Good evening, everyone. I’m afraid this Beer Barrel will be even more self-indulgent than usual, and no, I’ve never engaged in any self-deception about just how high that bar is. You see, yesterday was my thirtieth birthday, and I decided my gift to myself would be to drink whatever the hell I wanted and then write about it. So here’s what you get: Capsule reviews of every beer I drank over my birthday weekend, sorted by where and when I drank them. We apologize for the inconvenience, and swear to God we’ll have a real beer review next week.

JANUARY 8, BANGER’S SAUSAGE HOUSE AND BEER GARDEN

Sierra Nevada Hellraiser Chocolate Chili Imperial Stout (Chico, CA): Delivers some real chili heat, which is great for me. Very little chocolate, though, and the underlying imperial stout comes off as pretty unremarkable. I’m always probably inordinately tough on a beer like this, but it’s not going to be everything you hope for, no matter what part of the description attracts you to it.

Collective Petite Golden Sour (Fort Worth, TX): Whoa. This is tart as hell. Lots of grapefruit, lots of sour orange. I love it. I’ve never had anything from this brewery in my entire life, but if they want to introduce themselves with this sort of over-the-top sour ale, I’m pleased as hell to meet them.

Independence Bourbon Barrel Aged Convict Hill Imperial Stout (Austin, TX): You can fuck up a barrel-aged stout. You really, really can. You can age it in fresh barrels for too short a time and make it taste too much like bourbon and not enough like beer. You can age it in barrels you’ve used three times for six months and your beer will taste basically the same after it comes out as it did when it went in. You can put it into barrels you haven’t properly sanitized and make it taste like nothing but bandaids. Independence didn’t do any of these things. Instead, they brewed a good strong stout, put it into barrels for a reasonable amount of time, and kegged the smoothest fuckin’ beer you’ll ever taste. This one got the make it snow’s mom seal of approval (once you stop capitalizing names, you basically can’t ever start again), and my mom doesn’t even like beer.

Deep Ellum Barrel Aged Oak Cliff Coffee Brown Ale (Dallas, TX): It’s only fair to say up front that I’ve got some minor beef with Deep Ellum Brewing that undoubtedly affects my overall perception of their product. (Skip to the first bolded text if you don’t want to read any preachy shit.) They produce a pretty good blond ale that they label Dallas Blonde, which is fine, except they went ahead and slapped the words “Goes down easy” on some of the label’s peripheral space. This makes me real uneasy. Call me a squishy liberal, call me a social justice warrior, but trading on the stereotype of any particular group as “easy” strikes me as especially dangerous while the blurring of lines on sexual consent is still as commonplace as it is in this country today. I’m not boycotting or anything. I’m just disappointed. Having said all that, the standard Oak Cliff Coffee Brown Ale is one of my favorite coffee beers, especially on tap. (In cans it seems to lose a certain richness.) The barrel-aged version was… well. I’d had three beers at this point. Maybe I wasn’t getting all the nuances. But the truth is I wasn’t real pleased either with the barrel influence (which seemed fairly minimal) or with the way the coffee presented, more herbal than the rich, deep coffee flavor of the original beer.

JANUARY 8, CRAFT PRIDE

(512) Maple Pecan Porter (Austin, TX): (512) Pecan Porter, if you’re lucky enough to find yourself in one of the few cities that gets it, is just about the best porter you’ll ever have. I was lucky enough to find myself at Craft Pride on an evening where they had a cask of this fantastic beer refermented with maple syrup. Beautiful.

8th Wonder Dream Shake (Houston, TX): Sometimes you just want to make a really good and really strong stout, and you don’t want it bound by stylistic rules and you don’t want it adulterated by introduced flavors. If that’s what you want, and you make this exact beer within those constraints, you deserve commendation. Every time I drink an 8th Wonder beer (which isn’t often because they don’t get distributed to Austin that much) I’m starstruck—connotatively, this is not the word, but you know—by how perfectly brewed it is.

8th Wonder Premium Goods (Houston, TX): Belgian-style beers are not my jam. I respect the tradition. I love a lot of Belgian beers. I drank a Westvleteren 12 right after the last final exam of my law school career, and it’s still one of the ten or so best beers I’ve ever had. Still, though: Maybe it’s the overspiced finishes. Maybe it’s the fruity mid-taste. I like these beers. I think I underrate them, though. They’re not built for someone like me, and that’s okay. However: I’m even tougher on American-brewed Belgian-style beers, many of which, I’m afraid, come off as cash-ins on the sterling reputation of real Belgian beer. My country has done this with the beers of a lot of other countries too; we’ve ruined German pilsner, and Czech pilsner, and German bock, and Irish lager. Point is: Premium Goods is an incredibly faithful representation of Belgian brewing, delivering a vast array of delicate flavors, from apple to banana to clove to hops to warm bread to cool clean candi sugar.

JANUARY 8, HOME

Goose Island Bourbon County Barleywine (Chicago, IL): I was mad when Goose Island sold out to Anheuser-Busch. And then I waited, and watched, and not only did Goose Island keep brewing the same stuff they had before, they expanded their lineup. Nothing expanded more than the Bourbon County line, their historically groundbreaking series of barrel-aged beers. They dropped the Bourbon County Barleywine, the Proprietor’s Stout, the Bramble Rye… the list went on and on and on. The options for we beer geeks got bigger and the supply got wider. I talked to Goose Island brewmaster Greg Hall at Hopfields about the takeover. He told me the infusion of money from Anheuser Busch had given him even more room to experiment. I believed him. Why shouldn’t I have? But. Then. Anheuser Busch decided to stop selling the Bourbon County series in four-packs, with the practical effect that the price per ounce of this series went way the hell up. And I didn’t buy one bottle this year. However: I did have a single bottle of Goose Island Bourbon County Barleywine left over, and I broke it open at the first moment of my thirtieth birthday. It was great.

JANUARY 9, NXWN BREWING COMPANY

NXNW Sanguine Dare (Austin, TX): A really good gose-style ale brewed with some blood orange. I’ve got something in the hopper about the lighter sour beers of Central Europe; the Berliner weisse, gose, Lichtenhainer, Grodziskie. It’ll probably come sometime in the summer. For now: If you’re the type to take fruit juice in the morning, this is probably extremely your shit.

JANUARY 9, HOME

Dark Horse BourbRum Barrel Aged Plead The 5th (Marshall, MI): For my twenty-fifth birthday, I got a trip to Chicago. There I discovered, at the Twisted Spoke, my new favorite beer, and a beer that remained my favorite probably longer than any other. This was Bourbon Barrel Aged Plead The 5th, a bourbon-tinged imperial stout so utterly delicious that I couldn’t imagine anything better until I got a glass of Founders Canadian Breakfast Stout four years later. BourbRum was an additional twist on that; a version of Plead The 5th aged in whiskey and rum barrels and blended together. Unfortunately, I traded for a bottle of it over a year ago and waited until now to drink it, and… well, shit. It’s infected. It was shipped containing some kind of microbes that are making it taste bad. Specifically,… lady snow: THEY’RE MAKING IT TASTE LIKE POTATO CHIPS. me: Exactly right. And that’s awful. But I still drank the whole thing, and then decided I had to drink the regular Bourbon Barrel Aged Plead The 5th to compare it against.

Dark Horse Bourbon Barrel Aged Plead The 5th (Marshall, MI): Extremely sad about this. Opened it up to make sure that the rest were okay, and they’re probably not. Same off flavors as the BourbRum version, and I’ve still got two bottles of this. Guys, protip: If you get a bunch of bottles of your favorite beer from afar someday, arrange to share them with your friends immediately. Do not wait for them to go bad.

Breckenridge 25th Anniversary Imperial Vanilla Porter Aged In Rum Barrels (Breckenridge, CO): Finally found my birthday winner. This was big on the vanilla, small on the rum, but it was a goddamned delicious glass.

JANUARY 10, HOME

Sierra Nevada Beer Camp Tropical IPA (Chico, CA): Goddamn this is hoppy. I didn’t want to get a whole six-pack. And if I’m honest, I still don’t. This beer fucking explodes with hop flavor, and if you like IPAs, and you’re the adventurous type, and you’re seeing this beer show up in your grocery store, you should probably get some. You’ll probably like it. But man, there are just so many IPAs. This really isn’t better than Racer 5, or Sculpin, or Modus Hoperandi, or Stash, or… Stop that. It’s an $8.50 or so sixer. It’s worth it.

Victory Java Cask: Hallelujah. Holy shit, Pass the Tylenol. This beer is fucking insane, a 14.3% ABV monstrosity that dials up both the coffee and the bourbon to such levels as invite an independent investigator. That independent investigator is me, and let me tell you: This shit’s great for your tongue.

Lagunitas Sucks Brown Shugga Substitute Ale (Petaluma, CA): This is the last thing I drank on the weekend of my birthday. I drank several. I drank all of them. I’m still drinking one right now. It’s a near-perfect IPA and essentially the apotheosis of the Perfectly Typical Lagunitas IPA, the thing that tastes like most of the things Lagunitas makes and yet so, so much better. It’s a great way to finish the weekend.

make it snow is an alot of beer who is drunk tonight and watching Making a Murderer and extremely unhappy about having to work tomorrow.