Avery Mephistopheles Stout

This beast is a serious beer! It's winter time, it's 8 below outside, my dogs won't even go out, it must be time for a stout.

Avery Mephistopheles Stout is the biggest, baddest stout on the block. This beer makes most stouts look like session lagers. Checking in at a Prince of Darkness like 14% abv, this is definitely one to savor. Deep, rich black color, the first scent is of rum or bourbon.

It has all your typical stout flavors (black licorice, coffee, etc) but is surprisingly smooth for a beer this strong. You can clearly taste the alcohol, but it is not harsh and passes quickly, leaving a rich coffee aftertaste. The predominant flavor is a strong fruity flavor, plums or cherries soaked in rum or bourbon. Enjoyably sweet, but not for the faint of heart.

Warning! This stout will leave smaller beers feeling weak and unappreciated. This should always be your last beer of the night, as puny, insignificant beers will be rendered completely flavorless by this devil's power.

This is a perfect beer for sipping on a cold Minnesota night. After enjoying one, I feel like I've had a scotch, neat, and should head for bed.

Brooklyn Brewing - Black Chocolate Stout

Ahh, now this is my kind of beer. This beer means business and you can tell from the first sniff. It smells richly of coffee and chocolate. The flavor is like sipping on a warm mocha, if a beer could taste like that. Many Russian Imperial Stouts have a strong alcohol overtone to the flavor, owing to the 10+% ABV. Not this one. It is smooth and delicious. Drinking this beer is warming, like a glass of good scotch, and the rich, complex flavor will probably lead you to drink a few more than you should at 10.5%.

Sadly my friends, this beer is not (at this time) available in Minnesota. Hopefully the beer Gods will see their way clear to bring distribution of this and other Brooklyn Brewing products to Minnesota.

Finnegans Irish Amber

Finnegan's is a local brew, contract brewed by Summitt for a worthy cause; 100% of the proceeds go to charity. For that, they should be commended. But is it actually, you know, good beer?

Sadly I'm not a fan. The drinkability is high, it is smooth going down and I could easily pound a few of these at a pub. It checks in below 5.0% abv, so if you are going to be sitting around the Liffey or the Local for a few hours with friends you could do much worse.

The malts, which have a certain nutty, german flavor (strange for an "Irish" beer, but perhaps not so strange coming from Summit), present a pleasant aroma at the start, then quickly fade away.

As a social choice, I highly recommend this beer. As a beer however, I suspect they made this as "unchallenging" a beer as possible to appeal to the socially conscious mainstream beer drinker.

Beer: Surly Furious

My first beer post! Appropriately, it is about my current favorite beer, Surly Furious. This also happens to be the beer brewed closest to my house, the brewery being in Brooklyn Center, MN. Surly Furious is a deliciously hoppy beer, but it has a crispness that other heavily hopped beers lack. Some highly hopped beers overwhelm you with their bitterness, but Surly Furious manages to check in at 100 IBUs (International Bitterness Units, the universal measure of a beer's bitterness) without overwhelming you with hops. The Surly website claims that this is due to the use of Golden Promise malt, which is the same type of malt used in Macallan scotch. Whatever the reason, Surly Furious is a strong, hoppy ale with a terrific flavor. It will hit you with bitterness without overwhelming you. If you want to start your journey into heavily hopped beers, you could do much worse than Surly Furious.