The San Antonio Six

On my recent trip down to San Antonio, I found ample time to drink and review some very interesting beers. Jenny, Aaron, and I sat down with six such bottles and unleashed our respective palates on the sextet of brews.

The first beer of the night was Baltika Wheat Ale (No.8). Brewed by Baltika Brewery in St.Petersberg, Russia, this cloudy dark gold ale pours with a persistent white head which clings to side of glass. Baltika Wheat Ale is an unfiltered brew with a notable Belgian nose and flavor profile. It has a very refreshing, wheat flavor, after the wheat flavor goes away there is a taste of bananas and spice. At 5% abv, it’s a highly repeatable choice. We all liked it quite a bit and would drink more.

The next beer was Mississippi Mud, a New York-brewed black & tan that, where its mixed together in one bottle, ends up more like a brown ale. Mississippi Mud comes in a one quart jug, similar in design to a moonshine jug and there’s an alligator on the label. It claims to be a “Famous Slow-Brewed Black & Tan using Classic Porter and Continental Pilsner”. On opening the twist-off wide mouth cap and pouring the reddish-brown beer, there was a thin light tan head with minimal lacing. The beer is the color of watered down molasses. It tastes hoppier than one would expect on the attack, but the flavor soon mellows to the tastes of leather, sugar, dusty paste, and a sour backend. We compared it to drinking an old leather-bound book. At 5% abv, it’s a passable session beer. It was at my first job, as stock boy at Front Street Market in Richmond, Maine, was where I first saw this ubiquitous jug. Knowing nothing of beer at the time, I figured it to be some sort of chocolate drink. I would have been sorely disappointed.

The third beer was Baltika Porter (No.7), also by Baltika Brewery. This 7% abv porter pours very dark, so dark that you cannot see through it, with a light tan head. Taste is very molassesey, with sweet and bitter notes of dark bread, a very delicious and straightforward porter. It has little bubbles; just enough for a tingle after you swallow it. No coffee or soy sauce notes were present; tastes that ruins many porters. There is not much of a taste of hops in this porter, and I welcome that. Too many times, brewery’s will try and improve on the porter by adding things that don’t belong. This was the favorite of the night.

For our fourth bottle of the night, we cracked open the self-aggrandizing Old Growler Special Porter, Supreme Champion of Great Britain. Produced by the Nethergate brewery, this 5.5% abv porter claims to follow a recipe from 1750 and had an adorable bulldog on the label and cap. This beer pours deep dark brown, about the color of black coffee, with a quickly fading tan head. Not really any nose to speak of, a little sweetness maybe, but nothing else. Old Growler has a lot going on in the flavor, black coffee, sweetness, and hops up front gives this impression that this is intended as an “improved” porter. As is warms, the taste gets a lot worse. Tastes like bad breath, and gives you bad breath though there is a slight floral sweetness, like bad breath disguised by flowers. Old Growler has an astringent finish that also gets worse as it warms and becomes more medicinal, coppery, and bitter. The bitterness really sticks around, kind of an herbal medicinal bitterness. We all found it difficult to drink a lot of this beer and we equated it to the bulldog on the label lapping up coffee and beer, eating a handful of roses, and then tenaciously licking your nose and mouth. On any other day, this would have been the worst of the evening, but we weren’t that lucky this day.

The dubious prestige of worst beer of the night goes, hands down, to Breckenridge Brewery’s Remarkable Vanilla Porter. A paltry 4.7%abv would undoubtedly make this porter “Partakable” as the label claims, however, I’d beg to differ. This beer is brewed with real vanilla beans, though we had a dickens of a time trying to find that flavor anywhere. It pours the color of RC Cola with similar fizziness and lack of head. The smell… oh God the smell... it smells like a fart… not a vanilla one mind you, it smells cheesy…like a cheesy fart. The beer pours with a film on top. It tastes bad... really gross… sour, barely a ghost of vanilla hiding behind the cheese… just terrible. The mouthfeel is sticky, soapy, and filled with all kinds of non-porter flavors. A written account barely does this beer justice, so I am including the unedited audio review here.

The final beer of the night was Shiner Smokehaus, made by the Shiner Brewery out of the San Antonio area. Smokehaus is a Helles-style mesquite smoked beer. This amber, almost orange, beer pours with a foamy bright white head that dissipates quickly, but keeps a champagne-like effervescence of tiny bubbles. It. smells very smoky, like a good barbeque. Smokehaus, unsurprisingly, tastes smoky, clean, refreshing, though not overpoweringly smoky, its not trying to cover anything up. At 4.89% abv, you would think that a six-pack of these would go down pretty quickly, but I don’t know that I could drink more than one in a row as the smoke flavor does loose its glamour by the end of the bottle. Still, we had just about every variety that Shiner makes while down in San Antonio, and this was, by far, the most unique, and my favorite of their offerings.

These six beers had very little in common, but it was a testament to the joy, and sadness, one can draw from randomly picking beers based solely on their labels. Drink well!