Brütal Brëws: More Metal Beers from Three Floyds
Mmm, more liquid metal.
Awhile back I made the brilliant decision to remodel my bathroom. I’m not one of those guys who does home repair shit, but I figured with enough instructional YouTube videos (and enough shouting down your internal thoughts of “no no don’t touch that holy fuck what did you do“) you can basically step-by-step your way through just about anything these days. I was optimistic and naive, thinking I’d have it done by the end of the weekend. Wrong.
The night of the teardown, the T-X was savvy enough to spot these three kickass beers (two of which are band collaborations) from Three Floyds, Indiana’s mecca of craft brewing and frequent subject of reviews in this column. These would provide us with the critical courage needed to rip important bathroom-type things off fragile drywall, around pipes, between tiny doorways and generally make a colossal mess. And hey you know what? They helped. Here’s a rundown of each beer and the manner in which it accompanied my foolhardy home improvement endeavor.
Initially in the bathroom clusterfuck project, I had to remove the fucking enormous glued-on mirror from the wall. This was the part I feared the most since I expected the thing to shatter into a million little razor-sharp shards and force me to reenact that Die Hard scene. Thankfully, mercifully, the mirror came right off in one piece like it should, along with several big chunks of drywall because drywall is fucking stupid and gluing mirrors onto it is even more fucking stupid. Fuck you, dude who thought of that. Anyway now that I gained half an hour not having to clean up broken glass, I had some Hopped In Half and all was well.
HOPPED IN HALF
“A crisp session pilsner for those who like to rot slow, live large and drink their beer quickly. Very quickly.”
Although the bottle artwork looks more like the Toxic Hopvenger there was less “chopped in half” and more “conveniently skin-ripped from face to gut,” this collaboration between Obituary and 3F has resulted in a high-quality cheap-tasting beer. And I sincerely mean that in a good way. Like 3F’s other (older) pilsner Jinx Proof, this golden clear pilsner improves on the flavor of your old man dive bar standards with a richer, more concentrated yeast and malt flavor that won’t result in complaints about being watered-down. Not a whole lot in the way of fruit or sweeter overtones, although it does smell a bit floral at first pour, but if you like your craft beer tastes simpler this is the way to go. Very tasty. Highly quaffable. [Beer Advocate score]
With the mirror taken care of, the vanity was next to go. The sink top also took a generous portion of drywall with it, eliminating my idiotic hope that I could just slip the new vanity in place without having to touch up or repair the drywall. The enjoyable part here was getting to rip the back of the vanity to pieces instead of trying to figure out the Houdini-esque way in which the builders fit the pipes through the damn thing in the first place. Some time later, after some sweating, cursing and slight water-spraying, there was a vanity-shaped void in the bathroom and I had only a small amount of drywall repair to do. Another battle won, we celebrated with some Wiseblood.
WISEBLOOD
“I listen to few and I’m fueled by fire.”
That C.O.C. logo looks right at home on that bottle, doesn’t it? [hilarious joke about the label artist not needing to clean his wounds after submitting it]. This is the first time I’ve tried a wood-aged Baltic porter so I was a little in the dark about what to expect. It pours as a translucent ruddy dark amber color and smells right away of a higher ABV lurking in the murky swirls of carbonation. Has all the typical weight and smoothness of a strong porter but with a darker malt flavor, slightly burnt oats and an oaky aftertaste. Drinks like a thick black sludge beer from a century old NOLA cooper’s barrel. [Beer Advocate score]
The last task of the night was to patch up the drywall damage and prep for painting. A family member helpfully loaned me a big ol’ tub of topcoat (which looks like vanilla frosting and smells like poison), so I got to slapping a whole bunch of that shit over the wall and hoping to god I wasn’t making an enormous mistake in my choice of activity for the weekend. Apparently the stuff takes a full day to dry, so that left us with little else to do other than removing the vanity light and putting up blue painting tape. I fear working with electricity because it’s approximately a billion times faster than me, but thankfully the cheapo dollar store vanity light came off without incident. Finally, if there’s one thing I can do better than anyone in life, it’s tape things in a straight line. It’s a useless skill, but it’s one I excel at, so once the room was all edged up in that shitty blue painter’s tape, it was time for the final bravado-booster of the night, Blot Out The Sun.
BLOT OUT THE SUN
“Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun. I will do the next best thing: block it out!”
An imperial stout aged in Sauternes sweet wine barrels (ooh, fancy) with strong notes of roast, barley and malt. A slightly higher hop bitterness and a bit of dark chocolate flavor is present where you’d usually expect a richer, earthier coffee flavor. Has a very unique and very slight saltiness to balance the faint molasses aftertaste. Pours extremely dark, as black and opaque as a steer’s tuchus on a moonless prairie night, which would perhaps be equally as dark since the sun has been blotted out. Helpfully, I’ve obscured the glass with my kvlt gauntlet so you can’t actually see the real color. [Beer Advocate score]
If you have the means, I highly recommend picking up any of these excellent beers for your next household clusterfuck project or regular weekend kickoff. They are so choice. If you’ve been drinking anything of note you’d like to share, tell us in the comments below, where I’ll happily gripe about other complications I encountered in my quest to build an upscale room in which to take a leak.
(Header image via)
