Re: Drinking Thread: Beer, Whiskey, Rum, Vodka, Wine - Raise a Glass, All Are Welcome
Had some beer adventures this past weekend. Friday evening, the wife and I went to a tasting at
Big Alice Brewing, a self-labeled "nano-brewery" that I had come across while looking for beer places in Queens to recommend to BBDL while he was here (but didn't recommend it to him because they're only open on Fridays). They have a rather atypical business model; they brew a single 1/3-barrel batch of of a given beer (~45 750 mL bottles, thus nano-brewery) and then don't repeat the same beer, so everything they produce is a very limited run. As a result, when we got to their tasting room, we found out that, when they open each week, they only make one beer available for free sampling (so as not to deplete their stock). We got a complimentary pour of their Pepper and Salt Table Beer (table beer as a play on table wine because it's made with a mix of malts; pepper and salt because it's literally made with a bit of pepper and salt). We paid for a tasting of another beer (smoked wheat beer with oranges), and when we shared some of it with a few other guys who were there, they reciprocated and shared their sour imperial stout with us. Everything we had was really tasty, if a bit off the wall in a "homebrewers gone wild" sort of way. We picked up another couple of bottles to take home, a barleywine aged in yellow birch and a saison flavored with elderflower. Looking forward to cracking into both of those.
Saturday night around dinnertime, we realized we had to cook something to bring to my mother-in-law's house tomorrow, so we decided to head to the newly-opened Brooklyn Whole Foods, which has a rooftop bar/cafe, and kill two birds with one stone. (Yes, we know. We went to the grocery store on Saturday night. We're old and lame.) One of the beers on the chalkboard was Great South Bay's Lethal Cupcake. With a name like that I had to ask about it, and it was described as an imperial chocolate porter. When I (naturally) ordered one, the bartender asked if I wanted whipped cream on it. I thought maybe she was joking, but she pointed to a guy down the bar who was drinking one that way, so I figured why not? Well, it turns out that Lethal Cupcake topped with whipped cream is like drinking a dark chocolate cupcake that, at 9% ABV, will get you drunk. In the words of a great fictional teenager, if you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.
