Beers have gotten big. At a 9.5% ABV, this 16 oz. can of Big Cranky, from Stony Creek Brewery, is more than twice the alcohol content -- almost 2.5 times! -- of a standard 12 oz. Heineken. And this is where buying cans, instead of grabbing a beer at a brewery or bar, really shows how nutzo the price differences can be. I imagine it’d be hard to get more than 12 oz. of this if it was served to me at a bar and around here that’d likely cost at least $10 or $12, or at least $1 an ounce. I got this single can for $3.79, or less than $0.25 an ounce. A 4-pack of this looks like it sells for around $13, which is quite cheap for a big beer like this.
Anyways. Going out for beer is expensive. But you’re not hereto read my gripes about beer prices. Let me crack open this can of three Heinekens...I mean Big Cranky. Turns out it was packaged...yeeks...October of last year. So this is nowhere near a fresh Double IPA. It pours nice though. Golden yellow with a bright white head of large bubbles that quickly dissipates. It smells...oooh...boozy. A little bit of tropical fruit. A little candy.
It’s predominant taste is bitter. And some cooked fruit. I fear this beer tastes old and not well taken care of. That’s what I get for falling for the “single can in a big shelf of other single cans” trick. But it’s an easy trap to fall for. It’s the same trap I fall for when I try to buy paper towels. I don’t think I’ve ever in my life bought more than two paper towels at once. The larger packs...what...6 or 8 rolls? They won’t fit in the cart, the car, or the apartment.
The bitterness in this beer is nice. It’s sharp and prominent. And the booziness actually does a good job balancing it out. I imagine it’d be more hoppy/fruity if it were fresh. But I’m a little over freshness. I don’t know if I’m getting old or...cranky....or what. I chased beers down in the past. The Heady Topper craze was intense and not so fun (but that is a good beer). I think I had the most fun tracking down the Bell’s Brewing planet series based off of Gustav Holst’s “The Planets.” I still have one bottle cap of each of those (Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) in our kitchen. And I remember one of those beers...maybe it was Mercury?...had a distinct hot dog flavor, and I accidentally drank the one I meant to save, so I scrambled around town to find some place that had any left. That was fun and all, but now there are enough beers around that the idea of chasing particular beers doesn’t sound fun anymore.
Oh, and if you want to hear some real crankiness, my brothers recently shared with me some beers that called themselves Lollipop IPAs, filled with fruit (like five fruits) plus coconut or marshmallow or vanilla, and so on. This is beyond the milkshake IPA phase, which I avoid, and into some sort of bizarre state where I find myself wanting to yell “This ain’t beer!” But at this point, there are multiple generations of dull men sipping a beer and making ugly faces and yelling “This ain’t beer!” to the youngsters of the time.
This beer is pretty good. And I’ve found a trick -- not an original discovery by any means -- that makes a beer last. I crack open the beer and put it into a cozy and pour roughly a fourth into a smaller glass. In this particular case, it’s a Night Shift Brewing cozy and a Heady Topper glass -- and for flavor I’m waiting the MST3K episode “Ring of Terror” -- and I trick my silly monkey-reptile brain into thinking I’m drinking more than one beer. Or, more usefully, multiple rounds of a very fancy beer at a very fancy beer joint.
I don’t have much else to say about Big Cranky. It’s tasty. It’s getting me tipsy. It was cheap. I’m about 2/3rds through. It’s nice to be at home drinking this for less than $4 instead of in a crazy pricy bar somewhere. Maybe I’m old. Maybe I’m cranky. Maybe I’m both?
