Fall, Part 2

I'm a marketer's dream - the moment something is marked "limited release" or "seasonal offering," I will almost certainly buy it. Sometimes it works out. Other times, it really, really doesn't.

I even have apples in the background. Fall is fun.

Now, I'm not willing to write-off hard cider just because it's not beer, or because it seems really girly. I enjoy a good cider. This is not a good cider. I should also mention incidentally that this is one of those situations where I really REALLY wished I could have just bought a single rather than a sixer.

"Hint of American White Oak."

I don't think hint means what you think it means.

So Woodchuck Fall Cider has "a unique taste and special aroma" does it? This is a situation where the whole is so, so much worse than sum of its parts. Cinnamon (check), nutmeg (check), American white oak (check), add together to produce a sickeningly cloying artificial flavor (check, and mate). Here's where I think this thing breaks down - I think it's just too many things that kind of work together.

Apples and cinnamon is kind of a standard flavor combination. Nutmeg is in a lot of apple pie recipes, so let's throw that in. At this point, this cider could have been fine - probably the apple equivalent of pumpkin beer. But they had to go and use American oak for the finishing.

Oakiness, in fine wine, is a result of aging in oak barrels. It's what gives a wine complexity, with flavors of caramel and butter and, yes, vanilla. Apparently, though, cheap winemakers age their wine in steel vats and just toss oak chips into the wine. This allows for less of the caramel and butter and rich flavors, and tends to highlight ONLY VANILLA. Woodchuck sells its sixer of Fall cider for, oh, $9. Do you think they use fine oak barrels, or oak chips (wikipedia even suggests that oak powder can be used? gross).

It was a really cute label too.

All Autumnal, with nice colored leaves.

So this cider doesn't taste like Fall as much as it tastes like a poor Yankee Candle facsimile of Fall. I tasted a lot of vanilla, a lot of sugar, barely any hint of apple, some coconut (I think by this point my palate was totally shot), and what under any other circumstance would probably have made me think of a dish of potpourri. I didn't finish mine. My fiancée didn't finish hers. And now I have four freaking bottles of it stuck in my fridge.

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.

Pimm's!

Perhaps it's the Royal Wedding talking, the long-awaited advent of spring finally coming to fruition, or just a general sense that I wish I were in the UK in a pub with my friends, but thoughts have turned this past week to Pimm's, possibly the national drink of England.

Pimm's is a gin-based liqueur, of about 25% ABV, and it tastes rather medicinal on its own. But when mixed with "lemonade" (more on this in a moment), it becomes a very basic Pimm's Cup, and is the very perfect thing for a hot summer day. Lemonade, in the British world, is a very dry fizzy drink with actual lemon juice in it. The closest I can come in the US is San Pellegrino Limon, but any of the lemon sodas will do in a pinch. I like to squeeze in some fresh lemon just to cut the inevitable sweetness of an American soda. Pimm's cup may also, incidentally, be made with ginger ale. Or, for a Pimm's Royale, champagne.

Traditionally, a Pimm's Cup is built in a large pitcher, with slices of cucumber and lemon, and topped with borage and mint. I never have been able to find borage, so I use more cucumber, and add orange, lime, and strawberries. So basically, a fruit cocktail in a cocktail. Mix 1 part Pimm's to 3 parts lemonade, add lots of ice, and enjoy, preferably while floating down a river, enjoying a picnic lunch, or overlooking some beautiful slice of the English countryside.

Or whenever. This stuff is great, and 'tis the season.

Not Beer

Autumn really is a delightful time for drinking. Especially this autumn, which has wavered between ridiculously cold and unseasonably warm. As such, it provides for a wonderful mix of seasons that supports a wide variety of refreshment-delivery options. But of course, perhaps my partner and I have been a little blind to the possibility that there are things out there to drink other than beer. This is, after all, a blog called "Bicoastal Drinking," and not "Bicoastal Beer Drinking." So here it is: a few things that aren't beer, but are still well-worth trying out.

Last Saturday, a very good friend of mine came to town, and having heard not 24-hour prior that we had both passed the New York State Bar Exam, we were both in the mood for a celebratory drink. Thankfully, the Greater Boston Metro area is more than willing to oblige.

The Friendly Toast, near MIT, is pretty new, but it's already made quite an impression on the Cambridge crowd. A lot of folks love its hipster-bohemian decor. Not me. A lot of folks love its amazing vegetarian alternatives to their meat-laden offerings. Not me. A lot of folks love that it has a liquor license and a heavy hand with the alcohol. Bingo.

This is a full pint of bloody mary.

I can't really complain about a restaurant that sees fit to offer a bloody mary on a beautiful saturday morning in a pint glass. Not some 10.5 oz. collins nonsense so packed with ice it's a fight to put the celery back into the drink, but a nice, hefty, and strong pint. It's really spicy, with a wonderful kick of horseradish, thick specks of black pepper you can crunch between your teeth, and two nice, fat pimento olives - one that stays on the toothpick for a mid-drink nibble, and one that slides off into the drink so you have something to look forward to at the end. Plus, the food is amazing.

Now, it was warm enough last month that ice cream wasn't a total pipe dream, and J.P. Licks in Harvard Square is a staple. A lot of folks, myself included, like their black raspberry, and almost every Boston ice cream shop has coffee oreo. But last month, I had their cream stout ice cream. J.P. Licks makes all of its alcohol-flavors with real booze (November's flavor is Wild Turkey Bourbon), and this one had an awfully strong alcohol flavor for an ice cream.

J.P. Licks: Cream Stout & Coffee Ice Creams

Its sharp alcohol bite was balanced by caramel malt sweetness, but I wasn't sure if I was really tasting "stout." It really wasn't bitter enough to be stout (right, like you'd expect bitterness in ice cream?), so it really had more of the character of a stout in which a scoop of vanilla had been floated. Incidentally, that is delicious. The pairing was really a necessity: the coffee ice cream provided the absent bitterness while accentuating the roasted flavors of the "stout."

Finally, it's not really fall in New England until the cider comes out. I've already posted a photo of , but the cider itself becomes the star later in the season. A good, crisp, hard cider can be really refreshing, and my girlfriend and I thought maybe we'd found a winner or two at the store. We might have been wrong.

Is this a urine sample or a bit of hard apple cider?

Sam Smith's Organic Cider was crystal clear and the color of very, very dehydrated urine. It was really dry dry and therefore incredibly refreshing, and furthermore dangerously easy to drink. It had a lot of clean apple flavor but was a little one-dimensional. Lots of apple, not much else. Which I guess is fine if that's all you're looking for. It was, sadly, a little more like a sharp apple juice than a cider.

Hornsby's Amber Draft was like an alcoholic version of Martinelli's sparkling cider, which again, is much more of an apple juice than a cider. My girlfriend described this as a "starter" cider. For kids, I think she was referring. Terrifying. The start and finish to each sip might be called medium-dry, but the heart of the sip was basically an alcoholic jolly rancher. Ew.

Finally, Hornsby's Crisp Apple was even lighter in color, and even lighter in flavor. Gross.