It's flat and today we try an ice spear. That's next to the flat spear of the week. So, the particular beer we have today is ice house. Some of you out there may know the brand or not. Popular back when I was in college about 25-30 years ago. Another one of these classic brands I want to kind of come back to and talk about a little bit. Ice house is produced by Plank Road Brewing. Plank Road is part of the Moulson Cours Portfolio beers here in the US. It's referred to as Miller Cours for legal purposes. Plank Road is in the Miller Portfolio to be technically correct. Plank Road Brewing is located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And something I totally forgot about, so I'll research this video. Plank Road was the original Miller brewery. Frederick Miller purchased the brewery in 1855 and later changed the name to Miller Brewing. He bought it from Charles and Lorenz Best at the time. They also besides the brewery, also had a beer garden. I believe Frederick Miller came in later and added a full blown tavern, so you could have a shot and beer right on the premise of Miller Brewing, which sounds like pretty cool. One of the things that Trent Miller to purchase the brewery was at the time, currently, Plank Road Brewing is in the middle of Milwaukee, but the time the brewery was located outside the town gave Miller plenty of room to grow. He also got access to spring water, so instead of having to use kind of the cheneur flake water, he had access to spring water. And we know quality water helps make quality beer. Plank Road today only has two products. They produce there's ice house and then they have something called ice house edge. It's an 8% ABV variation of this beer. I believe it's a little darker in color. It's not a dark beer, but a little more dark, golden color. Some will say that 8% ABV kind of pushes it more into that malt liquor category. Yes, you know, it's sold in the same fine locations where you can find malt liquor, though. One other product, Plank Road, used to produce, and if you're a certain age, you might remember it, it was called Red Dog. That was the FAD after the ice beer FAD of the early to mid-90s. Mid to later 90s was the Red Beer FAD. Red Dog is the most popular. There was Red Wolf. There was Red Elephant. There's not a couple others out there, but that FAD ended fairly quickly. Well, before we try this beer, let's check out the stats. So today I thought we would talk about ice beers in general. Again, it was kind of a FAD 25 plus years ago. They're still around today, but not as popular as they used to be. They were really big when I was in college. And part of the reason was these beers are typically just to generic American loggers, but they go through a fractional freezing process that bumps up the ABV. Ice House is 5.5%. Your generic Bud Light Miller lights the wharvers 4.2%. So you basically got that style of beer that you like drinking, which got an extra percent plus of alcohol, and these beers were generally, well, at the time they were the same price. Today they're probably cheaper than those beers. So it was kind of a win-win thing, especially for the college kid, which I was at the time. Real quick, actually they used something called fractional freezing. You could use the term fraction of distillation, even though don't think of it in that sense, we're not getting... Well, you could get beers up to the 40-50% range, but generally this is done to just add a couple of percent of alcohol by fine. The original ice beers were something called icebuckers. They German style beer. They would take a doppelbock, which is normally in the 6th-Symperson ABV range. Do a partial freezing, and that would... They could get the beer up to the 9-13% alcohol by volume range. You could, like I said, you would take a beer, partially freeze it, get some ice crystals, kind of scoop those out. All your water freezes at lower temperature than alcohol. So what you're removing is just pure water at that temperature, and you're dropping the volume, but concentrating the alcohol. A variation on this theme is something called Applejack. If you never tried to herve it, I actually have a video on how to make Applejack, and they would take Apple cider and leave a barrel outside and let it freeze partially overnight, scooped ice out. They would generally, with Applejack, they would take something that would be 8-10% alcohol by volume and get it up into the 20. So they would ramp it up a little bit more. Cut the volume in half, basically. Here in North America, most of these ice beers are in the 6-8% range, and that is mainly due to most jurisdictions. Once you get above 8% or so alcohol by volume with beers, they're generally sold in liquor stores only, and not sold in grocery stores, gas station, convenience stores, what have you. So, and the crowd that these beers are catered to is the person that buys beer gas stations, a convenience source. So that's why the North American version of the style of beers is a little lower, 80-D-wise. The first North American ice beer was produced by Moulson. It was Canadian ice, came out in early 1993. A few months later, Miller introduced ice houses the first American ice beer. After that, there was kind of a mini rush to different ice beers. Some of those brands have disappeared, but there's still a few out there. Generally, on the bottom end of the portfolio range, these major breweries, there's bud ice, natty ice, keystone ice, bush ice, lapat ice. I think O'Millwaki still produces some kind of O'Millwaki ice. So these beers are out there just kind of on the lower end of the range. Again, the product has been catered to kind of the variation of the malt liquor crowd. Again, younger drinkers, they're trying to get as much alcohol as possible for their dollars. Real quick, I want to talk about, when I'm talking about these beers, I'll tell me how to get on what you'd see the 16-ounce 24-ounce can in a convenience store. There are other ice beers out there that are on the other end of the scale. Good one is Brew Dogs Tactical Nuclear Ping One. I talked about this one time in a video about the ultra high ABD beers, and that's achieved through fractional freezing and not actual distillation because then it wouldn't be a beering or if you distilled it. And those beers are getting into 30, 40 plus percent alcohol by going, but that's a little different than what we're talking about here. Well enough about ice beers, let's drink one. All right, we've got a good deeper golden color, not quite finger width, light or white foamy head. Smell the fresh adjuncts. Let's give her a dry. Oh my god, that tastes like passing out on a couch and a can. Again, it's in the vein of an American, the logger, bud miller, corers. A little more of a scotsy, a little more body, and again because they've reduced the water. It's not a larger malt based or anything like that. So you're going to pick up a little more mouthfeel in these beers, just again, to the lack of water in them, mainly. Flavor wise again, this is a miller light, but in that vein goes down easy. No real hopper or rumour flavor. This beer is slightly sweetish, not sweetish, but sweet. All right, goes down easy. Like I said, this tastes like college. All I need is some jello shots and beer pong and we're business. Not a bad beer though at all. It is what I would call a consumption beer, but you're wrong, not too bad. Well, I hope you liked this video. If you did, please subscribe down below. Also please like the video because it lets you tune over, putting out good content. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, you can leave them in the comment section or you can always contact me on the Twitter page. Well, until next time. Bottoms up.