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.