While Operation Cheddar was predicated on acquiring beer from the Holy Triumvirate of Vermont Brewers (Hill Farmstead, The Alchemist, and Lawson’s Finest Liquids), I was also pleased to pick up a few random bottles from Vermont breweries that I’d never heard of. This one is from Foley Brothers, a small family business consisting of an Inn, a winery, and most recently, a brewery. The brewery is less than a year old, but they seem to be churning out some solid stuff. Not Hill Farmstead level hyped stuff, but this brown ale brewed with VT grown hops and maple syrup sounded pretty tasty, so I took a flyer on a bottle at the Warren Store:
Foley Brothers Native Brown Ale – Pours a clear brown color with a solid three fingers of fluffy tan head and plenty of lacing. Smells of your typical toasty brown malts, with a sweet, almost fruity kick, presumably from the maple syrup. The taste has that same sweet maple syrup kick to it, which sorta puts the brakes on your typical brown malts, though they still peek out for some toasty fun in the middle and finish. Mouthfeel is highly carbonated, medium bodied, with some richness up front yielding to dryness in the middle and finish. Overall, this is a very good Brown Ale, a style I’m not normally really big on, but this gives it a nice twist. B+
Beer Nerd Details: 7.2% ABV bottled (22 oz. bomber). Drank out of an Alchemist pint glass on 8/25/13.
I’d certainly be curious to try more from these fellas. Their Redbeards Ale, while not garnering much the way of ratings, certainly sounds interesting (a hoppy strong red ale)…
It’s funny. Your ratings end up relatively high for the same reason I rarely outright dislike a beer. We’re good enough at picking beers out that we just don’t grab terrible beers. Even random ones end up being at least decent because there’s enough resources out there now to avoid awful beers.
Yeah, it’s pretty easy to get to B+ level in my book, and that’s my most frequent rating by far. In truth, a lot are probably in the B or B- realm, but I do genuinely enjoy them so I slot them in at B+. You really have to screw something up to go below a C, and something has to be epicly wrong to score an F.
I like to think that to move up to an A-, it takes more than is implied by the single uptick, but that’s my second most frequent rating. I’m definitely more picky about A and probably far too stingy on the A+.
And these days, I’m not as slavish about writing up every beer I drink, and who wants to write about mediocre beers?
Oh look, I forgot I wrote this, heh:
http://beer.kaedrin.com/2012/03/the-grading-system.html