Draft

I like a good draft beer. It tastes fresh, clean, full of carbonation and life. It's delicious stuff, when it's done well. But unless you live by an amazing beer bar, there's just no way to get an amazing variety of beers the same way one can with a bottled selection.

Last night was my Fantasy Football draft, and already, I have awoken to severe buyer's remorse. It's amazing how a good solid week of planning, of making sure the numbers are solid, the rankings are there, etc. can all go straight down the toilet on the back of some very minor tweaks. Like finding out I draft 9th of 10, or discovering that because the draft order reverses itself, that there are 16 picks between my 2nd and 3rd round pick. So I did the only thing I knew to do. Crack open a beer.

The best part of the draft. Before anything has happened.

I've covered Samuel Smith brewery before on these pages, and I'm a fan. I tried their Imperial Stout, which was a delicious 7.0% abv. Their website says to serve with Espresso, Stilton and walnuts, cheesecake, steak au poivre, caviar, or coffee trifle with roasted almonds. I enjoyed mine with panic and a side of why the hell did I just draft that player?!?

It pours a fantastic opaque black with a wonderfully creamy tan head. The aroma is promising, like I'm maybe going to be OK this year instead of drafting a useless Tony Effing Gonzalez. First sip, I get wonderful molasses and coffee flavors. I settle in and wait for my draft turn. Foster, Peterson, and Vick drafted - nothing I couldn't explain or deal with, though I was disappointed. Ended up with Darren McFadden. OK, ok...

Lacing on the glass is fantastic.

More sips - this beer is really rich in the mouth. It's almost akin to drinking beef broth, it's so satisfying. But it's incredibly smooth and easy to drink, so I'm not noticing the timer ticking down or the 7% abv.

Panic. I don't like to draft a QB this early in the draft, but if Vick is already drafted, and suddenly Rodgers and Peyton are as well, maybe I should jump on the QB bandwagon? This beer is going to my head, and now I only have 2 minutes to decide on my pick...

Did I really drink half a glass in the first three rounds?

Uh oh...

Tom Brady. Wait, what? Two picks later, LeSean McCoy gets drafted. I'd long ago decided to take McFadden over McCoy, but McCoy should have been picked up 2nd. I'm an idiot. Drink more beer. A lot of dark fruits coming into the fore, like plums and raisins. I'm really liking this beer.

I need to top off my glass and empty the bottle.

I wait a while. Drink more beer. Dark bitter coffee and malt sweetness are battling it out, and I'm just loving every sip. My turn again? About now is when I realize most of the good running backs and wide receivers are gone. Panic... Reggie Wayne.

What? A guy who depends on having Peyton Manning throw to him? Peyton, who's been come off the injured list? I'm insane. I pass up known quantities for the likes of Plaxico Burress; I even pick Ahmad Bradshaw. Blurgh.

I don't love my team, but I love this beer.

First order of business: dumping some of these players for good ones. Second order of business: buying more Imperial Stout. This stuff is amazing.

Truth in labeling

I collect beer labels. It's fun. There's a lot of great beer out there, and I'm kind of a sucker for a silly or fun label. Then again, sometimes beers go too far.

Sometimes label collecting can be a pain in the ass, especially when breweries, perhaps out of aesthetics (Hitachino Nest) or environmentalism (Dogfish Head) use all-paper labels. Or Stone, out of Escondito, CA, which prints directly onto the bottle. Or Flying Fish, whose labels seem to be made of some sort of vinyl.

But I've got four books of labels and I'm continuing to collect more. However, one side effect of my enjoyment of beer labels is that while I'm drinking and writing, I tend to look at who's making the beer and what it's called, and less at a classification of the style of beer. In some sense, I think this reflects my reluctance to compare a beer to its theoretical archetype (see philosophical post) as well as a lack of intricate knowledge of the very many varieties of beer. Incidentally, birthday's coming up in a little less than two months. *cough*

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I've gone through all of our past posts and, with only one exception, tagged the type of beer reviewed therein. Let's face it: in the wake of Hurricane Irene, I didn't really have much else to do today. I've tried, as best as I can, to use the styles of beer listed by Beer Advocate, a leading beer review / education website. However, I'm not going to be nearly as pedantic as they are - no need to split between American Adjunct Lager and Adjunct Lager. However, I do hope this helps in comparing beer against beer.

Whirlwind

As you can see, I've been clearing out the notebook for a while. After a flurry of once-a-day posts, I'm moving to once every few days. I hope not to fall into the once a month funk that engulfed this blog for the majority of last season. Readers have been very good at getting on my case about more frequent posting. You know what would help, readers? Send me beer. That'll get me posting more often, that's for sure.

Of course, at the moment, I'm hunkering down for Hurricane Irene, and we'll see how that goes. One of the things I've enjoyed this past week is having an excuse to pull up weather maps. I'll admit it: I'm a sucker for geography. I used to be able to spend hours just staring at a globe or a map or an atlas. I could blow a whole afternoon exploring on Google Maps or Google Earth. So Sam Adams' Latitude 48 IPA is really just pandering to me.

The 48th Parallel North is what Sam Adams calls the "hop belt," a narrow band in the Northern Hemisphere in which hops flourish. I've come down hard on Sam Adams before for their excessive use of hops, but here (in an IPA) I'm pretty open to liberal interpretations of balance.

Good looking pour.

There's a really thick head on this beer, and it laced down the glass rather attractively. There's wonderful grassiness and a lot of grapefruit on the nose, but the aroma isn't bitter the way some other IPAs sometimes are. There's actually an undercurrent of sugary sweetness in the nose, which I found very pleasant.

Even prettier lacing.

The sip was a little harder to get behind. It's an IPA, so I do expect to be smacked in the face with a pine cone. Oddly, instead of pininess, I got a lot of bitter citrus (lemon and grapefruit) and some weird tinny metallic flavors as well. There was a decent malty backbone that did balance out the beer so as not to lean toward puckeringly or bracingly sour. Nonetheless, that metal flavor was rather off-putting.

Dinner was less than thrilling, sadly.

I ate it with a dish of cold sesame noodles and some roast chicken, two flavors that should have really complemented the IPA. They didn't: too bad.

Chunky beer

One of the descriptors I use in writing and talking about beer is that it's "thin," and I thought perhaps that bears some clarification. It could be a function, I suppose, of viscosity, but more than that, it's the way the flavor sits on the tongue. A thin beer washes out and leaves very little taste to savor after it's done. By contrast, a nice complex, deep, and full flavored beer has layers of different flavors to dig through. Sometimes what I want is a thin, uncomplicated beer, like a Sam Adams Light (a review for another time) or even a Budweiser. But I had to go pretty far back in our blog archives to find a thin beer that I actually enjoyed - most of the time, I want something that tastes beery, that tastes of grain and hops and malt and sometimes of vanilla, coffee, or dark chocolate.

This next beer is one that, in truth, I had a tough time with. I've liked Abita Beer ever since being clued in to their existence by a law school friend from New Orleans. What gets exported to up north is often a mystery, but much of what I've had (Amber and Turbodog) are quite nice. Purple Haze, not so much.

Not a bad looking beer, and quite a nicely designed label.

Anyway, they brew a series of Harvest Beers designed to highlight, as they say, "the finest Louisiana-grown ingredients." One of these is a Satsuma Harvest Wit. Satsumas are delicious: they're little mutant oranges with loose skins and amazingly sweet juice. My girlfriend's mother grows them atop a hillside outside of Los Angeles, and they are without a doubt some of the best citrus I have ever tasted. Amazing. So when I saw beer made with Satsumas, I was intrigued.

It poured a very hazy gold color, with not a lot of head. There's an orangy aroma, but lacking in the brightness that differentiates a satsuma from, say, a navel. Definitely also a characteristic sourness on the nose that wheatbeers can sometimes take on.

The first thing I noticed was that it was very highly carbonated, which surprised me, given the lack of head. The second thing I noticed was that the flavor of the citrus didn't come through at all. The aroma was what pushed the flavor into the realm of oranges: without smelling a clearly orange scent, I don't think I would have automatically thought of satsumas while tasting this beer. Otherwise, kind of a middling beer.

OK, that's just gross.

I tend to pour pretty aggressively, and I like a bit of sediment in my beer, as I think there's quite a lot of flavor to be had in spent yeast (just ask the good people at Marmite). But I was unprepared for exactly how "chunky" this beer was. On a lark, I held the beer up to the light. Shocking.

Victory is mine.

Sometimes it's good to have a nice, light beer. Something that's not too heavy, something that's not too aggressive. Something flavorful, but which plays nice with others.

A few of the most recent beers I've written about are not those kinds of beers. Those are beers that obliterate the food with which they are enjoyed, and they blow out the palate pretty aggressively. That's not always a bad thing, but sometimes it's nice to taste your food too.

Especially when the food is a nice, juicy, perfectly cooked burger at Mel's Burger Bar by Columbia University. I went with my brother and was very pleasantly surprised to find a pretty fantastic burger and tater tots. I'm totally a sucker for tater tots.

Pennsylvania's own Victory Brewing Company makes a wonderful pilsner called Prima Pils, which I've seen in stores but never purchased. Pilsner lagers aren't always that appealing to me: I tend to like darker beers with more oomph behind them. But that day, I was in a lager-y mood and just wanted something refreshing. And the Victory Prima Pils was damn near perfect and full of surprises.

Sometimes I'm so thirsty, I forget I need to take a picture before drinking half the beer.

I got a lot of grass, hay, and flowers right up front as I approached the beer. The aroma was pretty heavy, which is another thing I don't tend to find with a pilsner. It was a clear golden pour with a thin head (what you see in the picture is after a wait for the burgers), which didn't last long (nor did it lace at all). Pre-burger, I tasted a lot of hops and honey, with maybe an undertone of sweetness. It made the tater tots pop as well, since the grassier flavors and aromas of the beer accentuated that lovely golden-brown caramelized potato goodness. And with the burger, the hops were strong enough to cut through the juicy fat of the meat. Overall, couldn't have asked for more.

Hong Kong

So I'm in Hong Kong for another 9 hours. I've been here for the weekend and a bit more attending to some family business, and I had a hankering for a beer while I was here. Small problem: Hong Kong doesn't really have a craft beer scene to speak of. Like seriously. NOTHING. You know what's everywhere? San Miguel and Carlsberg. Gross.

What they do have is a bar in Causeway Bay called East End Brewery, which isn't a brewery at all. They do serve Brooklyn Brewery products though. But really, did I go from Newark to Hong Kong to drink Brooklyn Lager?

The names of the house beers are on the ceiling.

Not on the taps, not on the menu, but on the ceiling.

Their house beer is HK$52 per mug, and during happy hour, it's two for one. Just pulled up the menu and it's supposed to have been HK$48 per mug. I totally got hosed out of HK$4. Or as it is known in America, 50¢ US. Bastards. Anyway, it's made by Hong Kong S.A.R. Brewing Co., a company that doesn't even have a website.

Aldrich Bay Pale Ale. I'm pretty sure...

I tried the Aldrich Bay Pale Ale. It's, um, pale, I guess, even though it's the darker of the two beers? Also, not very flavorful. Also weak (below 5%). Poured a decent orange color with a good creamy head. No aroma of hops though, which is one of those things that should be apparent in a decent pale ale.

Decent lacing on the Aldrich Bay.

Flavor was bready, with a sweet finish that was pretty nondescript. Basically, like white sugar. Not much to recommend it. Boring, really.

Too Soo Brew. What does that even mean?

And can you tell the difference between this one and the Aldrich Bay above?

Second, there was the Too Soo Brew. It was a touch more pale (it's a lager), but it had everything a hot climate like Hong Kong needs: refreshment and lightness and a reasonable ease of drinkability. Bud Light tried to tout its "drinkability" last year. What that campaign sounded like was "we're too afraid to make beer taste like beer." But unlike Bud Light, Too Soo tastes like beer, just like a pretty light beer.

Too Soo - no head retention, no lacing. But free bar peanuts, so... yay?

It's more crisp on the finish than the Aldrich Bay, but put the two side by side, and they look virtually identical. Like people from Hong Kong. That's racialist.

Anyway, East End Brewery isn't a bad place on its own. It's got a good beer selection and both English Premier League and Major League Baseball on the TVs. It suffers from one basic problem: it's in Hong Kong, and the Hong Kongers just don't really care for beer enough to make it worthwhile to microbrew.

ps. The dateline for this post is going to show up as California Time (thanks, Mr. West Coast). But let the record show that this post goes up on Monday, August 22, 2011 at 11:38 pm local time, Hong Kong.

Heavy

Yesterday, I intimated that the "more equals more" trend in brewing may have been distinctly American. I didn't mean to imply that at all. I *do* think that American brewers tend to be more aggressive with their hops profiles, which does throw things out of balance. But a different trait that is shared on both sides of the Atlantic is a "more equals more" philosophy as it pertains to alcohol content.

Wine critics have been on this bugaboo for years, bemoaning the rise of big and punchy California red wines with tremendous alcohol contents. They say that the alcohol flavor masks the subtle nuances of the wine while the burn of the alcohol aftertaste scorches the palate. They're not wrong.

In beer, the movement toward higher alcohol contents has been going strong, and while the first "tripel" was invented in Belgium (of course it was), the genre has been enthusiastically adopted by brewers from Alaska to Scotland. Although one of these days, I'll have another Westmalle, the tripel that started it all, I recently had the pleasure of trying two of the strongest brews I've had in a while.

The Harpoon Leviathan series is designed to mess with people, or at the very least, to seriously mess people up. While most of Harpoon's other offerings are well-balanced and refreshing, the Leviathan series takes its cue from its namesake: they are big, bold, truly "one is enough" bottles.

Barleywine. It's got a kick, but it's still well-balanced.

The Barleywine (10.00%) poured a deep chestnut brown, with a wispy head that dissipated quickly. I poured it into a goblet-shaped glass, as I wanted it to warm a little and release some of its aroma. That aroma ended up being a very enticing caramel, with the alcohol hit of a red wine. The flavor was intense: a lot of ripe dark fruits (figs, raisins, cherries) and yeasty, like a heavy English bread. The alcohol, as expected, was incredibly spicy, which was nicely balanced by the toffee / brown sugar flavors. Outstanding. I definitely felt it by the end of the first glass (I got one and a half servings out of that 12 oz. bottle), and I definitely cannot recommend that anyone should have more than one bottle of this at a time. Still, it's quite tasty, and makes for a nice treat.

Quad. A little too much.

I wish I could say the same about the Leviathan Quad (11.75% ABV). I actually drank this one first, which was why I made the mistake of pouring the whole thing into a tall pint glass. Nice head retention though. This allowed the beer to warm too fast, and the whole affair got sour pretty quickly. I found this one less balanced - the sweet ripe fruit flavors and spicy alcohol kick were unmistakeable, but there wasn't enough backbone to stand up to it. I like my Quadruppels a good deal warmer and rounder - the alcohol in this one was angular and hot. I did appreciate the extra flavor of vanilla, but that was an extra flavor that didn't quite mesh with the rest of the sip.

Harpoon makes a Leviathan Imperial Stout as well. I've had it before but can't remember much of it. Perhaps another one to try.

More is... more?

A typical complaint I've had over the years is a reaction to the idea, especially in American brewing, that more equals more. Hops add flavor, so if we consider that American macrobrews (Budweiser, Miller, Coors, etc.) lack that flavor, then more hops equals more flavor. Sam Adams runs an ad that says they put a full pound of hops in every batch of their (I think) Boston Lager. But of course, there are other things that add flavor besides hops, because more hops will probably only mean more hops flavor. On the far end of this spectrum are beers that end up drinking like pine cones.

Hold still: I want to beat you about the face with this branch while you chew on a pine cone.

Among these is the Goose Island IPA. Out of Chicago, Goose Island picks up on a great Midwestern brewing tradition, though they've been in the news of late for moving productionof their signature 312 Wheat (named for Chicago's area code) out of Chicago entirely.

Now, I'm not here to pile on Goose Island for their business practices. I'm here to drink their beer. And drink it I have. The IPA pours a hazy dark gold with a nice fluffy head that traps a lot of wonderful grapefruit/lemon hops oils. That haze isn't a function of leaving the beer unfiltered: rather, this is probably due to the sheer amount of hops that are added. I also smell some pine as well.

Not a bad pour. And a classic looking label too.

The flavor is instantly bitter and sharp, like sticking my face into a pine forest and licking the branches. It's refreshing, in as much as being smacked in the head with a Christmas wreath could be refreshing. I honestly couldn't taste anything else after finishing half a bottle. With that in mind, I ended up drinking the rest of the bottle. And then another, and then another. Genius marketing strategy, Goose Island. I'M ONTO YOU.

Summer Beer Gone Awry

I've written before about my contempt for Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy. I hadn't heard of Shandy until I went to the UK - it's basically a mix of dry lemonade (a lemon soda that's got very little sugar in it, like an un-sugared 7Up) and cheap lager. Shandy, when made well, is refreshing and delicious: it's low alcohol, and the lemon flavors do elevate the lighter grassier notes of the lager.

Leinenkugel's on the other hand, sucks. A friend of mine ordered one over dinner while I went to the men's room. Why she did so is quite beyond me - we have had previous problems with Leinenkugel's products before. I seem to remember her and her roommate trying desperately to pawn off Leinenkugel's Honey Weiss to no avail, and eventually throwing out the remains of the case someone had purchased. It's pretty terrible.

Looks gross. Smells gross. Tastes gross.

Don't order this beer.

So this Shandy. Good lord. First of all, it came in the Boston Beer Co.'s glass for Sam Adams Lager, but it wasn't helped at all. Secondly, as you can see, it poured the color of dirty dishwater. The aroma was all sour lemon and white bread. In a normal shandy, one should smell a sweet lemon perfume. Here, it was like the lemon smell of churning stomach acid reminiscent of an aggressive college night out.

Flavor? Beer mixed with lemon pledge. Not pleasant at all. Gross.

Proust! Or was it Prost?

Flavor is an amazing thing. While there is certainly something to the idea that smell is the most powerful sense (I seem to recall reading somewhere that the part of the brain that negotiates smell is conveniently close to the part that holds the deepest memories), it's also clear that the sense of taste is so closely related to smell that I'm going to lump it in there as well. Involuntary memory is pretty amazing stuff, really.

After all, while the tongue can distinguish perhaps six flavors (sweet, salty, bitter, sour, umami [assuming one believes in it] and hot), the majority of flavor distinction is found when the nose is involved. Block up the nose (hello allergies!) and food just doesn't taste the same.

So one of my great disappointments living in the tristate area is that I can't get Oberon, a lovely summer beer native to Michigan. I am told that it is available in Pennsylvania, but even I'm not willing to drive that far. Seriously - somebody get on importing this stuff to New York / New Jersey. During a long layover,* I had an opportunity to go back to Ann Arbor, Michigan and knew immediately what beer I was going to have first.

The color of a Michigan summer.

Oberon is a cloudy yellow peach color. Often, when poured aggressively, it develops a nice thick head. Our waitress was being trained, and I don't think she was willing to pour my beer with the right vigor. Too bad. Anyway, Bell's is a native Michigan company, and while I'm not wild about all of their beers, Oberon is a perennial summer favorite. The color, aroma, and flavor are enough to transport me back to the good days of law school (and some of the bad ones too).

There's a lot of wonderful citrus in this beer: grapefruit and bitter orange peel come through the aroma. The flavor, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly herbal: it starts out with grass and hay before moving to a floral sourness that refreshes. The one thing I found odd was that the mouthfeel was thinner than I remembered. And toward the end of the sip, I could have sworn I tasted some bubblegum.

Taps, glorious taps. Plus a huge selection of whisky and other alcohols.

Following a delicious lunch, my friend and I invoked yet another memory with a pint at Ashley's. I spent many, many afternoons and evenings at Ashley's, which is a lovely beer bar right on State Street in the heart of Ann Arbor. The place memories are fantastic - this is where we celebrated getting jobs, finishing exams, fatherhood, and friendship. A group of three of us even went to Ashley's in our caps and gowns on the morning of our graduation.

This is a happy place.

As you might imagine, the smell was exactly the same - a faint hint of smoke from when Michigan allowed smoking indoors, and the wonderfully inviting aroma of beer.

Edmund Fitzgerald, next to its tap. Note its front row status - very well deserved.

We toasted to old friendships with an Edmund Fitzgerald, from Great Lakes Brewing Co. I will be the first to say that I hate Cleveland (I got a flat tire there in the rain while moving out of Ann Arbor), but the Edmund Fitzgerald almost makes up for it. It's a near perfect porter, with all of the characteristics I would look for. Unlike the Oberon, this one was also perfectly poured. The flavors are wonderful: mocha, dark chocolate, burnt caramel, malt. The hops are present, but they work on the margins. Each sip is creamy, yet bitter; sweet, but refreshing.

It's been a long time since I've seen the bottom of an Ashley's pint.

It's honestly one of my favorite beers, and it was exactly as I remembered it being. This one, I'll drive to Pennsylvania for. Proust can have his perfectly dipped madeline - I'll have another Edmund Fitzgerald.

*incidentally, that layover was scheduled to be 4.5 hours. It ended up as 8. Awful.

Beets Suck

I'm usually a pretty big fan of Magic Hat. Their #9 is a nice pale ale with an apricot twist, and it's a good local beer (yay Vermont) so I can take comfort in that when I order it.

I was intrigued by the tap pull of the Wacko, which featured what I thought was a heart with weird vines behind it. I saw it from pretty far away, but decided I'd order it. When it came to the table, I wasn't sure if I'd been given the right thing - it was a really bizarre magenta color. Turns out, that's no heart. It's a beet. Holding a guitar and microphone. It's a thing out of a nightmare.

A giant beet with hair. Truly the stuff of nightmares.

Wacko is brewed with beet sugar, which gives it a hot pink color. I'm not sure you can taste the flavor of beets (I mean, this beer didn't taste of dirt, so that's a start), but I'm really not sure the beet color does the beer any good. It's freaking pink, and the last time I saw a pink beer, I was mocking a table of Philadelphia Phillies fans at Boston Beer Works.

Funny side story - my buddy Russell and I were going to try getting walk-up tickets to a weird interleague Red Sox game: Philadelphia at Boston. If tickets were not an option, then what we would have spent on tickets would go to beer at Boston Beer Works across the street. Well, no tickets. Boston Beer Works has some strange brews on hand, and one was a blueberry ale with actual fresh blueberries in it. It functioned like a poor man's lava lamp: a blueberry would sink to the bottom of the glass, become the nucleation point for a bunch of bubbles, and then float to the top, where the bubbles would detatch, making the berry sink. Cute, but not for me. The aforementioned Phillies fans? Big table of 'em, all drinking pink beer with watermelon spears stuck in the glass. Gross.

It's bad when beer is the color of vomit, though it does remove some of the guesswork after of a long night out.

So anyway, what I didn't like about the Magic Hat Wacko wasn't just its ridiculous pink hue, but the flavor, which was quite middling. You could smell the grassy earthiness of the beets, but the beer itself just tasted of grain sugar, much like an American Macrobrew. Thin on the tongue, not bad, but not good.

Beer should not look like gatorade, even a little.

And that color. I still can't get past that godawful color. I bought a single bottle of it again just to grab the label. As an illustration, here's a cherry gatorade next to a glass of Wacko. That's just disturbing.

Feel the burn.

Another painful day at the gym yesterday; another day of nursing my poor aching joints. My goal has been to sort of get my body used to being warm, as I am headed to Hong Kong in a couple of days. It's been my experience that as my body gets used to being warm, I tend not to react so poorly to heat when I'm in it. And Hong Kong is hot and humid. Severely.

I wish I were going to Hong Kong under better circumstances, but it's for a family funeral. My grandmother died a couple of weeks ago, and I'm off to the funeral this weekend. But of course, because it's on the other side of the world *and* I cross the International Date Line, I end up leaving on Wednesday morning and touching down at 7:00 pm on Thursday night. I'll line up a few blog posts, I hope, in the next two days. If not, well, it's not like prolonged absence is new around here.

I thought it might be nice, since I'm headed back to the old country, to try a beer that's a conscious echo of a different old country. Back in January, Mayflower Brewing from Plymouth, MA (duh) released a limited edition Imperial Stout. I wish I could link to something more definitive, but it's off of their website already.

Not a bad pour. This is a big bottle of a very big beer.

Mayflower Imperial Stout is strong stuff. It's a really dark pour that my camera doesn't do justice because the iPhone camera sucks at low lighting situations. A weak wisp of bubbles is about all this one could muster.

So the "Coopers Series" is all about reusing old barrels for aging (this is etymologically unsurprising), and the pedigree on this one rivals even my own. The barrels used to hold bourbon. Then they held Sam Adams Utopias. And then, Mayflower's own Barleywine, before they made the Imperial Stout. Pretty fantastic stuff. ...on paper.

Close-up of the bottle.

I wish I'd enjoyed the beer more, I'll be honest. I found the alcohol content distractingly high (10% abv). You can smell a lot of vanilla and caramel aromas left over from the bourbon and barleywine. Each sip is infused with a lot of bourbon flavors that do complement the deeply caramelized sugars of the roasted malt. It wasn't the flavors that were the problem at all. It was the alcohol burn. It felt really hot on the tongue, and the aftertaste of each sip was really warm. What we had here was a total lack of balance - the sip itself was pretty delicious, but the alcohol really got in the way, which doesn't always have to happen. Too bad.

The Real McCoy (sort of)

So yesterday, I made fun of the short stubby bottles of Coedo Brewery and compared them to those of Chimay. Duh. I'm not thinking of the Chimay bottle, I'm thinking of the bottle. I'm stupid.

However, the traditionally bottled-up Duvel is now available in the US on draft. It's referred to either as "Duvel Single" or "Duvel Green," and it comes with an obnoxiously snooty website to boot. Of course I had to try it.

The elusive Duvel Green.

Duvel Green has a lower alcohol content than the classic Duvel, but it has many of the same spicy notes. It was inexpertly poured, sadly, with far too little head and much too much beer. That's right: I'm complaining that I got TOO MUCH BEER. The thing about Duvel (and many of the other high-octane Belgians) is that the high alcohol content obliterates some of the nuances in flavor, making much of their appeal is in their much more volatile aromas. A thick head in a tulip glass will help to trap those volatile compounds for your nose to vacuum up. No head and no headroom? Not a lot of aroma. Sad.

Duvel Green can get away with it though, because it's a much lower strength (6.8% abv instead of 8.5% abv) than the classic. Think it comes with a corresponding 20% reduction in price? THINK AGAIN. Of course, being at a gorgeous bar in SoHo didn't help price mitigation.

I picked up a lot of lemon peel and grass, with an undertone of fresh bread. It cut through my brunch of Croque Monsieur and fries, with Duvel's trademark spice pairing especially nicely with the creamy gruyere. No, it's not the classic Duvel, but it's a hell of a lot closer to the mark than Coedo.

Knock-offs

In a previous post, I derided Japan's Coedo Brewery of appearing to knock off the Chimay brand. I'm not linking to their website because it's full of flash and other infuriating website crap. However, here's a screenshot of their lineup:

My apologies on the size of this screenshot.

From left to right, that's Kyara, Ruri, Shiro, Shikkoku, and Beniaka.

It's got the same stubby bottle feel, same general color scheme, same luxurious feel. Same undersized pour too. Anyway, that red one, the Beniaka, was actually pretty good. So I had high hopes for the other two.

I tried the Shikkoku next. It's a schwartzbier, and I've had mixed successes with those. Sometimes they're insanely sweet (Xingu); other times, they're perfect (Full Sail Session Black).

Jet black pour

Apparently, Shikkoku is named after Japanese black lacquerwork, and it's pretty apt as an inspiration. This beer poured a very deep black, with a lot of roasted, almost charcoal qualities in the aroma. It had a very creamy head that lasted to the end of the beer, which wasn't terribly surprising given how small the beer was.

I should mention, without snark, that it was also really easy to drink. A lot of that had to do with the 5.0% ABV and a surprisingly dry finish for a schwartzbier. More of that had to do, unfortunately, with a very thin mouthfeel. I got some weak coffee flavors, maybe some brown sugar as well. But the nice aromas and inky blackness ultimately promised more than the flavor could deliver.

Two nights ago, I tried the final in the three (yes, there are two more out there in the world, but only 3 were available in my Japanese megamart. This was the white-label Shiro.

Shiro bills itself as an an unfiltered wheat beer with a "bright, smooth, slightly cloudy appearance." For an unfiltered beer, there's an awful lot of clarity in the glass. Otherwise, it was decent in its presentation, but once again, a wretchedly small pour.

That's a pint glass. Seriously. Maybe this beer is targeted toward people with Asian glow?

When I'm drinking a wheat beer, I try to find some banana or clove flavors, sometimes even bubblegum. It should be crisp and tart, without going too far into "sour." This guy didn't deliver on any counts. I got a lot of sour apple and a lot of just non-descript "beer" flavors with an alcohol bite that a 5.5% abv beer shouldn't have displayed.

There were two strikes against this beer, I think. The first was that it wasn't terribly fresh, and I think it may have just gotten manhandled in transit. The second was that I don't think I was eating it with a complementary foodstuff: fresh cherries. The cherries have been plentiful and cheap and sweet in NJ, so I've been enjoying them a lot this summer. But when paired with the beer, the cherries took on an astringency that negated any apple sweetness that I had managed to coax out of the beer. As a result, all that was left was a chemical bitterness. Small beer as it was, I didn't finish it - I ate the rest of the cherries instead.

Field Mouse's Farewell

I'm definitely a sucker for a cute label, and the Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project out of Somerville, MA has some of the folksiest and most lovely labels around. I mean come on, how can you resist a little mouse with a satchel slung over his shoulder? Of course the beer has to taste good too, and thankfully, Pretty Things makes some amazing beer.

This camera doesn't really do the beer justice.

The Field Mouse's Farewell poured a nice cloudy golden color, with a fluffy white head and an enticing aroma of light brown sugar and apples. It actually did look a little like a pale unfiltered apple cider. All of that sweetness in the nose gave way quickly to a bracingly (and unexpectedly) bitter sip on the tongue. Pretty Things gets a little wordy in their description of this beer though. "The hops are Strisselspalt from Alsace and Bramling Cross from England. We combined Belgian and English yeast strains (inspired by the proximity of Calais and Kent?). Oldy woldy worldy." Really? Oldy woldy worldy? Stick to beer - your writing is weird.

I will say, though, that the hops profile really gave this beer a huge kick of flavor. Unfortunately, the larger bottles in which this beer is sold means that by the end of the first glass, my tongue was crying out for something to cut the bitterness. I wish that this beer had been a little more balanced - maybe some sweetness in with all of that hops bite. I do, however, commend Pretty Things for varying up the hops profile: a lot of American hoppy ales are pretty one-note, like drinking a pine cone. Field Mouse's farewell delivered a lot of citrus, some pine, and quite a lot of pepperiness too. It might have gone well with some smoked cheese or cured meat: something with richness and oomph that could stand up to the flavors of the hops. I liked it, but next time I'll try to find a friend to share it with.

I swear this post was going to be timely.

The following is a reprint, in full, from the Boston Globe's Op/Ed page on July 23, 2011. I was still trying to figure out how to appropriate it for this blog's purposes when its timeliness ran out. So as a next best thing, I'm just re-running it in full, but here's a link. Enjoy.

It wasn't the shuttered state parks that prompted Minnesota’s governor and legislature to resolve a budget impasse. Nor was it the 22,000 furloughed state employees or the disruptions in services for the needy and the disabled. In the end, it was all about the beer.

The Minnesota state government shut down July 1, after Democratic Governor Mark Dayton and Republican legislative leaders failed to reach a budget deal. And for days, there was no end in sight. But on July 12, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that hundreds of bars would no longer be able to serve alcohol because state permits were set to expire. With no one on hand to issue new permits, there’d be no beer. The 10,000 places that sell liquor in the state were starting to see a depletion in stock, as inventories cannot be resupplied without a distributor tax stamp. The state had stopped issuing those.

And then, the unthinkable: Brewing giant MillerCoors was told to pull 39 of its brand labels from all shops, bars, and restaurants because it did not process its registration paperwork in time. The registration was set to expire on July 13.

Suddenly, Dayton and GOP lawmakers were willing to make compromises. The final budget deal, not much different from where the parties were before the shutdown, was negotiated less than 36 hours later, on July 15.

Coincidence? Maybe members of Congress, facing a much larger budget problem, should take a breath and have a beer. And thank their lucky stars that they can still have one.

I'm proud of Massachusetts as well for having seen the error of its ways on a new regulation passed last week. It would have required that brewers licensed as farmer-brewers grow 50% of the grains or hops they use to brew with. Without that distinction, Massachusetts brewers would be classified under the Federal rules enacted after prohibition, which mandate a three-tier industry of brewer to distributor to retailer. A brewer can't sell retail directly, so the rules mandate, unless it's a brewpub or a brewery tour, or, as in Massachusetts, a brewer-farmer. Here's the problem: the Commonwealth of Massachusetts doesn't have the field capacity for all of the brewer-farmers to purchase or grow 50% of the grains or hops needed. They just don't. Of course, the brewer-farmers licenses are a LOT cheaper than the regular brewers licenses, but I'm sure that didn't have anything to do with it.

So here's to Massachusetts for overturning that ridiculous rule. And here's to the New England Patriots. Football's back, baby.

oh dear...

Well, clearly, something went wrong... It would seem to the world that I enjoy drinking beer much more than I like writing about it, and that's not entirely true. It's just that hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now.

This same thinking, incidentally, might be why I kind of let all of July go in terms of going to the gym. There's a little counter on the gym login computer that shows the number of times I've logged in for the last 60 days. The highest I got was 30 - that was during Lent. Yesterday and today, the counter read 5, which means that the last time I was there regularly was about two months ago. Ouch.

What have I been doing instead? My colleague and I have been enjoying some good times at a Newark establishment called Port 44. We became regulars - the bartender would ask whichever of us showed up first where the other one was. One of my favorites: Siren's Wheat.

That's a good looking glass of beer.

Here's a beer that's drinkable on a hot day (of which, Newark has more than its fair share). It's a pretty low alcohol content (4.2% perhaps?) so it's great for a session, and because it's not too dark, it's pretty dry. I've found the darker the beer, the sweeter the beer (thanks to the Maillard Reaction). Siren's is good and dry - refreshing. And I don't need a lemon slice, thank you. It also goes to a good cause. Port 44 is owned by former cops, and 25¢ from each glass goes to fund a scholarship for the children of Police Officers, Firefighters, and EMTs. Not bad.

I say that Port 44 is owned by former cops, but that may not be for much longer. One of the few bright spots in Newark has been this pub, and now, it's for sale. Anybody want to sink $2.1 million into downtown Newark? Anybody?

Damn...

Anyway, for the next couple of days, I'm going to try to clear the notebook. It's a big notebook, and it's gotten pretty thick, so I hope you'll bear with me. As for Mr. West Coast? Maybe he's just out having too much fun.