Aloha! ...Oregon?

One of the nice things about my fiancée is that she likes beer. It's nice to have someone to try a bottle of beer with, or to kick back and have a beer with, or shop for beer with. It helps when you also think that person with whom all that beer is happening is really cute.

Another nice thing about my fiancée is that her dad likes beer, and they have cool things in their house including beer from bygone eras. What follows is one such beer.

A True Oregon Experience?

Behold, Star Brewing Company's Pineapple Ale. You know you're in for a treat when the interwebs note that it's been closed since 1996. Says a positively ancient article from the Portland Business Journal, "Wayne Anderson, president and chief executive officer of Star Brewing, said the company expects to close its Portland brewery by late September and move the operation to Phoenix. The company will be reborn as Phoenix Ale and Lagering Co. and consumers in the Southwest could start quaffing its brew by February 1997." However, that proved to be too optimistic: Star never made it to Phoenix, and shut down instead. A quick google search reveals that Wayne Anderson is now the chief sales manager of Oskar Blues, so at least he's landed on his feet.

I don't know why 1894 is featured on this bottle.

But back to the Pineapple beer. There's indication then that this beer is around 15 years old, since an article in Country Living from 1996 notes that the Pineapple Ale was added at that time. Here's a quote from the article: "Though Star features such high-flying comets as an Alt, I.P.A., and an Imperial Stout, it is the Raspberry Ale that puts ink on an account ledger. "It's an abomination to mankind," [Owner Scott] Wenzel overstates, "but it represents 44 percent of our sales." Star has just added a Pineapple Ale to its line." The art is screened onto the bottle directly, so it's held up nicely. As my future father-in-law opened the bottle (with significant trepidation, I might add), we were all shocked to hear the breaking of a potent seal.

Real live bubbles. Who'd have thought?

Bubbles! Actual carbonation survived for 15 years in this bottle. Impressive indeed. The aroma was all sugary sweetness and while I wouldn't have been able to pick "pineapple" out of the aroma if asked directly, I suppose after a while I started to detect some hints of the ripe tropical fruit on the nose. It wasn't a bad pour either - good ruddy copper color and a fluffy head that stuck around a while.

"Surprisingly tart" is not a descriptor I would use.

Flavor was really out there. True to its aroma, this was a super sweet beer. I tasted none of the Perle & Willamette Hops that were so lovingly highlighted on the bottle. Nor do I think I got much of the 2-Row, Munich, or Carastan 30-37 malts. What I got was sugar and maybe some very sickly-sweet pink bubblegum.

A Vacation In A Bottle!

In my dream vacation, I'm drinking a different beer.

When I was a kid, my Dad used to crack open cans of Dole pineapple chunks to put on cottage cheese. I, being wholly uninterested in the cottage cheese, would spoon the pineapple juice / syrup out of the can. The flavor here was not far removed from that sensation, and it left me in much the same state: speedy sugar high followed by crash.

Sediment. Not nearly as much as a beer this old should have had.

We were totally impressed that this beer had held up for as long as it had. Between the four of us, we ended up finishing a nice tasting of this bottle, though I'm pretty sure I was given the lion's share. This beer went down quite easily, I have to say, but it sat weirdly in my stomach and I would not recommend it again in case another bottle is somehow found.

Christmas on the Bayou

OK, after the snooze-fest that was last night's Allstate BCS National Championship Game at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, in New Orleans, I'm a little Louisiana'd out. This after the nail-bitingly close yet also oddly boring Sugar Bowl exactly a week ago featuring my Michigan Wolverines. But this one's for Mr. Drew Brees, who led my fantasy football team to a commanding win (176.32 - 61.30, but who's counting?) over my sophomore year roommate from college and, as a result, won me a handsome virtual trophy.

Sure looks promising, doesn't it?

I've sampled Abita before: even in Ann Arbor, I was able to get a few of their beers. I have enjoyed some of their lineup - their Amber is lovely, as is the Turbodog. But their Christmas Ale did not live up to their potential. Actually (and unfortunately), it kind of did, given the weaknesses of Abita's Purple Haze, and the truly offputting weirdness of the Satsuma.

All that head is trapping some very weird aromas.

I think there were just too many things going on in this beer, really. It poured nicely dark into the glass, settling to the color of its own bottle, and with a head that started out with very large bubbles that formed the basis for a thick creamy off-white foam. The aroma was promising - it had some floral hops and nutmeg along with an intriguing lemon-pepper thing.

Mirrored labels are hard to photograph.

But on the tongue, the lemon-pepper kind of took over and the beer finished sour. I tried to find some maltiness in here, especially with a beer colored this darkly, but it all got overwhelmed. Not Abita's finest outing. The back label reads "Every year the recipe changes. Abita Christmas Ale is a perfect gift. It's always the right color and fits nicely in your hand... we hope it's just what you wanted." The thing is, there's no talk of flavor or aroma or deliciousness. Just color and how it fits in my hand (it did, thank you). Maybe next year, we try working on flavor?

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.

Still summer?

It's the weekend after labor day and I'm watching Penn State hosting Alabama. Mr. West Coast, I'm sure, is thrilled that Iowa is up against Iowa State. Fantasy football has started. I'm pretty sure this means it's fall.

And yet, the summer sun is shining, it's gorgeous here in Cambridge, MA, and the breeze is warm. Maybe it's still summer? I found a singular bottle of Cisco Brewery's Summer of Lager. Maybe it's just denial, but I was looking for a last gasp of summer, and I went with it.

A promising beer. Sometimes promises let you down.

It pours a lovely gold color with a light ephemeral head that smells of grass and herbiage. Unfortunately, it also has a distinct aroma of mushroom earthiness, something that would continue throughout the beer, much to its detriment.

What happened to the head? Same thing that happened to the flavor.

Each sip had a pretty hearty "beery" flavor with a lot of grain and a decent malt foundation. The Cisco website touts this beer's "hints of citrus" and "light, refreshing flavor." Crap. This beer is straight-up sour. But even worse than that, there's a musty fungal aroma that works its way into each and every sip. Just checked in on Iowa - tied in overtime. West Coast must be having a fit. Speaking of West Coast, the label on the Summer of Lager indicates a conscious echo of the Summer of Love, and I think perhaps all that the brewers at Cisco brought back to Nantucket from San Francisco was a love of sourdough. Gross.

There's probably a reason there was only one of these left. Maybe summer really is over.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cruel Britannia

So I'm a pretty big fan of Britain. I spent two years of my life in the UK, and I enjoy a good pint of English bitter on a hot day. Or a cold day. Or really any day. Personal favorite favourite: Morland's Old Speckled Hen. Delicious stuff, and brewed not far from the dreaming spires I called home. But that's another beer for another post.

Which was why I was so excited about two British beers I was able to find in my local beer establishment, and why I was ultimately so let down by them.

First up, Wells' Bombardier. This poured a very promising ruddy amber, with a creamy off-white head with a decent staying power. From the looks of it, a good start.

Given the gorgeous look of this beer in the glass, I really expected better.

However, there was really no aroma to speak of. Granted, I poured the beer all the way to the top of the pint, so the glass was unable to trap any of the aromas. Clearly, I had to empty some space at the top of the glass by imbibing some of the liquid therein. Sadly, even the first sip was weak, a little bready and yeasty, but without the characteristic burnt caramel bite that I expect from a traditional English bitter. Additional attempts to coax an aroma out of the glass were roundly unsuccessful, and the mouthfeel got thinner and thinner as I continued to drink. It even developed, by the end of the bottle, a faint sourness, which was very out of place, and overall, the beer felt and tasted exceptionally watery.

Incidentally, I've provided the link to the Bombardier website, in case you are so interested. I cannot, however, in good conscience recommend clicking on it, however, as the site itself is designed very poorly, and the user experience assaults the sensibilities. Blah.

I also held out some promise for the Fuller's Vintage Ale 2009. Fuller's is the brewery of one of my favorite beers: London Pride, which is a wonderfully well-balanced session beer, as well as the previously and very well-reviewed London Porter, so I had very high hopes for the Vintage 2009. Sadly, this was also not to be.

Unlike the aforementioned watery mess of the Bombardier, the Vintage 2009 was awash in heavy flavors and aromas. The aroma was of sweet fruit, toffee, and candy, and the flavor was about the same, but with a kick of alcohol spiciness.

A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down.

Unless the medicine is already as sweet as this stuff.

The pour was a deep amber, with a beautiful fluffy head that concentrated the aromas of cherries and, perhaps, cotton candy (or at least, severe amounts of sugar). The carbonation was pleasant and kept the sip interesting, but the flavor was severely disappointing. Instead of a molasses (treacle?) complexity that combines both bitter and sweet, this smacked of pure cane sugar. There were some banana esters that managed to escape being drowned out by the heavy sugar content. Instead of hops, the flavor of raw alcohol punctuated each sip, making for a truly bizarre counterpoint between cloying sweet and harsh spice. In the end, however, the syrupy sweetness of the beer won out and became very unpleasant, making the bottle a chore to finish.

It's almost enough to make me take up arms in revolution.

Douchetastic Beer

Happy memorial day. It's the start of summer and it's the start of grilling season. It's also the start of bad beer season, as lamented last week. Miller Lite, for instance, is offering "taste points" for "epic prizes" to "save my summer." My summer will certainly need saving if I'm caught drinking Miller Lite.

Anyway, so it's summer in New Jersey, which means watching out for jackasses wearing Ed Hardy clothing. It also, unfortunately, also means watching out for people drinking Ed Hardy beer.

Thankfully, this stuff is pretty easy to recognize: it's decked out in the same tattoo-festooned crap that is so easy to find on the bridge & tunnel crowd. There are two: a lite and a regular. Both are godawful.

I am ashamed for having purchased this.

The regular is surprisingly dark for a summer lager, but one can never be sure if that color is real. The smell? Stale fraternity basement. The sip is thin and lousy, with corn sweetness and no real bitterness at all. It's just a watery mess that made me regret dropping the $1.50 on it.

Whoever makes this beer doesn't like beer.

The light is, well, it's worse. Like somebody let wonderbread ferment in a pint glass of water and then pissed in it for good measure. I have nothing else except to say not to drink these beers. Ever.

Of Summer and Secrecy

So it doesn't exactly look like we've been doing our jobs now, does it? I mean, the numbers tell the tale: 7 posts in January, 1 in February, and only 3 each in March and April. And in May? This is the first one. Nope - we're just not drinking enough. Or if we are (and OK, I'll admit it - I am), then we're not writing about it. And that's a shame.

I'll try to have a bunch more reviews and posts up soon. I make no promises, especially since I've already derelict in my duties and it's the 25th. But I'll see what I can do.

As for now, I'm slowly switching back to summer beers. Summer beers aren't always the best tasting: they can be watery, a little sour, sometimes a bit too sweet. They're often pretty low alcohol to accommodate longer drinking sessions that are more apt to take place as the days lengthen. And a lot of the time, brewers think that because there's going to be less alcohol and we're going to drink more of it, there should be less flavor in the beer as well.

And really, that's crap. The fun summer brews are those that have a little citrus, maybe some extra spices, some bracing hop bite. Cascade hops can sometimes mimic the bright flavors of grapefruit; I think Centennial hops can taste quite lemony - both are welcome as a wonderful sour component to a beer that quenches the thirst like a lemonade. In fact, there are a few preparations of lager and "lemonade" that can be quite nice: in Germany, where it was "invented," it's a Radler; in France, a panaché; and in England (where I spent lots of wonderful time and money), it's a shandy. Keep in mind that this is a European lemonade: a dry sparkling lemon soft drink that's like Sprite but without all the sugar. See the Pimm's posting for more. Feel free to mix your own. Under no circumstances should one consume Leinenkugel Summer Shandy, which is a premixed abomination of a concoction in which tasteless lager is mixed with lemon pledge and bottled. Gross.

But last Friday (before a delightful dinner with a good friend), I enjoyed my first Samuel Adams Summer Ale, which is an old favorite. My affinity for Boston Brewing Company is no secret, and I do think that Sam Summer is one of the best summer beers around.

Finally, I had a weekend project last week, and that was to hide a full martini bar inside an innocent-looking briefcase. The results are spectacular, if I may say so myself. I realize it's not exactly fashionable to carry around a hard-cover attache case anymore, and it does make me feel a little dated.

This is like the Clark Kent of briefcases. Totally mild-mannered. Dull, even.

But once I open up the interior, I've got room for all the essentials. That's my gin of choice: Old Bombay (I find Sapphire a little harsh and astringent), a small bottle of Martini & Rossi vermouth, and a cheap but decent Vodka (not for me, but in case I'm feeling hospitable and a friend insists). Incidentally, the NYTimes did a tasting of super-premium vodkas about 6 years ago and threw in Smirnoff just for fun. The Smirnoff beat the Grey Goose, Level, Ketel One, and a few others - nice.

I really enjoyed constructing this. I have also really enjoyed constructing drinks out of it.

I also have a shaker, a miniature bottle of olives, some toothpicks, two shot glasses (for unadulterated drinking) and two collapsible cocktail glasses. And with Ivy League reunions coming up (snob alert!), I'm well-provisioned. See you after reunions.

East. Far East.

Well, I've been a little preoccupied with the day-to-day routine of my job, though that has a lot less to do with the demands of the position and a little more with the snow that keeps getting dumped on Newark. For real - it's snowing again tonight.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've started into a new job and moved into a new apartment, and the one thing that saddens me the most is that I don't have a local bar near my place. Actually, the thing that saddens me the most is that the heat in my apartment is controlled by the elderly owner of the building, and I think she's trying to get us all to grow tropical fruits in our bedrooms. It's 77 degrees in my apartment right now. So beer helps with that.

Like drinking banana-flavored pancake syrup.

Today, I'm drinking the Ginga Kogen "Silver Bottle" Weizen. I'm a little concerned that the bottle isn't silver - it's dark blue. But the label is silver, and I suppose that's what they mean. There are antelope on this label, and I was heretofore unaware that there were antelope in Japan. This beer is very pale, with an aroma of sour hoppiness that I wasn't a huge fan of at first. The head disappeared quickly, and what's left has a sort of unctuous quality on the tongue. Initial flavors of citrus melted into a very sweet core of banana esters, with a hoppy bite that clears the palate at the end. It sits rather heavily in the stomach as well: something about being so thick and yet so stingy with the carbonation, I think. Ultimately, the sweet banana flavor and syrupy texture will take a lot of getting used to, and I just don't think I'm willing to make that effort. Delightfully, the Ginga Kogen website also doubles as a tourism shill for the region.

Hello? Hello taste? Where are you?

Bonus Beer: Yebisu Premium. This was a very thin lager with very little in the way of hops, depth, or backbone. Instead, what I got was honey and sweetness. Yebisu is marketed as an "all-malt beer," and while that's just fine, there was none of the caramel sweetness that I have come to associate with malt. Instead, it was a very one-dimensional sweetness that I didn't quite care for. Yes, I tend to be a dark-beer snob, but I have absolutely enjoyed a good many lagers. This just wasn't one of them.

Not for everyone

While waiting for a late-night reservation a few friends and I decided to grab a quick drink at B3, a burger and wine bar in our neck of the woods. Not in the mood for wine, I saw that they had an a stout on tap that I hadn't seen before, the "Breakout Stout" by Marin Brewing Company. The Bartender excitedly mentioned that his distributor told him that he was the only place in San Francisco that had it on tap. Curious, I ordered a pint.

The beer looked nice, it poured quite dark with caramel head and very mild carbonation. Given the nose, mild chocolate and coffee notes, I was really looking forward to a sip. The first sip was really quite good, I tasted chocolate cake, a mild smokiness and there was a mild alcohol finish. Pleased, I took a second sip. The sweetness vanished and what I was left tasting was alcohol, hops, and iron. My mouth felt parched from a strong, drying (almost tannic) aftertaste that was not at all pleasant. Although advertised as having "a long finish," I can assure you that this beer should not have been called "finished" at all. I should point out that I love bitter beer. Bitterness wasn't the problem with the Breakout Stout, but rather the acrid and tannic mouth feel. Nonetheless, having paid San Francisco prices for the damned pint, I was determined to finish it. After a while, the 7% ABV started to kick in on my empty stomach, and my dulled senses found the Breakout Stout more palatable. Not by any means something I'd order again, but palatable.

As I finished the glass, the bartender asked me what I thought. I explained that I enjoyed the first sip, but that the finish was a bit unpleasant. The bartender looked at me, seemingly dumbfounded, and stated dryly, "well this beer isn't for everyone." Personally, I think that unless you're in the mood for a bracing aftertaste, this isn't for you.