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Pilsner Madness Round 1: Victory Prima Pils (11) -VS- Gordon Biersch Czech Pilsner (12)

April 18, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Next up: The hop-heavy hitter, Victory Prima Pils trades blows with the malty-mangler, Gordon Biersch Czech-style Pilsner!

The Contenders:

Victory Prima Pils (11) –

For an unacceptable amount of time, I hadn’t anointed my tongue with Prima Pils, and had let Sam Adams Noble Pils, in all its noble, hoppy glory, reign as the king of flavor town. One sip immediately caused a coup in my brain; the loyalists of Noble Pils lining up in the corpus callosum, the revolutionaries of Prima Pils meeting them head on, glasses in hand like clubs made of delicate stemware. Then it got ugly. German malts and delicious hops everywhere. There is still a great-schism in my mind, two factions constantly warring over the holy pilsner lands, clashing at least once a month when I stand in front of a refrigerated case struggling to choose a six-pack.

Prima Pils carries with it the Victory Brewing pedigree than can be enjoyed in a few of their other brews: HopDevil, Golden Monkey, Storm King. They have a reputation for going big with the flavors and never going home, staying all night to party it up with the most hedonistic beer enthusiast. The word “prima” is a proclamation of joy, excitement, and success in German, and is definitely something I recommend yelling, inappropriately loudly for wherever you are, when you drink a glass of this stuff.

Gordon Biersch Czech-style Pilser (12) –

Where Prima brings the weight, the seriousness, the raw-heft, Gordon Biersch keeps it light and simple. Gordon Biersch (who many of you might know from the very massively displayed “GB” signs outside the restaurants that pepper various states in the US) is an odd mix between craft and mass produced. Some of their beers have hints of technique and artistic culinary flair but then you find out that they also brew beer for Costco.

Their Czech-style pils is competent, but unapologetically plain. It tastes like a beer brewed by committee, who decided what the best flavor balance would be with reports and statistics, not with what hops and malts went into the brew kettle.

The Fight:

I don’t want to be mean to Gordon Biersh here; this pilsner is solid, tasty, perfectly refreshing on a hot day. It’s got a nice balance of subtle hops to mildly-sour malt and I quite enjoyed drinking it, and would drink it again.

But Prima Pils – holy shit – it’s like a battleship cruising the seas of taste. It fires 48, deeply bored cannons of perfect hop, blasting a hole of wondrous joy into the smoking ruins of your taste buds. Drinking this stuff is like convening with a deity whose sole purpose in the universe is to make your happy and warm your belly with perfectly executed post-beer-bloat. It is alpha, followed quickly by omega, followed quickly by alpha again as you pop off another top. This beer is good.

So, this wasn’t a really fair match up, but not much could stand up to the mastery of Prima Pils.

Review: Gordon Biersch SommerBrau

July 19, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

You are sick of the heat. You are sick of feeling like you’ve been dipped in a tub of sweat and grime after 10 minutes of being outdoors. You are sick of everything that makes you warm. Clothes. Fire. Human touch.

You are officially broken up with Summer.

In an attempt to cool down, you’ve tried everything you remember from your childhood. You’ve flipped your sweat-soaked pillow more times than you can remember. You’ve clumsily jumped through your sprinkler while your neighbors watched, concerned, from their windows. You’ve put bags of peas on your forehead as you lay on the cold, tile floor in the basement.

And yet, you’re still too hot.

You try to think cool thoughts. Penguins, the arctic, the opening scenes from the 1993 X-Files episode, Ice. Mind over matter and all that. Think cold and you’ll be cold, right? You sit next to the AC vent, letting the forced air push the hair from your face and evaporate the sweat that has pooled in your eyebrows.

You waft your shirt over your stomach, hoping that the improved airflow will lower your internal temperature. You stare at the digital thermometer, questioning its accuracy. Your mind wanders to Spring, Fall, Winter; any time when the world isn’t trying to burn you to death.

You fill a large glass with water and add four blocky ice cubes until the contents almost overflows. You feel the relief penetrating your throat and chest as you take your first gulp. Before you realize, you’ve finished the glass of water. That was good. But you want more.

You pour another glass. Cranberry juice cocktail. The sweet and tangy concoction brings a smile to your lips, but your body cries for even more quench. Another glass. Chocolate milk. Bad idea. Refill. Unsweetened lemon-laced iced tea. Getting there, but still missing something.

The hiss as the cap comes off alone makes you feel cooler. The yellow glow of the beer in the glass is worth at least a degree or two. You take a sip. Hop bitterness, a hint of fruit. Cleverly balanced doughy malts.

Relief.

9 out of 10.

This beer never grew up and moved out. He still lives at home with his glasses.

Review: Gordon Biersch Czech Style Pilsner

June 18, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

It is hard to tell at this point in my life whether I have gotten much better at video games, or video games have gotten much easier.

I’d like to think that I have the mental ability and dexterity to skillfully play any game, but deep down, a part of me thinks that my recent rise in skill is only thanks to a coincidentally timed decrease in challenge.

When I was but a wee-Oliver, I remember games like Secret of Evermore (SNES, represent!) being stupidly hard. Even now, if I fire up an emulator, the game isn’t incredibly easy. Easier, maybe, but that is because I’ve played (and beaten) it many times before.

I blame the years of World of Warcraft and Kingdom Hearts, and other such games that offer the gamer very little consequence. Failure means little more than restarting at the latest checkpoint, or casually trotting your ghost back to the place you died. The days of losing hours of progress because you forgot to save and got unlucky on one random encounter are gone.

Not that such a trend is a bad thing. I enjoyed the aforementioned games. Autosaves and in-game progress markers make for a much less frustrating gaming experience, and one that requires significantly less time to feel like you’ve accomplished something. But on the other hand, these “features” detract from the edge-of-your-seat excitement that comes from squeaking past a level or area to get to a save point, your characters and investment in the game on the brink of annihilation the entire time.

I enjoyed new attempts to revive gaming difficulty in the likes of Bastion (with all of the idols activated at the same time, the game was near impossible) and a fresh take on puzzles like in PlayDead’s creepy platformer, Limbo. I didn’t enjoy the illusion of difficulty in Dark Souls; I really tried to give the game a chance, but a lack of instructions and monsters that can kill you in one hit is artificial difficulty. The game is no longer testing the player’s skill, but instead, their patience.

Thus I come to the point of my post, the faux-difficulty wall that is Inferno difficulty in Diablo 3. I speak from nerdy experience (Witch Doctor in Act3 Inferno) when I say that Blizzard is simply capping how far players can go with stupid, overly strong encounters. It doesn’t require skill to progress, it requires borderline exploiting and repetitive, boring game play.

Boring game play. That’s kind of against the rules of gaming, right?

That’s why I like beer. Drinking beer is never more difficult than swallowing and savoring. Maybe after 10 or so the difficulty increases, but I’ll save that for another discussion. When I play a game and get frustrated by something completely out of my control (Fast/Invulnerable Minions/Fire Chains/Mortar, anyone?), I can always remind myself that I can have a beer, and enjoy it for what it is.

Gordon Biersch’s Czech Style Pilsner is exactly that. It carries a bit of German influence, but it is sour and malty, setting it apart from more acidic pilsners in the same category. It has an abudant, pure white head that smells hoppy, and takes a good minute to settle. Most importantly, this beer is the epitome of “drinkable.”

When everything is face-bashingly hard and unfun, GB:CSP goes down easy.

8.5 out of 10.

I normally play a Witch Doctor, but I was sick of getting killed in Inferno so I was messing around with a Demon Hunter.

Review: Gordon Biersch Marzen

June 6, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

Maintaining a blog is a strange exercise in commitment. I really enjoy writing these posts and sharing them with my readers, so much that I actually miss writing them when I am busy with other, more pressing issues. But when I haven’t posted for a few days I am overtaken by a creeping guilt, the feeling that my readers may think me dead in a cornfield somewhere just because I haven’t posted timely updates.

Absurd, I realize. But hey, you need method and madness to put words on page.

I’ve been clubbed over the head by my job; inundated with more tasks than I care to describe. The biggest of which was some guided SharePoint training, in which, I showed people who don’t know how to use SharePoint how to use SharePoint (amongst several hundred other things).

It went well. Tiring and a bit unrewarding, but well.

As I completed my training sessions, collecting evaluations and answering questions (for the record, there are dumb questions), I started thinking that this was the most labor-intensive and mentally tasking thing I’d done at work in a long time. Instead of feeling sad that I’ve gotten so used to my responsibilities that I could probably do my job after 12 beers and a brisk run around the corporate headquarters, I started to think about how many people have much more difficult jobs.

This training seemed hard because I don’t often train people, and it was outside of my normal, numbing work. It really wasn’t that hard. I made it out to be harder than it was because it was foreign, not because it actually presented a challenge. At the end of the day, I’m glad I did it. It stretched my mind, and reinforced my delusions of grandeur.

I wonder if this is how Marzen as a style came to be. Were brewers bored with traditional lagers and wanted to try something new, just for the challenge? Were they sick of the overwhelming sameness of Bavarian beers in the sixteenth century? Did some master of brewage just wake up one day and say to himself, “Let’s mix things up a bit today, ja?”

I’d like to think so. In a sea of yellow lager, Marzen swims apart. It is bold and malty and decidedly different. Gordon Biersch named their version an “auburn” lager, which is self evident when looking at the picture below. Unlike other, more traditional lagers, the Gordon Biersch offering is sweet and mild, sort of like a light puff from a Cuban cigar. I’m not in love with overly sweet beer, but this had enough lager hop to balance out the heavy malt flavor.

Quite nice. Protip: Drink AFTER the training, not before.

8 out of 10.

I sing the sewer electric.

Next up: Troegs Pale Ale!

Review: Gordon Biersch Blonde Bock

May 30, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

I was born with very blonde hair. Total towhead. I looked a lot like Paris Hilton, only shorter. I’d post a picture if I could find one, but for now you’ll just have to take my word for it.

As my middle school years whizzed by, my luscious golden locks mellowed into a dirty blonde. After high school, it darkened to a rich walnut. At this rate, I expect it to be raven’s wing black by the time I am 40. Either that or my hair is going to actually start capturing light and matter in an event horizon somewhere near my forehead. I’ll call it, “The Blackhole Bob.”

As a former blonde, I appreciate the plight of current blondes. There is a lot of pressure for one with fair hair to be ditsy and frivolous, even if you’re not in the mood for such lighthearted nonsense. The stereotype afflicting all blondes is unfair, as some are perfectly capable of doing math, swimming unassisted, and driving a car without crashing it into anything and everything.

Stereotypes are wrong, but they exist for a reason. Out there, some blondes are giving the rest of the blondes a bad name. Every time someone says, “I was having a blonde moment”, every other blonde person in the world loses one strand of hair. It’s a sad truth, but soon, all blonde people will be bald.

No, I don’t have anything to back this up, but it’s science. You don’t question science.

But, with stigma comes lifestyle, and with lifestyle comes eventual acceptance. Blondes may be synonymous with “dumb”, but they’re also synonymous with “exotic” and “fun.”

Blonde? Exotic? What am I drinking?

Stay with me. Historically, blondes were a minority; a tiny little subset of humans who had hair like straw, yellow and flaxen. These blondes usually had pale skin as well, making them even appear even stranger. This was a sharp contrast from the olive skin and dark hair prevalent across the middle east and Mediterranean regions, and the blondes (often Nordic) were regarded as scary and fearsome because their hair was like the sun. The light reflecting off of their hair even caused some to think they were angelic; their shining manes a mortal halo and tangible proof of their divinity.

As is the case with humans, most people were afraid of what the didn’t understand, and blondes had a rough time fitting in. People threw stuff at them a lot. Usually stones, which hurt if they hit you. To counter this, many blonde headed people dyed their hair brown or at least some shade darker, to fit into the Roman ideal of beauty.

Seems ironic that people now do the exact opposite for the same reason. Oh human race, you so crazy.

I digress. Blondes are great. Especially blonde beers. Double especially blonde bocks. They’re usually carefree and pretty, and know how to have fun. They’re brewed with pale or golden malts and brewed with a high gravity yeast which results in a heavy, sweet lager. Blondes also taste great, but that’s hardly appropriate conversation for the likes of a blog.

Gordon Biersch knows what’s up, and brewed a Blonde Bock that is tasty, fun, smooth, and refreshing. This is the kind of blonde you’d want to spend a wild summer day with, but at 7% ABV, unfortunately not the kind you’d want to bring home to mom and dad.

9 out of 10.

Blondes have more fun?

Next up: Troegs Hop Back Amber Ale!