standing IPAs. Ballast Point, an archetype of west coast-style IPA, recently released Sculpin Unfiltered. They advertised it as being classic Sculpin “with a slight haze and less bitterness,” but they could have just as easily called it “East Coast.”

The post How the East Coast Won the Battle for the IPA appeared first on PUNCH.

The swim-up bar is pretty much clickbait incarnate. Just ask your browser: “Coolest Swim-Up Bars in the World” (Travel + Leisure) “18 Resorts and Hotels With the Most Amazing Swim-Up Bars” (Trips to Discover), “12 Best Swim-Up Bars Around the World” (Travel Channel), “The World’s Most Enticing Swim-Up Bars” (Paste).

“It says something about a hotel and casino when the pool is one of its sickest, most sought after attractions,” Thrillist notes in their entry into the crowded field of swim-up bar reporting. Yet, for all of the “coolest,” “most incredible,” “sexiest” slideshows of swim-up bars the world over, it’s a lot harder to figure out where the hell they originated.

When exactly did people decide they wanted to sip frozen Margaritas on a submerged bar stool?

Like most seemingly misguided drinking trends, the swim-up bar was born in—you know it—Las Vegas. As architect Stefan Al explains in his recent book The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream, the initial goal of Las Vegas developers was “to seep gambling into a suburban vacation.” Swimming pools grew tenfold in the U.S. during the early-1950s, becoming a requisite hotel attraction. It was only a matter of time before someone tried to mash up legalized gambling and pool-going.

Just after opening, in 1952, The Sands Hotel and Casino launched floating craps and blackjack tables, as well as poolside slot machines, as a gimmicky way to garner press coverage. It worked: in 1954 the casino landed a spread in Life magazine. Other hotels took note. When the Tropicana opened at the other end of the strip, in 1957, the pool area quickly added “swim-up” blackjack tables and tiki drinks in an attempt to combat the loss of summer revenue from guests hanging out in the pool as opposed to the casino floor. It turned out to be a match made in paradise.

“These days in Las Vegas, the bar and the pool have truly become a hybrid,” Al told me over email, “with entire pool clubs, such as XS in Encore, among the top 10 world’s highest-grossing nightclubs, because they can get revenue during the day as well as the night.” In actuality, buoyed by frequent poolside “nightswim” performances by musicians such as Laidback Luke, XS has been the number one highest-grossing bar in the entire world the last five years running.

However, today’s more archetypal swim-up bars—with their signature submerged stools and comically-named drinks—are more closely associated with Mexican and Caribbean resorts, favored by the same folks who enjoy Carnival cruises and the ring of “all-inclusive.” Credit for this breed of swim-up boozing goes to the Jamaica-based Sandals Resorts.

Originally, Sandals’ Montego Bay flagship location (which opened in 1981) only served beachside cocktails to guests who didn’t want to leave the ocean. But when a new block of rooms was added away from the beachfront in 1984, management decided to build something that might attract guests to that end of the property. Architect Evan Williams casually remarked to Sandals chairman Gordon “Butch” Stewart that he “never understood why you couldn’t have bars in pools.” Recognizing a potentially lucrative idea, Stewart promptly gave Williams the go-ahead to build the Caribbean’s first swim-up pool bar. It was an immediate hit; today, all 16 Sandals resorts sport swim-up bars serving drinks like the rum cream-backed Hummingbird and the Dirty Banana.

“Guests love these bars because they are a novelty,” claims Paul Bauer, Sandals group manager of F&B standards. “Plus, it’s virtually instantaneous cocktail service without having to move a muscle.”

Less a trend than a resort necessity, swim-up bars have become an indelible part of relaxation culture, spreading beyond well-trodden vacation spots.

Des Moines, Iowa, has a swim-up bar. Last summer, Nebraska got the state’s first at the Fun-Plex Waterpark. The famed Wisconsin Dells (“The Waterpark Capital of the World!”) has two: Margarita’s Swim-Up Bar at the Wilderness Resort and Mud Hut Swim-Up Bar at the Kalahari Resort  (with both places serving 42-ounce “monster” drinks in souvenir cups). And you’d better believe the Jersey Shore has a swim-up tiki hut.

So does Manhattan, it turns out. Located in Times Square’s Hotel Room Mate Grace, the pink-lit swim-up bar is located in a side room of their indoor nightclub. The 3’ 9”-deep pool abuts a 40-foot bar, hosts DJs and synchronized swimming performances and offers guests disposable bikinis and swim trunks. As a goggle-clad drinker told Travel Channel earlier this year, “Having a cocktail in the pool just can’t be beat. You’re not gonna find that at the Y.”

Unsurprisingly, the swim-up bar has also been co-opted by private citizens looking for a snazzy McMansion amenity. For the less financially-solvent among us, there are a few inflatable swim-up bars out there, which are probably more fun than a few twenties should buy you.

But nothing really beats drinking Mudslides in lukewarm water alongside middle-American moms and dudes with barbed wire tattoos. It has its risks, though. While Tropicana’s pool bar was shut down in 2015 for a litany of predictable health hazards, there is a more benign, but ubiquitous issue, according to Bauer.

“Well, we do have to increase the amount of chlorine in the pool,” he says. “Many guests either won’t—or can’t—leave.”

The post The Surprising History of the Swim-Up Bar appeared first on PUNCH.

They go by nicknames like Donut, Split Label, Pewter Top and, most amusingly, Cheesy Gold Foil. They’re oily in mouthfeel, with a floral perfume on the nose and a taste that has been described as “antique leather,” “fragrant pipe tobacco,” “damp mustiness” and even “blue cheese.” More often than not, though, that indescribably complex profile is simply called “Wild Turkey funk.”

While today, the Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, brand is often seen as bottom-shelf, drinkin’-in-the-woods-type whiskey, the bourbon cognoscenti have always known otherwise. Many believe the flagship Wild Turkey 101 isn’t just a thrifty buy, it’s also world-class. But it’s the old, off-the-market bottles of Wild Turkey (known as “dusties”) that have lit up the online whiskey-collecting forums.

Bottles like 1980s Beyond Duplication and 1990s Kentucky Legend now command huge prices on the black market, with many claiming they are better than any Wild Turkey released today. This is particularly interesting because, while vintage bottles from such defunct distilleries as Old Taylor and Stitzel-Weller (the progenitor of Pappy Van Winkle) remain highly coveted, no other still-active Kentucky distillery has such a devoted following for its old products.

This fandom has mostly developed online, especially on forums like Reddit where users try to explain, sometimes half-jokingly, what exactly dusty Wild Turkey tastes like. David Jennings is a Wild Turkey enthusiast who blogs under the name “The Rare Bird.” After acquiring and tasting numerous samples of Wild Turkey 101 as old as the early-1970s, he sketched out a Venn diagram comparing how dusty (“sweet herbs & spice”) and modern (“’nutty’ toffee”) bottles differ while still maintaining the classic Wild Turkey notes of “rich vanilla” and “musty oak.” Others think it’s the fruitiness that is crucial, going from a plummy, port wine-finished taste in pre-1990s bottles to one more citrusy and bright today.

But what exactly created this unique flavor in the past?

Unlike wine or beer, whiskey doesn’t age, though slight oxidation is possible, depending on cork quality. (Wild Turkey is known for having crumbling, sub-par cork stoppers, which is sometimes cited as a potential culprit for its unusual flavor profile.) Still, for the most part, what a vintage whiskey tastes like today is what it tasted like back when it was bottled. And whatever master distiller Jimmy Russell was distilling in the 1970s and ’80s is unlike anything out there now, though many folks aren’t exactly sure why.

Noted bourbon historian Mike Veach wrote an extensive blog post trying to explain the unique flavor found in vintage bottles of not just Wild Turkey, but any “old” bourbon, ultimately noting that it could have been a variety of factors from copper stills to lack of water treatment to smaller barrel size. But everyone has a theory about what causes the Wild Turkey funk; I’ve heard everything from a secret change in yeasts to a switch to automated equipment to wider “cuts” being taking in the distillation process to “bottle conditioning”—i.e. how UV light and air effects a poorly-stored bottle over the years.

Jennings, for his part, thinks the lowering of urethane levels (by law) in 1989 might be a critical factor no one considers. Urethane is a cancer-causing crystalline compound formed naturally during fermentation, found in particularly high levels in older bourbon, which is said to product a bitter flavor. “I’d imagine [urethane] to be part of the old bottle taste, or mouthfeel at the least, but no one’s talking about urethane levels,” notes Jennings. “It’s apparently second only to alcoholism in spirits industry taboo.”

For what’s it’s worth, the entire Russell family knows about the buzz their old products elicit online. Jimmy’s son and current master distiller, Eddie Russell, told me he and his father unfortunately do not maintain an archive of past products, and haven’t since the Pernod Ricard acquisition in 1980 (today Wild Turkey is owned by Gruppo Campari). But it wouldn’t matter; he doesn’t think they are much different from what he’s producing today.

“Biggest difference is that back in the ’70s and ’80s everyone had excess whiskey because it wasn’t too popular, so there was older whiskey in the blends from excess stocks,” Eddie Russell explained during a recent Reddit AMA, noting that now that bourbon is way more popular, age statements are way more accurate. (A bourbon age statement must legally list the youngest barrel used in a blend.)

Eddie Russell further told me the company’s recipes, yeast and processes haven’t really changed since he started working there in 1981. Though, the “entry proof” of liquid going into the barrels was raised from 107 proof to 110 proof in 2004, and then to 115 proof in 2006—something that many think has gradually changed the flavor profile over the years. (Higher entry proofs are believed to create more grainy flavors.)

Eddie Russell does note that back when he started at the distillery, they still used cypress fermentation tanks, only switching to more modern stainless steel ones in the early 1990s. (“It took Jimmy eight years of testing the stainless tanks to feel comfortable switching, to make sure it didn’t change the taste,” he told Reddit.) Installed around 1925, Wild Turkey’s cypress tanks were literally made of virgin-growth cypress wood planks. Porous wood is obviously harder to clean than stainless steel and thus, as Veach notes, “there may have been more bacteria influences on the whiskey.”

The bourbon collector and producer of California Gold, Danny Strongwater (not his real name), believes it’s self-evident the Wild Turkey funk comes from bacteria created by old, possibly dirty equipment and facilities. “That’s the yeast!” he exclaimed. “It’s developed its own chemistry.” It sounds akin to the Belgian lambic-makers like Cantillon who don’t ever clean the cobwebs in the rafters, lest they disturb their brewery’s delicate ecosystem of wild yeast and bacteria. While this theory seems most plausible to a beer geek like me, it doesn’t quite explain why Maker’s Mark, which still uses similar cypress tanks, doesn’t have their own signature funk.

Whatever the culprit, bottles that exhibit the Turkey funk have become increasingly rare. So called “dusty hunters” have been clearing Wild Turkey from shelves at off-the-beaten-path liquor stores for the last decade and a half. Finding even early-aughts bottles “out in the wild” has become near-impossible; forget about older, more coveted bottles. Today, most are bought and sold on the secondary market, where many of the bottles mentioned below sell in the $400 to $700 range, or trade straight-up for today’s big ticket items like George T. Stagg and William Larue Weller.

If that’s too rich for your blood, Eddie’s son and Wild Turkey brand ambassador Bruce Russell believes private barrel editions of the current Russell’s Reserve Single Barrel “can be very close to the old stuff.” Other modern analogs people often cite include the Japanese-only export Master Distiller’s Select, the recent Decades and Russell’s Reserve 1998.

The 1998 was released in 2015 at a fairly lofty suggested retail price (SRP) of $250. Like many high-priced, limited-edition Wild Turkey bottlings, consumers initially passed on it, and it lingered on shelves. Then, just last summer, around the same time that word begin to spread online that the 1998 embodied that enigmatic funk, shelves were quickly cleared and the bottle skyrocketed to three times its SRP on the black market.

Five of the Most Sought-After Wild Turkey Dusties

While dusty bottles of 101 will always remain a geek delight, a few other bottlings in the portfolio remain timeless, gaining esteem as the years go on. (For what it’s worth, Jennings hails a 1981 Wild Turkey 101/8 as the best he’s ever had, calling it “punchy and rich.”)

Wild Turkey Kentucky Legend (a.k.a. “Donut”)
Originally released in 1998 as a duty free product in Japan, it’s earned the nickname “Donut” due to its strange bottle shape. More significantly, it’s one of the only barrel-proof single-barrel bourbons the distillery has ever released, usually clocking in at around 115 proof. Intensely herbal, Jennings tells me, “Donut is, in my opinion, like dusty 101 cranked to 11.”

Wild Turkey Beyond Duplication
A 12-year-old bottling with apparently enough of a goofy moniker that it doesn’t require a forum nickname, Beyond Duplication came onto the market for a few years in the early-1980s. Eventually pulled from shelves in the U.S. to make way for Cheesy Gold Foil (see below), it remained a Japanese export until the late-1980s.

Wild Turkey 12 Year Old Gold Foil Label (a.k.a. “Cheesy Gold Foil” a.k.a. “CGF”)
The most ballyhooed bottle from Wild Turkey’s past, and certainly the most comically dubbed, Cheesy Gold Foil earned its nickname for its garish and cheap-looking 1980s-era packaging, even coming in an equally eye-injuring tube. The next in a long line of 12-year-old products produced after Beyond Duplication’s discontinuation, it was on the market from 1985 through 1992. Jennings notes it has a “very unique, oily mouthfeel.”

Wild Turkey 12 Year Old (a.k.a. “Split Label”)
Yet another incarnation of Wild Turkey 12-year-old, Split Label is so named due to its, well, bifurcated label. Released to the market in 1993, it’s one of the last Wild Turkey dusties to still garner much online discussion.

Wild Turkey Kentucky Spirit (a.k.a. “Pewter Top”)
Still a bottling in Wild Turkey’s portfolio, earlier releases of this bourbon, which debuted in 1994, are the most coveted. Though the current bottle shape (with glass meant to resemble a turkey’s fanned tail) is similar to earlier batches, dustier bottles can be recognized by their pewter cap (today’s is made of wood). A single barrel bottling, brought down to 101 proof, the flavor profile back then was of rich maple syrup; today it shows more of a citrus note with a hint of cinnamon.

The post How Wild Turkey “Funk” Became a Whiskey Geek Obsession appeared first on PUNCH.

No modern beer style is as far removed from its historical basis than the saison. While India Pale Ales were never over-hopped simply to withstand the long voyage to India—that’s pure apocrypha—saisons were indeed once strictly seasonal farmhouse beers. Saison means “season” in French and these pale ales were once made in the French-speaking farmlands of Wallonia, Belgium. They were slightly funky, imminently drinkable beers brewed in open-air barns during the colder months and drunk in the hot summer months as an in-the-fields refresher for the farm-working saisonniers.

Today, however, the saison has mostly moved away from being brewed in farmhouses if not Wallonia altogether. It has likewise lost those low-ABV, thirst-quenching qualities in favor of characteristics more beloved by the modern American beer consumer: boozy, barrel-aged and often packed with adjuncts.

American saisons are now being brewed in warehouses, office parks, urban brewpubs and even an occasional farmhouse or two (though one possibly climate-controlled). And, while Saison Dupont still exists as the Belgian archetype for the style—cloudy, fizzy, slightly funky—American variants have tended to become way more sour and acidic. This is usually owing to their so-called “mixed” fermentation, meaning they employ both regular brewer’s yeast and wild yeast and bacteria. In some cases it has become impossible to differentiate today’s “saisons” from “wild ales.” In fact, the very definition of the modern saison is that it’s incredibly hard to define.

With last month’s release of his Saison Americaine, the founder of Texas’s Jester King, Jeffrey Stuffing, summed it up best: “[T]he very lack of a clear definition has become somewhat synonymous with the style. For us at Jester King, saison means beer that is… inextricably tied to the water, agriculture and microflora of a place, the seasonal and environmental fluctuations of time, and the desires, palates and eccentricities of people.”

That sounds philosophically accurate, but taste-wise, saisons mostly remain a know-it-when-you-sip-it sort of style. They must be yeast-driven beers, sure, but also slightly funky and acidic, too. They should also be light and drinkable even if the standard ABV continues creeping upward. Personally, I feel saison-like qualities can still be maintained when aged in a neutral oak barrel, but once placed in a wine barrel they became something altogether different. Ditto with adding fruit to the fray. This distinction meant that, in our tasting, we skipped over some real whales of the style from Side Project, Sante Adairius and Hill Farmstead. We’ll save those “saisons” for another time.

For this tasting, I was joined by PUNCH’s Editor in Chief Talia Baiocchi; Senior Editor, Lizzie Munro; Assistant Editor, Chloe Frechette; and Social Media Editor, Allison Hamlin. We tasted 25 American saisons from breweries on the east coast, west coast and middle America; from urban, suburban and countryside breweries; and from gypsy brewing upstarts and massive microbreweries that have been around for decades. While earlier examples of the style tended to be more sweet and flabby, recent standouts have become drier, more acidic and a ton more pleasurable to drink.

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