So Brian and I haven’t been the most diligent about blogging lately, something I’ve been meaning to remedy.

What better way to get things rolling again is with a beer from Short’s Brewing. Joe Short is a guy not much older than us who makes incredible beers and seems to love trying new things.

Here we have Short’s Black Cherry Porter. Not sure if I’ve seen this at one of the Michigan Brewer’s Guild Festivals or not, but this is certainly the first time I’ve found it in a bottle.

It pours with a slightly reddish hugh to it, and you see a tint of that red color in the lacing on the glass. Not a lot of head in the pour.

Definitely a chocolate nose here. There is a bit of cherry in the aroma too – like a dark chocolate covered cherry.

It has the nice roasty flavor you expect from a porter to start with, but the cherry provides almost a sourish note up front. It finishes smooth and dark. This is one of those porters where you actually taste the grain of the chocolate malt. Its a nice rich barley flavor.

As you settle into it, the cherry presents itself a bit more, but not in the way you expect. Its not as if there is a sweet cherry flavor, but there is definitely a presence of it. A bit of tartness.

All in all, this is a great porter if you want something a little off the beaten path, but nothing too unfamiliar.

6/10

A friend shared this on facebook today. It appears that they have a new design for Super Grover. What do you think of Super Grover 2.0?

Also: am I the only one who thinks that Elmo is Grover’s younger, mentally handicapped cousin?

So, it has recently come to my attention that Quirk Books, publishers of such fine semi-illustrated comedy as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as well as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, is publishing an anthology of 100 of the most important covers of DC books over the last 75 years.  While this may, in fact, be well outside of their normal realm of publishing, I’m shocked nobody has endeavored to do this previously.  Who wouldn’t want the cover of Swamp Thing, or the first appearance of Batman hanging on their wall?  Or, you could merely keep the book whole as a coffee table book to out-nerd your friends…  Check it out here!

-brian!

I convinced Ian to get this guy because of my love of Brutal Bitter.  We’d never had it before, so we decided to give ‘er a go.

The Pour:  It poured considerably more cloudy than I had expected. It had a pretty dense, foamy head that stuck around through almost the whole glass.  It also left a fair amount of lacing on the side of the glass.

The smell:  A little sweet, a little astringent.  A bit of citrus hops, and a fair amount of grassy nose.

The Taste:  I was surprised.  It’s a little bitter, but not too much.  It’s tasty.  The one place I think this beer was perfect was in the mouthfeel.  It’s really nicely thin.  The sweetness is not over the top, especially when compared to the nose.  Not exactly perfect in my opinion, but not bad.  A little less quality than I’d expect from this price ($7.99)

7/10

-brian!

So, the fine fellows of Beer and Comics got together for the first time in a long, long time.  We have decided to provide you with a review of several beers, none of which we have pictures for.  The first of which will be the New Holland B.A.M.B.

At first, you may note that if you pronounce these letters together, it sounds like Bambi.  Strangely, this beer tastes absolutely nothing like deer.  Not even baby deer.  What it does taste like, however, is delicious.

There is a story behind how this beer came to be.  Something about how this was the beer that won in the employee homebrew contest.  Ian knows better than I do.

So, what does this limited beer have to offer you, the consumer, if you can somehow get your grubby little paws on it?  In one word: deliciousness.

This is a light, pale, belgian style beer.  It is actually considered a Pomegranate and Clove Tripel.  For the purposes of this review, we will disregard that this is supposed to be a tripel, because it is not… at all.

It pours a standard pale ale color, a light orange/tan color.  It pours with a decent head, even out of a growler.  Thick enough that it’ll stick to your moustaches, but it fades with some predictability.

The nose, is all clove and esters.  In fact, I would say the nose is the most standardly tripel in style (and that’s not exactly a truth).  If you love clove flavor, you can’t go wrong in the nose.

The taste, on the other hand, is dominated by the cloves.  Ian may claim there’s a hint of sourness imparted by the pomegranate, but it’s not something I’m noticing.  What I am noticing, is that this is fucking DELICIOUS.  The mouthfeel is considerably smaller than my brain is leading me to believe the alcohol content is.

I cannot in good conscience give this beer any less than a 7.5/10, but I am reluctant to lump it in with the greats.

7.5/10

Ian’s two cents:

So as I noted in my post about my trip to New Holland, this beer was indeed the winner of the employee homebrew contest at New Holland. Brian is pretty much dead-on in his description of the nose and flavor. I did notice a bit of tripel-ness in the nose (that sort of banana, rotten fruit smell), but Brian is more or less right in saying that its not the truest trippel in the world.

What I really liked was how the pomegranate came through. Just a little bit of sour, but not very fruity. The only sweetness it had could have been from the pomegranate, or it could have been plain ol’ Belgian candy sugar. Hard to tell.

It was nice and summery, though. I will concur with Brian’s rating of 7.5/10.

And despite what Brian said above, we do have a couple pictures now, although they are both blurry and shitty.