Mother's day beers

Had the extended family over on Sunday for a lazy BBQ and a few tasters.

John Boston lager. A reasonable drop available through the Wine Society, and competes on price & style with other "premium" lagers such as Cascade & James Boag.

Brewdog Bashah. From Northmead cellars. A so-called Black Belgian-style Double Indian Pale Ale. What ?? Tasted like a hopped porter to me. I'm not so sure about all this "extreme" brewing & style cross-overs. The style boundaries are being challenged, which is OK I guess. But why then try to categorise the beer using the standard category definitions ? It comes across as a bit, um, contrived.

BrewDog case study: creating a high growth beer brand within a falling beer market

Duvel. I scored these for $2.30 a bottle from Dan Murphy. Someone mistakenly printed off the price tag as $47.95 per case, rather than per six-pack. I cleared them out of the stock and took the tag to the checkout, knowing full well there was a mistake. :-) If it had been a small privately owned bottle shop, I wouldn't have..... but, Woolies ? Come in spinner....

Trappist Westvleteren 8. Unavailable in Australia, but sent over via the "grey market" in the US. Me and a couple of other beeradvocates banded together and paid, from memory, $30 a bottle for the 8 and the 12. The beer is outstanding. An earlier review can be found here: http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/313/857/?ba=vancurly

My own concoction, a kind of imperial schwartz beer (lol), was on tap. Coopers European lager tin, augmented with Special B, pale Cara, and chocolate malts, plus some Perle for additional bittering and my home-grown Tettnang for dry-hopping. Fermented around 18C, and kegged/conditioned for a couple of weeks.

Had some wine, too.....