The Imperial Stout from Sweetwater Brewing Company is available on tap at
>select Atlanta Area bars. It won't be bottled, so get it while you can. This
>is the list of the locations offering you the Happy Ending.
I hope it's better than their Exodus Porter. That porter might have made it as a passable ale, but it sucked as a porter. Much too thin on mouth feel and taste.
Penelope
ObPedantry: Many porters *are* ales. And there's a whole substyle of porters that are not robust. Sometimes a (so-called) brown porter can hit the spot.
...but not this one.
Penelope
Umm, actually I'm betting it is.
Considering every beer of theirs I've ever seen or tried have been ales, I wouldn't at all be surprised. Outside of some "Baltic" porters and the odd East Coast porter, I don't know of any that are lagers.
It's *supposed* to be a medium bodied porter.
Penelope, with a rich, velvety mouth feel, no less.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think you may just not like that beer:
Awards * 2002 Gold Medal - World Beer Cup * 2002 Gold Medal - Great American Beer Festival * Silver Medal winner at the 2002 World Beer Cup * Silver Medal winner at the 2000 Great American Beer Festival -- Brown Porter * Originally crafted as the symposium beer for the 1998 National Craft-Brewers Conference
Craft-Brewers Conference
wonder if it's available up here in VA. ALthough.. I'd rather go to Dominion for food and beer than Sweetwater.
You would have loved the Okocim and Zywiec Porters.
This is Sweetwater Brewing Company in Atlanta we are talking about, not Sweetwater Tavern and Brewery.
Oh, quit rubbing it in that you can get beers that good and I can't!
Penelope
Ale is not a style of beer. It's a broad category the incorporates most porters, stouts, Trappist beers, pale ales, India pale ales, Belgian golden ales, Kölsch, Düsseldorfer alt, hefeweizen and others. "Ale" simply refers to a beer that's feremented at warmer temperatures and without (in all but a few cases) a period of cold conditioning and with ale yeasts (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), in contrast to lager beers, which are feremented at cold temperatures, have a medium to long cold conditioning period, and are brewed with lager yeasts (S. uvarum). With occasional exceptions, porters are brewed as ales.
I wonder if you're equating "ale" with "pale ale," which is a distinct style and, yes, tastes and looks nothing like porter.
-Steve
I didn't know I was rubbing anything but...the key word is "would". Both of those fine Baltic Porters are no longer exported to the US.
Best regards, Bill
Yes, and if you take another step or so back, they're all beers. Yet another step or two and they're in the same category as wine. Keep going and soon the beer and wine are lumped in with liquor. However, if you stop at the beer store and wander around in back, you won't see labels like "Grant's Perfect Ale" or "Bison Brewery Chocolate Ale. You would be more likely to see "Funky Monk Ale" or "99 Shilling Scotch Ale".
When, as I mentioned in my last post, you get out of beer geekery, and you purchase a beer that purports to be a medium-bodied porter, there are certain expectations for what's in the bottle, and one of those is that it doesn't taste like that which would be sold with "ale" on the label. Sweetwater Exodus Porter doesn't meet those expectations. You remember Exodus Porter, the one that started this sub-thread? If it had been labeled as an ale or brown ale instead of a porter, it would get a good report from me.
No, punkin, I'm not.
Penelope
Yes. And that's totally irrelevant. If you say that something would be better labeled as something else, that something else has to have enough specific meaning to be useful. Ale is not a style, it's a category, and labeling a beer as such is going to tell you next to nothing about it. It is about as absurd as labeling everything "alcohol." Yes, that's correct, but what kind?
I have no idea what you're getting at there. But, let's say a certain beer is named just "Brewery X Ale." Usually, somewhere else on the label, they'll spell out with more specificity which style they envision the beer to be in.
Differentiating between different styles of ale is hardly geekery, any more than identifying the difference between rye, whole wheat and white bread is baked goods geekery.
But, to keep pounding the point, "ale" is so generic as to be meaningless. Not to mention, the porter is an ale.
Going back to the bread example, if you bought rye bread that tasted much more like French bread, would you suggest that it would be better labeled "bread"? No dispute that it shouldn't be labeled "rye bread" (or "porter," as the case may be), but it doesn't help the situtation to go to just about the broadest term possible. You instead find something that is at the same level of specificity as "rye bread" but describes it better.
-Steve
but if you take another step back, they're all colored flavored water. What's your point?
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