BrewDog Paradox Isle Of Arran (Batch 16)
Toasted like a slice of bread, lightning struck and crispy black charred. This is yer bank account evaporating. Ice cubes on a summer sidewalk. Diggin’ it? At least you’ve got a chilled beverage called Paradox and a gathering of homies.
Scraping yer throat like rusty spoon, this stout is no creamy mudslide or oily syrup smile on a pancake. It’s an angry cyclone of carbonation trapped inside a glass coffin by a drunken wizard from the Isle of Arran.
There is cruel and bewitching trickery afoot.
The kid gloves are off and yer raw adult tasting knuckles are about to get bruised. Proceed with light footsteps. Be a Maya priest on a bloody, phallus-puncturing trip beyond our known boundaries of perception. Each moment is full of caution and each sip a tear in the fabric of spacetime.
A faint glimmer of light reveals a vine covered wall in front of you. Beyond these spells and trances lay (very real) ancient hieroglyphs showing the transformation of yer pretension against Scottish ales. These are the signs of William Yaxka Wallacnal—the great Scot ruler of Maya foreign exchange students in the 990s.
Jesus! What blasphemy is this? Chronologies rended asunder. These shredded ribbons of spacetime can’t mend themselves. Pour one or two ounces of Paradox around the rips and tatters. A guaranteed fix to bring reality back in order.
Just remember to pour one out for the homies. And yer bank account.
-Pedro
- 2 years ago
Complicated and Sexy. Truthful and Saucy. Deep and Drowning.
There’s no teasing snake here like a fake dating-site profile, hunting unsuspecting nubile flesh. At first look, a demonic reptile’s screaming ominously about what yer about to consume. There’s something fallen, unrepentant, forbidding, and zealous to this Snake and his Brew.
Talking serpents, though, are about as common as unicorns so let’s focus on something tangible and, as the Germans say, “tastelich”. Despite being black as midnight, nothing hides within this beer. In fact, there’s probably an inky demon shitting bloody murder amongst the barley, malts and water so angrily churning in yer glass.
The lights around you get dimmer and the noises surrounding you fade as you plunge yer drinking hole around a goblet of this stout. Bottles may break all around you but you hear nothing. Fires may start in yer crotch but you feel unaroused. The warm swath of a stout blanket has enveloped you like yer on mushrooms. And freaking out won’t save you because for the next six hours you’ll watch the sky and the stars zoom and zip in a manner no sane person should be forced to see.
Sliding in and out of consciousness simulates the ethereal astonishment you inevitably encounter when yer glass is, yet again, unpleasantly empty. Order another. Yessssssssss. Go ahead, take the liquid drug. Plunge again into the murky, delicious abyss.
-Pedro Wooly
- 2 years ago
Dagger teeth form on the insides of yer skull as you get older. So maniacal and pompous dentists say. To speed up this regression to a Cretaceous dental heritage, consider this aggressively ancestral brew.
Like a wasp behind yer teeth, this demon-dark beer stings the first thing in its path: the tip of yer tongue. There’s an angry amount of alcohol inside the bottle and it’s rather cross that you didn’t age this bitch 4 years longer. Survive the onslaught of flavor across the bow of yer dainty palate and you’ll have some pleasant liquid islands of tranquility to pillage and savour.
In a David Lynchian vein, drinking this ale manages to frighten and humour you. Imagine consuming the creature, Bob, from Twin Peaks. Lynch created an atmosphere of terror around him but Bob remains hopelessly white-trash and richly hilarious with his mullet and jean jacket. And chocolatey. Use yer Dale Cooper powers of intuition and conjure up some Himalayan gods to guide you, Bob, and that jailbait babe Audrey on a booze-flooded vision quest into yer liver. Only good things will come of this.
This bottle has the night-ending potential if used unwisely. Or consumed in tandem with it’s brethren of high-alcohol coffee stouts. But sturdy your light heart and forge into the belly of this beast, hook its thorny appendix and gorge yer now razor jaws on the nectar of its primordial bile.
- 2 years ago
Pike’s Entire Wood-Aged Stout
Off in the distance, the slow coo of trains lulls young minds to sleep while bubbling broths of chili gurgle sloppily in the near kitchen. The carbonation in the Entire Stout stews and beckons like the hefty dose of cayenne pepper in a steaming bowl of chili. Totally unexpected, however, is how much carbonation leaps up at ya like tiny carbon fireworks. Yer lips buzz as the fizz journeys up your moustache(ette) on an ascent of treacherous, dangling hairy handholds.
The warm tumble of vanilla washes over yer tongue blissfully like a melty cheese curd. It coats everything about the inside of yer mouth and hesitates ever so slightly before it smuggles witness-protection-act alcohol past the looming spectre of the Eye of Uvulua. But the chocolate gets caught and assassinated in front of a firing squad of taste bud soldiers. Think of the mouth as a penetrable fortress. Or a fish net that somehow avoids catching the carcasses of runt dolphin.
I prefer to think of my own mouth as baleen. I carefully sieve out the millions of krill bubbles in this stout, tasting each one as though someone’s rating my abilities. That or a giant squid is about to rake my whale-ass with a deadly suckerprong. Then again, the depth of the ocean are a perfect place to get intimate with these suds.
- 2 years ago
