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…Okay, it’s the first post of the year, but technically the Boy and I had Infinium a couple days before New Years.

It showed up in my Stocking and there was no way I was going to be able to wait for the New Year to drink it!

Especially since I was scheduled to work 12/31/10 at 10pm, till 6:30 am on the first.

That’s right folks, for the fifth or sixth year in a row I worked a New Years Eve over night shift. Freaking “real” jobs. But got to pay the bills.

The Infinium hype has been around for a few months, long enough to get everyone excited at the idea of a collaboration between major craft brewer Sam Adams (www.samueladams.com) and the worlds oldest brewery Weihenstephan (www.weihenstephaner.de).  This collaboration beer was two years in the making and followed the hard and fast Reinheitsgebot; the German Beer Purity Law dating back to 1560 which allows the use of only water, malt, hops & yeast.

The claim was made that this was going to be something new, something exciting, but with Weihenstephan’s thousand years of brewing under these same laws everyone wondered what else could possibly be done just using those four ingredients.

Well, they showed us.  The rumors said champagne like and Infinium appropriately enough began showing up a couple weeks before the New Year in it’s Champagne like bottle and foil wrapping.

From the Webpage:

Flavor: Light and dry with a crisp clean malt character, and delicate fruit and spice notes Color: Pale golden with a sparkling effervescence Original Gravity: 20.5° Plato Alcohol by Vol/Wt: 10.3%ABV – 8.1%ABW Calories/12 oz.: 257 Malt Varieties: Custom blend of two-row malted barley, malted spring white wheat, and malted oats Hop Varieties: Hallertau Mittlefrueh, Spalt Spalter, Tettnang Tettnanger and Hersbrucker Noble Hops Yeast Strain: Samuel Adams ale yeast, Belgian yeast Availability: Limited Release Holiday 2010 First Brewed: 2010

I knew I shouldn’t have let the Boy pour this one.  Typically he is in charge of the pour, but he doesn’t drink wine or champagne.  I on the other hand love champagne and before the diet would have it at least once a week.  The Boy poured with gusto…which of course created a ginormous head!

The nose was tart apples and grapes, and yeasty bread…and butter.

There was one time where a brewer let me taste a batch before the diacetyl had reabsorbed and I still remember the buttery slippery slick feel in my mouth.  This is the first time I consciously noted that in a beer since.  Now I know a lot of people hear Diacetyl and run as far from the beer as they can, but it’s not necessarily a deal breaker for me.

The taste is more of the same, crisp tart fruit flavors, light bready yeast and…butter.  Coupled with champagne carbonation I did like this beer.  I didn’t love it, but I liked it.

Would I drink it again?  Sure.  Would I drop twenty dollars on it? No.

None-the-less it was worth the try to see what deviations on style can be done after a thousand years with the same four ingredients.

-The Boy here. To me it tasted like Sparkling Cider. Couldn’t taste the 10% plus abv at all which was awesome. Very fun celebratory beer but for 20 bones I don’t know. Also, I think this is a good bridge beer to suggest to people that are more wine/champagne drinkers. Give them a glass of Infinium, watch them convince themselves they like beer and are beer drinkers and drop a Hoptimum on them for the next glass and watch their mouth explode!!-

Clown Shoes Brewery (www.clownshoesbeer.com) has perhaps one of the most interesting origin stories.  Last Year Beer Advocates ( www.beeradvocate.com ) Alstrom Brothers collaborated with Dogfish Head Brewing (www.dogfish.com) to hold a naming contest for a Pecan-centric beer they’d brain stormed together. The name that ultimately won was (as you may know) Wrath of Pecant.

…but what about the people who didn’t win? Did they drag their feet and drink their sorrows away in abv filled, malty, rejection? No doubt, some did…but this rejection gave birth to the inspiration that would ultimately lead Gregg Berman to start Clown Shoes Brewery.

Let’s talk about Gregg Berman (co-owner) for a moment. Research into him has taught me a few things. 1. He has a douche-bag obsession as evidence by several douche-man comics on his blog. 2. He’s has alcoholic origins. Gregg comes from a family that owns Berman’s Fine Wines and Spirits (www.bermansfinewines.com) which likely equipped him for the next bit. 3. He’s practical. Opening a brewery is expensive and as the General Manager of Arborway Imports (www.arborwayimports.com/), a fine wine distributor in Massachusetts, Gregg was in a position to distribute the beer if he could figure out how to get his creative brew-visions made in a cost friendly manner.

Thus we come to Mercury Brewing’s (www.mercurybrewing.com) Dan Lipke. Clown Shoes is technically a contract brewery through Mercury Brewing, the relationship is a very different one.

Normally in contract brewing there is a specific recipe given to the brewer to follow on behalf of who ever is contracting. However Mercury Brewing’s Dan Lipke (brewer) and Clown Shoes Gregg Berman actively brain storm their beers together making this a unique variation of the concept that is closer to a collaboration than a contract.

I contacted the brewery and here is some of what Clown Shoes Brewing’s Brand Manager, Sean Geary had to say about their unique dynamic:

“Enter Dan Lipke. Since starting up your own brewery would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, going the contract route seemed to be the best idea. After searching and looking into a few places in state, Mercury Brewing Company and Dan Lipke were picked as the guys to work with in the project. The beers are brewed under Dan’s watchful eye and recipes are a collaboration of efforts in taste+style (Gregg) and science+masterful brewing skills (Dan). All of the sales, marketing, distribution, and other business is handled by Clown Shoes, but the actual brewing of the beer and bottling is done by Mercury Brewing–they have no other stake in our business aside from that.” -Sean Geary Brand Manager for Clown Shoes Brewing Sincerely, Gregg Berman”

Now that you’ve had some of the unique history of the company, let’s talk beer.

I’ve referenced how dieting has made me crave top notch beer (Cha, as if that craving didn’t exist before the diet) fortunately my beer hoarding (hmmmm, maybe we should start a new show, Beer Hoarders) means I have quite a few options from all over the states thanks to all the beer trades I’ve made recently. The Pecan Pie Porter was brought to me by Alec (www.tabrews.blogspot.com) who I met on twitter and is working on starting his own beer blog.

The Pecan Pie Porter is 7% ABV and the bottle declares that it is a homage to the child who hated pecan’s but grew into an adult who loved them. The bottle declares “Our Pecan Pie Porter balances sweet and nutty porter flavors with the subtle addition of all natural and organic pecan concentrate and butter pecan extract.”

The result is a deep dark mahogany beer that smells of nuts, vanilla, butter and sugary caramel malts. I adore pecan, Butter Pecan ice cream is one of my favorites, candied pecans in a salad are dreamy, and pecan pie when done right is superb. So needless to say, this is a beer that I wanted to satisfy me.

And satisfy it did. Warmed up a bit, all those smells transcend in my palate. Butter, (dieting girls need butter badly!) sugar, toffee, vanilla, caramel, and of course, pecans, roasty, nutty, pecans. This is another of my dessert beer musts.

I’m really discovering the down side of trades! Getting a taste for a beer that is EXCEPTIONALLY hard to ever get again.

Very Good Beer, Very Sad Girl.

I’ll have to bribe beg and steal from the East Coast to get more.