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.

25. Indian Brown Ale - Dogfish Head Brewery

Ok so this is a make-up beer for Monday. Lets see. I didn't like this beer so much, and I had high hopes for this beer because I actually like brown ales. But alas, I didn't like this one much. It tasted like three parts Bell's Best Brown and one part Leinenkugel's Winter Brown or some shit like that. Had it been more Bells and less Leinenkugel it would have been great. But the sweet rootbeer-y taste ruined the whole beer. Too sweet but also too boring, not very rich. Ok yeah, enough about that beer. Blah and disappointing. 2 out of 5 brown dogs with fish heads

20 - Dogfish Head Chicory Stout

Chicory AKA curly endive AKA cornflower AKA those little blue flowers are the basis of this Dogfish Head creation. Dogfish Head AKA DFH seems to be the Frankenstein of beermakers with strange creations (Note that I am noting Frankenstein and the maker and not the monster which is AKA Frankenstein's Monster).

While I'll believe them that cornflower is present and accounted for, the real mover and shaker in this brewsky AKA beer is the Mexican coffee that they slide into the description in lighter text. I do not doubt this clever marketing coup will lead most beer drinking slobs AKA consumers to mistakenly believe chicory is spicy and assume that chicory should be AKA chipotle. But we may never know what Chicory tastes like. But the bottom line is that this beer is exactly as advertised "smooth, dark, rich," and has the slight coffee kick that makes it an interesting and complex flavored stout without any of the lazy syrupy sludge that is usually AKA stout.

I give this 3.3 out of a possible 4 potentially tasty chicory pedals. (P.S. This beer is dedicated to Senor Douchebag AKA I am not the president and guess what butthead neither are you.)