New Blog Feature – Quick Beer Reviews

This is the first in what may become a regular feature here on the blog. I fancy myself as a bit of a beer connoisseur. Well connoisseur may be overstating the facts a bit. I just like good beer, I’m not a snob about it, or know much about beers, but I do appreciate good ones.

I recently was interested in joining a monthly beer club but then realized it’s a pretty simple task to create your own. In this era of “do it yourself” I decided to come up with my own method. Just visit a good local beverage house that carries a wide array of your not so average spirits and pick up a few I’ve never had before once a month. It’s a pretty simple concept actually. Also, this way I can control the varietals to my liking as well as save a little cash.

In the process of researching beer clubs I did come across the beer of the month club from Clubs of America which seemed like a pretty good one and is even the club selected by the Diggnation guys. So it should be a decent choice if you want to join one.

So now that you have the history behind my motivation, it’s time to get on with the first review.

In this first month of my newly created club I ventured out to my second favorite store to visit…Bevmo (Fry’s Electronics is my first). I excitedly began picking out my first batch of beers for the month. I decided that I needed to create some sort of guideline to help me determine which beers I would be selecting. In the case of Bevmo, they list the scores of their Bevmo Beer Amabassadors rating system on the beers in the store. So the first guideline was that a beer needs to score at least 90 points to qualify. If I run out of Bevmo’s top rated beers then I can move on to Beer Advocate and draw from their top beers list. My second qualification will merely consist of either a novelty factor which could include either a fruit infused beer, fancy label, or other strange criteria that perhaps will trigger the purchase.

Now that I have my beers in hand it’s time to unveil the first entrant. I will try to keep a fairly simple and fun system for these that will resemble the stats on a sports card. Below is the results of the first one.

Beer: Anderson Valley Poleeko Gold Pale Ale (22 ouncer)
Bevmo Rating: 95 Points
Brewery: Anderson Valley Brewing Company . Check out the website which appears to be stuck in the 90s, but I guess that’s pretty futuristic considering their theme is more Greatful Dead circa 70s. They do have some coolness though by having deployed solar powered system.
Cool Brewery Bonus: 18 hole Disc Golf on the premises!
Varietal: Pale Ale (get used to this varietal. It’s my favorite)
Food Pairing: Orville Redenbacher’s Smart Pop Kettle Corn. The sweet yet salty taste created the perfect palette cleansing and trigger to pull another long sip from the bottle.
Description: Right after savoring that first sip the taste left behind was as if I just took a big bite out of a celery stalk. This is a good thing as I like celery. It was a lighter Pale than I’m used to and I found it to be very smooth.
My Score: 3.5 out of 5. I happen to like a bolder taste with my Pales, but that’s not to say this isn’t a good beer. If you’re looking for a lighter taste this is a good choice.