3 Sheeps Hello My Name Is Joe

The fun thing about buying lots of beer and keeping it in storage for awhile is when you finally get around to drinking it and you discover a) the brewery is never making anything like it ever again, or b) it was so wildly popular the brewery is expanding its production. In this case, Hello My Name Is Joe (HMNIJ) used to be a seasonal and is now a year-round offer from 3 Sheeps. I personally would take Ewephoria over HMNIJ in a heartbeat, but...so it goes.

HMNIJ is an extra take on their black wheat ale (Baaad Boy), where they add specially-roasted Colectivo coffee to produce a wonderfully dark, smooth, bitter beer. There's a very strong coffee aroma right off the bat, but it's not overpowering from a flavor standpoint. I'm generally a fan of coffee beers (especially ones that aren't porters or stouts), but there seems to be some bizarre aftertaste haunting HMNIJ. Maybe it's the dark malts, maybe it's the wheat.

Prep/Cooking

Obviously with a beer as dark as HMNIJ you're going to get some fun-colored batter and pancakes. What was really interesting was actually the consistency - it seemed relatively watery, but the pancakes it produced were bubbly and fluffy (some of the fluffiest I can recall from this blog). Flavorwise, it was incredibly creamy (moreso than the already creamy beer), and had no detectable coffee flavor. What it did seem to emphasize were the dark malts in this beer. It was almmost oatmeal-like in its smoothness.

Results

Again, they came out "super fluffy", as in probably the fluffiest pancakes I can remember on this blog (I wonder what factors lead to that...). The aroma of these pancakes reminded me of something, but I couldn't quite place it &endash; dark, sweet, roasty, slightly boozy. Maybe rum balls? The flavor echoed the smoothness of the beer, and the dark malts really stayed strong throughout. No sense of coffee here, either.

The Decision

• Pancakes: No. In beer form, it's a pretty delicious, smooth, boozy drink. In pancake form, it's basically nothing.
• Syrup: No. The aroma gained this spicy sort of aroma, like allspice or nutmeg, but the flavor was virtually unaffected.

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