Michigan Beer Reviews.....

Headed up Michigan way this past weekend to visit a good college friend of mine. We spent the weekend watching football, drinking beer and pigging out on some good home cooked food. Even got a few hours to brew up some Coffee Porter on Sunday. Tried a few new beers and an old favorite while there. Had some sort of local brew IPA Friday night at dinner, wasn't bad but didn't blow my head off or really have a truly unique taste. My buddies Heffe homebrew that he had on tap was quite nice. A good balanced taste, perfect amount of yeast floating around, a nice malty note up front but not too sweet, good carbonation and a nice mouth feel. A well done brew, hope my first foray into large batch homebrewing/kegging turns out as good.

In anticipation of eating lots of BBQ and watching football on Saturday we picked up some random beers at the local package store. I about fell over when I noticed they had Dogfish Head 120 on sale. Had to pick up a bottle, pretty well priced too at $10.67 per bottle (I paid $10 even at the brewery). Also picked up a sixer of Dogfish Punkin. A nice fall brew, I liked it better than any Oktoberfest I've had this year. I find most Oktoberfest beer to be way too malty for my taste, I usually get excited to buy a 12 pack then get 2 beers in and realize how much I really don't like the style. The Dogfish Punkin had just the right amount of malt sweetness, brown sugar note, a tad of cinnamon spice to it to make it an extremely smooth and drinkable ale. Hides the 7% abv very nicely as well. Better than any other Pumpkin Ale that I have tried, most are way too over the top.

Ended the Saturday evening festivities chowing down on some wonderfully smoked pulled pork, baked beans, corn bread and a wicked Guinness Chocolate cake that someone brought. Wow, good meal, good beer and good friends. Cant' beat that, well except that my buddies fiance decided to cook southern style biscuits and gravy (big fluffy buttermilk biscuits and white sausage gravy) for breakfast the next morning, double wow. The perfect hangover cure! And to think, she grew up in Michigan....

Last thing I got a chance to do before having to hop a plane back to the ATL was help out brew up some more beer. The heffe pretty much got killed at the party Saturday. It was nice to kind of walk through all the steps of brewing a big batch before I give it a go myself. I can't wait to give it a try, just need to do a little inventory and make sure I have a few of the little things to make everything go smoothly!