12/30/10
beeradvocate.com rating- A-
Dogfish Ale Bitches Brew Russian Imperial Stout- Community Beverage, Queens, NY- 25.6 oz. bomber into Pub Glass- 9.0% ABV- First batch of Dogfish Ale Bitches Brew Russian Imperial Stout brewed in conjunction with the 40th Anniversary of Mile Davis' Bitches Brew album. Bought approximately 3 months ago. My first Imperial Stout so I have no reference other than a regular stout for taste comparison. Poured super black, like motor oil or Coca Cola with no light penetrating the brew. About a fingers worth of head which receded pretty rapidly. Head was a dark, burn butterscotch color. Not much lacing. Medium bodied mouth feel, which is less than I expected with modest carbonation. Smells like dark chocolate and possibly even black licorice. After the brew warmed up a bit it smelled kind of boozy. Taste is like a rich complex stout with a definite fruity characteristic which I have never tasted in a stout before. Honey and Gesho as the bottle advertises? Definitely a possibility, especially the honey. Its a pleasant surprise. A bit of alcohol detected at the end. Not a beer I would drink regularly but certainly a well crafted "off-center" beer in tribute to an off beat , classic album. I have to say, well done.
On the turntable is Miles Davis- Bitches Brew- Recorded in 1969 for Columbia Records. I am listening to this as a counterpart/tribute to this brew. I am a fan of the album but this album needs no further discussion from me and its not exactly what I would choose to listen to on an average Thursday night. I actually spent quite a bit of time listening to both Miles Davis' acoustic and electric albums and have a majority of them on CD but my cousin lent me this LP because I didn't have it on vinyl myself. My favorite electric album is probably Dark Magus: Live At Carnegie Hall with the guitar stylings of Peter Cosey with his extremely funky, evil wah-wah guitar providing searing rhythms. Compared with alot of "hard rock" or "heavy metal" albums I have listened to this actually has a way more evil quality to it which can be unnerving. I wonder what I would have thought of this album if I first heard it as a teenager or in my early twenties as opposed to hearing it for the first time when I was about 30 yrs old. I am certain I would have liked it even more than I did at 30. Davis was searching in a way that many of his contemporaries chose not to do and it left him open to criticism. Davis had the last laugh because his electric albums have proven to be very influential for a wide variety of artists and continue to inspire to this day.
Bob Dylan and Davis were label mates on Columbia when they both managed to enrage and ostracize the more conservative elements in their audience by going "electric" in the mid to late 1960's. Especially Davis, whose career was much longer than Dylan's at this point, who was universally revered by the critics for the majority of his career and saw little if any criticism towards his various incarnations until his electric period. Where Dylan was merely taking what were essentially his songs, at the time, to a new level by adding an electric backing band Miles Davis music became fundamentally unrecognizable in comparison to his prior albums. The shift from his "cool" period and his early to mid 1960's albums, largely conceived and orchestrated with the arranging skills of Gil Evans, left most of his fans and critics unhappy.
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