Summertime. I love this time of year. Fall is still my favorite and I find pleasure in all seasons but I really also enjoy the end of spring and the start of summer. Still cool but warm enough to break out the shorts and spend the day outside doing various projects or just relaxing by the fire. Every year we have projects, you can read more about our at my wife’s blog, Raising Delia. This weekend we will be building a sand box and enclosure to the new swing set we put together for Delia, plus I will be doing another Summit tour and there will be back to back Stanley Cup finals games on Saturday and Sunday, Detroit and Pittsburgh again, some are upset over this but personally I am looking forward to a rematch, hopefully Detroit can get back most of their depleted roster by then. Anyways the big reason I love this time of year is that I am more active than in the winter. Winter, to me, is fun at first. I get to chill inside, make a fire, eat hot dish, watch hockey and bust out big beers.  But winter towards the end gets frustrating. You start to get that itch and you start to feel boxed in. It is dark from 8 to 5, the temp just hangs at 0 and for me, the big beers just start becoming too much. I love big beers. The barley wines, stouts, porters and of course this day in age everything is doubled so you get 14% ABV beers and eventually these start to get old.

Like Dark Horse’s Plead the Fifth Russian Imperial Stout. Great beer. Beautifully roasted malts and chocolate with a plethora of various fruits, earthiness and hops. It poured jet black with a sexy brown head. The first sip was excellent, as was the second but after that bottle I had no desire to drink another. In fact it took me about 2 weeks to finish off the 4 pack and I usually never let beer sit for that long. Not that I got sick of it, it was just too much and lately I’ve been on a lighter beer kick. Dark Horse Brewery still makes great beers and this one is their best in their 5 part stout series.

Now Great Divide’s Belgica is the right beer for this time of year. A Belgian style IPA that is crisp, citrus, spicy (cardamom possibly?), floral and fermented with a Belgian yeast strain. It poured a golden hazy color with a nice frothy head that left a terrific lacing as it went down. These are the beers that I am enjoying these days. I knew that the time of the season was here when at Dark Lord Day I found myself liking the Gumball Head Pale Wheat beer more than the Dark Lord itself, in fact I have one bottle of the Dark Lord left that I really want to drink but I find myself waiting for the right moment when usually I really don’t give a rip. I think I will take it down this Saturday night. But anyways the Belgica is a fine beer. I love how the complexity is yet very subtle in it’s execution, a lot going on but easy enough to drink down. A nice ABV but nothing too toxic. I will be on the look out for more of these being that I grabbed the last one from The Cellars. As I have always said, I am a seasonal beer drinker. I live the seasons and I love how each season has it’s beers.

Dark Horse’s Plead The Fifth

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Great Divide’s Belgica

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