beer | Barley Prose

Review: New Belgium Voodoo Ranger Juicy Haze IPA

You know what’s good? Barbecue.

You know what’s better? Barbecue, washed down with the sweet nectar of life.

Out for lunch with a couple of my friends at Syracuse’s best local barbecue joint, the well renowned Dinosaur Barbecue, to enjoy their sublime Chicken Deluxe sandwich. Listen to this description!

“Mojito marinated chicken breast, melted American, lettuce, tomato, pickled onion & jalapeno relish, BBQ mayo, BBQ sauce”

I’m not exaggerating when I say that I’d punch my mama in the ear to get to one of these sammiches.

(Minus tomatoes, which I don’t dig on, due to their textural similarity to what a human heart must be like if you were to pull it out of a man’s chest and then place it on a mojito themed chicken).

The choice for this particular day was to wash it down with a New Belgium Voodoo Ranger Juicy Haze IPA.

Well, this beer is murky and delightful, with hints of deliciousness!

Honestly, as I find my voice writing beer reviews, I will admit, that many of the nuances of beer descriptions are just lost on me. It may be that this beer contains all of the wide variety of spices, aromas and flavors as described on the site’s own media.

ITBMCBB*, the Juicy Haze has a “very strong hop aroma of citrus (lemon, some orange, lime and grapefruit) and tropical (guava and pineapple), with light grassy and caramel-like malt aroma.”

And how’s the mouthfeel? Well, hell, my mouth is full of beer and chicken, so it feels great!

This is a delicious tart beer and with an ABV of 7.5% it also packs a nice little wallop to it. And that’s always a good quality by my own measure.

If I were writing copy for this product, I would describe it as the taste of “two sexy leprechaun ladies making out with each other in a rainstorm.”

This beer was served draft style but it’s also packaged in a pretty slick design by the fine folks at New Belgium.

Go out and have one!

July 4th Beer Selections

Just a quick friendly reminder that all craft beer is the perfect patriotic choice of beverage, and those red white and blue bottles you see everywhere are actually part of a huge international conglomerate.

Fruit beers and lightly soured beers are particularly popular lately. Goses as well, which is a style of beer with some salt in it.

I haven’t quite decided what I’m bringing to the party, the hosts have a keg of Yuengling which will do in a pinch, but I’m leaning towards something like Bell’s Oberon and Bell’s Two-Hearted, which are new to New Jersey.

What are you drinking? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter at @BarleyProse.

Repost: A Tribute To A Coconut Brown Ale

This is a repost of a blog entry I wrote on BeerGraphs in 2013.

Technically coconut fruit is a drupe, not a nut. So brown ales with coconut are really fruit beers and not nut browns, but that’s just semantics and botany really.

Coconut is a flavor that many people will tell you they don’t like, although if pressed a lot of them will cite the texture. This is understandable, as a lot of times their initial exposure to the flavor is similar to mine; When I picked the unlucky chocolate out of a box of Russell Stover Candies. This wicked game of chocolate Russian roulette is not working with the highest quality ingredients to start with, and if you go in thinking you’re going to get a smooth milky chocolate it’s only going to make the surprise more jarring. Trying a Mounds or Almond Joy at Halloween is less surprising, but it’s still only the grainy and chewy form of the stuff. My mother would have one or two, but there were always a handful of the blue-wrapped candies destined for the trash in the remains of my Halloween bag when we found it months later.

I rarely gave it another thought. I’d made up my mind that I didn’t like coconut, and that was that. I passed over things with coconut in or on them, immediately assured it was something I didn’t like.

All that would change on October 16th, 2010. I’m a big believer of the old adage, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” When I’m in new places, I open my mind to the differences and try the local cuisine. It was an innocent enough night in Kona on the isle of Hawaii and me and my new wife were sitting at the bar at the Kona Brewing Company waiting for a table. I flipped open the menu to the one-off section where they had a couple of experimental beers, which is usually my favorite section of any beer menu. I read about one, a brown ale with toasted coconut called Coco Loco Toasted Coconut Brown Ale, and was intrigued before I finished reading the name. My mind was open to new flavors and Hawaiians do not shy away from coconut, unless it’s via a warning not to sit under a palm tree.

So I ordered it, and it was wonderful. It wasn’t a hint of coconut. It wasn’t a rich malty beverage with a lingering aftertaste. It was a full-on, in-your-face explosion of coconut. And it was delicious. The nutty sweetness of the coconut was the predominant taste and the beer enveloped it from there creating a rather tasty beverage.

When I returned to New Jersey I knew there was Kona beers around, but I also knew there was no chance they would have this specialty beer since it wasn’t even in bottles in Hawaii. As most people do when they return from the Hawaiian Islands I wallowed in nostalgia for a couple of weeks and missed my coconut beer and my Mauna Loa macadamia nut chocolate chip cookies. After that I got down to work researching homebrew recipes for a clone. I found some other homebrew threads talking about toasted coconut, and after a while I formulated a recipe and brewed my nostalgic brew.

To date it’s probably the best beer I’ve created. I’m clearly biased, but I’ve had independent confirmation of this by friends who have had most of my other creations including an odd, but not bad, root beer beer. I even rebranded it as a Mets-themed beer called Oliver Perez is Coco-Nutz. I just bottled another batch of it this past weekend.

Then the miraculous happened: Everyone else loved Kona’s beer as much as I did and they decided to both bottle it and add it to their Aloha Series, the one that gets distributed to the mainland along with Pipeland Porter, Wailua Wheat, Fire Rock Pale Ale and Longboard Lager.

Kona Brewing Company’s Koko Brown is deliciousness in a glass. It tastes like lounging on an island beach during a Luau entwined with stand-up paddleboarding on the blue waters. The aroma evokes a relaxing vacation bottled with the rich aroma of tropical paradise. Drinking this coconut delight brings images of gently flowing palm trees in a warm breeze and beautiful pink sunsets over giant ocean waves.

Koko Brown has a 3.68 rating with 2.26 BAR and 0.2 wOBAR. It’s a well-crafted malty beverage with a smooth coconut taste and a caramelly sweetness and just enough hop bitterness to keep it balanced. If you can’t find it, brew it.

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Review: Brooklyn Brown Ale

Well, let’s get one thing clear, right out of the gate.

And if we can’t agree to this basic premise, then, well, I’d suggest you go off in search of a blog about knitting, or dressing up tiny dogs to look like celebrities, or dressing up stuffed animals to look like tiny dogs.

The premise is: beer is delicious.

Having said that, I am privileged enough to live near a Wegmans. And one of the great joys of Wegmans is the “Craft Your Own Six Pack.” For $10.99, a shopper can choose from over one hundred various porters, stouts, sours, ales, lagers, IPAs, hard lemonades and ciders, and so on, and get six new beers to try. Many of my reviews will be obtained in this fashion.

(And, don’t tell anyone, but, theoretically, a shopper could just grab a beer from a united four/six pack and place it gently in their own “crafted six pack” and add to their possible choices. I wouldn’t do that, due to the Judeo-Christian ethic and Big Brother and such.)

So, a number of the Brooklyn Brewery beers are available and made available via this fine program. This is how I came across the Brooklyn Brown Ale.

This ale, if the brewmasters can be believed, (or ITBMCBB for short, as I intend to use this acronym again, hey, Ceetar, let’s get a glossary going!), is a “blend of six malts, some of them roasted, [that] give this beer its deep russet-brown color and complex malt flavor, fruity, smooth and rich, with a caramel, chocolate and coffee background.”

Now, that’s just fancy brewer speak, to me. I can tell you is that it’s dark brown and sweet and delicious. I tend to pair this with beef dishes, when serving it up at the ol’ KilgoreStout residence.

I would describe this as what it would taste like if you were to make out with a unicorn that ate nothing but pancakes and maple syrup.

Perhaps the greater joy is that a six pack of these beauties goes for just $8.99 at my local food jobber, a good $2 less than the sampler sixer. Which means that, when I am pressed for time or energy and don’t feel like I can find six new, interesting beers to try, I’ll grab a 6 of this and a six pack of another Brooklyn Brewery beer, one that pairs better with fish and chicken, and which I shall review at another time.