-officially not on the diet - but who can turn away yellow tail foie gras…
Offical Site RateBeer
From their site:
This recipe is the actual oldest-known fermented beverage in the world! Our recipe showcases the known ingredients of barley, white Muscat grapes, honey & saffron found in the drinking vessels in King Midas’ tomb! Somehwere between a beer, wine and mead, this smooth, dry ale will please with Chardonnay or I.P.A. drinker alike.
He Said:
Now that I’ve been through a competition - I figure I can do this one by the numbers a little more.
Appearance: It is seriously clear. It has a copper/golden color - basically imagine mead combined with saffron and you get the idea. There is no head to speak of and it has almost no carbonation.
Aroma: It’s still pretty cold - and there isn’t that much aroma - especially because it doesn’t seem like there are any hops in the beer. What little aroma it does have is sweet and floral with a hint of alcohol.
Flavor: It has a very thick texture on your tongue. It feels more like syrup going down the back of your throat. The lack of hops and carbonation mean that there is no bitterness to its flavor. It is not sweet at first - but the finish definitely has a sweetness to it. There are a lot of flavors going on in this beer. I can taste the grapes the more I drink it. It almost gives you a warm feeling at the back of your mouth when you swallow it. As you let it warm up, the sweetness and burn become even more pronounced.
Overall: This is another unusual beer. I’m not even sure beer is the right word because it has so many flavors that are off the path of beer. I think it should be thought of as the love child of a belgian strong ale and a mead. This combination puts it in its own category. I would recommend it to some one who wanted to try a beer that prefers wine/mead.
My Vote: I’m not always a fan of the Dogfish Head brews - but I’ll admit I like this one - in a once in a great while kind of way.
She Said:
I first read about this beer in Travels With Barley, a book given
to me by my loving husband for Christmas the year before last. The author
devoted almost an entire chapter to I believe what he called “extreme
beers”. I started looking for it after reading about it and didn’t find it
until our fateful trip to Muncie, IN in January. For those who don’t know,
we went to Muncie for the sole purpose of drinking beer at Muncie’s famed
Heorot (a beer bar). Dirk and I probably drank six beers each that night.
AND ate way to many friggin’ nachos.
But I digress.
Dogfish Head’s Midas Touch Golden Elixir is a curious brew by Dogfish Head
that purports to be derived from one of the oldest known beer recipes in
the WORLD. Hats off to Dogfish Head… those people are CRAZY!
Once poured, it’s color alone is worth noting — simply put, it looks like
honey — especially since there is no head and very little carbonation. At
9% ABV, the nose is strong, smells more like a dessert wine than a beer.
Wait, maybe that’s because it is brewed with muscat grapes!! :) When the
brew touched my lips, I was surprised at how much carbonation there was.
Not that it was a lot, but definately more than it looked like inside the
glass. Inside my mouth, it tasted nice, albeit a little syrup-y for my
taste, but it went down smoothly and the honey and saffron really linger.
I probably wouldn’t buy this beer for regular consumption, but would buy
it in a heartbeat for something “different”, to make a point to someone
that not all yellow beer tastes the way you think it will, or just to
support Dogfish Head. The website suggests pairing it with pan-asian
dishes or curries, which frankly sounds enticing.
My vote: Give it a try — how often do you get a chance to get a history
lesson from the very beer you hold in your hand?
I recently dusted off a project I haven’t worked on since the migration to Rails 1.1. A number of my function steps just stopped working.
It turns out it’s related to how the flash works. (Background here Bug)
The problem basically only happens if you call multiple get/post in the same test method. It turns out that I end up doing this when I’m testing actions to make sure certain classes of users cannot access the action.
There are three work arounds.
1. Rewrite the code to only call it get/post once.
2. Actually test the resulting html WikiPage
3. instead of calling
assert_equal "Permission Denied", flash[:notice]
You can do this
assert_equal "Permission Denied", assigns("flash")[:notice]
Until I find a reason not to just switch to the last case for these special functions - I’m going with it.
Long John Silvers has a solution - take broccoli - cover it in cheese , batter it, and fry it up.
Part of their new - “Eat Your Veggies” campaign.
I’m thinking you would be better off eating the carton they are served in…
I participated in my first homebrew competition as a judge! It was the 3rd Annual Austin ZEALOTS Homebrew Inquisition. THey had over 200 entries. I was a judge in the Strong Beer/Big & Boozy category.
The picture is of me about half way through the process. The guy next to me is Chris Colby - the Editor of BYO (Brew Your Own Magazine).
All in all a very good experience. People were nice, and it was also great to get to try the home brew efforts of so many other brewers. Even though this was a very informal event, I got a much much better idea of how a beer in competition is judged. I think I need to spend some more time on my vocabulary when it comes to describing the flavor and aroma of a beer, but I did pretty well at capturing the problems with some of the beers (probably because I’ve a lot of mistakes myself). One beer that really threw me a curve was a spruce tip strong ale which I could have sworn tasted like raspberry (Sorry Joe!).
Now I just have to carve some time out to brew more - who know maybe I’ll be ready to enter a contest in the next year.
Beervana - here is a friend’s homebrew flanders red - so sour and so awesome - going to have to try to make some.
I guess I’m an “old-school” programmers - even though I’m not that old. I blame it on my start in the world of formal programming. (I actually started on a TI-99 and an Atari ST - but that was mostly self taught (aka book and magazines pre widespread internet)). Remote programming on an HP-UX at the dawn of the web will force you to learn your way around vi, the shell, and the wonders of Unix.
Welcome to a new column at Economys Size Geek - He Said / She Said Beer!
You’re probably wondering what the hell that means - well be patient and I’ll explain. Basically, my wife loves beer even more than me! To maintain marital harmony, we have to keep a lot of different beers in stock. I thought it might be fun to offer up some of our beer-sperience to my faithful readers so that the next time they are out and about they can journey beyond the tried and true.
We chose a very special beer for our first review. Left Hand Chainsaw Ale (Double Sawtooth)
This is a special release from Left Hand. It’s called a double ESB (for more about Bitter style (Wikipedia RateBeer). Following a trend in American brewing - by putting the word double in front of a style means you are going to kick everything up a notch. In this case, it means instead of a 4.5% ABV (Alcohol By Volume) you get 9%ABV. No mention on the bottle of IBUs.
He Said:
Truth be told, I’m not much for the Bitter Style. I tend to stay as far away from most pales - becasue frankly I’m more about the malt than I am the hops. (Though I will admit I had a St. Geroge’s this week and enjoyed it.) I wasn’t very excited about this beer. It has the incredibly low carbination that seems to be typical for the ESB style. It is a reddish brown color with more than a bit of precipitate (mostly probably yeast - the beer is bottle conditioned).
It has a very slight aroma with the smallest hint of sweetness. It’s very smooth going in with a very serious bitter finish. One thing I will say for the bitterness at the end - it is also very smooth. So much so it almosts seems to linger well after you finish swallowing it. I will also say that when I started drinking it, it was probably a little too cold. Now that it’s starting to warm up, the flavor is even more mellow and enjoyable. The really nice (dangerous) thing about this beer is that it is so smooth even in its very bitter finish - that it is hard to tell that it is 9%. If this weren’t a special release I would stock up on it just to launch it on unsuspecting visitors who drink all beers like they are Miller Light.
My Vote: Good enough for a special occasion beer, but it won’t be pushing Negro Modelo out of my fridge any time soon!
She Said:
The funny part about this beer is that someone tried to order it from me earlier this week and I had to say sorry, that I hadn’t heard of it, so it
must be a seasonal that’s not in season right now, but that I’d keep an eye out for it. The guy then noticed that the price tag was $124.40 per
case and quickly decided it wasn’t *that* interested. For price comparison, the cost of a case of Delirium Tremens is $72.
The next day I was in the warehouse and came across a pallet of it in the Left Hand order. We decided to bust a case open for samples. I grabbed two — one for me and one for the above mentioned customer.
Now on with the review!
This beer is a double version of Left Hand’s Sawtooth ESB and comes in a 22 oz. bottle with a cork. Let me start out by saying that I’m not much of an ESB drinker, although I did drink a fair amount of Red Hook back in the day. :) I was a little concerned when, after a fair amount of effort to remove the cork, it did not make that familiar popping sound. I poured three pint glasses (for Dirk, Brett and myself) about halfway. The color is pretty… very typical of an ESB, from what I remember. It’s lacking in carbonation, but that’s typical too, I think. On first drink, this beer is a bit of a punch in the face. However, now that it’s warmed a little, it’s much, much more palatable. I think I would enjoy this beer on draft with fish and chips in a smokey London pub.
As we work out our rating system, Dirk asks if I would buy this beer again. My response was a quick no, but that I’d drink it if it were given
to me. :D It’s obvious that I’m not loving this beer, but maybe I would feel differently if I didn’t know that the retail cost would be something
in the neighborhood of $13 per bottle.
My Vote: Save your money and buy a six-pack of Red Hook.
Makes me wonder what else they cut out of the original
