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Hey Everyone-

We don’t need to say how shocked/saddened we all are about yesterday’s events.  We live about a mile from the finish line and things still feel very surreal.  In light of that, we’re going to be taking the next few days off from promoting anything via social media (with the exception of twitter where we’ll be retweeting information that is relevant to what happened yesterday/how you can help).

That’s not to say that our hearts and minds won’t be with those who were effected, we would just rather pay respect silently and give the social media stage to those people/organizations involved in returning Boston to its normal state.

If anyone has any questions regarding Backlash-specific things (events/inventory etc), drop us a line at StandUp@BacklashBeer.com, otherwise we’ll see y’all in a few days.

H

It’s been about a week since we’ve released Salute, our Double IPA, and all the kegs are sold.

Well that escalated quickly.  So where did they all go?

While we’ve been really active on social media with places where you can find the beer, I wanted to compile a list of all the places we now know have brought it in.

One thing to note- these are places that have bought the beer.  It may not yet be on draft. If that’s the case, ask the bartender which beer it will be replacing and then proceed to drink the shit out of that beer.

Here we go:

Bars — Kegs/Draft

Union Brew House – Weymouth

Atwood’s Tavern – Cambridge

Russell House Tavern – Cambridge

Hops n Scotch – Brookline

Star’s – Hingham

Flatbread/Sacco’s Bowl Haven – Cambridge

Tip Tap Room – Boston

Beacon St Tavern – Brookline

Cambridge Common – Cambridge

Brendan Behan Pub – Jamaica Plain

Five Horses Tavern – Somerville

The Kinsale – Boston

Bison County – Waltham

Bars — Bottles

Eastern Standard – Boston

Formaggio Kitchen – Cambridge

Redd’s in Rozzie – Roslindale

James’s Gate – Jamaica Plain

That’s it!  We’ll be publishing a separate post of the stores that are carrying Salute.

H

Call me crazy but 10 days do not a week make.

Hence the title of this blog post.  But hey we’ll take a few extra days of beer celebration.  Why the hell not?

Shaky definition of a “week” notwithstanding, we’ve got a lot of shit going on — and while we’ll undoubtedly be telling ya’ll through social media, we figured we’d put it all in one place here.

And away we go:

3/9/13:  Cure Me I’m Irish – Here’ well be pouring some Groundswell for a good cause.  We did this last year and the turnout was great.  Definitely something you should check out, being that it’s for kids with cancer and all.

3/12/13:  Triva @ Brendan Behan in Jamaica Plain – Pretty straight forward, just chillin and drinking beer. No bells and whistles, come drink great beer at a kick ass spot whilst flexing thy noggen-muscle.  BONUS:  They’ll be pouring Salute.  Cash only so bring your loot.

3/13/13:  Beer Tasting at Pemberton Farms – We’ll be sampling our normal-ish lineup (Groundswell/Declaration/Famine/War) including SALUTE.  If you guys haven’t ever been to this place, it’s a real gem.  TONS of beer, including a pretty killer local lineup.  They even have the sexy imported stuff you normally may have trouble finding elsewhere.  A general hub of win, if you will.

3/14/13:  Massachusetts Beverage Alliance Brewer’s Night @ Stoddard’s – Lots of exciting beers being poured at a kickass bar.  These guys do it right — this should be a really fun night.

3/15/13:  TWO events where we’re pouring Salute  –  (1)  Beer Tasting @ The Wine Press: 6:00-8:00, and (2) a tap takeover at The Kinsale in Government Center 7:00-10:00.

3/16/13:  Beer Tasting @ The Urban Grape, South End — This place is great, they just opened this new South End location and stock a lot of awesome beer. Plus they’re nice people to boot.

That about wraps it up folks, we’ll be busy for sure, but we’d love to see you!

Peace out,

H

Here we are at another installment of pre-release tasting notes, and I honestly couldn’t be any more excited.  You see, usually when we produce a new beer we go heavy on how much beer we put into our 22oz bombers.  As such, there’s normally plenty to go around (one 20 barrel batch of our beer will net out 3,000+ bottles, just for some perspective).  However, with this beer we decided to go heavy into kegs.  The reason being it is of utmost importance for this beer to be consumed fresh.  That deserves repeating.

IT IS OF UTMOST IMPORTANCE THAT THIS BEER BE CONSUMED FRESH.

Sorry to yell at you.  I do it out of love, I swear.  And I’ve been drinking… so there’s that.

No seriously though.

DO NOT CELLAR AN IPA.

Unless it’s like a 120 minute or something with an assload of malt.  West coast style IPAs (like Salute), only get worse with time.  Hell, the lion’s share of IPAs do.  So don’t get cute and tuck these kinds of beer into your cellar, I promise you hop character fades very quickly — and when the essence of a style of beer is predicated on its presence… well you get the idea.  Just drink the shit already.  Jeeze, you’re so stubborn.

Ok, anyway, I don’t remember where I was going with that… oh ok, yea.  We produced a very limited number of bombers for this beer, so I’ve actually had to ration myself out only a few for personal consumption.  But tonight is tasting notes night, so, Woo!

Ok, off we go.  Here’s the beer, in all its hopped up glory:

As a side note (I know, another tangent, just what you wanted, right?) for all of you who think the glassware-for-particular-styles-of-beer argument is bullshit.  You’re wrong.

I’ve conducted side by side tastings before to test the glassware thing, but nothing has been more definitive than a super dry hopped IPA like Salute.  After pouring the 2 beers out, one into the pint glass and one into the tulip, it was clear as day that the tulip showcased the aroma of this beer with an intensity that if I had to quantify, I’d put at probably 10x magnitude.  It’s no joke people.  I’m not saying go out and buy a different glass for every beer you’ll ever consume.  But there is a very tangible distinction here, and I challenge the naysayers to do a side by side comparison.

Alright, tasting notes. That’s what we’re here for, right?

Appearance:  Salute pours a rich golden color with a pure white head which upon first pour sticks around for a few, but then recedes into a thin layer of bubbles, with a slightly thicker population around the rim.

Aroma:  Now we get down to brass tacks.  The aroma here is just plain ol’ lovely.  I just swirled mine for a little boosting charge of aromatics and — sweet baby Jesus, yum.  I get a lot of sweetness in the nose, all very tropical and soft.  Think papaya, mango, maybe even a little bit of pineapple or passion fruit.  That’s the backdrop of the nose- soft sweetness.  Swirling through that however is this almost intoxicating (ha, get it, cause it’s booze?) interplay of pine and what I can really only describe as dankness.  Just a twinge, but it’s there.  It’s so very complex and, to me, exactly what I love in a big IPA.

Taste:  It’s really hard to groove on the nose of this beer for very long without wanting to take a sip.  The aromas just kind of beg you to partake, so I shall.  This beer nears 100 theoretical IBUs.  As such, you’d expect it to kick the crap out of your pallet and send you home to suck on ice cubes.  Not here though.  The beer starts with that same sort of tropical sweetness you get in the nose.  It’s very soft and easy on the tongue — really enjoyable.  Somewhere around mid-pallet the grapefruit/pine/dank taste creeps in, just in time to keep the beer from being cloying or juice-like.  The finish is probably the only point in this beer where the bitterness really becomes evident, lingering with a grapefruit pith kind of feel, drying you out ever so slightly, begging you to take another sip.  And so I shall.

Mouth feel:  Make no mistake, this beer is bone, bone, bone-bone-bone dry.  Any perceived sweetness is a result of the hops used, and has no real malt implication.  This beer finished more dry than many of our Belgians which was perfect because if it hadn’t, the sweetness from the hops might be overwhelming.  As it stands the beer has just enough body (not much) to allow all the hops to shine through but not seem watery.  The carbonation is middle of the road, especially because I’ve been constantly swirling this thing to release more aromatics.  It’s like a sickness, I can’t stop.

Drinkability:  DANGEROUS.  A lot of other double/imperial IPAs are bitter enough to kind of make you sip them and pace yourself.  At 8.5% and with such a smooth bitterness, this beer is dangerously drinkable.  You’ve been warned.

Overall:  This beer is the shit.

Sorry I know that seems cocky or whatever, coming from the brewer, but I’m so incredibly happy with this beer that I don’t care.  It should be hitting shelves in a day or two — go grab one and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Cheers guys, I’m gonna go enjoy the rest of this,

H

It’s been about 18 months since Backlash has been selling beer commercially.

Damn, where did the time go?

Somewhere amidst the endless beer tastings, beer fests, brew days, labeling days, waxing days, and lots of drinking, a year and a half went by.

We set goals — some we hit and some we did not.  We made pretty awesome beer.  We made a shitty beer. We’ve grown, a lot.

One thing has been consistent though since we started — All of our beers have been Belgian. I’m not sure why it’s been that way to be honest.  I have nothing against hops, but I think when I started brewing for Backlash I was just burned out on IPA.  I tend to do this thing where I’ll obsess over certain styles/categories to the point where, a few months later, I’m sick of whatever I had been drinking.  While Belgian beers will always be my favorite, I have to be honest — I miss hops.  I find myself drinking more hoppy beers these days, though obviously Belgian beer and hoppy beer are not mutually exclusive.

All of this is a very long winded way of saying this:

We made our first American beer. 

Well technically that’s not true…Death was the first American beer we made, but that never saw the light of day — so let’s just call this the first, ok? Ok.

Last year Sam Adams did one of the coolest things ever and shared a few of their en vogue hops with local brewers.  The out pour of requests was so huge that they had to hold a lottery to determine who would get hops.  Apparently we rescued babies from a burning orphanage in a previous life or something, because we won and got access to a SHITLOAD (for us) of amazing hops we would never have access to otherwise.  The pipeline of these varieties is all spoken for well into the next few years.

I used some (though I wish I’d used more) of those hops in Conquest, but I’ve really been waiting for the opportunity to showcase the hell out of these fuckers.  The best way, in my opinion, was to brew up a big kick-you-in-the-knee-caps-and-make-out-with-your-sister west coast style IPA.  We’re calling it Salute.

The beer is still in the tanks while we dry hops its pants off, but I was able to taste it today and have to say — I’m really really excited to get this beer into your hop loving mouth situations.  I’ll say this as well, I’ve never been more nervous for a first sip of a beer in my life.  I’m no stranger to losing sleep over a beer, and am very familiar with dreaming about the beer when I do finally get some shut eye.  Coming off what I still consider to be an epic fail with Death, my hand was literally shaking today as I raised my glass to the sample valve.  The golden liquid that filled my glass however, immediately made me feel better.

I’ll give you guys a few tasting notes here, but the beer will change dramatically as we continue to put it through our absurd dry hopping regiment.  As of today the beer is taking on a really nice tropical juiciness with some pine notes.  It is very very dry with a firm but smooth bitterness, not the type of beer to pucker you up, but the bitterness is most certainly there.  Citrus, floral, mango, pine, and pineapple are all solid descriptors for this beer right now.  I imagine/hope all of those qualities will intensify in the coming days.

I fully expect this to be the best beer I’ve ever made to date.  It also happens to be our strongest beer ever, clocking in at 8.5% abv.

Stay tuned for more details .

AHHHH.IM.SO.EXCITED.

k bye,

H

I’ve said it before, but I’m continually amazed by how things work out in life.

It’s crazy to me how I can go days on end with a bullet proof diet, being well hydrated, completely sober and not have one deep, “intellectual” thought.  Then in a hungover haze, full of 2 a.m. regret pizza, in a bedroom devoid of light, be struck with realizations that really cut to the core of me.

Life has no sense of timing.

Moments of clarity choose you, not the other way around.

I’m very lucky. That knowledge is never lost on me.  I try to remain as humble as I possibly can on a day to day basis.  It’s one of the things that keeps me hungry, keeps me pushing.  Because of that, I’d say that the idea of “happiness” is kind of a difficult one to define for me.  I’m constantly measuring, analyzing, rehashing and re-executing.  It’s just kind of my nature- most people who know me will tell you the same.

But today, this morning (most people’s afternoon), that all just melted away.  For the first time- seriously.

I don’t know what did it, but I know it definitely had something to do with Stout being velcro’d to my side, in a dead sleep.  Maybe it had something to do with his hypnotic deep breathing, maybe the bed was just extra comfortable today.

It doesn’t matter.

I guess I realized today that sometimes you need to stop chasing happiness.  In fact, running after it may be the worst way to attain it.  I think you just need to stop, take a big deep breath and look around.

I think when words fail, when you feel a moment that you’d be perfectly content to live out in eternity, when you’re flush with warmth- from your core to your skin, when it wells up in your eyes and runs down you face – and you look over and see the same in the person you love.

That’s happiness.

Scratch that.  That’s heaven.

Have an awesome long weekend guys.

Go Pats!

-H

First, a little back-story.  As is the case with every beer we’ve done in the Apocalypse Series, we try to tie the beer back to the horseman which it represents.  With Conquest I did this by playing off of the beer’s color (‘white”) to tie back with the white horse which Conquest rode.  With War I also used the color of the beer (kinda sorta red), but in addition I infused the beer with an element of conflict by using multiple yeast strains.  So the question became, how do I follow suit with Famine?

A suggestion from a friend is worthy of a lol:  “Maybe just sell empty bottles?”

Hilarious yes, but that has to be illegal.

Anyway, I set some rules for myself: I wanted to brew a SMASH beer.  Homebrewers will know the term, it stands for: Single Malt and Single Hop.  Pretty much as bare-bones as you can get when brewing.  It makes sense right?  If a famine were to fall on us tomorrow, it’s reasonable to think that you’d have to make the most out of very little resources.

And so, Famine was born:

Famine is a SMASH Belgian Style Tripel.  I chose this style because it’s one where the yeast does most of the legwork, so the malt and hops selections aren’t at the forefront.  I also happen to love tripels, and belgians (shock of the year right there, huh?).  This beer only employs continental pilsner malt and stryian goldings hops.  I did however also spice it up a little bit with some coriander and orange peel.. which you can consider cheating, but hey shut up.

Ok, here’s the review:

Appearance:  Before we even dive in – because the yeast is so important to this beer, PLEASE ROLL THE BOTTLE.  If you pour yourself a crystalline golden beer for your first glass, and then a glass of what looks like orange juice for your second, you did it wrong.  Lay ‘er down for a few so you get a nice, uniform tasting experience.  The color should be a cloudy pale gold with a decent amount of head that recedes fairly quickly.  Damn you SMASH beer, if only I could have used some wheat for head retention.

Smell:  This beer has a nose that reminds me vaguely of Groundswell believe it or not.  The beers are totally different, from malt bill to hop choices and yeast selection, but they both have that distinctive belgian spice kick.  Famine does have a bit more of a sulphury smell.  Those of you who have had Golden Monkey might know what I’m talking about here – although to be fair, Famine is much more subdued that G.M. There is some citrus on the “edges” of the nose, very faint but they’re there if you search for them. No hint of the 7.5% alcohol.

Taste:  The taste starts off with a slight malt sweetness which kind of melds with the fruity esters component that you could pick up in the nose.  Around mid palette the Belgian spice begins to take over, and the finish is more Belgian peppery/clovey spice with some herbal/spicy bitterness.  Again, I do not detect any alcohol at all.  The finish is bone dry, with the spicy clove character lingering a bit- kind of makes you want to take another sip, which I shall.

Mouthfeel:  Again, the body on this beer really depends on you reincorporating some of the fallen sediment.  The yeast needs to be in suspension for both flavor and mouthfeel purposes.  With the beer fully blended, the mouthfeel is medium, with good carbonation cutting through.  However, without rolling the bottle you’d lose out on a lot and the beer would be much lighter.

Overall:  This beer was a big challenge for me.  By committing to the SMASH approach, I really limited myself in regards to what styles I thought I could pull off and have the beer still be dynamic.  I think this beer proves 2 things:  1) You can do a lot with a little when you need to, and 2) Belgian yeast kicks ass.

I’m proud of this beer, you wouldn’t know it contained so few ingredients unless someone told you.

Give it a shot and let me know what you think!

Enjoy,

H

Oh boy.

Talk about screwing the pooch — we’ve out done ourselves this time, ladies and gents.

As you might know, we’ve been debuting new beers as our four-part Apocalypse Series for the last few months.  So far Conquest and War have been well received, and Famine should be hitting the shelves in the next few days.  Although the timing wasn’t perfect (we had initially hoped to release all four in 2012), the beers themselves have been promising.  The last in the series, Death, was slated to hit the market around the end of this month.

That was the plan.

The thing is, you can plan until you’re blue in the face but things don’t always work out the way you had intended.  After doing several test batches and dialing in the recipe, I was ready.  I initially brewed Death some time ago, and it’s been conditioning since, slowly mellowing out.  In my test batches, this extended conditioning time allowed the chocolate and coffee notes to meld together, while the heat from the chipotle pepper addition lingered in the background — really nice stuff.  There were a few hitches on brew day, but nothing crazy — I was eager to see how the beer evolved.

This weekend, I had Maggie pull a sample off the condition tank and bring it back to me so I could ensure the beer was ready to be packaged.  It had been a week or so since I tasted the beer.  I raised the mason jar to my lips and was…

…immediately disappointed.

What a shitty feeling.  The beer wasn’t what I had hoped for.  It was good, but (to me) not good enough.

So we have several thousand dollars worth of beer (a Russian Imperial Stout is NOT cheap to make) that I am not totally happy with, hanging out in a conditioning tank, waiting to be kegged.

But it won’t, its ultimate home is the sewer.

What I’m trying to say is, there will be no Death — at least not for a while.  Sure, we could re-brew it, but at this rate it would be ready sometime in mid-March — and we all know that Spring beers will be in full effect by then.

We missed our chance.

As much as this sucks all around, I still feel it’s the right move.  I want to be sure that when a customer walks into a store and buys a $8-$10 bomber of our beer, they’re getting the best possible beer I could make.  The beer has always been first, and it will continue to be so.  We’ve been pretty lucky up until now, but I guess it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.  It just so happened to be the last beer in a series we’ve been really vocal about and had especially high hopes for.

The bottom line is that we’re extremely grateful for all of the support you guys have shown us for the past year and a half, and we promise to never forget that.  We know that we’ve let those people down who were excited for the final installment of the Apocalypse Series, but hopefully you can appreciate our commitment to making great beer.

You guys deserve the very best.

So Backlash will continue to be without a dark beer, for now.  That doesn’t mean we don’t have some other awesome beers planned, though.

Unless those turn out to be not so great either, in which case this blog post never happened.

Cheers,

H

Ask anyone.

I’m a perfectionist – to my own detriment.

As a brewer, I’m predisposed to being my own biggest critic (as I think all brewers/creators of any art form are).  I’ll be the first person to point out that maybe I could have done better on the hop character, malt flavor, dryness , color, etc of a beer.  I’m never quite content.

As a business owner, I obsess over details.  Because really, if I don’t, who else will?  It’s me at the helm, and that’s it.  Look away for too long and you’re off course, coasting into peril. I pour over the ins and outs of everything I can control, looking for an advantage or any insight I may have missed at a previous glance.

These qualities in me create a trifecta; a perfect storm if you will, resulting in a quality that can be good but is usually bad:  micromanagement.

Since our inception (I have a really hard time typing that word without thinking about the movie- which by the way I haven’t seen.  I know right?  The rock I live under is pretty heavy), we have been SUPER hands on with everything we do.  From our infamous wax dipping/hand labeling to conducting every single tasting ourselves, we’ve had skin in the game since day numero uno.  And it served as a point of pride for us, a badge of honor.

“Look how much we care!”

It’s a really nice touch, and people appreciate it a lot.  So why am I writing this?  Am I just tooting my own proverbial horn here, detailing all the ways why we’re awesome?

Nah, not my speed.  As I write this, Maggie and Zach are headed to the brewery- alone.  For the first time ever, I’m sitting on the sidelines while they go and do what I love to do.  They’re not brewing per se, but they’re packaging up beer, which I’m getting nostalgic over just thinking/writing about.

Things change.

A few months ago Maggie and I took a pretty huge leap and introduced Stout into our family.  He makes us happier everyday, BUT, he’s a baby.  He still needs constant supervision (because this little idiot will eat ANYTHING, I swear he’s part goat), so that makes things tricky.

Add to that the fact that I’m nursing a back re-injury, and all signs point to “no heavy lifting” for this guy.  And it sucks.

But I guess what I’m driving at is that at some point in all our lives we’re going to be approached by a pretty hard-to-swallow truth:  Sometimes you’ll do better for yourself/your family/your company by un-involving yourself.

Putting pride aside can be a tough thing (nay, near impossible for yours truly), but you need to keep the bigger picture in mind.  For me, that means not pushing myself to get out to Holyoke today and lift cases of beer for 8 hours, because I know that I’d probably be laid up on bed rest nursing my back for the next week if I did.  As a company, we’re doing the same thing.  We’ve already “let go” of our wax dipping with the bigger picture of getting beer to you guys as quickly as we can, and we’ll continue to look for more efficiencies as we grow.

Sometimes you think your greatest strength is one thing, when really it’s something else.  Sometimes obsessing over the details means you miss the forest for the trees.

Sometimes what’s right, and necessary,  is letting go.

That’s all for now guys, I have a puppy to take care of.

H

Ladies and gents, I introduce War:

As it goes, War is the second horseman of the Apocalypse.  With man’s desire to conquer his fellow man (aka Conquest, the first horseman) set firmly in place, the outcome is almost a foregone conclusion: War.

In the spirit of the horseman, I wanted to infuse this beer with an element of conflict.  To get there, I pitted 3 yeast strains against one another in primary fermentation, 2 Belgian ale strains and a farmhouse strain.  The result?  It’s pretty safe to say that the farmhouse strain dominates the flavor profile.  Follow along for what to expect when you try War.

Appearance:  My intention was to make this beer red, playing off of the fact that the second horseman rode a red horse.  To do this, I dry hopped this beer with dried hibiscus leaves, which impart an almost magenta-like color at high concentrations.  Problem is, at those same high concentrations hibiscus also throws off a very herbal, tea-like flavor.  So I erred on the side of caution and used a little less than I originally intended, and the color as a result isn’t quite “red”.  It certainly has hints of red/pink when you’re pouring it out especially against a darker background- but you could call the color a burnt orange shade.  The beer pours with a modest amount of head which faded and left a small ring of foam around the perimeter of the beer.  Could be slightly more carbonated.

Smell:  The nose on this beer is what you’d expect given the Farmhouse style.  It has hints of Belgian peppery spice and some muted fruitiness.  Behind that is a touch of earthiness from the hibiscus leaves, and a small amount of malt sweetness.

Taste:  The taste follows pretty closely along with the nose.  Spicy, tangy and tart with hints of lemon and some fresh cut grass.  The finish is dry, but not as dry as some other beers in this category.  I believe the use of multiple yeast strains allowed the other Belgian yeasts to contribute some rounder, fruitier characteristics that wouldn’t have been there had only a pure saison culture been used.  The mouth feel is very light, and the carbonation slightly prickly, although not to the champagne-like level of many other saisons.

I really like the way this beer turned out.  The blend of yeasts produces an interesting array of esters that kind of meditate on the tongue, and that earthiness/grassy note from the hibiscus really fits well with the overall profile of the beer.  Were I to brew this again, I would use a little more hibiscus leaves in the dry hop and carbonate it a little higher, somewhere in the neighborhood of an additional .2 volumes of CO2.

That’s pretty much it guys, definitely go out and grab some of this and give it a shot.  It’s a pretty distinct take on a farmhouse ale and I really hope you enjoy it.  It will also pair nicely with any sort of savory food dish, helping cut through some of the heavier flavors with it’s tart and spicy flavors.

Cheers!