In honor of the Victory Brewing event I’m going to tomorrow night down at The Blind Tiger, I figured I’d write a little post about my good friend, the Golden Monkey. We have some rich history. About a year or so ago, my friend brought a six-pack of this to our apartment’s weekly Blue Moon Chess Club (named so for the chess playing and beer drinking that inevitably turned into drinking games after everyone got too drunk to play chess). Long story short, these tasted so good after a long day of work that I was quite gone after two (it’s 9.5% abv, in my defense) and have no idea of my state of mind after the third one, because I remember none of it. According to my friends, I took people into my room to loudly whisper secrets, attempted to make cupcakes, and somehow earned the name Buckethead. So here’s to you, Golden Monkey, thanks for the first blackout of my life.

How could this beer possibly be so good? Good enough to make me lose my dignity on a Thursday night? I’ve revisited it a few times in a more sober state, and discovered there are three things I really like about this beer:

1) it’s spicy as shit. Seriously, it’s like a banana rolled in cinnamon and clove and then deep fried and covered in more cinnamon. I love cinnamon, so this rocks.

2) it’s high alcohol, but you don’t get a huge alcoholic bite. I like a little booziness in a beer, but not something sharp. just a personal taste. this may be a negative for some.

3) it’s medium in feel, with a perfect balance of flavor, and carbonation.

All of these are pretty typical of a tripel, and since I haven’t had that many tripels, I can only say since I like the style AND I have good memories of this beer, I’m probably going to rate it a little higher than most things. Let’s give my monkey a nice B+, with an A for effort.

Damnit, now I want a beer.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 9:43 pm and is filed under Beer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.