First, the Not So Awesome Brew…

Every month, a Not So Awesome Brew is featured as a baseline. After all, what is an Awesome Brew? Awesome compared to what? Compared to something like this:

Miller Brewing Co’s, Milwaukee;s Best Ice, 5.9% ABV

Ahh, the Beast, my old fiend.  Back in the late 80’s and 90’s, beer talk would occasionally pop mention of “the Beast”.  “The Beast” being the term used to refer to Milwaukee’s Best, which it was agreed that it wasn’t.  It wasn’t until college that I finally had a cold glass (cup) of it and realized just how shitty this beer is.  Even my wife gave this beer prejudicial treatment with the photo of it to the left.   She didn’t bother lining up the shot well enough to hide the grey background behind the one she used for this month… or even reach to the back of her setup and turn on the backlight… or even bother edit the picture in any way, most likely because “the Beast” wasn’t worth so much of her time as a professional photographer.  She even elected to forego her payment for this one; her payment being a sip of the beer she just shot.  I’d like to say we went out to get some actual red Solo brand red cups for the shot… but we didn’t.  This beer just isn’t worth that effort either, so you get to see it in a generic Walmart red cup, which it seems oddly more at home in.

Even the website is every bit as shitty as the beer.  Go ahead, click the link on the title of this and check it out if you don’t believe me.  It shares it’s single-page website with Milwaukee’s Best Lite and Milwaukee’s Best Premium with the former taking up the prime real-estate.  This tells me even the web developers couldn’t be bother to make a better site for this stuff.  As mentioned, this review is specifically about Milwaukee’s Best Ice (The Ice Beast), because it’s apparent they no longer make original Milwaukee’s Best anymore. It could be Miller is labeling original Beast as Milwaukee’s Best Premium, but this stuff is rarer to find than a hand-made, barrel aged Poire, because I could not find the Premium Beast at any of the 9 gas stations, drug stores and beer stores I visited looking.

So I settled on the Ice Beast.  I’ll save discussion about ice beers for a later edition since this certainly won’t be the last ice beer I review.  When I poured the beer, it certainly looked good.  It had a nice warm amber color and a decently frothy head.  Looks are where it ended though.  Like all AALs, it had no taste except cheap corn, and unlike most AALs, it had a wicked bitter aftertaste that left you considering a shot of Malört to wash it away.  At 5.9%, it’ll get you pretty drunk in short order if you make a night of them, and like most mass produced swill, it’s brewed so you can drink one after another without it filling you up.  I suppose that’s the appeal of all these mass produced AALs after all.  Serve cold with a slab of ribs and a copy of The Beastmaster.

And Now, the Awesome Brews…

Destihl’s, Saint Dekkera Poire, 5.5% ABV

Wow, where do I even begin with this one?  Straight up, this stuff is rare and expensive.  It’s a hand-made, barrel aged Poire and it’s certainly the most expensive beer I’ve ever purchased at a little more than $17 a bottle.  It’s rare because they only produce a small handful of bottles… period.  My particular bottle came from the blending of wooden barrels 72-73 from the 2013 batch as identified by the hand-penned label.  After, the bottle was then presumably hand dipped in black wax to thoroughly seal it for the next three years.  As far as I know, they have never brewed another batch of this stuff.

So what exactly is a Poire?  Belgium many many moons ago, began brewing what are now known as sour ales.  Back then, it was just ale because all beer made during that time had a sourness to it.  Sourness in beer is typically caused by bacteria and wild yeast that go along for the ride.  As beermaking advanced through the ages, it was discovered that sterilization and pure, cultured yeast removed the sourness from beer.  This worked for most of the world and the Germans were certainly rejoicing as they prepared monks for their epic quest to teach every culture on the planet how to make beer.  Belgians on the other hand, being the hardy folk they were, decided that back in their day, all beers were sour and they liked it that way, and decided to figure out how to put it back.  One method they found was that while the beer was aging, if you add fruit to it, wild secondary fermentation happens, and not only does this put the sour back in the ale in a very controlled fashion, but also gives it a cool fruity flavor on top of it.  Add cherries to the beer, and you get kriek.  Add raspberries, and you get framboise.  Add pears, and you get what we have here, poire.  If you get confused, just look up the name of the fruit in French.

Slicing through the wax seal and pouring it, it has a nice rosy amber color with perfect clarity and just enough head to be noticeable. The flavor is complex and smooth.  It’s not nearly as sour as others I have tried; more on the order of Tell-Tale Tart, and the subtle flavor of the pears is present but not overpowering and is mostly in the aftertaste rather than up front like most lambics.  This brew is honestly pretty epic and a lot of time and effort and expertise was put into making it.  The flavors are all carefully balanced so nothing overpowers anything else.  It’ll immediately let you know it’s a Belgian sour up front, and the rest follows along as if to say “oh, and also made in oak barrels… and pears were used…”  The only fault I can find with Destihl’s Saint Dekkera sour lineup – and believe you me, when I saw these on the “special” table at Red, Wine and Brew, I snatched several up, price be damned – is that they were a limited run.  If you can score a bottle of this stuff, then serve ice cold and just by itself.  It’s special enough you don’t need anything else getting in the way of the experience.

B. Nektar’s Zombie Killer, 5.5% ABV

B. Nektar is always into interesting concoctions.  They do meads, ciders and even beers.  This is one they’re pretty infamous for and as a longtime fan, I’m glad I can finally review this awesome brew here.  Zombie Killer is a hard cider first and foremost, but honey and cherries are added in giving this brew truly superheroic flavor with attitude.  It’s like they figured out how to take all the best parts of a hard cider, add in all the best parts of a honey mead and all the best parts of a kreik lambic and have it all exist in one magic bottle.

Zombie Killer pours golden like any good cider, with a head that quickly dissipates and light carbonation.  It tastes exactly as the description says.  You taste apple cider, you taste honey mead, you taste the cherries.  They’re all present, up front and in every sip in perfect balance.  The honey doesn’t overpower the cider with it’s sweetness and buttery smoothness and the cherries don’t make you think you’re drinking some weird experiment in Belgian sour brewing.  It’s a brew awesome enough to have won a gold medal at the 2011 Mazer Cup international mead competition, which is about as close as a mead/cider can get to an Olympic gold.  It’s pretty widely available, so if you’re a fan of ciders and/or meads, I highly recommend picking up a few bottles.  I’ve been a personal fan since about 2012 when I first discovered it at World Wines here in my hometown.  Serve chilled with SPAM, Twinkies, and any other foodstuffs that can survive a zombie apocalypse and a copy of Zombieland.

Some of the pictures taken for Awesome Brews were done by Diane Schuler of Schuler Photography