Tag: flying-saucer

Dogfish Head Beer Tasting – Review

I had a thoroughly enjoyable time at the Flying Saucer last night. They had a Dogfish Head beer tasting event, where we got to try five different Dogfish Head beers along with a five course tasting meal to go with the beers and such.

First: By far, my favorite was the Midas Touch. It was an excellent beverage, extremely smooth. The contents of it are unusual (as with all Dogfish Head beers), and it had a flavor which I’m somewhat unable to describe. Very mellow and mead-like, but not overpoweringly so. Strong as heck (9%) but you can’t tell at all. A very complicated beer.

Second: The Festina Peche, which was not a beer that I was expecting them to have. It’s a wheat beer, but they called it a “Neo-Berliner” which was new to me. It had the most variation in flavor of any beer that night, very sweet at first, turning almost sour by the 4th-5th taste. High in carbonation (for a beer), but surprisingly low in alcohol (only 4.5%). Excellent flavor though, and I will pick it up again when I find it.

Third: The 90 Minute IPA. For those of you that know me, you probably know that I hate IPA’s. Really, really hate them. However, the 90 Minute IPA really does an amazing job of hiding the hop flavors with the sweet flavors at the start. I did discover that if you block the sweet flavors by eating some bread just before taking a drink, then it’s extremely hoppy. All the hop flavor comes out when you can’t taste the sweetness.

Fourth: Raison d’Etre. This is one I’ve had many times before, it’s a beer made with green raisins and Belgian yeasts. It’s a good beer, but many people don’t like it because it’s slightly sour flavored and very malty. Note that by ranking this 4th, I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m just saying that the other three were better. 🙂

Fifth: The 60 Minute IPA. It’s a pretty average IPA, but with a lot more hops than per normal. The hop flavor is immediately apparent as it’s way overhopped. I have to say that while I can drink this beer, I don’t really care for it much. It’s a high alcohol beer (6%) for a low alcohol price, and that’s a good thing. It’s also a much better beer than many others on the market. However, it’s very much an IPA with a huge amount of hops, and I don’t care for that style of beer myself. But if you like IPAs, you’ll love it.

Unranked: The 120 Minute IPA. Mikey was lucky enough to procure the “Golden Ticket” and thus win one of the coveted bottles of their heavy-duty IPA. We also procured a couple of other floating bottles, so I got to taste this one fairly well. The short of it is that that it’s very strong. At 18%, it’s not messing around when it comes to the alcohol. It’s also very heavily hopped, but honestly, the alcohol hides that flavor. Again, I tried the bread trick, and it worked, you can really taste the hops when the sweet alcohol is hidden from your palate. I do not recommend doing this trick on this beer however, as it tasted like I had chewed on a handful of hop pellets. It’s that strong. On the whole, however, it’s a good beer, but it’s more like a fine wine. Sip it. Slowly.

The food was delicious as well, and whoever thought of mixing the Peche wheat beer with orange sherbet is a sheer genius. Same goes for the Beef Stew and the 90 minute IPA.

The guy from Dogfish Head mentioned that they’re bringing their beers into more Memphis liquor stores. Apparently we have a 6% law I did not know about, so you’ll likely only be able to find the stuff in liquor stores and not general grocery stores. Some of their beers are well worth the extra trip, so I plan on making some liquor store runs soon and seeing what I can find.

Weekend madness

Unfortunately, I’ve been entirely too busy this last week to say much, so here’s the brief rundown.

Last weekend was a massive blowout on all fronts. Friday night, I was at Sleep Out’s for the last Friday ever. What a blast. I went in early, hung out to hear the band’s first set, and then headed over to Mikey’s for the housewarming. Mikey’s place is cool. I like it. Mikey got a little drunk, so I left and headed back to Sleep Out’s at about 11 for the evenings end. 4 hours later, I passed out. 🙂

Saturday, I tried very hard to make it to Sleep Out’s for the last day, and I was there that morning, but I had this weird delayed migraine hangover thing going on. It kicked in around 2 and I was unable to move very rapidly until about 10. So my Saturday was spent in pain, with iced tea.

Sunday was a lot more fun. We had brunch at the Majestic, which I like for a couple of different reasons:
a) They always have good food at good prices, and,
b) It’s literally right downstairs from me, so it’s not like I have to walk anywhere for it.
They showed off their new brunch menu, which was fantastic. I had a andouille sausage and cheese frittata that was just incredible. I highly recommend it. Paul had good things to say about his smoked salmon hash browns, so I’ll try those this weekend.

Sunday afternoon was spent back at (now closed) Sleep Out’s, helping Mikey remove some TV’s and such. Kinda sad to see it all torn apart like that. I know I’ve only been going there for the last year or so, but still… That place had character.

Sunday evening I went over to Chad’s place for his and Rebecca’s Oscar party. It was a lot of fun and I drank a lot of Boulevard Wheat and had a really good time. I also got the worst score of anybody else in the Oscar pool (a whopping 2 correct answers! woot!), so that was good. 🙂

The rest of the week I worked. A lot. It’s been a vicious week. I put in almost 60 hours.

This weekend is shaping up to be interesting though. Apparently , we’re having a multi-brunch. There’s the brunch at Texas de Brazil on Saturday, followed up by the Majestic on Sunday. And Saturday night, the trivia team is spending the winnings at the Flying Saucer, so it should be entertaining to see how much beer we can go through.

On the whole, all this drinking is good training for St. Pats, which I’ll be going to in T-minus 277 hours, 23 minutes. So that’s nice.

LibertyBowl Parade

So I dropped by the Saucer yesterday, and ran into Mikey and Paul, who were having drinks and going off to the LibertyBowl parade on Beale. Now, I’m not one for sport much, but a parade should be worth seeing, I figured.

Unfortunately, it was one of the more redneck parades I’ve ever seen.

Okay, so there were a lot of fans cheering and shouting things like “game” and “cocks”, but the parade itself was extremely weak. There were the required high school marching bands, and there were people on firetrucks and such, and A. C. Wharton riding around, and that was all cool, but the “floats” were just weak. AutoZone just stuck three big semi’s with the logo on the side in the middle of the parade. FedEx tried even less and just had a standard delivery truck all by itself. Most of the “floats” were basically existing rides or very hastily decorated. It was about what I would expect a parade to look like if it was thrown together in, say, a week. Rather disappointing.

However, I did see Semi-Charmed Kat on the Ride The Ducks truck, throwing out beads and moon pies. Unfortunately, I believe she was deaf at the time and so did not notice me and Paul screaming out “Kat” to get her attention.

I got a couple of rather poor pictures from the parade on my new phone, so I’ll post them later when I get near a Bluetooth enabled PC.

Here’s the shots I took using my new phone:

Word from the scene

Okay, so I go out tonight mainly to fuel my hunger and thirst. While I have plenty of stash packed away to fuel the thirst, I’m sadly low on foodstuffs. It’s been an interesting couple hours.

First, I head over to Wang’s. I’d just like to state, for the record, that this is the best named Chinese place, ever. Forget the play on word places, Wang’s doesn’t mess around when it comes to suggestive names. Wang’s.

Wang’s is right up the street, less than a block away. They used to be over at #1 Beale, but that old building got demolished (nobody seems to really know why), and now they’re over at the corner of Main and Gayoso. They’ve been there for a few months, I’ve just been too lazy to stop by. And I must say, their new digs? NICE. They have possibly the best stage I’ve ever seen in a restaurant. I may drop back over in an hour or so to hear whatever band is playing, because they did not skimp one bit on the sound system, or the stage. It’s huge, takes up like a quarter of the place, and looks like they could put on one hell of a show.

Anyway, I get some chinese food and a couple of chinese beers, and notice that the place is practically empty. This naturally concerns me, because I like the places around here to do well. Doing well means they stick around which means more fun for me, because I ain’t leaving anytime soon.

So I finish my meal, pay the extremely reasonable tab, and head over to Sleep Out Louie’s, or as Paul calls it, the Union Avenue Branch Office. They have a couple playing in there that I had not heard before. Pam and Terry or some such thing. I cannot recall. In any case, they’re pretty good. I listen to them a while, while playing some NTN Trivia and drinking mixed drinks, since I’m not quite trusting their beer dispenser system yet. Seriously, I love Louie’s, and I make it a point to go every Sunday morning if possible, but the beer taps need a major overhaul. First they had to clean the lines, then the fridges went out so it was warm. And IMO, it was never really cold to begin with. Still, they have very cheap liqour, so I tend to stick to the mixed drinks and we get along just fine.

In any case, Louie’s is dead too. There’s like three tables full, and nobody at the bar, and this is unusual for 7:30 on a Saturday. So I pay my cheap tab, and head to the Flying Saucer, (aka Paul’s Second Avenue Branch Office). And they’re practically empty too!

I have one beer, then ask around, and appearantly there’s not only a baseball game going on tonight, but some kind of concert. Looking around the intarweb, appearanly Widespread Panic played last night and is playing again tonight. I had no idea. That’s what I get for working hard all week and not paying attention. Not that I’d go and see them, but still, I like to be in the loop on this sort of thing.

So here I am at home, enjoying a Red Bull and Ketel, and typing this worthless drivel. Oh well. With any luck, Mandy will stop by later in the week on her way to NC, although I am doubtful at this stage. It’s kinda out of her way and all. Yes, this is a blatent attempt to guilt Mandy into showing up anyway. )

Enjoy the links.

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