Beer Buying King!

Yesterday Amber and I were on our way to Portland for some chowdah (Gilbert's Chowder House, seriously some of the best I've ever had) and I wanted to stop at the Allagash brewery to pick up some beer.  I checked online to see what time the shop was open and saw that they were advertising a new beer I hadn't had before, Fluxus 2008.  So we show up at the brewery at 3, which is when they do tastings and tours.  I was looking around at the bottles in the shop and didn't see Fluxus, so I asked about it.  It turns out they had just finished aging the first batch and were packaging them up for shipping to distributors the next day.  So they broke out a bottle for us at the tasting (it was only Amber and I), and because most of the employees had only had it from a keg the night before, and never bottle conditioned, we drank the bottle with a few of the employees.  And after the tour I bought the first two bottles of Fluxus 2008 ever sold, which is dope.

The beer itself was what they were calling a double white ale, meaning they doubled the grain bill and bumped the alcohol % up to around 9, which is nuts for a white.  They didn't use coriander and orange peels this time for the spice kick and instead used ginger, which I'd never seen before.  It was good, with the ginger adding an interesting element to a white ale, but it was my 5th beer at that point, so my taste buds were out of spec and I'll have to crack open another bottle to get a better sense of it.

I also bought a few other bottles, including Hugh Malone (a belgian pale ale, but hopped like an american pale) and Black (a belgian stout, good with oatmeal raisin cookies apparently).  Hooray beer and overly-long sentences!