lumensoutdoors.org - Page 9
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100 Beers, 100 Days: Day #25 - May 3, 2009
All the way from the Philipino mega food conglomerate San Miguel comes tonight’s beer, a dark European style lager. Dark European lagers are popular in a variety of unusual places in the world like Mexico, due to the flight of brewers out of Germany in the 19th century. I believe something similar is how we have an interpretation of a continental European style in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This is also part of my plan to widen the list of countries I’ve been drawing from, especially from the traditional large beer producing countries.
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100 Beers, 100 Days: Day #24 - May 1, 2009
This is going to be a really lame review, but I found Bell’s Two Hearted Ale to be a rather standard, well made IPA. I did not really notice anything outstanding about it. It was more of the floral style of IPA than the grassy kind, but that’s about it. I think perhaps I should stop trying and reviewing IPAs unless I’m told they are really standouts since I never have much interesting to say about them. For the most part, they’re just very interchangable beers for me.
Oh, I know how to draw this out a little bit. Sarah was back in Ohio for a week in April and brought me back a six pack of random beers I haven’t had before. This one comes from a brewery in Michigan that’s not distributed in NH, but is where she’s from. So this was one of the random one she picked up for me. She also got me a case of miscellaneous Great Lakes beers. I’ve already had all them so I know they’re fantastic.
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100 Beers, 100 Days: Day #23 - April 30, 2009
We go once again to Germany for tonight’s beer, the land of the dreaded German Purity Law that is both a great source of pride and a straightjacket for commercial brewers. Luckily it is no longer in effect. This beer claims to be a Maerzen or Oktoberfest beer, but it is like none I have ever had.
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100 Beers, 100 Days: Day #22 - April 29, 2009
Buffalo Bill’s Orange Blossom Cream Ale
The front of the label says Buffalo Bill’s Brewery, the back of the label says Pyramid. That means this beer is contract brewed, which is not in itself a bad thing. That just means one person came up with the recipe and had it brewed using the spare capacity at a larger brewery. From the website, it looks like maybe beers on tap in the restaurant are brewed on site but bottled beers are contract brewed. Nothing wrong with that. I bet lots of places do the same thing. I’ve sometimes wondered if I should do the same thing, but decided against it because that takes the fun of brewing out and leaves you with all the marketing and business work. Yuck. Anyway, on with the show.
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100 Beers, 100 Days: Day #21 - April 28, 2009
Smuttynose 2007 Really Old Brown Dog
I bought this bottle of Really Old Brown Dog a couple years ago because I liked the name and put it in my kitchen beer rack to see what it’d end up tasting like. Two years later and having no other new beers in the house, I threw it in the fridge for later. The bottle was so old that it still had dust on it. I hoped the age wouldn’t detract but being part of the Big Beer Series, I figured it could do with a little aging.
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100 Beers, 100 Days: Day #20 - April 27, 2009
From the people who brought you Gulden Draak and Piraat (yarrr!) comes Augustijn. This is another strong Belgian abbey-style ale, but unlike all those others it’s not nearly as sweet. I’ve had both of those before and while I liked them well enough, they’re both awful sweet. Gulden Draak was described to me as “candy”, in fact. So I’d say I enjoy them only every once in a while. I was nervous this beer might be more of the same.
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100 Beers, 100 Days: Day #19 - April 26, 2009
The second I read “Yorkshire Square Brewing System” on the website, I realized someone on this project had already written about Black Sheep. Sure enough, David Shea drank it way back on day #5. It seems so long ago and so many beers away. His is a pretty good review, and I’d like to echo many of his observations here. I hope we don’t have too many overlapping beers. This is the first one, at least. Hopefully we can go another 20 days before we hit the next.
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100 Beers, 100 Days: Day #18 - April 25, 2009
Tucher Hefeweizen is a rather standard German hefeweizen. It pours a cloudy straw color with a gigantic foamy head that sticks around for quite a while. I made sure to swirl the bottle to get that last bit of yeasty goodness when pouring it into my hefeweizen glass. The smell is typical German wheat beer, too - no detectable hops, fruity, a hint of the wheat and yeast to come. Tasting it, I got minimal amounts of the flavors you would typically expect. There was little in the way of banana or clove and only a bit of yeast flavor. I also noticed a high degree of carbonation in the beer. The aftertaste didn’t do all that much for me either.
Bottom line, this was a refreshing but uncomplicated wheat beer. I’d love to get more yeast out of it. And I’d love to really get a good banana flavor, but there was little to be had. So I might pick up one of these again in the future, but I’d reach for a Paulaner (or homebrew) first. The dunkelweizen is probably worth trying out.
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10 years of anaconda - April 24, 2009
With this commit, anaconda began its reign of terror over the installer landscape. Ten years and hundreds of thousands of lines later, we are still working on it. Sure, all of the original authors are gone and most of the original code has been rewritten or removed, but anaconda marches on. So today, say a brief prayer thanking anaconda that your computer got installed upon, and have a drink in its honor.
I, however, have only been working on this thing for 4.5 years. It will be a long time before we’re celebrating the ten year anniversary of my first commit. Perhaps I will have moved on myself by then.
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100 Beers, 100 Days: Day #17 - April 22, 2009
This being an English beer, I sampled it in the English way by not letting it reach -45F in the fridge. Instead, I drank it at a much more moderate temperature. Sadly, I did not have a cask of it in the cellar that I hand pumped into my glass. I had to settle for a bottle. I hope my English friends won’t report me to CAMRA.