I’ve heard that some dogs, if left to their own devices, will eat their food until they get sick and even make themselves terminally ill.

I feel as though I could do that with corned beef, and I made a solid effort towards that goal last night.

I hope everyone had a good st. patty’s day. Ben and I tried to go see some irish music downtown in phoenix yesterday evening. We ended up hitting up Seamus McCaffery’s. It looked promising. One band had just finished up when we got there around 10, and another guy was coming on at 11. We grabbed a couple guinnesses (guenni?) and waited for some kickin’ irish music.

What we got was a mediocre pasty white guitar player who was kinda drunk and doing mediocre cover songs of american ‘sing-a-long rock’ (stuff like ‘brown-eyed girl’ and ‘jack and diane’).

LAME.

I hope somebody out there got to see some irish music on St. Patty’s day. All I got was a scratched CD of Flogging Molly I found in my car on the way home. What the heck kind of irish bar doesn’t have irish music on St. Patty’s Day?!?

Seamus McCaffery’s, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

Oh well, at least I got an obscene amount of corned beef and some guinness.

More importantly, though, I would like to turn the clock back to last saturday night. I got a call sometime last week from the Beer Fairy saying he had a little something he wanted to share, and we should set up a beer tasting evening. Who am I to pass up on an evening like that? So, saturday he showed up at my house with a couple wine-bottle-looking bottles, and an unidentified New Belgium growler.

The growler conatined what could have possibly been the last bit of a keg of Bierre De Mars left in Arizona. For those of you who are familiar, Bierre De Mars hasn’t been out for a couple years, but it’s kind of a dry brown ale which is fermented using wild yeast strains. It has a slightly sour flavor with some really tasty hints of caramel in it, and kind of an organic earthy flavor. Rumor has it that it’s going to be available in bombers and kegs here in a few months.

And then there were the wine bottles. They are a limited edition batch that New Belgium does every year called La Folie.

It is a hand bottled, hand corked (using wine corks) and hand labeled limited edition beer. It is classified as a Belgiuan Sour Brown Cask Ale. It’s got an incredibly strong flavor, and the belgian sour yeast they use in it is simply amazing. It’s definitely a sipper, as the flavor is really strong. It’s aged in wooden casks, and because of that, it almost has a whiskey-like overtone to it.

I was actually amazed that it is (only) a 5-6% alcohol beer, because usually belgian ales with that heavy sour flavor are higher in alcohol content. I think that’s because the higher alcohol beers tend to get a weird off-flavor if they don’t have a strong flavor to offset the alcohol. Sometimes that flavor is contributed by hops (as in IPAs) and sometimes it’s the yeast flavorings (as is more the case in belgian ales).

Unfortunately, the La Folie is such a limited batch that it’s only being sold in colorado. So, if you’ve got a friend in the state, you might want to have them pick up a bottle for you. It’s well worth it.