Founders Imperial Stout

Appearance: Black with milk chocolate head

Smell: Iced mocha and booze. It smells like a Starbucks Frapuccino.

Taste: Really chocolatey and smooth up front with a super dry, almost chalky finish. It reminds us of the Taza 80% cacao chocolate, with dark berry notes despite the complete lack of fruit. There is definitely some alcohol in the finish of the flavor. While this is a very good imperial stout, there are definitely some better ones out there.

Note: This is one we've been wanting to try for a while. It's always been on their website, and we saw information about it when we hit the Founders tap room in Grand Rapids, MI back in September of 2007. We had it when it was totally fresh, so we're going to retry it down the line and see how it does with a little age on it.

Read more...

Hey all you craft beer drinkers! It's that time again! What time? New Beer of the Month from Gourmet Monthly Clubs time! Yeah... we know, it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. But the beer... The beer tastes good. So let's get to it!

This month, we've got beer from Mercury Brewing Company and Abita Brewing Company. Mercury sends their Ipswich Original Ale and Nut Brown Ale, while Abita has their Jockamo IPA and Turbo Dog. On a side note, Mercury Brewing Company is quite local to DrinkCraftBeer.com. They're just about a half hour away in Ipswich, MA. They brew some delicious beers, so we're stoked to get reacquainted with these local brews (especially twice this month as we got Mercury beers from both of our Beer of the Month Clubs). With that in mind, let's get to the beer!

And, as always, if you want to get the same club as us go here: Click to Join

Mercury Brewing Company Ipswich Nut Brown Ale

Appearance: Wow, that's a beautiful brown beer! Clear, reddish brown with a chocolate milkshake head.

Smell: Sweet malt with some molasses.

Taste: That's a pretty good brown ale! It's a little nutty. Actually, it's peanuty, which would make it a legumey beer. But that doesn't sound nearly as appetizing as this beer is tasty, so let's go with nutty. It goes very well with roasted unsalted peanuts. The malt really makes this beer, as it's lightly toasted with a hint of nut. A nice session ale at 5.4% abv.

Read more...

Hey all you craft beer drinkers! It's that time again! What time? New Beer of the Month from Amazing Clubs time! Yeah... we know, it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. But the beer... The beer tastes good. So let's get to it!

This month, we've got beer from Pennsylvania Brewing Company and the Stone Cat line from Mercury Brewing Company. Pennsylvania Brewing Co. sends their Penn Weizen and Penn Gold, while Mercury has their Stone Cat ESB and Stone Cat Blonde Ale. On a side note, Mercury Brewing Company is quite local to DrinkCraftBeer.com. They're just about a half hour away in Ipswich, MA. They brew some delicious beers, so we're stoked to get reacquainted with these local brews. With that in mind, let's get to the beer!

And, like always, if you want to join this club go here: Click to Join.

Pennsylvania Brewing Company Penn Gold

Appearance: This beer pours with a white thick head and a straw pale, clear body.

Smell: Clean and crisp with a hint of biscuity malt.

Taste: This helles lager is clean and crisp, just as it should be. If Budweiser was done very well, it would taste like this. This is a perfect lawn mower beer for a hot summer day. Dry, crisp and refreshing. Penn Gold would be GREAT from a can. This is a good camping or boating beer. We would have rather been sent this beer in the summer, but it's still a mighty fine beer.

Read more...

Apple Ice Wine on a beer site? While we focus on beer those of you who have been following us for a while know we love featuring great local products and this happens to be one of them. We were introduced to Still River Winery's Apfel Eis by a friend of ours. We've had regular ice wines before, many of which have been a bit sweet for us, but we were intrigued by Apfel Eis Ice Wine.

So what is Apple Ice wine? Good question; Still River Winery separates out the frozen water crystals from ice cold pressed cider and then slow ferments the remaining cider at cold temperatures over a few months. The result? A really interesting and delicious ice wine. We shared a bottle with a group of friends after dinner one night and were really impressed.

The nose is full of crisp apples, a slight hint of tartness and a nice mellow sweetness. Wile some ice wines can be cloyingly sweet we were surprised by the balanced sweetness. The flavor of the apples is extremely complex and each sip is almost it's own unique experience. The alcohol is nicely tempered by the sweetness making this very easy to enjoy. 

Having had regular ice wine martinis before we thought we'd try and Apple Ice Wine version. We did a simple 50/50 mix of vodka and Apfel Eis Apple Ice Wine. The result...delicious! There's not doubt that this wine is sweet, making it more of a dessert drink for us, but in a martini this drink becomes something new, something we could definitely drink at dinner or just out for drinks. While we didn't try it, we think it might be even better with a splash of cranberry. 

And for any beer drinkers out there still a little puzzled, we already make our own hard cider, and Apple Wine isn't that far off! Give this wine a shot, we think you'll like it.

For more info check out Still River Winery's site: Still River Winery

Hi Craft Beer Drinkers!

As you may have noticed, the site is in the middle of a bit of a redesign. We were hoping to unveil this when it was 100% complete but unfortunately we were forced to release our new look early (and less than completed) due to some server and host issues. Basically, our growth estimates turned out to be a little conservative and more of you have been coming every day (we know, it's a good problem to have). We've known we had to do some back-end upgrades for a while and these are tied directly to the redesign.  We just thought we had more time. Our choices were to either do the release early and a little unfinished or to shut down the site for a longer time. We chose to keep the site up and running!

So we thank you for bearing with us during this time. We promise we have some really cool things planned in this redesign and it's going to end up way better than the old look. So, until it's done, we hope you can tolerate our mid-renovation look.

As always, thanks for reading!
Jeff & Devon
Founders
DrinkCraftBeer.com