As for Mocne, I can’t decide if I’ve been duped or not.  They’ve gone ahead and put “Malt Liquor” on the label — does this indicate a foriegn-brewery lack of knowledge about the stigma associated with Malt Licka’s here in the U.S.?  Or have I purchased Poland’s equivalent of King Cobra, thinking it was a fancy import, despite them giving me fair warning on the label?  The fact is, it’s not nearly as bad as domestic Malt Liquors, but it’s not nearly as good as the specialty quintuple-boch-uber-malty brews that must technically be called Malt Liquors because of their alcoholic content, but nevertheless are quite tasty.  The flavor has a faint whiff of whatever domestic malt liquor reeks of.  The head had that same super-fine-grained soapy bubbliness that you see in cheap 40′s, industrial solvents, ocean foam in Newark, but never in a decent beer.  I have to conclude, therefore, that this beer is to King Cobra what Harp’s Lager is to Budweiser — an imported, better-quality yet essentially in the same family of beverage.  Since being the Best of the Malt Liquors is a distinction akin to being the professional bowler with the fastest 40-yard-dash time, I’m not sure what the point really is for this beer.  If you were somehow constrained to the world of malt liquors forevermore, this is your best beer choice, but if you’re in this situation then you really have more pressing problems to deal with…

After taste-testing six malt liquors in the past year, I thought I was able to handle the typical malt liquor.  St. Ides didn’t at first appear to be anything special.  But this is a malt brew full of surprises.  And, needless to say, surprise is NOT what you want when it comes to beer this bad.  At every turn, in all respects, I shamefully underestimated this dreck, and it made me pay for my miscalculation.  Here’s the rundown:

*** Characteristic:   Flavor

My expectation:    “Probably terrible, but I’ve done terrible before… bring it on!”

Reality:    “Oh my dear lord!  We’ve hit an iceberg!   We’re going down!  Oh, the humanity!”

***  Characteristic:   Intoxification-ness

My expectation:    “I might be giggling a bit too much by the end, but I’ll be back to normal by bedtime”

Reality:   “Ehhhh?  … I’m only down about halfway, and I can’t see straight…  my toes are numb…  I can see through metal, I swear…”

*** Characteristic:    Hangover

My expectation:    “Eh, a little water before bed, and I’m fine.”

Reality:    “Could someone turn down the throbbing in my arteries?  I think I can hear my eyeballs moving in their sockets…”

Maybe for some reason I was caught off guard (did I give blood earlier?  do I have a tapeworm?), but this 40 knocked me on my behind.  It was just like high school all over again.  Late that night I happened to catch a few minutes of the kid’s show “Oobi”, where all the characters consist of human hands with googly-eyes glued to the knuckles.  That show is surreal sober, so you can imagine my discombobulation.  So while I don’t have much remembrance of the flavor, quality, or other characteristics I usually use to judge the beer, I will give this one a rating of 2 beers as a reward for reminding me not to be complacent.  I gotta start training better…  where was that Rocky 8-track tape?

And, I might add, serious cheek bite.  Holy mouth burn, does this beer bite!   You may want to go over your tongue with a pumice stone for a few minutes before drinking, just to warm up.  Certainly it’s not the biggest offender out there — specialty store stouts could bite your cheek twice as hard, I’m sure.  Somewhere, somebody is probably brewing some prototype Nuclear Stout that contains so much hops that not even light can escape, a beer that will blast your cheeks into next October, where they will suddenly reappear after you’ve learned to cope without them, reattach to your face and hurt like hell for the next twenty years.  But as far as beers that you can readily find during a trip to buy diapers, this is pretty sharp.  Not a bad taste, though — I do like stouts quite a bit (Guinness being my all-time favorite beer) and so it was definitely a good diversion from the usual horse pee I drink for entertainment’s sake on this site.  But I must ashamedly admit I bought it more for the label, once again suckered in by soul-less commercialism.  Isn’t that how Rasputin would have wanted it?

When I finally got to the barley wine, it didn’t take long to get to me. With the word “wine” in the name, it seems like it could be classy. But at 11% abv, the 1 pint, 6 oz. bottle that they sell it in is more than enough to get me feeling… loopy. I got to admit though, I think Old Guardian is my favorite of all the Stone brews. It has that signature hoppiness that all Stone brews have, but it doesn’t kick quite as much. Maybe the high alcohol content and the high hop content cancel each other out, I don’t know. All I know is that I liked it.

Yikes! Whooo!!! As I write this, I’m about halfway through a bottle of Samichlaus, and I’m quite loopy — this beer is advertised as officially rated by the Guinness Book of Records as the strongest beer in the world, at 14% alcohol, more even than the malt liquors I’ve been reviewing. This is not a beer for the mild at heart — the flavor more than stands up to the bite from all the alcohol, and needless to say the alcohol itself will cause some complications in your life if you have one, say, on an empty stomach at the start of a business lunch. (“No sir, we didn’t land the Stevens account, because I burped up my spinach omelet into the salad bar…”) It has a licorice taste reminiscent of McEwan’s (or about eight McEwan’s distilled down into a thick slurry) to go along with the kick from the alcohol. All beers over 7 or 8 percent alcohol have a punch-in-the-teeth “Holy Crud!” bite to them, probably from the unexpected combination of beer taste and ethanol. I just dunno if it works, though — ale flavor can’t really stand up well to the alcohol kick as well as other boozy non-beer beverages in the same range, for example cinnamon schnapps (whose taste could overwhelm coal tar).

The label is strangely understated (though the font is so gothic and serif-advanced that I can barely make out the name), much as the champagnes that are superior have the bland labels — they don’t need lots of fuss and business for Jay-Z to know to buy them. Plenty of fuss goes into making this beer, however — it is brewed only once a year on December 6th (St. Nicholas’ birthday — “Samichlaus” translates as Santa Claus), then is left to age for ten months to age before escaping to specialty beer stores. Hardly needs to be said, completely wasted on me. For the average joe like me, this is the beer equivalent of $100 wine that you and 19 of your friends bought together just to see what all the fuss is. And for me, the fuss with Samichlaus turned out to be not much more than getting unexpectedly plowed on a Tuesday night…