This was an uncharacteristically busy weekend for me.  Saturday I was at the Atlanta Cask Ale Tasting, an annual event I try not to miss.  Sunday was the NHL All Star Game here in Atlanta which has been a long time coming.  The All Star Game was initially awarded to the city for the 2004 season but that wound up being the season that was cancelled due to the lockout.  I’ll post photos later this week for those of you interested.

While this year’s Cask Ale tasting was inferior to previous years, it wasn’t for a lack of effort. Out of the 20 beers on tap, I’d say there were maybe 5 that I said “Wow, this is good.”   It simply was a case of brewers trying to swing for the fences and striking out instead.  One brewer tried an ale aged in an oak barrel, something a lot of brewers have been doing as of late, often to tasty success.  The problem with this version was that he actually added chardonnay to it.  It seemed to be a hit with a lot of people but I thought it was unbalanced as hell – a bastardized version that didn’t know what it wanted to be.  There are brewers who have aged beer in wine barrels with great success – Dogfish Head and Russian River come to mind – but this wasn’t one of those times.

The point of today’s blog is I absolutely had to mention two beers that were in this competition.  The first one, Pulchritudinous Porter, gets a mention simply for the name alone.  It was a tasty oak aged and double hopped porter but the great name gave it the winning combination of taste and marketing for me.

The other beer I need to mention was not one that I liked but I think the brewer made something that’s never been done before.  The beer was called “Little Chocolate Doughnuts”.  The description given on the informational flyer said “Little Chocolate Doughnuts is a porter with an appealing, semi-sweet, not-so-bitter, chocolate malt character.  This beer was actually ‘dry-doughnut-ed’ in the firkin for a little touch of ‘HOT NOW’ goodness.  Brewed by John Pinkerton and Chris Lady of Moon River Brewing Company in Savannah, GA.”

For those of you not familiar with the term “dry hopping”, this is when your beer is fermenting (pre-bottling stage) and a brewer adds hops (the ‘bitter’ taste of the beer) to the top of the fermenter.  The alpha acids in the hops add a stronger hop profile to the beer.  But this beer was the first time I’ve ever heard of ‘dry-doughnut-ing’!  I’ll give the brewer credit for originality.  Scarily enough, when you sniffed the beer in the glass you truly could smell doughnuts.  It’s like no beer I’ve ever smelled before.  As expected, it was rather sweet – a bit too sweet for my tastes.

The problem with that beer is that the scent was so overpowering, the next 2 or 3 beer samples I had in my glass of other beers still carried the lingering smell of the doughnut beer even though I had rinsed my glass with water several times.  I think that spoiled those following beers for me and I think I should have had this dessert beer at the end of the evening.

I wasn’t going to include a picture that didn’t have all 7 of us who went, but I had to share this picture.  I’ll give you three guesses as to who the Boston native is.  And for those of you who I know are going to comment – 1) Yes, that is a beard I grew last week and 2) The sweatshirt is from a friend who was a professor at Maryville College – home of The Fighting Scots.