Three Floyds! In Brooklyn!!!

This afternoon, we set out to North Brooklyn for a cask ale festival only to discover the line for beer stretched the length of the entire bar. Nothing on the beer list was worth waiting in a line half that long, so we left and walked up to the Brooklyn Brewery, only to find a line outside the door there as well. Seems we were destined to fail in North Side today, so we walked down to another beer bar, Spuyten Duyvil, which was on the way to the subway. Even if we were crowded out, we wouldn’t need to walk much more to jump on the train to go home.

The bar turned out to be relatively empty, so we walked in, grabbed a table and checked out the menu. The first thing I saw was Three Floyds Dreadnaught, and I didn’t bother looking any further.  Three Floyds is, in my admittedly limited opinion, the best Indiana brewery. Somehow, I managed to completely miss out on them during the 8 years I lived in Indiana and have only developed an appreciation for them since moving to Brooklyn, where I have found Three Floyds beers twice in the 8 1/2 years I’ve been here.

The Dreadnaught was also a favorite beer of a guy named Tom who Martha and I knew through an online forum. Tom and I bonded a bit online over our love of American craft beers, and the similarity of our tastes meant I was inclined to seek out any suggestions he had. Martha and I never got the chance to met Tom before he died suddenly of heart failure at age 29, but he made enough of an impression on us that we still talk about him and drink to his memory on occasion.

As for the beer itself, it is a delight for hopheads. I would place it up among the likes of Russian River’s Pliny the Elder, Port Brewing’s Hop 15 and Dogfish Head’s 90 Minute IPA in terms of quality. The nose greets you with pine and resiny aromas along with a bit of alcohol. There are biscuit and caramel malt flavors and a bit of golden syrup up front with lots of hop flavors following up — pine, grapefruit, orange and grass feature in the bouquet. The finish is surprisingly clean with a little syrupy stickiness and not much lingering bitterness. My only complaint is that there were no more bottles left at the bar.

We also had Three Floyd’s Broo Doo Harvest Ale, which is their wet-hopped IPA. It has the usual green, grassy aromas I expect from wet hopped ales. Broodoo is a smooth drinking, medium bodied ale with a pleasant vegetal bitterness in the finish. I suspect I would have enjoyed this more if I didn’t drink it after the Dreadnaught.

In the end, this turned out to be the sort of night where it was a good thing that our original plans fell through.