By Greg B. There are some nights when all you want to do is head down to your favorite watering hole and just hang out, have a few beers and just chill.  Well, this past Friday was one of those nights.  I hadn’t been out and around in Baltimore recently… in fact, the last time I had been across town to Max’s had to easily have been a month prior, possibly longer.  I wasn’t looking to get completely hammered, but I was looking to get a nice buzz going and learn more about beers.  There are so many varieties of beer that it’s difficult to keep up with the new and interesting recipes breweries around the country (and now around the world), but this night, I was going to try!

I began the night by walking into Max’s and thinking I had hit some kind of time warp… everyone looked so young!  So to shake off the concept of the inevitable march of time, I marched up to the bar (after checking in the back to see if Courtney was serving, but the back bar wasn’t open yet) and gave the draught list a good once over.   Of all the delicious sounding beers at the time, I wanted to try something that would shake off the bitter chill I had acquired in my cross-town walk to Max’s (it’s a bit of a hike from Union Square to Max’s in Fells Point!).  So here’s a rundown of the beers I enjoyed this evening!

Alvinne Bathazaar – A Belgian strong dark ale – Beer pours a big off white head that is very lively, foaming up and over the glass in a way that the first beer of the night should!  The beer was served in a tulip glass, and the color shone through, a nice dark amber with some hints of red.  The beer really smells of sweet fruit and Belgian yeast, with the fruit carrying a much more cherry type of aroma.  The taste is good, the carbonation is a little high and noticeable but there’s an interesting interplay between the bitter hop flavor and the cherry-ish flavor.  Dark malts come out towards the end of each sip, but are driven away by a more solid bitter finish.  2.9/5, 9.5%abv

Cuvee des Jacobins Rouge – A Flemish Red Ale – I decided not to look at the beer list, but instead to just pick beer by taps and this caught my eye.  It had been a little over a year since I first had a rouge beer, and I was going to try another one!  The beer was poured into a standard lager pint glass, and demonstrated very minimal head at the pour which rapidly faded to a thin white carbonated film on top.  The carbonation was very aggressive, you could see the beer actively bubbling and almost frothing in the glass!  It has a nice hazy reddish color to it and smells strongly of apples, yogurt, barnyard funk, old gym sock and maybe a touch of vinegar. It’s a very expressive beer!  The flavor was delicious, tart and sour, right to the point with how sour it was.  There are flavors of apples still very strong and the beer is amazing at making the mouth pucker and the salivary glands salivate after each sip… If you like Flemish red ales, you know what I’m talking about!  The finish was a little odd though, I felt.  Giving the impression of almost ’sea-water’ funk, which was interesting and notable.  3.7/5,  5.5% abv

The Bruery Autumn Maple – A Belgian style dark strong ale – since I’ve discovered beer from The Bruery, I have never been disappointed.  And since my sister was out this evening I felt it my duty to teach her a bit about beer (she was nursing a Lindemann’s framboise).  So I went to the bar and surveyed the interesting beers in the bottle, not on tap and saw the lineup of 750ml bottles from the Bruery.  Rather than try one of the beers I knew already, I asked the bartender if the Autumn Maple was good, and he laughed, told me it was extraordinary, grabbed the bottle and asked how many glasses I needed.  Great!  So with two empty tulip glasses in my hand and a full bottle of this beer, I went back to pour it myself and see what was up.  The beer pours with 1 finger of tan head that foams up, then recedes leaving a nice bit of lacing but also bubbles looking similar to a hand pump style beer.  The beer is a dark amber color, really embodying the ‘maple’ aspect of this beer.  With that being said, this beer actually does embody maple.. maple color, maple flavor, maple aroma… it’s one of those beers you sip and stand back and say “wow!  that’s cool!” (I even wrote ‘wow’ in my little notebook!).  The beer smells like real maple syrup, not that Mrs. Butterworth stuff, but real syrup, collected from a ton of trees, reduced by several orders of magnitude and somehow made into a beer, carbonated, bottled and shipped to me.  The beer itself captures the flavor and even texture of maple syrup without getting too sweet, as you can still get a strong dark malt flavor and even a bit of the yeast from the bottle providing some nice character.  A great beer… trust your bartenders at Max’s!  3.8/5, 10% abv

Drie Fonteinen Oude Geuze - Geuze/lambic – When I saw this on the list of beers on tap, I had to try it.  I had just read an article about how the master brewer/blender for this brewery was going to retire from the business.  Blending lambics is an art.. knowing when and how to take young, fresh, fruity lambics and combine them with old, funky, mature lambics to produce the deliciously refreshing beer that we know, so it’s a sad day when one of the best is retiring.  So in honor of this, I bought a beer.  This beer comes as a dark gold color with a 1 finger very white head.  It smells intensely of old sock, horseblanket and just the funkiest funk that ever funked.  The taste is straight up in line with the aroma for the most part.  Sour fruit with a lemonish finish, tempered by a nice restrained wood (I think it was oaked) finish that actually matched very well with the funk in the flavor.  A delicious beer, and a great way to end the first part of the night!  4.3/5, 6% abv

So, it was only my sister and me at the bar, and she had to go, so I snagged a ride home and got to explore my personal cellar.  I tried my new recipe of the Winter Spiced ale (NOT the one with wormwood in it) and it’s excellent, nutmeg and cinnamon barreling down on your nostrils with the spicy kick of ginger in the back awakening your palate.  Ask me sometime if you’re around, I’ll pull out a bottle for you!  After a few more beers, my friend West Side Jess wanted to hit up the bar, so I found myself heading back to Max’s, this time with a bottle of my beer in my pocket.  It’s always good to get real professional opinions on beer, one of the bartenders is an excellent source of information!  So I found myself back in the bar, exchanging beer for beer.  And what Jamie had in store for me was a heck of a beer treat!

Mikkeller Black -American Double Imperial stout – I think just the name of the beer and the beer style will give you an idea of what this beer is.  Served in a small wine glass, approximately 3-4oz, this beer represents an explosion of flavor, but also a drink that, if you don’t treat it right and respect it, will turn even the manliest man into a little girl.  It’s 17.5% alcohol.  Lets just lay that on the table first.  And in order to balance this amount of alcohol with flavor, the brewers must have gone through a heck of a time checking sugars and milking every last drop of flavor from their yeast and malts.  And they succeeded.  What a beer!  The beer looks like used motor oil from a very dirty engine, black as night with minimal to no head.  There are aromas of dark malts, but these are clouded by a dark fermented fruit aroma that nicely blends yeast and alcohol together.  The best is great, but this is definitely a sipping beer!  Dark fruits, dark plum with a sweet malt, and just when you think it might be too sweet, the heat from the alcohol kicks in to balance it out.  Don’t get me wrong, this is not a perfectly balanced, easily quaffable beer.  This is a beer you need to sit, sip and enjoy for it’s provocative flavors and aromas and just be amazed at what those brewers can do!  3.6/5, 17.5% abv

Weyerbacher Hotel -Imperial Porter – I love Weyerbacher beers, and a few days ago a friend of mine had texted me, asking if I had heard of or tried Weyerbacher’s Hotel.  I had not, until then, even heard of it and then lo and behold, this weekend it’s on tap at Max’s!  So I ordered a pint, a good hearty porter to follow up the Mikkeller Black!  in doing a little bit of research on it today, it appears they ran out of bottles at the brewery, so they only had 60 cases of this beer bottled, only available at the brewery if you wanted to pick some up, the rest got kegged.  I can only hope Weyerbacher is running out of bottles because they are producing so much of their great beer.  The beer pours a lovely dark chocolate color with an intensely thick tan head that leaves a great lacing on the glass as it recedes.  The smell is of sweeter malts, chocolate and espresso.  The flavor is spot on, a well balanced slightly sweeter beer (though after the Mikkeller it wasn’t really ’sweet’) that nicely blends the dark malt flavors and aromas together.  It’s a solid porter, one I’d love to drink again and could easily drink a few of through the night.  The thick, creamy head is indicative of the creamy, smooth mouthfeel of this beer as well… good job Weyerbacher!  3.5/5, 8.2% abv.

Lancaster Boss Hog - Double IPA – As Jamie made me re-order the beer, instead of pronouncing it Lancaster, I had to say it with the Bawlmer accent of ‘laancster’.  In all honesty, this beer was not one that I ordered for the night, but one for my friend West Side Jess.  The beer pours a beautiful golden color with a good 1.5 fingers of thick white head that leaves a nice lacing as it recedes.  The beer smells intensely of floral hops, pine resin and citrus are exploding on the nose, and as you drink it, some of the toasted malt character makes itself known as well.  I only had one sip of the beer, to cleanse my palate between other beers, so I don’t know the beer intimately, but this is what I got on a first pass.

And these are the beers of the night.  It was a great night of beer exploration with many new flavors and beers drank, all sorts of styles consumed and a few lessons in beer could be passed on to others.  If you’re in the Baltimore area and like beer, you owe it to yourself to get over to Max’s on Broadway to broaden your beer knowledge, experience and learn about beers.  Happy hunting!