Surprising beer find - New Belgium's Trippel

When it comes to beer, I swear by Beck's Pilsner and Stella Artois (at the moment). When it came time to replenish my stock last week, I got that "it's-time-for-a-change" feeling. A little bit of change to coincide with the change of season... not unlike an untimely rash to match unwashed bargain bin clothes.

I found myself gravitating to offerings from New Belgium at my local liquor store. Maybe it's the fancy bottle artwork which makes you think their art department has a huge surplus of red orange crayons. But I digress...

Choices choices. Fat Tire? Been there done that. No matter what anyone says it still tastes like soil. Good soil with nuts and malt. Soil that you would want to drink. Tickles my brain at the prospect of twisting the saying "Eat my dust" to "Drink my dirt". But I digress again...

In the end, I took a 6 bottle pack of New Belgium's Trippel. I have tried a triple ale so why not. To the uniniated, a trippel is named for a strongest ale in their lineup. This beer kicks in at 7.8% ABV (alcohol by volume). That is almost 50% more that your typical beer. A good bang for your buck alcohol-wise. (or -vise, whatever).

The taste is surprisingly good. Then again I'm a trippel first-time. For all I know, this might be mediocre for Belgium-style trippels. Surprised at the amount of carbonation. This beer fizzes more than it foams. This gives it a fresh and crispy note. Drank it straight from the bottle so no comment on the color. I got vanilla-like hit for its body. The finish is long with a hoppy sort of aftertaste which I like. Interestingly enough, the flavor changes the warmer it gets. Light and crisp initial punch gave way to a more caramel-like smoothness as it warmed. There is another flavor there that I want to describe but have no comparable food experience yet to describe it. The beer is probably too complex to describe in the 3-bottle I've had so far. I think this beer would go well with strong cheese. Something with a pungent flavor to cut through the beer's complexity.

Overall a pretty good beer for insightful conversations. Don't chug it. Savor it.

Back again

It's been months since I last posted. I never even followed-up my "best of the 90's albums" post. I can list a couple of reasons for the neglect:

1. I tore the ACL on my left knee and had surgery to reconstruct it. I spent 2 months on crutches and 6 months under physical therapy. This ended any marathon plans for 2008. This is not really a good reason for not being able to blog. Most people will use this idle time to blog but then again, I am not like most people.
   
2. We were planning for a wedding. This happened last dec. 23. Wedding planning is like training for marathan with the end result result mostly in the hands of other people.
   
3. Nothing worthwhile to blog about. I'm not a microblogger or have feelings of "angst" to push me to blog.
   

Neglecting my blogging does give me enough material at hand to successively post entries (not that I'm really going to do it).

I'm obviously rationalizing my neglect in an effort to exorcise my i-didn't-do-it-so-i-feel-weird feelings. Blogging is not a strong compulsion (yet) but it has enough gravity to be associated with "neglect".

We'll see if this post gets a follow-up. Maybe being newly married will change my blogging habits.