Beers of 2024

 1.  Bizarre Brewing - The Flood

Come on down to the Flood.  You can buy some mud, mud, mud, mud.

I love pilgrimages, and proper homages.  The Flood is a London Brown Ale, not to be confused with a British Brown Ale.  They are different.  I promise.  But first, a story.

Learning about the near-history of beer will certainly take you three places: Belgium, Germany, and England.  Belgium brought the monastic dedication, Germany brought the Teutonic fervor, and England brought the motherfucking ruckus.  No one event might crystallize this better than the London Beer Flood of 1814:

In 1810 the brewery, Meux and Company, had had a 22 foot high wooden fermentation tank installed on the premises. Held together with massive iron rings, this huge vat held the equivalent of over 3,500 barrels of brown porter ale, a beer not unlike stout. This was St Giles Rookery, a densely populated London slum of cheap housing and tenements inhabited by the poor, the destitute, prostitutes and criminals.

The flood reached George Street and New Street within minutes, swamping them with a tide of alcohol. The 15 foot high wave of beer and debris inundated the basements of two houses, causing them to collapse. In one of the houses, Mary Banfield and her daughter Hannah were taking tea when the flood hit; both were killed.

In the basement of the other house, an Irish wake was being held for a 2 year old boy who had died the previous day. The four mourners were all killed. The wave also took out the wall of the Tavistock Arms pub, trapping the teenage barmaid Eleanor Cooper in the rubble. In all, eight people were killed.  

 Oof.  

What is a Brown Porter?  Porters were beers enjoyed by the eponymous dock workers.  They were always dark and malty-sweet, and notably a brown porter is not a stout porter, it fell into that beautiful daily-drinker status of 2.8 - 3.8% abv.  

Which bring us to The Flood, from Bizarre. Squirreled away in the former Urban Family space up in Magnolia, they have quietly built a portfolio of excellent English and German inspired ales and lagers.  They are brewing like homebrewers.  They are playing free.  And it seems like with these lighter english ales, they don't miss.  Not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Taking advantage of smaller scale batches with imported malts, natural carbonation, cask conditioning and drafting from a beer engine, they love this shit.  And so do I.

The Flood is our nod to the Brown Porters of London and an homage to the folks that perished in the Great Porter Flood of 1814.  Our version is brewed with English Maris Otter Malt, Flaked Barley and Rye, a selection of Caramel and chocolate Malts, and a Touch of Beechwood Smoked Malt.  The Flood was hopped exclusively with East Kent Goldings, then allowed to ferment and naturally carbonate with our house Pub ale yeast.  

Wow, inject it into my veins.  This reads like a love letter to the Real nerds of beer.  You know who you are.  Notably, the beechwood is that little flair that makes Bizarre... bizarre.  It's a risk that pays off.  Well fucking did, lads.

Alright, that was like nine paragraphs of bullshit. This is the beer.

Deep chestnut hue, just under 22 SRM, so deeply dark but not at that porter level.  The head is deeply tan and prominent, which reminds me of roasted barley.  I love tight natural carbonation so much. 

Aroma is a bouquet of molasses sweetness, breadcrust, touch of woody tobacco, and milk chocolate.  The beechwood smoked malt is really unique here.  Dry, smoky flavors can emanate from chocolate and roasted malt, but the "secret ingredient" effect of using perhaps 1-2% a mild smoked malt to add malt intensity is a theme I've visited across styles this year.  Bierstadt Lagerhaus does it for their Helles, and it's sublime.  Do I pick up any smoke?  Suggestion is a powerful drug, the best way I could describe the aroma is when you cook smores on a wet fire, a little of that campfire transfers into the graham cracker and marshmallow.  

This beer is very smooth drinking, slightly sweet, medium bodied for an English ale.  Yes, there is a touch of smoky flavor, like slow cooked pork with a little liquid smoke.  The flavor is true to the aroma notes, with debittered molasses and toffee sweetness immediately greeting the drinker.  If it were that simple, I wouldn't be writing about this beer, because that describes about 100 dark lagers and ales I had this year. What I love about this beer is that it provides a premium experience in a small package.  The depth of coffee, chocolate, and ryebread crust character on top of the sweet toffee and malt is exquisite.  

If it couldn't be a dark lager, I'm glad it was you, London Brown Porter.  

 2.  North Park Beer Co - TDH Hop Fu!

Imagine the audacity to label your can of IPA with shimmering gold.  It's the kind of thing you expect from an ascendant homebrewer with a little success gone to their head to do.  The Homebrew-to-Pro pipeline is less of a Minor to Major League Baseball system, more of a Celebrity-to-National Politician.  Because only a celebrity has the audacity to say "Hey, a lot of people like me, I have millions of Instagram followers and a popular brand association... maybe I should make policy for 330M Americans."  Kelsey McNair, founder of North Park Beer Co is an exception to the rule, and has the bona fides to back up that gold can.  

Hop Fu! is a beer that has ascended from being the most winning homebrew in the state of CA. Though, to be honest, this is a volume game, I don't know a single homebrewer who has ever put their beer into more than a few competitions.  And in 2022, he , as a special batch locked in the prestigious GABF Gold in 2023.  I got really, really lucky this year, with Function PDX opening up a North Park takeover, and having the wherewithal to join their Basement Club that month.  

In March of 2024, I got my hands on the gold label, gold-winning, triple dry-hopped edition of Hop Fu! through Function. In his words:

Double is good but Triple is better so without further ado, we proudly present to you "TDH Hop-Fu!-Gold Edition" Triple Dry Hopped West Coast India Pale Ale hopped with a ridiculous amount of Chinook, Strata, Strata CGX, Amarillo, Citra, Citra Cryo, Citra Incognito, Mosaic, Mosaic Cryo and Simcoe. Sticky, dank, crisp and clean with a magnificently dry finish, but wait there's more...mouth watering tasting notes of grape Jolly Ranchers, strawberry Gushers, zesty lemon-lime, mega sinensis orange and delightful piney resin give a not so subtle chop to your mouth hole. Prepare for battle and to be entertained because "Hop-Fu" level expert is on full display. 

My knee-jerk reaction to this description is "Jesus, you hop-slut!" And while K.I.S.S. is great advice for any brewer when it comes to recipe design, Kelcie has sparred with this hop bill for half a decade and can surely justify how every component contributes to the final product.  And now for my drunken check-ins:

Mar 13 

Oh shit that hop resin hits immediately. This is so damn good. Pink grapefruit, pine and sticky clean ganja. West coast was never not sexy, but this is a goddamn succubus.

 April 7 

So damn good. Grapefruit, piney, a little more dank as it ages. Pithy and bright. Very tasty.

 April 20

 You don't know how lucky you are to be drinking this.  The pungent ganja aroma has kept in the month I've had it, all of the good hop saturation with none of the bad, polyphenol or astringency.  

 

3.  Suarez Family Brewing - Poet's Walk

If you told me a Suarez beer made it into my top 3, I'd say "no shit."  Then when you gently informed me not to freak out, but it wasn't a lager, it wasn't even a farmhouse - err - Country Ale, I'd have questions.  Like... why didn't I buy more Suarez lagers this year?  Oh, rest assured, darling, you did.  But lace up, and let us embark on the Poet's Walk.

This beer made me fall back in love with Barleywine.  When and why did I fall out of love with it?  I don't know.  But I remember the first time I had a J.W. Lees Harvest Ale, over in London, and it blew me away.  I think I just love English barleywine so much more than the Colonial swill.  Unless... Danny Suarez is on the brew deck, making his best stab at the style.

Okay, where to begin.  Let's set the stage.  It's early November, you've invited some of your city friends to come brew a way-too-authentic Svetle Lezak 11.5, share some beers, go get some sushi, more beers, warm pool soak beside the Columbia river, few more bottles, and then it's 1AM, you're never finding a ride home, and you say "fuck it, what's next", and out comes this bottle. How is it possible for a 10% ABV beer to be sobering at that stage?  I don't know, but this beer jolted me out of my hedonic stupor and made me realize I was drinking something very special.  So find your better senses and take some good goddamned notes!

The notes: 

Sweet Jesus, this is one of best beers I've had all year. It's everything beautiful about the deep English malt magic. Candied walnut, molasses cookies, vanilla,

I'll be honest, we're lucky to have gotten that much of the transmission before it cut off.  So let's see what Danny and crew had to say about it:

We brewed this high gravity English-style barleywine in late 2020 and lagered it in stainless steel tanks until spring of 2021 before bottling. We then “bottle aged” this batch for 2.5 years until the beer showed enough aged flavor and softened edges. We present you with an intensely malty and contemplative beer that exhibits strong nougat character, date sugar, candied walnut, roasted chestnut, barley malt syrup, dark caramel, and robust black tea. Enjoy this strong beer as a cold weather nightcap. 

 See that highlighted portion?  I did the right thing.  

So why did this shock me out of my apparent crestfallen state against Barleywine writ large?  It was the appropriateness of delivering the payload.  All these pastry stouts and Bwines just became whales and barrel fodder for Instagram over the last 4-5 years, it felt like.  With COVID, my opportunities to enjoy a beer over 8% solo were limited, as did my awareness of how damaging ethanol, not beer, was for ones longevity.  My ethos became: If you have the gall to use up 3 drinks worth of my beer currency in one bottle, a full 42g of ethanol by weight, you had better damn well be delivering more than a 300% return on my investment.  It's why so many TIPAs and big stouts fail this