28. Midas Touch - Dogfish Head Brewery

I was pretty excited for this beer. We sell it at Lilly Chocolates and I talk it up to almost everyone that is looking at beer because I think it's so interesting.

In the 50's a Penn archiolgoical team discovered a tomb in the region of central Turkey that was the capital of Phrygia, the area where the guy who inspired the King Midas myth lived. So they dug the tomb up and besides finding a guy in a oddly shaped coffin (it looked like a log, or at least was log shaped) they also found one of the oldest sets of drinking vessels ever found. Actually I don't think they were the oldest ever, because they were metal, so obviously there are older ones, but they were important for some reason or another. And in some of the vessels there were the remains of what they were drinking, which I'm almost 100% was indeed the oldest ferment beverage ever found. After the Penn people analyzed, the Dogfish Head folks set off to recreate it and what they ended up with was Midas Touch. Cool, huh? Well I think it's cool, but I'm a nerd.

So the beer has barley, honey, muscat grapes, and saffron it. I was a little afraid that it would be super sweet, but it wasn't. It smelled really great when it was poured and had a nice reddish gold color. None of the flavors knocked you it, they were all pretty subtle, but it definitely had that distinct flavor that mead has. For the record, I do not like mead at all, and so had to try really hard to look past the mead flavor. Once you get past the funky sweet meady flavor, you realize that there isn't that much flavor in your mouth, but it's followed up by a nice bitterness that slides all the way down your throat. I enjoyed this beer more than I have most of the others lately, but at the same time I'm not sure I'd drink it again. Yet again, after drinking my alloted half bottle, I didn't feel sated, but at the same time I had gotten a whole bottle to myself I'm not sure I would have finished it.

But that doesn't mean it was bad. It seems like as I drink a beer every day, I am less likely to want to finish the beers that I'm drinking (and this isn't just the crappy cheap beers). I'm not sure why that is. I certainly don't think that I'm drinking more that I usually do, although it has cut down on my "binge drinking" but I'm also not sure that I'm in the mood for a beer everyday and maybe that is the problem. Oh well. This beer gets 3 gets three intact mumified mythological men and one headless one, which equals 3.75 out of five mummified mytholigcal men.

Also we drank the Dogfish Head Chicory Stout and we agree totally with everything Bill and Kelly said.