BEER SAMPLING@HOME: “Mikkeller Simcoe Single Hop IPA”

One of my current favorites when you feel for a clean crisp hoppy flavor without too much fuzz and hops blending. As Simcoe is one of my number one hops styles when it comes to a good hop blend it is a delight to be able to drink it as clean as possible.

This is of course not a beer for people that only drink a so called balanced beer. But this should not be the idea when you drink this kind of beer. Instead it should be seen as clean beer for really understanding what this particular hops does for a beer. Great that Mikkeller can provide it for you to bring home.

Simcoe Single Hop IPA is defined as a American IPA, which is quite true. It is currently brewed all year round in Belgium at Brewed at the De Proef Brouwerij.

It pours with creation of a extremely fluffy white head, it actually took me several minutes to pour it as every try almost went over the glass due to all the head created.

The smell is really hoppy with bunch of pineapple and tangerine touches.

Also the taste is really citrus and great after taste of the crisp Simcoe hops.

It is not a masterpiece and everyday type of beer or your typical IPA due to the single hop of Simcoe. But if you want to learn what Simcoe does for a beer it is great way of doing it. And of course if you do not bother about balance and being a hop head like myself it just all the hops you want.

If you do not know it the beer is one of a whole series of beers coming from Mikkeller with single hops, currently they have this one, but also Warrior and Cascade single hops are available.

A Happy New Beer Year...

We had a nice calm New Year back home and of course with a bunch of great brews from my "beer cellar". Hope you all had a great time, what ever you did and I wish all the best for 08.

Our beer menu for the evening event consisted of the following components and order;

New Years Beer Menu:
1. 2*Nøgne Ø Pale Ale 2006
2. 3 Fonteinen Oude Geuze 2004
3. Cantillon Rosé De Gambrinus 2003
4. Shipyard Longfellow Winter Ale 2006
5. Great Divide Fresh Hop Pale Ale
6. Great Divide Hercules Double IPA
7. Smuttynose Smuttonator
8. Drakes Imperial Stout
9. Oskar Blues Ten FIDY (can)

Consumed but not part of the actual menu, mainly brought to the party:
10. Ridgeway Bad Elf Winters Ale
11. Rochefort Trappistes 10
12. La Trappe Dubbel
13. Anchor Steam Beer
14. North Coast Red Seal Ale
15. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (Bottle)

And yes we also had a full dinner during the beer menu and actually wine was consumed during the main course!

Regarding favorites, well then it must be the OB and the imperial stout, pours like motor oil, a amazing beer on can that I hope we soon can find at the fridges over at OT, plus the GD fresh hops which was a newcomer for me and a really fresh and hoppy pale ale that all of us enjoyed. And of course you can not forget the Cantillon that in this stored bottle from my "cellar" was dry as a dry Champagne counterpart, which worked very well with the starters.



Cheers!

Beers from Nils Oscar at Stockholm Beer 2007

The Nils Oscar brewery will have some exciting new and updated stuff at the Stockholm Beer this year. Always fun because Nils Oscar is not directly famous for producing many new products, they are more into producing a fixed number of beers produced in the best possible way.

They often get criticized among the beer geek community in Sweden that they are seen as a bit boring, simply because they stick to their normal beers. For my personal opinion it is simply two different strategies, produce a lot of new beers with the result of both amazing beers but also a lot of failures, or you try to concentrate on doing the best possible beers and stick to that. And I think both strategies works and should be accepted by the beer communities.

Anyway the following list of beers will be provided by Nils Oscar;

1. Nils Oscar Farm Ale 30L**Updated, with more hops!**
2. Nils Oscar Julöl 2007 30L **(Christmas beer), A new recipe**
3. Nils Oscar Rökporter 30L**(Smoked porter), A new beer!**
4. Nils Oscar Trippel 30L**A new beer!**
5. Nils Oscar Kalasjulöl 30L**(Christmas beer), Updated, with more dark beer malt**

The trippel is a very strange beer, had the opportunity to test it at Akkurat a few weeks ago and it was an amazing beer, but very difficult to define.

Some geeky statistics...

It is always fun with the unnecessary statistics about beers. I guess this is not so new but it is actually the first time for me where I found a list of the top IBU rated beers. You quite often discuss about what the beers with the highest IBU actually is or how the IBU is when it does not say on the bottle (often the case).

You guess it must be the Dogfish Head 120 Minutes IPA, but I have heard and tasted even more high level IBU beers.

So here is some interesting urls (at least for my geeky interests);

100 Most Alcoholic Beers (ABV)
100 Most Bitter Beers (IBUs)

And if you are wondering about the "winner" (if this is something to achieve) with the massive number of 2007 IBUs. I have to inform you that this is a Danish beer experiments from Mikkeller (beating all the US-hop monsters, and that I actually tested in Denmark during the beer festival in Copenhagen.

Here is some information about the beer from the brewer himself (they are actually 2)

Mikkeller X Hop Juice 2007 IBU



This beer is unrated by me because it was just a fun experiment and you can not actually say what it tasted because with that amount of hop it simply does not taste anything that has to do with beer, you just feel the bitterness.

High level IBU beers are something that I often enjoy, but you have to feel the difference between the bitterness and the rest of the beer to be able to be enjoyable. If it is just bitter there is no beer experience at all. And the secret is to combine that in a balanced way, sounds easy but you often see extreme example that proves that you can not create a great beer just with spicing it with loads of hops. It’s like saying that a crappy meat dish with bad quality meat could be a masterpiece just because you spice it until it is just "spicy".

Anyway it was interesting to taste and was surely a big it if you check the number of people that actually queued to get an "undrinkable" beer! picture below from the festival;



More statistics, has anyone heard about or actually tasted the number 1 beer regarding ABV? (If you skip Dave from Hair of the dog that is a retired beer).

Hakusekikan Eisbock 28%

A just remember one thing... beware the Hop Monster!