Stoned Ensemble

The Communal and unified nature of the American brewing scene shouldn’t be anything new to you. (Buy Our Book.) New, rowdy breweries are equipped with the obsolete machines of Elder breweries past, and Macro-Micro breweries are always evolving into new paternal forms: from distilling to distributing other fellow ale houses’ suds.
But the pinnacle of this new school of collaboration rests in grand old Escondido, in the vast fortress of our first love: Stone Brewing. Along with countless forays into expanding the expression of beer-madness, the dudes at Stone are in their third year of organized collaborative brewing and the results have been building in Rad.
Engaging in Hands-Across-The-Pond style brewing, and even embarking on something as official and nerdy as a “Brewer Exchange Program,” the Juxtaposition series presents the boys who always wanted to ruin your taste buds with a new set of potential hurdles to demolish. The process they’ve coined consists of a tryptic of current brewing baddies. Past projects, and current ones for that matter, pretty much read like a roll call of the best and brightest brewers on the planet.
The ‘witches round the fire’ situation that ensues from such a meeting of minds produces some pretty blazing results. In the case of 2009’s Black Pilsner, the three-way offspring becomes a veritable ubermensch. Pilsner, lets face it, is a fairly tired style. Yeah, when pressed to we can tell the difference between PBR and Czechvar but being deeply into Pilsner is like insisting that Barry Manilow is still a total ruler, or that a Wham! Reunion deserves closer inspection given the current economic climate — tepid and silly.
This Juxtaposition bottle was pried from the depths of the Rock n’ Roll 7-11 in Highland Park. Upon popping, a veritable palette of hops exited the wee bottle (there were 9 hop additions during the brewing). In the glass, this beer looks like the antithesis of Pilsner: black, velvety, dense. Swilling brings about a whole new feeling, not unlike the first time you shower stoned. “Wow,” you might say, “this feels really goddamn good!” And it does. And it tastes like pineapples. It tastes like hop candy, it tastes like the lightest, hoppiest, stout that you could imagine in all your beer dreams, like some amalgam of Black Flag and Pliny, and something else, like a perfect waxed cup of your best seven-year-old soda fountain cocktail with an inappropriate name (we called them ‘Suicides’).
And then its over. Flavor upon flavor, in unyielding nonsensical throbs for seven to 17 seconds and then… your mouth is clean. Did you just brush your teeth? Where’s my car…
This is aged magic in a bottle; a damn near perfect collaboration of three genies that comes out tasting like something you’ve never tasted before (or maybe never liked before). Find this before its gone; or covet the success of those who beat you to the punch.
Soundtrack: Mi Ami “Dreamers”
Dairy Pairy: Brebis Roussinere — a raw washed rind hard aged sheep’s cheese from way too high in the mountains.