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:

Colt 45 Blast Strawberry Lemonade, 12.0% ABV

Ok, so I’m hitting up the real bottom shelf recently with these.  I honestly never explored the wide and varied world of hobo-swill before.  I’ve typically found malt beverages pretty disgusting and my recent foray into them only reinforces that.  I was actually planning to review original Colt 45 this month, but found Blast too tempting to pass up.  First off, unlike OG Colt 45, which is a respectable 5.6% ABV, Blast is a whopping 12%!  Add to that fact that one can is “one serving” and a whopping 23.5 fluid ounces and painted like a 16yr old’s energy drink, and then market it with pop icons like Snoop Dogg, and once again, controversy over cheap hobo-swill targeting teens ensures.  To put it in perspective, one of these cans, has the booze of 5 out of the 6 cans in an average 6-pack.

Controversy aside, I hate nanny-state laws.  I feel if a country wants to slap an age limit on a dangerous, controlled substance like alcohol and parade it as a completely taboo subject to their youths and promote the stigma that parents shouldn’t discuss or educate them on until after they “hit the magic age”, then it’s their problem if the moment a kid hits 21, they blast themselves into an emergency room for alcohol poisoning because they drank four of these and a fifth of orange dreamsicle flavored vodka.   So how does Colt 45’s new lure for our young, first time drinkers stack up among the other awesome and not-so-awesome brews I’ve sampled on here?

Pretty nasty actually.  It didn’t have the industrial flavoring of Steel Reserve’s Alloy, nor the “I’m poisoning myself” gag reaction that Great America’s Red White and Blueberry had for me, but in it’s own right, it was not a wholly pleasant either.  It was better than those other two malt beverages I had, but not by much.  Blast lacked the syrupiness of Great America, which was a plus and made it go down without too much issue, but aside from the nasty malt aftertaste, it didn’t taste like I was drinking an alcoholic beverage or anything natural, brewed or otherwise.  Just like it’s can design, it did taste like an energy drink, with overpowering synthetic fruit flavors trying and completely failing to drown out the horrible bitterness of the caffeine – or in this case, the malt flavored swill.  Unlike Reese’s peanut butter cup, these are not two great tastes that go great together.  Serve with an empty stomach and an unhealthy desire to cause what friends you have to wonder if they should be dialing emergency services.

And Now, the Awesome Brews…

Brouwerij De Troch’s 2015 Winter Gueuze, 5.5% ABV

This bottle has been sitting around my refrigerator for about four months now. I bought it originally, along with Frostbite in an attempt to do a winter/christmas ale special for the holiday edition, but never got around to drinking it. You might notice this is the 2015 Winter Gueuze, which means it’s been sitting in it’s bottle at least a year longer than even that. This is a seasonal, rather than a limited run beer, but like most special holiday brews, things tend to get tweaked year to year.

Because it’s a Belgian gueuze, you might be jumping to the same preconceptions I did when I picked the bottle up – It’s a gueuze – It’s going to be a fruity but very sour ale. While I love my Belgian sour ales, and tend to review a fair number of them here on Awesome Brews, I can happily say my preconceptions were wrong after I took my first sip. De Troch’s Winter Gueuze isn’t very sour at all, in fact, it’s fairly sweet and fruity, like a modern lambic from Lindeman’s. It has just the slightest hint of a sour aftertaste, and tasted more like a slightly sour hard cider than a gueuze. To the beer snobs of the world, this is some huge negative, but to me, for my tastes regardless of what it’s labeled, it was marvelous.

It’s a great blend of sweet and sour and is a lot lighter and more refreshing than a lot of Belgians I drink. The flavor is that of grapes and apples and maybe a hint of peach along with the typical yeast and sour malt. It’s an extremely complex, hard to describe flavor. The carbonation was an energetic fizz more like that of a soda pop – similar to the fizz from the Cooper’s Sparkling Ale I reviewed a couple months back. From the sip my wife took, she was equally impressed. Beer snobs be damned, it just means there’s more for me next year because I’ll definitely be picking more up. Serve ice cold along with roast venison and a copy of the 1967 masterpiece “The Dirty Dozen”

Suzuki Shuzoten’s Hideyoshi Namacho Honjozo, 16.0% ABV

If I could sum up the two Awesome Brews this month into one word, it would be smooth. While De Troch’s Winter Gueuze is by far the smoothest gueuze I’ve ever drunk, Namacho is possibly the smoothest saké I’ve ever tasted.  I love saké, both chilled and warmed, and most premium sakés I drink chilled, but most all of them have, at least a little bit of an alcoholic “bite” to them.  The Kibo I had last month certainly did.  This saké though was perhaps the smoothest saké I’ve ever had.  It had absolutely no bite to it.  None.  Suzuki Shuzoten has certainly lived up to their esteemed pedigree as a brewery nineteen generations old (founded in 1689!) that was named the best saké in all of Akita by the Feudal lord who ruled there.

Unlike the junmai-shu I had last month, Namacho is honjozo-shu, which means grain alcohol was added during the fermentation process.   Now I confess, I haven’t had many honjozo saké.  In fact, I might never have had one before.  If they’re all this smooth, then I’ll definitely have to explore further, but unfortunately in this area, the saké pickings are fairly slim, and I have to drink what I can get a hold of.  This one in particular was a Christmas gift, from of all people, my mother-in-law who doesn’t know a thing about saké except the fact that I like them.  I swear, I don’t even know where the heck she even got this stuff, because I’ve never seen it before in the area!  Pat, if you ever read this (which you probably won’t because you stubbornly refuse to get a computer and enter this millennium) you did well.

Namacho is more than just smooth though, it’s light-bodied, clean, sweet… all the best properties of saké.  The flavor was a little on the unremarkable side – I don’t know if it’s an unrefined pallet on my part or if it genuinely is just a pure “saké flavored saké“.  It’s something I’m certainly not holding against it.  It’s more of an observation that you won’t taste anything but the sweet flavor of saké.. and it’s a flavor I happen to like a lot.  Honestly, this is one of the best sakés I’ve ever had, on par with the several selections I had at the former Shibuya in the MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas.  The next step is planning a visit to my mother-in-law’s house to find out where she found this divine beauty… of course, knowing her, that was her plan all along.  Serve chilled with fresh sea bass and a copy of Shogun Assassin.

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