Trillium Brewing Company & The Veil Brewing Company – Adult Human

Tags

Beer, Beer Review, Boston, Collaboration, Craft Beer, Massachusetts, New England, Richmond, The Veil Brewing Company, Trillium Brewing Company, Virginia

I do plan on reviewing something other than a Trillium beer sooner or later, but I only have so much time in which to “research” these reviews and honestly this is all I’ve been drinking these past few weeks.  Talk about a good problem to have.

Beer Name: Adult Human

Brewery: Trillium Brewing Company (Boston/Canton, MA) and The Veil Brewing Company (Richmond, VA)

Style: Double IPA

ABV: 8.2%

Description: Another collaboration double IPA, this one was brewed with blood oranges.  You can get the official write-up here.  Four packs were going for $20.20 though I personally took advantage of the brewery’s willingness to split them up this time around.  It’s been an expensive few weeks.

Appearance: Super cloudy, bright straw yellow body with a thin layer of yellowish/white foam that formed with the pour and quickly faded away.

Smell: Pineapple soaked in dank hop resin.

Taste: Opened with mellow tropical fruit and gradually became increasingly bitter by mid-sip whengrapefruit and orange pith began to take over.  After sitting for a minute or two, the beer took on a nice orange cream taste here as well.  The finish I found a bit raw and hot, as a combination of earthy and piney hops joined with the aforementioned grapefruit to rather assertively close out the brew.

Mouthfeel: Medium bodied with a moderate carbonation that left me with some happy little bubbles on the end.

Hype: On the basis of being a special release alone I’ll say high, though there had also been some speculation online about when this particular collaboration would become available.  Despite this anticipation I was able to just walk in and out at Fort Point.  Go figure.

Overall: This was good, but not quite as good as the other collaborations Trillium has put out in the past few weeks.  That’s admittedly some tough company for comparison’s sake, but it seems like a fair standard in this case.  I loved this beer until about the halfway point and then I felt the finish was just a bit too harsh for my preferences.  It’s nowhere near Never & Again levels, though perhaps in a couple of days that will tone down some.  Still a solid pickup.

 

Trillium Brewing Company & Other Half Brewing Company – Two Hundred Thousand Trillion

Tags

Beer, Beer Review, Boston, Brooklyn, Craft Beer, Massachusetts, New York, Other Half Brewing Company, Trillium Brewing Company

I’ve been hitting up Trillium a lot lately, but still felt the need to head on out and pick up their latest special release last Friday.  Motivating factors were these two breweries previously joined forces to create one of my top three Trillium collaboration beers and that it was an absolutely beautiful day to go for a walk when this came out.

Beer Name: Two Hundred Thousand Trillion

Brewery: Trillium Brewing Company (Boston/Canton, MA) and Other Half Brewing Company (Brooklyn, NY)

Style: Double IPA

ABV: 8.0%

Description: Another collaboration between two popular East Coast breweries, this double IPA was aged on peach, apricots, and guava.  As usual, Trillium has more of the specs here on their website.

Appearance: Golden/straw yellow colored body.  Lots of cloudy haze underneath a lively white head that was very quick to fizz away.

Smell: Mild tropical fruits followed by a rush of bitter resin.

Taste: Light to moderate fruit upfront; perhaps best described as a combination of peach, apricot, mango, and pineapple.  A light, crackery malt came through about mid sip.  The finish was bitter, slightly spicy, and featured a slightly tangy reappearance of the opening fruits.

Mouthfeel: Medium, fluffy body with perhaps just a touch more carbonation than I was expecting.

Hype:  Huge!  The release was announced on Twitter about 10 before the brewery opened.  Working downtown, I arrived about 10 minutes after opening and still got stuck with a 10-15 minute wait.  By the time I got out with my cans there was a line down the block.  Honestly, if I didn’t get there when I did I would have bailed.  As usual, the brewery staff did a great job moving people along but there were also a lot of people in line loading up on everything which slowed the process down.

Overall: I like this beer a lot.  It walked an immensely satisfying line between mellow fruit and harsh bitterness and successfully offered the best of both worlds.  This was another collaboration that came out a bit different than your typical “New England (D)IPA” and I really appreciated the variety.  Trillium and Other Half seem to work very well together.

Book Review: Men Without Women, by Haruki Murakami

Tags

Book Review, Books, Fiction, Haruki Murakami, Reading

I’ve been a pretty avid reader of Murakami for some time now and as such made sure this new release got on my list as soon as possible.  As luck would have it, my hold came through only a few days after finding myself in-between books for the first time in several months.

Men Without Women is a collection of short stories featuring male protagonists and their complex, often troubled, relationships with women in their lives.  Rather dark in tone, issues of death, separation, and personal/societal estrangement are common features throughout all the stories in this volume.  Each character is lost in some way and have either resigned themselves to their situation or spend their days searching for something within themselves that may or may not be within their power to find.

On the whole I found this collection to be something of a mixed bag.  There were a few stories that I liked, but aside from those none of the others appealed to me as much as I had hoped they would.  The overall feel of the book was generally very bleak and it didn’t seem to have that same sense of magical realism that usually draws me into Murakami’s work.  While each story was without a doubt well-written, Murakami does an excellent job setting a scene and building characters throughout, these just wasn’t really what I was looking for.  None of the characters captured my interest all that much and as such I couldn’t get fully invested in their stories.  Appropriately enough, I didn’t make it through the one from which the collection took its name.

That said, there were two stories that I was particularly taken by.  Kino, my favorite of the group, is the story of a recently divorced man trying to open a new chapter in his life by converting his aunt’s tea house into a bar.  When something happens to drive away his two most reliable guests, a mysterious book-reading man and a stray cat, Kino is advised to get out of town for a while and lay low.  This was the one story that really left me wanting more and also the one that best captured the otherworldly mysticism that usually draws me into Murakami’s books.  The other note-worthy story for me was Samsa in Love, a tale far creepier and horror-like than anything I’ve read from Murakami to date.  It’s protagonist, a man named Samsa, regains consciousness in a boarded up room.  Disoriented and in a great deal of pain, he gradually comes to his senses and begins exploring his surroundings, taking step by excruciating step through an unfamiliar house.  As he does so, the reader slowly gets the impression that something is very wrong.  Samsa doesn’t seem fully comfortable inside his body and certain thoughts suggest that he may not have always been human.  His awkward interactions with a hunchbacked young woman he encounters adds to the sense of foreboding and gives the story a very eerie vibe that for better or worse goes unresolved.

Overall though, I surprised to say that I consider this book a miss for me, a rarity from this author.  After reading a number of other reviews I realize that I am in an extreme minority in my opinion here, so I’ll say that dedicated Murakami fans would probably find this worth checking out (I wouldn’t fault someone else for being more into these stories than I was).  That said, for someone new to the author I would personally recommend they start elsewhere.