The past weekend was dedicated to some new beers – some absolutely new and some just new to me.

Maine Beer Company’s Mean Old Tom is a stout fermented on vanilla beans, and the mix of chocolate malt and vanilla is enticing. It poured with a nice tan head, and was wonderfully dark brown.

The hops in this beer were mostly hidden. The mouth feel was silky. Despite the vanilla, this wasn’t an overly sweet beer. And you couldn’t really taste the alcohol even though it came in at 6.5 percent.

This was a beer you could match with food, but it might be a little bit overpowering.

For comparison – and because we had a growler of it keeping cool in the garage – we opened the Sexy Chaos from Marshall Wharf Brewing, where I visited a few weeks ago.

This was Mean Old Tom’s even meaner older brother. It’s aged on vanilla beans – and on oak chips – but starts out as an Imperial Stout with 11.2 percent alcohol. It is sweeter than Mean Old Tom, more syrupy, and all around more intense. I could see drinking Sexy Chaos with a flourless chocolate cake or similar dessert — or as a dessert itself — but pairing it with other food would be tough.

Shipyard has also released its Brewer’s Brown Ale, a seasonal last spring but now to be a year-round beer. It’s available everywhere, even though I first spotted it at Oak Hill Beverage in Scarborough.

I tasted it with son Zachary, who was visiting for the weekend, and his comment was that it goes way beyond Newcastle, the brown ale with which he is most familiar, being both darker and richer.

If beer is a continuum of styles, Brewer’s Brown gets very close to a porter, with its chocolate malts coming on strong. It’s big, malty, silky and sweet, and at 5.4 percent alcohol, a beer you could drink any time — with food or on its own.

I found a bottle of Penobscot Bay Brewing’s Meadow Road Wheat at Oak Hill as well. Penobscot Bay is the beer segment of Winterport Winery in Winterport, and I don’t recall tasting its beers.

This beer is unfiltered and has strong flavors of yeast and wheat, but we didn’t get the fruity notes that we expect in such beers. We drank it directly from the car on a cold day, however, and the flavor improved as the beer warmed up. Perhaps we didn’t do it justice.

Our bottle of Allagash Victor Ale got lost in the back of our refrigerator after a party last October. This is a Belgian with chardonnay grapes added, a very good lightly flavored but complex beer. At 9 percent alcohol, is was perfect for sipping before a dinner of haddock.

In other news, Samuel Adams is beginning its annual Longshot home brew competition this month. Go to SamuelAdams.com to find the rules, and go through your own beer recipes to enter the contest.

And this is what is known as a teaser: As I was finishing this column, right on deadline as often happens, a package arrived in the mail with two 16-ounce tallboys of Narragansett Bock. I have been looking forward to the Bock since I learned that the Narragansett brand was being revived.

The cans were fairly cool, and I was tempted to taste them right at my desk and include them in this week’s tastings. Discretion won out, and you — and I — will have to wait.

Staff Writer Tom Atwell can be contacted at 791-6362 or at:
tatwell@pressherald.com

 

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