What I’m Drinking – Baseball Edition
This week was the opening week of Major League Baseball, one of my favorite weeks of the year. Every year on opening day of my favorite team, the Phillies, I take the day off from work and watch the game with some friends. I also usually buy a nice bottle of scotch whisky to celebrate the day and open up some good bottles of beer. This year was no exception, as I had some very nice drinks as I watched the Phillies beat the Reds.
I recently found a bottle of the now discontinued Benriach 21 Authenticus in a small spirits shop not far from me. It’s a heavily peated Speyside malt, which is pretty uncommon these days. I’ll be posting a full review of it soon. It was a good choice to celebrate the return of baseball.
I also have been enjoying a bottle of Balmenach distilled in 2003, aged 13 years, and bottled under the Exclusive Malts label by the Creative Whisky Company (an independent bottler that I’ve mentioned here before). It’s quite wonderful. Fruity and complex, with a good amount of bourbon influence.
For beer on opening day, I’d been saving a bottle of Free Will Blood & Guts (the 2015 bottling), a rather unique cherry sour. Those of you who know me know that I love Free Will, in particular their sours, and Blood & Guts is one of their absolute best. Such a terrific beer. I think I’m going to plan to have a bottle for opening day every year going forward.
Free Will is a Philadelphia-area beer (it’s from my hometown of Perkasie), so I thought it would be good to also represent the enemy on opening day with a beer from Cincinnati—Rhinegeist Mosaic Pale Ale. In this day and age when IPAs and flavored stouts (and sours, to a lesser extent) get most of the attention in the craft beer world, pale ales don’t get a lot of love, which is a shame. But whether or not it gets much hype, this is one terrific beer. I’ll take this over your citrus chocolate honey pepper double IPA any day.
And finally, I enjoyed a new beer I recently had for the first time—Against the Grain’s Everybody Wants Some, an Indian Pale Lager (IPL) brewed in collaboration with Hoof Hearted Brewing. I really love the idea of IPLs as a style, but there are two problems—1) very few breweries are making IPLs, and 2) most of the IPLs that I have managed to find have not been all that great. The first IPL I ever had was from the legendary Jack’s Abby, a craft brewery in Massachusetts that specializes in lagers. It was one of the best beers I’ve ever had, regardless of style. Ever since then I’ve been looking for another IPL that might come close to that bit of beer magic. All have fallen well short. Until I tried Everybody Wants Some. It’s not quite as good as Jack’s Abby (nothing is), but it’s a wonderful beer.
Anyhow, if you’re a baseball fan, I hope your team’s opening day was as enjoyable as mine. The Phillies won, I shared good whisky and delicious beer with friends, and ate babka (I think I might have to write a blog post about babka soon). It was a good day.
