Cigar City and Randall

Josher and Blair of ABBEY

Today I stopped by ABBEY before heading to see Transformers 3 and had a beautiful brew on draft.  They had taken the Cigar City Puppy's Breath Robust Porter and Radalled it with fresh raspberries.  If you don't know what that means I will explain.  The Randall is a contraption made famous by Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head.  It looks similar to a water filter.  The idea is that you use the Randall to infuse draft beer with your own fresh herbs, fruits, hops, or whatever else you'd like to flavor it with.

The Randall is hooked up directly to the draft line and filled with, in this case, raspberries.  When you pour the beer through the lie, it is run directly from the keg into the Randall to pick up all of the flavors from the raspberries, and then moves into your glass.  What you get is as fresh of an experience of that flavor that you can possibly achieve.

As for the brew, it was rated a 99 on ratebeer.com and is pretty marvelous on its own.  With the infusion of the raspberries, there was a nice mouth-filling tart flavor added with a fruit sweetness at the end that just continued to hit the palate. A good choice for infusion, I think.




On a side note, i just re-visited a movie that I love - The Last King of Scotland. If you have not seen the movie, Forest Whitaker puts on the greatest performance of his life (well, second best to his portrayal of Charles Jefferson in Fast Times at Ridgemont High), and James Macavoy gives a great performance as his personal doctor / "best and closest advisor."  This is a pretty heavy movie emotionally, somewhat in the same vein as Hotel Rwanda, so make sure to watch it when you are not wanting to get a laugh.  Also make sure to watch it alone so that you can focus on the dialogue, which can be scary at times.