Bryan Hopkins

9.0

This product won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I personally love it. The aroma is like perfume, rose and lavender, and the taste starts out as white peach and rose morphing to lavender and a Chartreuse-like herbaceousness. Juniper and rose on the finish. — a year ago

Bryan Hopkins

8.7

Scent of cotton candy, white grape, tiny hint of chamomile tea. Taste of sugar, sunflower seeds, custard, honeydew melon. Sweet and refreshing with enough funk to keep it interesting. — 4 years ago

Bryan Hopkins

8.9

Scent of butterscotch, croissant, and dried peach. The taste is Scotch-like, with noticeable peat, hardware store wood, caramel, and vanilla modulating on the tongue into burnt pecan and bitter dark chocolate that lingers on the finish. — 4 years ago

Bryan Hopkins

9.7

Fascinating notes of spicy peppers, dill pickle, lime, salt, celery: sort of like a margarita and a Bloody Mary all by itself. — 4 years ago

Bryan Hopkins

9.1

Beautifully complex. The nose reminds me oddly of aromas from elementary school: pencil eraser, chalk dust, perhaps even pencil lead, plus some sour dill pickle. The taste is intensely vegetal: the same dill pickle comes through with tomatillo and other green flavors, ending with a peppery finish. — 3 years ago

Bryan Hopkins

7.9

The word that comes to me with this wine is “mild.” There are some of the notes on the nose that I want in a North American Pinot Noir like cranberry and bacon fat, but very subdued, with almost an apple cider note. The taste is overly fruit forward and the mouthfeel too soft for my taste. It’s rather like drinking a blend of cranberry and grape juice, and more complex notes emerge only later at a very quiet volume. I rate this at a relatively low point score because this isn’t really what I want from North American Pinot Noir. If you like soft, juicy, easy drinkers, then you might like it better than I did. — 4 years ago

Bryan Hopkins

7.9

This is mead with ginger and hops, and it claims to be a recreation of a recipe from the 1700s, which is fun. Cloudy in the glass like apple cider. I suspect that sweetener of some type was also added, because it is extremely sweet, excessively so for my taste, but this was probably necessary to balance the bitterness of the hops. The ginger is noticeable on the taste. — 4 years ago

Bryan Hopkins

8.9

Initially the palette presents fruit-forward, but mid-palette notes of earthy wet leaves, bitter chocolate, and acidity present themselves, the bitter and earthy notes lingering on the finish. — 3 years ago

Bryan Hopkins

9.1

I am tasting the 2018 vintage. Beautiful complex scent of black tea, wood, bacon, potpourri, wet autumn leaves. On the taste, very tart cherry, eucalyptus, black tea, almost a bit of bone marrow. Highly tannic and astringent. Mushroom finish. — 4 years ago

Bryan Hopkins

8.2

I am a big fan of St. George distillery in general, but their California shochu is a bit of a shock at first if you are used to Japanese shochu. But to appreciate this for what it is, strong funky mushroom aroma with a hint of bitter cocoa powder. The mushroom funk comes through on the taste, with an unusual note of canned corn kernels. Bitter cocoa finish. — 4 years ago