Kyle Nabilcy
I know, I know, everyone feels the same way about their birthdays as they age. They’re not the mini-golfing, cake-eating, present-unwrapping party times they were when our ages were much, much closer to single digits.
But man, this last trip around the sun had me really worn out on the idea of any sort of birthday extravaganza. Like, for example, a birthday weekend road trip to Three Floyds’ Dark Lord Day, which was held at the Munster, Indiana, brewery on May 19. That was so not what I was looking for.
This year’s Dark Lord Day featured not a couple, but eleven variants on the base Dark Lord imperial stout, aged in barrels as weird and diverse as you could ever want. Sauternes, ruby port, scotch, tequila, an obscure French fortified wine called Pineau des Charentes — after aging in these barrels and others, along with a spice shop worth of adjunct ingredients, Dark Lord 2018 definitely came to party.
I went to New Glarus for a pilsner.
Now, before you accuse me of being one of those “finally, a fucking pilsner” old man naysayers, opposed to all novelty in beer, I will point out that Dan Carey did put a little bit of novelty into a beer that was otherwise very similar to last year’s Reinheitsgebot pilsner, Hometown Blonde. This year’s summer-long brewery exclusive is Mistral, another Bohemian pilsner. Unlike last year’s Blonde, this one’s got highlights: a dose of French Mistral hops amplifies the fruity sweetness of the style.
It’s no surprise, given the beer’s ambitions and general style, that a rating site like Untappd woefully underscores it. The beer is basically flawless, and even accounting for taste, the thing shouldn’t touch any numbers south of a four-star rating. And yet it averages a 3.8. Meanwhile, the worst of the Dark Lord variants — and these are beers that fanboys lurrrve and objective evaluators typically find pretty insipid, so you do the averaging — lands no lower than 3.38. The rest are all over 4.
In other words, get off my lawn, Dark Lord sycophants!
Give me credit, though: I did have an excellent bacon cheeseburger pizza at Sugar River Pizza in New Glarus after the Mistral run. The youths like pizza these days, right? And one of the few gifts I asked for was a limited edition pressing of Johnny Cash on vinyl. Vinyl is cool! Well, okay, that one might be a wash. But I drank a five-year-old Crooked Stave Origins Grand Cru aged in Leopold Brothers whiskey barrels, which was bottled on my birthday in 2013, and barrel-aged sours are definitely hip right now. The kids still say “hip,” don’t they?
Kyle Nabilcy
Another beer opened over the week since my birthday: Marz Community Brewing’s Chug Life, which I picked up in Chicago solely on the basis of its perfectly evocative, not-quite-trademark-infringing label design. That label instructs you to drink from the bottle, and I fully admit, the drinks I took straight from that bottle were better than the ones from the glass. It felt fizzier and maybe, just maybe, some of the more volatile flavors hadn’t aired out yet. An ironic lager certainly drinks like a millennial beer. Youthfulness! And vitality!
But who am I kidding? By the time my parents made it down to Madison to treat me to a birthday lunch on Memorial Day, there I was, scanning the menu for a single-digit ABV lager — nothing fancy, no frippery, certainly no adjunct stouts. Just something clean and crisp and a little sweet. A Mistral would’ve been perfect.
