Beer Review: Blue Point Toxic Sludge

Earlier this week I profiled Blue Point’s Toasted Lager as a gateway craft beer. A couple of months ago I reviewed Hoptical Illusion, Blue Point’s IPA. Both of those reviews were of solid but pretty unexciting brews. However, Blue Point does have some real stars in the lineup. Old Howling Bastard is a damn fine barleywine, and Rastafa Rye is one of the best rye beers out there. It’s high time I found out if Toxic Sludge, Blue Point’s newest, falls into the first camp or the second.

Back when I wrote my guide to the Cascadian Dark Ale (aka Black IPA), I noted that no local brewery had one yet. Well, Blue Point launched Toxic Sludge literally days after my piece came out. I had a pour at the Get Real NY cask ale festival, and while you can never write a review of something you’ve just had a small fest taste of, I was pretty impressed.

Plus, the beer was made for a good cause. All of the proceeds from Toxic Sludge sales are going to Tri-State Bird Rescue and Research, a group dedicated to helping birds and other wildlife effected by oil spills and other environmental incidents. So if drinking local wasn’t enough to bolster your hippie sensibilities, helping poor, oil-covered birds should be.

So, do you have to rely on an avian guilt trip to buy this beer, or is it actually good? I’m happy to report that it’s another fine entry into the burgeoning Cascadian Dark Ale field. Toxic Sludge is as black and slick as its namesake, with a small tan head. The smell is a bit faint, but it’s a nice burnt aroma with a lot of hop support. It straddles the line between stout and IPA.

While the smell was a bit ambiguous, the taste is firmly on the IPA side of the spectrum. A big dose of pine hops is the main taste here. There’s a good amount of chocolate malt, too, to remind you of the “black” part of the black IPA. The balance between the disparate style influences is the trick to a Cascadian Dark, and Toxic Sludge passes the balance test easily.

It’s smooth and easy-drinking. It’s tasty. It’s local, and it’s for a good cause. So if you’re looking to get into the Cascadian Dark Ale game, make sure to give Toxic Sludge a try.

Gateway Craft Beer: Blue Point Toasted Lager

With today’s gateway craft beer, we’re going back to lagers. As I mentioned while discussing Samuel Jackson’s Samuel Adams, lagers have an inherent advantage in persuading macro beer drinkers. They tend to know that Budweiser is something called a “lager,” even if they don’t know what that means, and they might be more comfortable trying a different lager than some fruity Belgian nonsense.

Toasty

Enter Blue Point Toasted Lager. It has some advantages right off the bat. First of all, it’s called “Toasted Lager,” which makes it sound like the kind of beer a neophyte already drinks, but classier. Of course, this beer bears only superficial resemblance to Budweiser.

The other main advantage is that it’s a local beer. Who doesn’t want to support their local breweries? Blue Point is brewed out in Patchogue, Long Island, on the South shore across the bay from Fire Island. Of the several Long Island breweries, it is the biggest and most well-known. It was founded in 1998, and its beers are now common up and down the East Coast. With the “eat local” movement getting stronger by the day, “drink local” can be a very effective motto to get your friends to start drinking the good stuff. Toasted Lager can be found in most grocery stores in New York City, so availability is another big plus. It’s probably the easiest-to-find local bottle other than Brooklyn Brewery stuff.

The question, as always: is it any good? While I probably wouldn’t choose Toasted Lager in a place with a broad selection, it’s definitely good enough in the right situation. The beer pours a light, clear amber color with a small white head. The smell certainly lives up to the beer’s name — toasty. One friend of mine described the aroma as “cheerios,” and that’s actually pretty accurate. Kind of a toasted grainy scent. There’s also the distinctive smell of lager yeast, which is kind of dank and “beery,” which the novice will probably recognize. Not all that complex, but nothing wrong with it.

The taste has enough flavor to keep your beer novice friend interested, but not too much so as to turn her off. It’s mild, with the same toasty grain from the aroma, coupled with that lager yeast and a malty caramel sweetness. Not much going on in the hop department. It’s highly carbonated, which new beer drinkers seem to like.

Blue Point Toasted Lager isn’t Blue Point’s best (Rastafa Rye and Old Howling Bastard are both exceptional beers), and it’s not the best American Lager out there, but it’s easy to find, and you could do way worse if you’re trying to hook a Bud drinker on the good stuff.

Style Guide: Rye Beer

Today we’ll take a look at one of my favorite styles. Apart from Cascadian Dark Ales, Rye Beers might be the trendiest style in the craft beer world today, as more and more brewers try their hand at it. Unlike the other styles I’ve looked at, Rye Beers are defined by the inclusion of a particular ingredient instead of the makeup of a recipe; so it’s difficult to peg as a particular “type” of beer. But so many rye beers are so good that we’ll do our best.

Rye Playland

Delicious, delicious rye

As you probably know by now, one of the four ingredients in all beer is malted grain (to answer a friend’s question from the other day, ‘malt’ is a process, not an object — it’s when grain is sprouted by soaking it and then stopped from sprouting with heat.) In the vast majority of beers, the malted grain is barley. However, other grains are sometimes mixed with the barley to add different flavors or textures. That’s where you get wheat beers (hefeweizns and Belgian witbiers), oatmeal stouts, and rye beers.

A kind of Rye Beer called Roggenbier was popular in Medieval Germany. However, the 16th Century saw the inception of the Reinheitsgebot, the famous German purity law (and what bad has ever come from a German purity law?) mandating that beer can only include water, hops and malted barley (yeast was added to the list once science figured out what was going on there). So the Roggenbier died, and is only recently starting to make a minor comeback.

Modern rye beers made in American craft breweries don’t much resemble Roggenbier. Roggenbier is made with majority rye malt, whereas modern rye beers are majority barley cut with rye. (Without going too deep into Beer Chem 101, rye is very difficult to work with.) Thus, most “rye beers” these days can actually be considered as some existing style infused with rye.

Most commonly these beers are basically American Pale Ales or IPAs with rye characteristics. The rye comes across as an earthy, pungent spiciness. It may sound odd, but it mixes wonderfully with American hop varieties. (It should be noted that, with a few exceptions, these beers don’t taste like rye bread, since that distinctive flavor comes from caraway seeds, not the rye itself. I did have a “rye” beer made with caraway seeds at GABF, though. It was…an experience. Quite good, actually.) There are also a handful of rye stouts (Bells in Michigan makes one), rye bocks and some other style variations.

Rye beers are growing in popularity, and accordingly you can find some nice examples on New York City’s beer store shelves. I’ve already professed my undying love for Bear Republic’s Hop Rod Rye on this site — that one’s on the far ‘IPA’ end of the spectrum. Cane and Ebel from Two Brothers Brewing in Illinois is on the spicier end of the spectrum, as is Righteous Rye from Brooklyn’s Sixpoint, which doesn’t exist in bottles but isn’t uncommon on NYC tap lines. While we’re talking about locals, Blue Point’s Rastafa Rye is terrific as well, on tap or from a bottle.

New York Ale Project’s Favorite Rye Beer: This is the toughest one yet. All the beers I’ve named above are amazing. I almost can’t believe myself that I’m not naming Hop Rod Rye the best rye beer on earth.

However, after much deliberation, I’m going to have to give the prize to Red’s Rye PA from Founders Brewing in Grand Rapids, MI. As has been mentioned elsewhere on this blog, Founders came to NYC earlier this year. Their beers are fairly common on tap, though almost non-existent in bottle form so far in NYC. But Red’s Rye is quickly becoming a beer bar staple in the City, and with ridiculously good cause. In no other beer do the hop and rye characteristics blend in such perfect harmony. Perfectly balanced and delicious. If you can find it on cask, it’s a revelation.

Some Local Rye Beers

• Righteous Rye by Sixpoint Craft Ales (“A-” average on Beer Advocate)
• Rastafa Rye by Blue Point Brewing Co. (“B+” average)
• The Manhattan Project by Brooklyn Brewery (“B+” average”)(No longer exists, but worth mentioning. It was Garrett Oliver’s attempt to make a beer that tastes like a Manhattan, my favorite cocktail. The jury’s split on whether he succeeded, and among those who think he did, the jury’s split again about whether or not that’s a good thing.)

Hoptical Illusion: Reppin’ Strong Island

Hoptical Illusion is the IPA from Blue Point Brewing Company in Long Island. It’s a supermarket staple in New York City, where it stands out thanks to its busy, colorful label. It’s got all of the hallmarks of an IPA but is pretty mild overall, and for that reason I can see it being an effective gateway IPA for your beer-averse friends.

The beer is a pale golden color. An aggressive pour creates a large head, but the bubbles are huge and the whole thing soon collapses into nothing. Not even a ring, not even lacing. To me, a healthy head means a healthy beer, so I’m unimpressed with the visual. The smell is pretty faint but pleasant enough. It’s mostly grapefruit hops with some sweet malt in the background.

The taste is better than the appearance or the smell. The grapefruit hops take the lead, but there’s a deep sweetness from the malt that balances it. The hops outlast the malt, though, and the beer finishes bitter. This finishing bitterness is different than the hops up front, though. It’s grainy, almost woody.

The body is thin and very dry, with low, lazy carbonation. It goes down quick and smooth. Overall, Hoptical Illusion doesn’t approach the best IPAs on the market, but its easy to find and definitely drinkable. I had one at Nassau Colosseum when I went to an Islanders game with my brother earlier this year (I’m a Rangers fan…it was his Christmas gift from me) and I was extremely happy to have it then. In short, nothing to seek out but nothing to turn away, either.