Tasting Notes: Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald Porter

Brewery: Great Lakes Brewing Company
Style: Porter
ABV: 5.8%
Date Poured: April 2010

I picked this one up on a trip through North Carolina a few weeks back. I should clarify; I picked up a full six-pack, not just one. I've had this during a couple trips to Cleveland and have enjoyed it. Haven't tried it in more than two years so I was curious to see if I still love it.

Pours opaque brown with enormous frothy brown head. Lots of thick lacing. Some coffee notes in the nose with a light milk chocolate aroma and a hint of roastiness.

Creamy mouth, equal parts bitter coffee, roastiness and milk chocolate smooth and luscious

Alternately dry and sweet maltiness up front. Morphs into strong roasted coffee bean flavors. This is like porter's greatest hits. Smoky, sweet, creamy and bitter. Coffee and milk chocolate and damn smooth. It has it all. Really like this creamy mouthfeel, it's just so luscious. Roasty, mocha flavor in the finish that linger through the aftertaste. Easy drinker but full of flavor.

It's still very, very good and I look forward to working my way through the rest of the sixer. One of the best porters in the country. A bold statement but I think the beer merits the title.


Great Lakes Brewing Company

Tasting Notes: Southern Tier Porter

Brewery: Southern Tier Brewing Company
Style: Porter
ABV: 5.2%
Date Poured: August 2009

Part of a sampler pack I picked up while driving through Maryland a couple months ago.

Pours thick, pitch black in color topped with a thin tan head. A sweet aroma with some dark chocolate and a hint of mocha.

The taste follows the aroma for the most part. It's still sweetish with notes of dark chocolate but with more bitterness...coffee, a bit of herbal hops present. Good body, sweetish but with a clean finish.

Tasty. Very drinkable. The only knock I can give this beer is that I wish it was a bit more roasty but that's just a personal preference.


Southern Tier Brewing Company

25 Beers of Christmas, Day 16: Samuel Adams Holiday Porter

The Samuel Adams Winter Classics Mix Pack is a tradition and has been in my house for about 14 years. The selection has changed over the years and three years ago Boston Beer added the Holiday Porter which at the time was the only porter in their lineup. (They have since revived their excellent Honey Porter.) It's an easy drinker clocking in at 5.9% ABV.

It pours a dark brown with a frothy and dense light brown head. Lots of fine lacing. A sweet malty smell but also some significant hops in the aroma as well. Smoky chocolate in the nose too.

Very creamy mocha taste takes over the palate. Bitter and roasty notes are prominent. Roasty bitter finish as well.

If you like your porters to deliver some of that roastiness from the malt (and I do) you'll like this porter. It does deliever some balancing creaminess too.

Boston Beer

25 Beers of Christmas, Day 7: Stoudt's Winter

Stoudts Winter is a roasty porter from the brewery out of Adamstown, PA. The recipe tends to change every couple of years so there is little available on how this beer is made.

This beer is jet black with a light brown head. No real lacing. The aroma is equal parts roasty malt and sweet malt.

Again, sweetish malt in the mouth balanced by some light roastiness and metallic flavors. The roastiness builds the more you sip. Lightly sticky mouth and a roasty finish.

Pretty drinkable porter and a nice winter brew.

Stoudts Brewing

Dead Reckoning Porter

Brewer: Troegs Brewing Company
ABV: 5.4%
Poured: September 2007

Filled my Troegs growler while passing through Harrisburg, PA on Labor Day weekend.

Pours a nearly opaque dark brown with mahogany highlights. Smells of roasty and sweet malt but clearly a lot of spicy hops aromas as well.

The hops bite right up front. Certainly the hoppiest regular porter I've ever tasted. The only other porter that would rival its hop profile would be Flying Dog's Imperial Porter and that's saying something. Anyway, after the hops it's creamy smooth and some sweeter flavors shine through. The finish glows with hops and the hops linger long after the beer has entered the gullet. There's an odd yeasty profile too, somewhat English in character but I can't really put my finger on it.

Definitely a unique porter but plenty tasty. I had no trouble finishing off the growler!

Beer Travel: Troeg's Brewery

OK, I'll write this up even though I lost all the damn pictures I took during my visit to the brewery! Argh!



Anyhow, this past weekend (September 1) I was passing through Harrisburg and went to tour the Troeg's brewery as well as to fill up my old Troeg's growler with some tasty beverage. I arrived about 15 minutes early for the tour but they were serving free samples so I decided to partake. The first beer I tried was a very spicy tripel they had brewed called Scratch Beer #3. It clocks in at 10% ABV and showed it a bit in the taste but a very nice tripel for sure. Also sampled some of their new fall seasonal, a porter named Dead Reckoning. Very hoppy for a porter! I ended up filling my growler with that beer so more on that at a later date.



Chris Troeg, one of the two brothers who are the brewery's namesake, gave the tour and it was fairly informative without getting too technical and going over the heads of the non-beer geek crowd. What was interesting to me is how small Troegs still is. You see their beers all over Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania so you get the impression that they would be a bigger operation. Their bottling line in downright tiny!



Anyway, it was a typical brewery tour. They are building some new, bigger fermenters and looking to expand a bit. The most unusual part of the tour is that when it was done, Chris let us basically have the run of the place so we could take a look around. It was then that I found (where the new fermenters were going to be located) several new oak barrels with names of beers scrawled in chalk. There was the name of a beer and then a date (ex: Naked Elf 071407) I did not know that Troegs barrel aged any of their beers so it was quite a surprise to find these.



On my way out, I was paying for my growler and Chris was nearby and I asked him if they were releasing any oak aged beers in the future. He said that no they weren't and that those barrels were holding beer that was being treated with wild yeasts as an experiment. You mean like brett is being added? Yes, he replied. Cool.

Tasting Notes: Samuel Adams Honey Porter

Brewer: Boston Beer Company
Poured: June 2007
ABV: 5.45%

Way back in the early 90's, Samuel Adams Honey Porter was one of my regulars. I picked it up whenever I could and thought it was one of the best beers in the world. And why not? It was flavorful enough to satisfy my burgeoning appetite for craft brew but not so strong that I couldn't down a sixer at a party without completely losing my senses. I could also be reasonably assured that it's strange appearance would put off the average partygoer enough that no one would drink my stash. It accompanied me everywhere a good beer was needed. It was my regular, man!

It started getting harder to find out in Chicago by '96 and by the time I got back from my first naval cruise (mid-'97), it was nowhere to be seen, at least not in Florida. Boston Beer discontinued it and I thought it was gone forever.

Surprisingly, Boston Beer brought back the Honey Porter for the latest "Drinker's Choice" promotion and it won the consumer vote. For the first time in ten years, I was going to get to taste one of my old favorites. It was out in mixed Brewmaster's Choice sixers but I recently found it in dedicated sixers and picked some up.

This porter is dark brown with a dense, frothy tan head. Lots of thick lacing on the glass. Sweet roasted malt and caramel aromas as well as hints of honey waft up from the glass. Sweet and roasty in the mouth. Light honey in the finish balanced well with the hops (East Kent Goldings according to the bottle). It's got a smooth mouth and a lightly roasty aftertaste.

It's back and as good as ever. It's gong to be one of my regulars again. Amen. Recommended.