Fall, Part 5 - Weather is Weird

So this past month, we've had 30 degrees and snow and we've had sunny high 60s, so I thought I'd channel that unpredictability with this post.

First, the ridiculous snow we had. Dear winter - go the hell away. Seriously - roads got sloppy, tree branches snapped under the weight of heavy snow, and I lost internet access for a whole two days. Horrible, I tell you, horrible!

Goose Island Mild Winter - another winner.

So we pray for a Mild Winter (see what I did there?). Goose Island's Mild Winter is a delicious malty treat of a beer. It's a nice deep brown with a great sweet aroma wafting up from a nice fluffy head. The first sip was beautifully smooth, with just a touch of bitterness on the back end to balance everything out. I couldn't really smell anything, but that might just have been a stuffed nose on my part. I had a hard time tasting any of the "spicy rye flavors" that Goose Island was touting, but I really enjoyed the beer's overall richness and dark fruit flavors. And Goose Island's got some slight balance issues (their IPA is aggressively hopped and their Bourbon County Stout could kill) but this one settled down nicely.

Sledding is very wintery.

Hockey Skates - also wintery.

I enjoyed the label as well - nice view of the Chicago Hancock tower on one side, and the Willis (née Sears) Tower on the other. I've become a pretty big fan of the city of Chicago over the last decade, and both it and the beer are worth a return visit.

Serving suggestion.

Ps. What's a Willi Glass?

And then there was that two week period of gorgeous late summer days and mild evenings, not even a week after the snow. In celebration, I grabbed a really nice Sierra Nevada Summerfest.

Sierra Nevada has the most scenic labels.

I'm usually pretty enamored of Sierra Nevada. Their Pale Ale is distinctive and delicious with just the right amount of bite for a good all-around beer. I wish I liked the Summerfest as much, I'll be honest.

Not a bad looking pour.

Color was off on the camera though.

I think a lot of the problem was just that I'm not as in love with lager these days. There was some great grassiness hay on the nose, and the pour was the pure bright gold of summer. It had, as it promised, "a crisp, refreshing finish," but I guess I didn't taste any of the "delicate spicy and floral hop flavor" that I was promised.

Overpromise + Underdeliver.

I think Summerfest's greatest strength is in how mild it is - I could put a lot of these back without overwhelming my taste buds, because there wasn't a lot of flavor there.

It did not take me long to finish this beer.

Maybe in the depths of August that's really necessary, but on an Indian Summer day in November, it was nothing more than my pathetic attempt to hold on to the fleeting sunshine.

Fall, Part 4

The sequential naming of all of past four posts has a point - I've been quite taken by the beauty of Autumn and its harvest bounty, and I'm much happier eating (and drinking) seasonally. As I've said before, I'm a marketer's dream, which isn't far from my first point. What is seasonal cuisine anyway, but nature saying "limited time only!"

Mmm...

Of course, the pinnacle of limited time only is, of course, the McDonald's McRib. Like Maine sweet shrimp or the best New Jersey tomatoes, the McRib is available for a tantalizingly brief moment, during which the truly devoted are eager to partake of nature's bounty.

Lovingly scattered onions

I mean, let's talk about this thing, right? It's a spongy slab of pork goodness shaped, with humor, as if it had ribs. It's "smothered," as the ads say, in tangy barbecue sauce, with two pickle slices and a smattering of real onions strewn across its textured meatscape. That barbecue sauce is pretty thick and heavy, and it paints a messy swath across the box, one's hands, and one's lips.

Bread is weird

This bun is hilarious - it appears at first glance to be toasted (I mean, it's got that irregular brown shading that one finds on actual bread that's been actually toasted), but the soft squishiness of the bread-like-substance shows it might as well have been painted on. But the whole of the sandwich is significantly greater than the sum of its parts, and because it's "limited time only," I'm all over this thing.

Way too thin.

Not enough depth.

Not enough complexity.

But what to drink? I tried a few seasonal varieties and found them sadly lacking - the Otter Creek Oktoberfest, the Sam Adams Octoberfest, even the basic Sam Adams Boston Lager. Nothing really had enough umph or backbone to complement the sharp onions, savory pork, or tangy bbq sauce. So I ended up looking a little outside the box to the other things that might complement slow roasted meat by-products and ended up with a true winner.

Big bottle of delicious

Samuel Smith's Yorkshire Stingo was exactly what this sandwich needed. The old oak barrels impart an amazing sweetness and lush roundness to the flavor.

What a color

The roasted malts provide a lovely caramel flavor with buttery toffee notes. On its own, this is already a lovely beer.

Hell of a pedigree for a beer

There's a bit of sharpness from the alcohol that cuts through the richness of the pork (this is a strong 9% abv), while the caramel flavors meld with the onions for a really amazing sweetness. And the aroma of apple cider in the beer was the perfect accompaniment to the fatty, squishy pork.

Part of this balanced meal.

Overall, the Yorkshire Stingo was bold enough to stand up to the smothering spice of the barbecue sauce, producing a truly heavenly pairing that elevated both elements. I'll be waiting, beer in hand, for the next time the McRib comes around.

Fall, Part 3

So I'm definitely a little behind. I love drinking beer and I love talking about beer, but there are a few times at which I'm not wild about picking up my laptop to write about it. My bad. There's also a TON of beer in my fridge that I'm also a little behind in terms of drinking. Trust me though - I'm working on it.

So there's a lot of beer in here. Hmm...

So my distaste for pumpkin beers is well known. I'm not wild about pumpkin as an ingredient, and I do not like it in beer. I do not like pumpkin in bread, I do not like pumpkin in pie, I barely enjoy pumpkins in catapults. I'm terrified of them when they're drenched in glitter.

But damn if suddenly come Labor Day, the liquor stores aren't flooded by pumpkin beers of every kind. It's rare to fine one that I like. Well, it's rare to find one I'll buy, which means it's even that much harder to find one that I like. I am a huge fan of the Sam Adams variety packs (see the Spring pack - I bought the Summer one, but didn't review much from it). So hooray for the Fall pack, which I started off on two posts ago. I ended up having to take home two of the Harvest Pumpkin beers as a result. And I have to say, they weren't horrible.

Nice copper color.

11 pounds of pumpkin go into each barrel, they say. At least it's actual pumpkin, and not 11 pounds of pumpkin pie spice. I appreciated that it wasn't too sweet, wasn't too heavily spiced, and wasn't frankly, an average pumpkin beer. I couldn't smell a lot of fruit on the nose - the aroma was bready and yeasty instead. The body was smooth, the mouthfeel was pretty nice. And then at the very end there might have been some cinnamon and other spice on the finish. It wasn't candy-like, but there was enough caramel malt sweetness to remind me that this was a fall beer. Really, not bad.