What should one drink at Christmas? Christmas Ale!!!

I've got the great idea to enhance my iTunes giftcard shopping by enjoying a few Breckenridge Christmas Ales! Hopefully it doesn't lead to buying the complete works of M.C. Hammer. This one will definitely warm you up in winter.  It's near 7% abv, nice malty power and not all loaded up with nutmeg, so you can sit back and enjoy quite a few. I hope that everyone gets one of these in their stocking this year!
So far I'll rate it DELICIOUS, but I've decided after only a handful of posts that I am going to switch to one of the those fancy "scale of 1-10" rating systems in the near future.

New Belgium brings new goodness yet again

IT'S A SNOW DAY!!!!!!!! Well, actually we've only had about a 1/2 inch of snow that lasted a few hours this year. But it's still the time to grab a Snow Day winter ale from New Belgium brewing, one of my sentimental favorite breweries.
My wife fell in love with their most popular beer, Fat Tire, on a camping trip long ago. The thought of it became synonymous with good times in the mountains of Colorado. So naturally we had to make sure there was some at the bar at our wedding for everyone to enjoy. It wasn't available in Ohio, were the wedding was to be, or Iowa, where we were living at the time, but we heard you could get it in Missouri. So we drove south, stopped at the first 4 grocery stores in Missouri until we found one that had a good stock on the shelf. That wasn't enough for a reception, so we asked if we could go "in the back" and clean out their entire stock of 14 cases. One of my fondest beer memories is still wheeling up that cart with a mountain of Fat Tire and 1554 (my favorite New Belgium brew) to the checkout - and still getting carded.
The bottle claims it was invented while everyone was snowed into the brewery - that sounds like the day or two before I went for a grad school interview at C. State. Any kind of awning, and even some roofs were caving in under the weight of all that snow. Snow Day is surprisingly good, and really hoppy for a winter beer. A lot of places just throw a shitload of nutmeg or clove flavor in a normal beer and call it "wintry", but this one would actually be satisfying any time of year. I rate it a DELICIOUS without hesitation, and at around $8 for a 6er it's a pretty good value too.

Lancaster Black

So the first beer to earn the incredible spotlight on my beer journal is Lancaster Black, a stout ale. It was around $3.50 a pint, which is the range that always attracts me, because it indicates that someone at least thinks it's worth more than average, but it's not so expensive that it will piss me off if it tastes like fruity dishwater. It definitely lives up to its name, no light can escape a glass that holds Lancaster Black. It has earned the first DELICIOUS rating ever posted on this blog. I guess that's a good start. If the first thing I reviewed was an 8 dollar bottle of piss, it would basically be like laying a curse on every beer I'd ever review in the future. But I would highly recommend grabbing one of these and curling up with a book on a black topic, like myself with Solzhenistyn's Cancer Ward. You can take a sip every time something depressing happens, like on the first page, and the second page, and the third page, etc.

It Begins.....

The birth of this blog can be traced to one event - the apparent death of the BeerSeek application on Facebook. It was pretty awesome, you could type in basically any beer you could possibly imagine, and get a bottle picture, info about the booze level and brewer, and dozens of pretentious ratings from other drinkers. On a day that will live in infamy, I went to enter a rating and the app didn't load. No matter, I thought, it must be temporary. But now it's been down for months, possibly because it rips off all its info and pictures from ratebeer.com and they caught on, I don't know. But the point is....BEERS MUST BE RATED!!!!!!!!!!!

The main reason that I loved BeerSeek was that if I have the opportunity to try a new, interesting beer, I will pass up one I already know and love about 90% of the time. Unfortunately, a clever name and eye-popping bottle art don't always translate into great beer. Also, some German beers are a little tricky to keep track of: was that WiehenstepahillanSLISCHaphanner, or WiehenstepahillanGLISCHaphanner that was delicious? The app was a great way to rate beers as I tried them, and keep track of ones that were worthy of picking up again.

It seems like the only trustworthy way to keep track is to start my own record keeping process. Of course Blogger could go to crap and somehow lose all my ratings, but it seems reliable so far, based on my art/cartoon/fantasy football/game review blog that's been largely untended for a year. I won't list the IBUs of various beers. I won't compare the aromas to a midsummer's dream, poached plums, or horse blanket. I won't suggest the brewers add another handful of rare hops that only grow on southern foothills of a mountain in Portugal. All I will do is tell whether the beer is worth trying, based on deliciousness and value. That's enough for me.