If you have your DDB desktop calendar, you may recall that there hasn’t been a shitstorm warning since the good old ABVMZABVMDZMZ row a solid three weeks ago. Sadly, there’s no idol toppling in today’s post because Creature Comforts came correct and pumped out two amazing beers. If you came here for some yellow journalism, sensationalism, and mudslinging to drive up engagement: apologies in advance. I’ll try harder to undermine my non-existent credibility in the future.

As much as I would love to shit on excellent beers for some alleged petty grievance, I will leave that to my innumerable alt accounts who pander for free beers. Let’s get to clapping them magic city stacks a second time in today’s review:

Orpheus got the raw end of the deal in the prior DDB review. While they are far from a paradigm-shifting leader, they are equally far from doing anything deficient. The Rites is a solid, over the plate fastball that is traditional but easy to get a solid piece of. The biggest issue that I had with this faintly tropical affair was a honey cornbread sweetness to the malt profile that seems to be attendant to many of the Southern breweries. BMIs and palates of Southern creatures seem to engender sufficient malty sweetness in the way a waify Vermontean loves FG1.0000 and wooden bowties. This beer is fine and leaves me with little to deride or exalt.

Similar to the foregoing, Wicked Weed shows that its talents lie in purveying expensive wild ales and not exactly in the hop game. With NODA absolutely shutting the club down with Hop Drop, I can’t imagine the average Silverado-pushing Raleigh resident exhibiting much tumescence for these standard wares. It is less malty than The Rites but also delivers a more resinous sappy enclosure for your big Pooh Bear mitts. I only wanted a smackerel.

This however, holy shit, now we are cooking with four butane burners. Other Half has an established pedigree in the hop game but their darker offerings compelled chin scratching that could not reconcile the two. So then enter Creature Comforts, who up until now have cut their teeth on darker offerings almost exclusively, fruited Athenas notwithstanding. This is a merger of two record collections that results in an incredibly sonorous dulcet aria of chocolate, deep roast, distinctively porter in execution with wafer thin body that swallows exceptionally clean and compels the consumer to froth it along the mandible like a mocha frap. If this was not exceptionally limited, then holy fuck I would advise to stock up on these pedestrian drillers because it is one of the finest iterations of a standard baltic Porter this side of Imperial Edmund Fitzgerald. Everett on PEDs.

Photo quality is commensurate with this pilsner: shit is fine. I am reticent to compare this to the Live Oak and Great Lakes pilsner masters because I don’t think that the Eliminator boat pilots of the world are really looking for depth or nuance in a beer style you can approximate at home. Sure there’s no certified BJ flaws, no DMS, it’s not exceptionally flabby, nor is it distractingly hopped, but there’s also nothing compelling about it either. Pivo Pils has already fucked things up for everyone in this genre much in the way that the PAERARARERABOLA refrain will be hot on the lips of anyone buying beer with an EBT card, railing against Fedex deals. Then again I drank it in a fucking paper cup. There’s no coffee in this pilsner.

Alright enough foreplay: is Existence a retread of See The Stars? Do we have to engage in the pabulum of denigrating that poor ATL minority who offered euphonious promises? Thankfully we are saved from that for the exact opposite reasons that made the StS culture so mandible grinding: this beer is phenomenal and almost no one was an asshole trying to redoubtably pump it up.

At 19 months in the barrel, I initially braced myself for the trappings of oversaturation, or some wonky “fresh beer” blended in: the typified high-age/old-cask dynamic. If the North Carolina way is to cask beer for 6 weeks in a third use barrel, this is a complete inversion of that paradigm. This falls closer to the magnificent Pugachev 25: long aging, no cutting agents, lacquer and oak forward, a substantial base that can stand the test of time without thinning, and a remarkable roast that neither expresses oxidation nor a beau geste of sweetness. It delivers so. much. complexity without relying upon any Tiny Tim crutch from the baking/confectionary aisle. For those who need hard and firm reference points, this was just shy of the Central Waters Ardea and SR-71 platitudes, but that level of moralizing needs to be taken in small doses. That being said, it is a firm rebuke to homebrewing dumbfucks who clutch a bottle of BCBS and decry any trading or seeking non-local beer. This is a non-local beer to which you will absolutely not find a comparable analog.

It is the most fitting irony that such a world-class beer was relatively snubbed by the OCD masses of completionist beer traders. They don’t deserve a phenomenally crafted, adjunct-free landscape portrait of brownie batter and tobacco. If you can’t handle a region’s shitty traders at their worst, then you don’t deserve ATL traders at their finest.

I would slide the superlative ladder over and start praising this as Creature Comfort’s best beer to date, that is until I dusted off this stonefruit masterpiece that even less people gave a shit about:

I knew that those Creature boys could do stouts, sure they can do porters, but this clipped me in the driver’s side door while pulling out of my peach driveway. I had no idea they were capable of this degree of nuance and unparalleled fruit expression in anno domini this year of our lord 2016. This has the vellus hairs right down to the pithy skin, the restrained acidity and delivers with balance and elan unseen since Persica b1 750ml.

Usually when a brewery makes a peach beer they have to allocate stat attributes like Madden create a character. Too often do we receive intense acidity without tannins, or Haribo Peach Rings with no depth, barrel complexity with no vestige of juice. This Gamesharks the fuck out of the stonefruit matrix and delivers each with such phenomenal balance that I am left to only praise the milky froth of the body. This is liquid Jolly Rancher merged with fruit leather structure, that dairy goodness of orange julius that closes with some dry Riesling.

If you have some odd restrictions on regional acquisitions, let this be the only beer from the south that you have this year. SCOOOP and Decoherence are amazing sure, but bask in the warmth of the second coming of our prophet Chez Monus. I know that even whispering that shibboleth causes sectarian violence, but seriously it does not get much better than this in my estimation and even my obstreperous attempts at shitslinging cannot deliquesce the form and structure of this peach pillar.

Get pitted fukn siiick pitted fleshy fruit bruhhh.

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There’s still some DDB shirts left, buy them so I can stop accepting cash under the table for favorable reviews. Because that’s what DDB, this non-sponsored, non SEO shithole is all about, PURE PROFIT$$$: