dogfish head

Febrewary: Palo Santo Marron

~ lobablanca

08-febrewary-psm

Brewer: Dogfish Head
Location: Milton, Delaware
Type: American Brown Ale
ABV: 12%

How best to regroup after a thoroughly disappointing beer experience? Get up, dust your taste buds off, and ease back into the game by way of a tried-and-true favorite. I wrote very approvingly of Delaware’s Dogfish Head back in Darktober. Even after more than a year of drinking other beers on tap and from bottles, I still consider Bitches Brew to be one of my all-time favorite flavor discoveries. (This also reminds me that I still need to buy a bottle for aging.) And DFH’s Indian Brown Ale remains one of my favorite go-to beers for when I want a nice, solid, reliably delicious brew.

However, when I want to treat myself with a delicious DFH beer without breaking the bank on something like a bottle of Bitches Brew or their deliciously overpriced World Wide Stout, but a little higher on the scale than the Indian Brown? I go with their Palo Santo Marron.

First, here is what DFH writes about this beer on its label:

An unfiltered, unfettered, unprecedented Brown Ale aged in handmade wooden brewing vessels. The caramel and vanilla complexity unique to this ale comes from the exotic Paraguayan Palo Santo wood from which these tanks were crafted. At 10,000 gallons each, these are the largest wooden brewing vessels built in America since before Prohibition. It’s all very exciting. We have wood. Now you do, too.

Silly guys.

Whatever they say about this beer, I say it’s one of my all-time favorites. In fact, whenever I go to one of DFH’s pubs, I struggle even to consider trying anything else on tap (unless they happen to have World Wide Stout, then that’s a no-brainer), because I know…I know that this beer is going to blow my mind, every time. For my particular beer preferences, this is a sensory feast, with rich, bold flavors; sumptuous aromas; and a massive mouth feel that invades every last inch of your palate.

Deep, impenetrable pour with a flutter of foam, but don’t mistake the absence of carbonation as a hint of flatness (like other recent appearances). This beer keeps some surprises internal. However, inhale and the blitz of smells is intense: malty sweetness, cinnamon-spiced complexity, fresh vanilla, toasted caramel, baking breads and dried dark fruits…plums, figs, cherries…a subtle scintillation, even, of pipe tobacco…all topped off with a woody freshness, for good measure. I think that might be my favorite part of this beer’s bouquet. Ever taken a deep breath in a wood shop? Or opened a drawer to a freshly built piece of furniture? Or even stood at a Christmas tree farm, surrounded by freshly cut conifers? That sensation…not necessarily the particular scents of these various woods…but that experience of inhaling something sylvan…organic…fresh…these are all intertwined throughout the nose I catch from Palo Santo Marron.

One sip and you discover where the carbonation was hiding. Not overwhelmingly bubbly, but enough to give the mouth feel a joyful effervescence as a counterpoint to the silky smooth rush of flavors. One of the wonderfully surprising thing about this beer (and several of DFH’s more “spirited” brews) is that the relatively high ABV doesn’t make itself overbearing at any point while drinking this beer. Another delightfully dangerous beer.

As for the flavor profile, I love bold malty brews that have nary a hint of hops, and this falls right in line with that particular personal preference. I fall in love with this beer a little bit more each time that I drink it. Riotously flavorful, smooth, complex, and satisfying, it has never been anything less that pleasing to me. The only way I haven’t yet had this one is aged in my collection, simply because I can never hold on to one long enough.

I’m going to try this time to save one bottle for at least a year. I’ll let you know how that goes…

Darktober 23: Bitches Brew

~ lobablanca

Brewer: Dogfish Head
Location: Milton, Delaware
Type: Russian Imperial Stout
ABV: 9%

And now we jump from Colorado back to home base…or close to home base, at least, with Delaware’s Dogfish Head. I honestly wasn’t expecting to revisit DFH this Darktober. Then I was broadsided by their Bitches Brew.

First, I’m going to let Sam Calagione, DFH’s founder, explain why he created this brew, in honor of the same-titled Miles Davis album:

Calagione was drawn to the alchemical spirits in Bitches Brew right out of college, acquiring a copy of the album “within months of the first time I brewed a batch of homebrew in my apartment in New York City. I listened to it when I was writing my Dogfish business plan. I wanted Dogfish Head to be a maniacally inventive and creative brewery, analog beer for the digital age. You could say that my dream was to have Dogfish Head, in some small way, stand for the same thing in the beer world that Bitches Brew stands for in the jazz world. You can imagine how excited we are to be doing this project 17 years after I wrote that business plan.”

One more quote (both from this Huffington Post article), explaining the multiple fermentation process used for Bitches Brew:

“We just did the test batch our pub. It is a threaded beer which means multiple primary fermentations […] and then you blend them together from multiple threads. It is a blend of Tej, which is the native African beer which is actually honey beer. They use gesho root because hops don’t grow in Africa and gesho is the bittering component that counterbalances the sweetness of the honey. That’s one thread. Three threads is an imperial stout with Muscovado sugar. Post-fermentation, we’ll blend those together to make Bitches’ Brew and that will come out in August.”

Why the quotes? Because I think it’s important to understand how special this beer is to DFH…which, in turn, I hope helps you all understand how devastatingly delicious this beer was when I drank it.

Again, I was lucky to drink this one fresh from the tap. I suspect, however, that this is also one I should buy bottled for some aging fun. If it’s this stunning fresh, I suspect it turns into an orgasmically bodacious beer when aged for a few years.

Yes, I did just write that.

Again, I’m trying very hard not to hype this beer. I don’t want to damage its standing with any of you by building it up higher than it should be. However, I can tell you this: The flavors of this Imperial stout almost perfectly match my preferences and even expand them to levels I hadn’t expected. It is a gorgeous brew, rich and intense with balancing notes of bitter, sweet, hoppy (or gesho) and malted. Let it linger in your mouth for a while and savor the taste rotation: dark chocolate, molasses, summertime honeysuckle, wintertime fire, soft spring rainfall, crisp autumnal earthiness.

Even better, let it warm for a while in your glass and return for deeper yet noticeably mellowed flavors surfacing from the darkness.

I’m sure a bottle is going to be predictably prohibitively priced. This is a DFH specialty. However, I’m going to vote that this one is worth it, denizens. It steps up to that edge of kitschy experimentation that DFH has sidled up to many times before, but this time they don’t tumble over into the abyss. This time, they stand their ground quite well.

Darktober 2: Indian Brown Ale

~ lobablanca

Brewer: Dogfish Head
Location: Milton, Delaware
Type: American Brown Ale
ABV: 7.2%

Continuing to ease into Darktober through happy, familiar beers, I’ve decided to pay a little tribute to the first microbrewery in which I fell in love: Delaware’s own Dogfish Head.

I wasn’t a true beer believer for a very long time, sticking mostly to the harder liquors for my quest for inebriated satisfaction. However, as I began to realize that, yes, Virginia, there was more to beer than bland offerings from mainstream American companies hell-bent on world domination through mediocre, barely flavorful brews, I began to better appreciate the world of craft beer to which I had been previously denying myself.

One of the first craft breweries to which I completely gave myself was Dogfish Head. Because of the proximity of the brewery to where I live plus the fact that one of their brewpubs popped up within reasonable driving distance…well, it just made sense to give them a proper go.

Now, I’ve heard rumor that some people have described Dogfish Head beers as “Best. Beers. EVAR.” I wouldn’t go that far, and I think that the people who do go there might be limiting themselves in craft beer experiences. However, I will say that if you are looking for one solid, reliable brewery to which you can pledge your alcoholic fealty? Dogfish Head would not be a bad choice.

Their Indian Brown Ale is actually quite an interesting follow-up to my first featured beer. Whereas Port City has only been in the beer brewing business for almost two years, Dogfish Head has been working on their craft since 1995. It shows, from their more unique offerings right down to their everyday reliables…like this one.

Deep, somber darkness topped by a thick-yet-quick-to-dissipate pillow of foam, this beer is what I suspect Port City Porter dreams of becoming. Eloquent flavoring and a ridiculously creamy mouth feel, with full frontal coffee haunted by hints of chicory and mocha. If you’re very patient, you’ll even catch the flutter of brown sugar across your palate as you move your way through this delightful beer.

Drinking this brew makes me realize how muted and subdued and…safe Port City’s porter is, and how far they have to come to become a bonafide Big Dog in the craft brew business. Not to say that I don’t still think that Port City’s dark offering is amazing, because it is. However, I think I may have forgotten how absolutely captivating Dogfish Head’s Indian Brown Ale is. Such a reliable everyday beer and a true delight to drink.

Dogfish actually offers quite a few amazing beers. The downfall of the company, however, comes with the fact that their more unique offerings are prohibitively priced. For example, I adore their World Wide Stout, which, at 18-percent ABV, is this stunning experiment in packing as much alcohol and flavor and sensory overload as possible into one beer. I’ve had it both from the bottle and on tap, and both experiences carry with them ripples of indescribable amazing (only because I don’t have to describe them for this review).

The down side is the fact that one bottle of World Wide Stout can go as high as $10 in some areas. It’s shockingly even more expensive on tap. And this is the modus operandi for several of Dogfish Head’s more daring brews, which means that the willingness to be daring that gives them their edge over other craft breweries is greatly diminished by the fact that so many of their brews are priced outside of normal beer-buying parameters. A shame, really. Prices that high are definitely a detractor from what is a producer of truly high note beers.

That being said, Indian Brown Ale is reasonably priced and consistently flavorful. I can’t say that Dogfish Head is still my number one craft brewery, but it still holds a solid top place in my heart, thanks in part to the continued reliability of steadfasts like this dark beauty.