New Year's Resolution

Blog more and also less sporadically. Starting tomorrow.

...at least I didn't miss December entirely. But this is only true because I'm on the West Coast and I got an extra 3 hours to post.

In that vein, here's something I'll be posting soon.

What a cute stubby bottle.

Also, remember how Session has twist-off caps with rock-paper-scissors underneath? This is what ended up under the Fest, along side two of its non-holiday brethren.

Fruitcake beats scissors. Duh.

Happy New Year, kids.

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.

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.

Fall, Part I

I love Fall. As a child of the Northeast, I am giddy when the mercury dips into the sixties, the air clears of summer pollen and the hideously draining scourge of humidity. Fall is a time of crunchy leaves and roasted meats, a time of bountiful harvests and sweet, sweet football. It is, in a word, PERFECT.

Shiner Sixer. Odd, but we'll get to that later.

It's also a great time to get out and try more beer. Darker beers, with their delicious caramel flavors, are perfect for Fall. Summer can keep its golden Coronas and weak Bud Lights, Fall is a time for beers with layers of substance and flavor. Of course, breweries aren't stupid - they're wising up to the fact that the "eat locally, eat seasonally" movement is a major player in the way consumers are willing to evaluate food purchases, and they're doing the same. Not so much with the "eat locally" thing, but they're sure willing to exploit seasonality. Case in point, two variety packs I purchased this past month.

Sam Adams Harvest Collection

The Sam Adams Harvest Collection and the Shiner Family Reunion. Now, I realize that the Family Reunion isn't exactly an 'Autumn' collection per se, but it's definitely pushing the maltier and darker roasts that are typical of the fall season. Both have provided interesting drinking, and I'll be writing more about them in the weeks to come, but I wanted to start with the Sam Adams Bonfire Rauchbier.

According to the neck label, this Rauchbier (literally "smoke beer") is brewed with "specialty malt ... dried over an open fire, giving the brew a distinct smokiness." That it did. I was discussing smoked meats with my fiancée (ooooh, French...) last night, and she mentioned that she's not wild about aggressively smoked meats because she starts to feel "smoked" herself. I get that. I love a good smoked salmon platter or polish sausage, but after a while, you kind of feel like you've been chewing on cigarette butts. I've had smoked beers that approached that level of preservation - stuff that made me feel like I needed a thorough cleaning. This was not one. The smoke here was distinct, but not overboard. And that's where the difference lies.

The nice fluffy head trapped a lot of the aroma of smoke.

I got a great smooth beer with a good amount of toffee sweetness that balanced out the light smoke flavor. I couldn't really taste any hops, but I probably would have missed them if they were there. Instead, I got a nice aroma and flavor of a lightly smoldering campfire. I was disappointed to find that I only got two in the twelve-pack.

This was a very easy drink. Delicious.

Also, while the label said that the Rauchbier has been brewed "since 2004," both the box and the website indicate that this is a "new flavor," with the website proudly stating that this was "[f]irst brewed in 2011." Strange.

Nostalgia begets whiskey

I was at my friendly neighborhood booze shop recently and happened to see a bottle of Leopold Brothers American Small Batch Whiskey.  I'm actually familiar with the brand.  Leopold Brothers, currently located in Denver, Colorado, originally operated a brewery and distillery in Ann Arbor, Michigan where East Coast and myself went to law school.  I really loved their Ann Arbor location.  Leopold Brothers was a place where you could drink, play board games (checking them out from the bartender), or have a pizza and catch the game.  Now, when they were in Ann Arbor they produced beer, gin, pisco, and vodka, but not whiskey.  So, for the sake of nostalgia I picked up a bottle.

Leopold Brothers claim that they produce their American Small Batch Whiskey in the pre-prohibition style, which is to say that they barrel at a lower proof (98 instead of the modern 125), ferment naturally without refrigeration, and distil the corn and rye over a whole day instead of flash-boiling.  Interestingly they claim that by barreling at a lower proof this allows "more of the whiskey to come into contact with the barrel, allowing the mild brown sugar and molasses notes that come from the charred barrels to shine through."  I'm not sure how that's true, unless the lower alcohol content means that the "angel's share" is smaller.  Anyway, the real question is how does this pre-prohibition whiskey stack up?

For the record, I'm drinking this neat.  First, the whiskey is very clear and light in color.  Leopold Brothers doesn't state on the bottle or their website how long they're aging the whiskey in the barrel but I wouldn't think more than a year and certainly not more than two.  It's similar in color and clarity to hard cider or a desert white wine.  It has a mellow smell, mostly yeast and alcohol.  The taste is similarly mild and distinctly unlike most bourbon.  The whiskey is sweet, tasting slightly of vanilla and corn syrup.  It's not cloying, but it is mellow and pretty one-dimensional. 

So my verdict?  I wouldn't buy this again or order it at a bar, but it wasn't bad.  I'm actually intrigued to try some of Leopold Brother's other whiskeys.  They make a "New York Apple Whiskey" that I might have to seek out given how much I love hard cider and Calvados.