Showing posts with label Fridge Fillers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fridge Fillers. Show all posts

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Recurring Fridge Fillers

Most of the posts up until this point have been my articles for The Triangle, Drexel's student-run newspaper. I try to find either interesting and fairly accessible beers to review for these articles (with the occasional Russian River beer tossed in because I like them), but I haven't really talked about my drinking habits. Now, while I love sour beers and lots of different imports, but as a poor college student I can't drink these all the time. So, here are my standbys:
Yeungling Traditional Lager: I love this beer. Its one of the few (if not only) remaining examples of a pre-prohibition American lager. Its clean, got a hint of corn (think high fructose corn syrup, but not horrendously sweet), full bodied and an all around good taste. Two other points: its local (Pottsville, PA), and dirt cheap: $19 for a case of cans.
Troegs Variety Pack: Troegs actually has at least 3 different variety packs on the market at different times of year. All contain Dreamweaver (Belgian Wit/American Wheat style), Pale Ale (well, its a Pale Ale) and Hopback Amber (American Amber, nice hop bite to this one without going over the top). All three of these beers are very good, clean and consistent; I've never had a bad bottle of any of them (except some Dreamweaver that I froze and killed the yeast, which doesn't count). The fourth bottle rotates with the season between Rugged Trail Brown Ale (an American Brown, not really my thing but a good beer none the less), Java Head Stout (a coffee stout, quite good) and Sunshine Pils (a nice, crisp Pilsner). I usually keep a case of this stuff in the fridge, as it provides enough of a variety of choices that people can find something they like, as well as letting me recommend beers that I know are good to people who are looking to try something different. I pay about $36 per case at my local distributor.
Victory On-Tap: I view Victory as my home town brewery, and I have been incredibly spoiled by them. They consistently turn out clean, to-style beers in a huge variety of styles. They have 20 taps and 4 hand engines, and generally all are full. The most impressive thing to me is the fact that I've seen 4 different pilsners on tap at the same time, and all tasted both very good and distinctly different. The growler prices at the Downingtown brewpub are insanely low, starting at $7.50 for a 2-Liter of their normal-test beers (pilsners, etc). Here is the catch, though: I only buy growlers from them. I have had inconsistent luck with Victorys bottles (Stormking tasting astringent, Festbier tasting funny, Victory Lager being just foul, Golden Monkey lacking the smoothness that it should), so I currently have 5 growlers and periodically drive to Downingtown to get them filled. Another nice thing about victory is that they have a growler filling station, which purges the growler with CO2 and fills from the bottom. This prevents oxidation and contamination, which makes the beer last longer (current record is a month, compared to the normal week for growlers filled off the tap).

So, that's what you will most frequently find in my fridge. I vary these from time to time, but I keep coming back to these beers, as they are cheap and fantastic.