Lazy Magnolia's Southern Pecan Nut Brown and August 6th, 2014

Lazy Magnolia's Southern Pecan Nut Brown Ale

There is a fight in the Southeast to establish the south's regional favorite brew company.  Lazy Magnolia is a new one for me.  I'm a huge fan of Sweetwater Brewing company, but I have to admit they focus on a lot of hot summer day at the lake brews, super pilsners and such.  Terrapin is trying to do the West Coast hop thing, something I've said before that I am not a fan of.  Lazy Magnolia is trying to find its footing.  One of the big novelties of all southern brewers is to take a regional favorite food and turn it into a beer.  Sometimes you get good results... sometimes you get bad.  Lazy Magnolia's Southern Pecan Nut Brown won a gold medal.

We here in the south "claim" pecans for southern food even though its popular all around the states.  This beer is the first to use Pecan in its grains as a fermented ingredient.  Take note of that; this is not a beer with Pecan additives or extracts.  It is a true Nut Brown, a style that you find Newcastle and Sam Smith's Nut Brown as the standards that others are judged.  Typically they are low sweetness, very lightly hopped, lower end alcohol content, smooth drinking beer with a slight malty characters that lean toward chocolate and light caramel notes.  Southern Pecan Nut Brown matches most of the description.

When I poured the beer, I noticed something you might see in the photo there; this English style Nut Brown ale sure has a ruby tinge to it.  This should be the first indication to the character of this beer as a whole, it seems to sit somewhere between the classic Newcastle style Nut Brown and something amber like Killian's Irish Red.  The taste starts with malty sweetness and then the nuttiness comes in.  Many Nut Browns and amber ales bring the nuttiness at the end, but not this beer.  The nuttiness will last the rest of the tasting period.  Once the malt tones down, the taste will turn to caramel and brown sugar, there is a tinge of burnt sugar(in a black lager, stout sort of way), but it leaves rather quickly.  The end finishes with some hops mixed with sweet nuts, finishing just a tad bitter.   If you think Newcastle is lacking the flavor department, you'll find Southern Pecan has much more nuttiness, and stronger caramel notes with a brown sugar sweetness to it.  If you think Killian's is too yeasty and a tad bitter, then you will find Southern Pecan to be more smooth with less hop bite.  Avoid this beer if you do not like a sweetness, especially if Dopplebochs turn your stomach, as there's some sweetness, especially when it warms up a little bit.  Serve it as cold as you can to tone this down.

My favorite beer styles are Nut Browns and Amber Ales.  So this is right up my alley.  Compared to my favorites of the style, I have to put it 3rd.  I still like Brooklyn Brown and Sweetwater Georgia Brown better because both are more refreshing.  I like Southern Pecan better than Sam Smith's and Newcastle because both of those are too subtle in flavor.  Oh, and the Pecans seem to add a lot of nuttiness to the beer, but not a pecan taste, so this is NOT some novelty beer, its a full on serious Nut Brown Ale.  If you like nutty beer, this is the best I've had.  It has a stronger and more complex taste than any other Nut Brown, but the sweetness and the thicker body keeps it from my top.  I would buy again, and I'd pick it over Brooklyn Brown or Sweetwater if I'm not in a hoppy mood or if its a cold day and I'm not looking for refreshment as much.

(Caps are a favorite of mine, so I include it here.  A nice graphic, and actually the lettering and style matches the old fashioned store aesthetic that the bottle labeling and box art convey)


August 6th, 2014

Its that time again, computers are about to make a leap forward.  Or is it?  Well there are certain years where things seem to all come together and in those years building a computer a year before will drastically reduce the lifespan of the computer you build.  This used to happen every couple of years, but has vastly slowed down.  Many upgrades lately are ones you can do after the fact; solid state drives are the single biggest upgrade you can do and even 10 year old computers can use them.  In the news today is the first commercially available DDR4 ram sticks. WAIT! you may say.  "Doesn't the PS4 use DDR5?"  or "Doesn't Nvidia's top cards use DDR5?"  Well here's a secret.  Those are actually versions of DDR3.  Marketing decided they wanted to sound "next gen" faster and so applied that to them.  When a REAL ram update happens, there's no way to have backwards compatibility, and entire new motherboard chips and systems have to be made because it just fundamentally does not work like the older stuff.  The specifications for DDR4 has been around a while, but motherboard and cpu manufacturers, and even software developers don't use it yet, it is still expensive.  I give it 1 year to get into enthusiast hands, and 2 years before it starts getting standard.

Ok.  I finished my other media stuff long ago.  I've played through a couple of other games since then, and I've seen way many more movies.  I'm ready to start my next official "block" of media content.  Thing is, I need to finish my book trilogy.  Why did I stop?  I have no reason.  It was wonderful.  Now, I do have to say that Riddlemaster of Hed does have one little flaw that some people don't like: it switched characters for the 2nd novel.  Yep, after you get to the super interesting and cliffhanger like ending of Riddlemaster book 1, momentum comes to a crashing halt as it switches viewpoints and we have to "start over" again with a new group.  Its like having 2 introductory novels in one trilogy, and if you know me... I usually like to get the introductory stuff out of the way and get to the story; its why I hate super hero reboots that rehash the origin AGAIN.  Anyway.  I have loved it so far, I just need to get into the novel reading mood again.

Two months until my birthday dinner and I'm already planning it.  This may seem weird to some people, but for me its one of few "guilt free, anything goes" meals I have in the year.  I've thought for a few months I'd probably do fish and chips with  a nice beer, but today I realized its been a while since I have had a sack full of Arby's Roastbeef and cheddar... and OMG would that go good with Oktoberfest beer.  My B-day happens about the time the Oktoberfest beers are released fresh, its prime time for fall beer.  As for my cake, I think I'm dispensing with my usual red velvet.  I'm thinking I may try invent some sort of salted pretzel white chocolate something.  My girlfriend chose a Terry's orange cake.  Chocolate on the inside, orange creamcicle on the outside.