It's odd to me that this is only the second Urban Artifact post to grace the blog. I'm a big fan of the brewery and their take on sours (especially their own addition to the beer style canon: the Midwest Fruit Tart). I was a huge fan of their Milkman (I rang 2018 in with it), but it seems like I'm the only fan that beer had--it's since become a sad punchline in the Cincinnati beer scene.

Can't even take a beer picture without the kitten ruining it.

Today, I'm reviewing something special. No, it's not a Midwest Fruit Tart, although I promise I'll get to one eventually. Instead, we have latest release in the brewery's Epicurean line: the retail-only Salted Rye Gose.

Memorial Day, as I heard on the news once in high school, is the start of summer. Is it the official start of it? No, not quite--that's still nearly a month off. But still, with all the cookouts and people heading to beaches today, summer might as well be here.

There's nothing quite a like a breakfast beer to start your holiday weekend off right. What's that? The holiday weekend started yesterday, on Saturday? Maybe for you, if you're lucky enough to have every Saturday and Sunday off work. I'm pretty locked into a rotation: one week I have Friday and Sunday off, the next I have Saturday and Sunday. This otherwise three-day weekend happened to, unfortunately, fall on my Friday and Sunday week. It's fine though. I'm still making the best of my time.


Over the last year of so, I've been talking stouts with some of my friends, specifically the view of the style as a seasonal beer. Don't mistake me, I do think that stouts are a seasonally appropriate beer for those awful, colder months. But, I think they decidedly have a place in the spring and summer: breakfast, especially if you were to find a stout that includes maple syrup. Which, wouldn't you know, is what I have right now. So, without further ado, I present to you, on this 75° morning, Salted Maple 10W-40, from Hi-Wire Brewing.

Back in February, I went down to visit some good buds in their new-to-me town of Austin, TX. It was a just a long weekend, but I had a blast on what was a well-needed beercation. One of these buddies, who was in our wedding party, took me around to a ton of Austin-area breweries: Jester King, Family Business, Fairweather Cider, Austin Beerworks, and Celis, among others. I brought some Ohio and Michigan brews down with me to drink and, by the end of the whole thing, I was pretty beered out.


But I knew that I wouldn't be beered out forever. So, I brought a ton of ATX beer home with me: some to split with people when they came to my place to visit (most of these were consumed with my brother before he left for New York), some to age, and, most importantly for our purposes this evening, two to feature here on the blog. The first of these two I'm visiting is Wee Beastie, a sour wee heavy from Blue Owl Brewing.

I've been holding onto this can for months, waiting for the right time to crack it open and share my thoughts. Unfortunately, plenty of those right times have come and gone when I've just been too damn busy to do anything.


Tonight that ends; I'm finally making time for this post.

I love the idea of adding coffee to hard cider--apple and coffee are two flavors that work super well together that rarely get any attention. The third cider I ever brewed on my own was a boozy dry cider with some homemade cold brew steeped into it (I also added some hazelnut extract). The result was an intensely satisfying summer drink that I named Purrline Ann, after my trusty four-pawed sidekick. According to my brother (who drank the last existent bottle of the stuff), the cider soured eventually, adding another, wholly unexpected, layer of awesomeness to it.

When Blake's announced that they were making a coffee cider I just about lost it. I stopped into my local bottleshop weekly after that announcement, hoping that I'd find this then-latest Kinder Cider offering on the shelves. Eventually, I did. Let's find out together if it's worthy of my self-imposed hype.