Well now, I guess summer vacation is over. My wife started back to school today, so I guess I’d better get back on this blogging thing. By my count I’m something like 15 beers behind my one-per-week goal. Sorry for the long layoff–I’ve moved to Maine and been busy blogging about that. One of the unintended bonuses in moving to Portland is that this may just be a beer lovers paradise. It gets cold up here, so there’s nothing to do but drink and [censored]. Seriously though, there are something like half a dozen microbreweries in the Portland area alone. So while I’ve been on vacation from blogging about beer, I’ve certainly not been on vacation from sampling them. Let me start with the best one I’ve had thus far.
Shipyard Brewing Company in Portland is the largest microbrewery in Maine (or so their website says). They have a shop and brewery tours at their location in Portland, and their beers are pretty much universally available up here. During the summer, they supply the beer for the Inn on Peaks Island, out in the bay off Portland. It was there that I encountered one of my top three all-time beers–the cask-conditioned Old Thumper Extra Special Ale. Quoting the Shipyard website:
Old Thumper Special Ale was created in 1979 by veteran British brewer, Peter Austin, founder of the Ringwood Brewery in Hampshire, England and mentor to Shipyard’s master brewer, Alan Pugsley. A British Grand Champion beer, Old Thumper is a non-traditional English Bitter, brewed in the United States solely by The Shipyard Brewing Company.
Note that I said that the above beer was cask-conditioned. For those of you not familiar with this term, Wikipedia defines it as “unfiltered and unpasteurised beer which is conditioned and served from a cask, usually without additional nitrogen or carbon dioxide pressure.” Basically, this amounts to beer with live yeast, which gives it a little extra kick in the alcohol department and a big extra kick in the taste department. It also means the beer is served cool rather than cold, which opens up the flavors even more.
The casked Old Thumper is simply wonderful. The complexity of the flavors and the mouthfeel of the yeast remind me somewhat of the hefe weizens I’ve written about, but this is a bitter, so the taste is markedly different–the hops are much more prevalent here. The cask conditioning, it turns out, is quite important. I’ve had this in a bottle and on tap, and neither was same wonderful brew I remembered from the cask. I looked this one up on BeerAdvocate and found general agreement with that sentiment. No one rated it higher than a 4.05, but no one drank in from the cask either. If you can find it served that way, I give this beer my absolute recommendation. If not, it’s still worth trying, but it’s not as good as Fuller’s.
My Rating:
(Casked)
My Rating:
(Bottled)