Feature Beer Friday! - Karbach Weisse Versa Wheat

So it's only been a few weeks since our last feature from Karbach Brewing, but we are getting into Spring time and that means it's about to be time for some more season appropriate beers!  Karbach is of course out of Houston, and the Weisse Versa Wheat is one of their year-round flagship releases.

The Weisse Versa Wheat is a hybrid wheat beer, their motto for the brew being "Both. At The Same Time." because it's a combination of a German hefewiezen and a Belgian white ale.  Both styles are wheat-based of course, but the German beer style gets its distinct flavors from the yeast strain primarily and the Belgian style uses a lot of spices such as coriander and orange peel.    The WeisseVersa Wheat combines the two and uses the Belgian spices with the German yeast strain.  The goal being to pack as much flavor and intrigue as possible into a pretty standard beer style.  Let's see how they did...

Reviewers: Eric Ducote (BR Beer Scene), Jay Ducote (Bite And Booze), Jeremy Spikes and James Lawson  (Whiskeybomb.com).

Serving: 12 oz. blue & yellow can.

Appearance: Hazy orange, with a smallish head... I love the color though.

Aroma: Jay was picking up all sorts of fruits, he wrote down, "grapefruit, banana, tangerine, satsuma."  The banana I got for sure, but the spices are there as well.  

Taste: Same basic flavor profile as the aroma... lots of fruit flavors with a little spice.  Banana is the dominant fruit flavor, which is both expected and delicious.

Mouthfeel: Easy drinking, Jay said it seems like there should be pulp due to the all the fruit flavors. 

Overall: This was a winner amongst the four of us, with James being the low score but still a respectable 64, and Jay coming in high with an 84. In my opinion this is an excellent example of an easy drinking warm weather wheat beer.  Very well done.


Overall Rating: 75
My Rating: 76

Feature Beer Friday! - Karbach Rodeo Clown DIPA

Time for only our second Feature Beer Friday! trip to Texas, where we have previously seen Shiner Bock put up a respectable 60.67 overall score.  Unlike Shiner, this feature beer from Karbach Brewing is not commercially available in Louisiana.  Karbach is a relatively new brewery in the Houston area located near 290 and 610 fairly close to the old Saint Arnold brewery.  Despite their relative youth, they have blown up in the region and have quickly moved to canning their normal releases and packaging their seasonal and special releases in 22 oz. bombers.

The featured beer is one of their year-round favorites, the Rodeo Clown Double IPA.  It's available throughout the Houston area in 4-packs of cans, so next time you're in Spec's or even the grocery stores over there, you'll be able to find some.  As stated it's a Double IPA in style, coming in at 9.5% alcohol and 85 IBU.  

Reviewers: Eric Ducote (BR Beer Scene), Jay Ducote (Bite And Booze), James Lawson  (Whiskeybomb.com), and Charles (BigMouthPodcast.com).

Serving: 12 oz. red & blue can.   

Appearance: Caramel, a little on the dark side for the style. 
 
Aroma: Rich, hoppy but not overbearing, Jay picked out some molasses as well.  

Taste: I thought the taste was a little muted on the hops compared to the aroma, but still very nice.  Jay agreed as far as the hops go, but we both gave high scores for a well balanced taste. 

Mouthfeel: Creamy, no bad aftertaste.
 
Overall: Karbach impressed us all with this DIPA, giving us a very well balanced and tasty brew.  James, who isn't an IPA fan, thought it was a "tastier beer than it is hoppy" and I wrote that it was an excellent local-ish Double IPA. 

 
Overall Rating: 76.75
My Rating:80

Beer Travels: O'Bannon's Taphouse - College Station, TX

Written by special guest writer Dustin Davis, thanks Dustin for your contribution!

A couple of weeks ago I hit the road to follow the LSU Tigers to College Station for their matchup with the Texas A&M Aggies.  Having never been to College Station, I decided to do a little research on the best place for craft beer in the area.  The results were clear.  O’Bannon’s Taphouse (facebook) was the place to go.

I arrived at O’Bannon’s on Friday afternoon and met with owner, Chris Steele, who was nice enough to stick around and let me bug him with some questions.  O’Bannon’s has a great Irish pub look and atmosphere, but it was apparent that the beer selection was far greater than that of your average Irish pub.  With 50 beers on tap and around 80 beers total, there were the Irish pub musts, Guinness, Harp, and Smithwick’s, but what set O’Bannon’s apart was their American craft beer selection, specifically Texas craft beer.

 Chris had a sampler of Texas beers brought over with beers from Rahr & Sons Brewing Co., Live Oak Brewing Co., Karbach Brewing Co., and Saint Arnold Brewing Co.  Some of the highlights of the sampler were the Karbach Rodeo Clown Imperial IPA, Saint Arnold Oktoberfest and Live Oak HefeWeizen.  The Live Oak HefeWeizen is an exceptionally good beer and is currently the 2^nd highest reviewed hefeweizen on BeerAdvocate.

A sign of a bar owner who really cares about a beer is a number of seasonal offerings.  This shows me that I’m drinking fresh beer and attention is paid to beer selection and tap rotation.  This was all evident at O’Bannon’s, with many fall selections, from Oktoberfest beers to pumpkin beers.   I was also impressed when Chris told me they regularly host cask nights, though I was saddened to discover that I would be missing a Saint Arnold Pumpkinator cask night by just a few days.

 After some friendly conversation with some Aggies and a couple more pints of beer it was time to say “Slán go foil” (goodbye for now) to O’Bannon’s Taphouse, with plans in the works for a return in the spring for the LSU vs. Texas A&M baseball series and many football games in the future.

January Resolution Results!

Hey everyone, for those who missed it, my 2012 goal was to walk at least a mile per drink consumed.  You can read all about the rules here, but I wanted to take a quick look at how January went.

 

Total Miles: 127.55

Total Drinks: 118.5

Average Miles: 4.11

Average Drinks: 3.82

Highest Daily Mileage: 9.41 Miles (1/9)

Highest Daily Drink Total: 9.5 Drinks (twice, 1/21 and 1/28)

Lowest Daily Mileage: 1.58 Miles (1/23) and 1.63 (1/24)

Lowest Daily Drink Total: 0 Drinks (5 times)

 

So what does this tell me?  I think the most eye-opening bit is the two lowest days, of 1.58 and 1.63 miles.  Both of these days were weekdays where I spent most of the work day sitting at my computer, then headed home and had things to do where I didn't get a chance to go walking at all.  A simple walk around the block with Abbey could have added about a mile to those totals.  Unfortunately I think this is what a lot of my days looked like in 2011.  The good news is that it's really easy to take that under 2 miles per day and turn it into an average of slightly over 4.  

 

The highest mileage was a day where I walked Abbey in the morning, then walked the full LSU lakes with Mandi, and walked Abbey a short ways again after the BCS championship game (BOO!!) that night.  I didn't quite get to 10, but still, 9.41 miles is a good bit.  

 

The two highest drinking days were Saturdays spent going out.  The first one was Avenue Pub for their Swedish beer tasting, followed by a few drinks at Mama Ford's birthday party.  The only reason this day wasn't higher was that Avenue Pub was only pouring half-pours of all the Swedish beers and they were almost all below 7% abv.  The second 9.5 drink day was a Saturday in Houston where Mandi and I went to the Karbach Brewery then to the Petrol Station for some more beers.  Both of those places serve a lot of high alcohol beers so even though I tried less beers they counted for more drinks.

 

What's the plan for February and beyond?  Basically more of the same... walk more and drink less.  As long as I can keep those miles above the drinks I'll be doing just fine.