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.

Barrington Brewery, aka Berkshire Mountain Brewery

I'm in Western Massachusetts for the July 4th holiday, and have had the great pleasure of sampling (read: drinking) quite a wide variety of excellent beers. Now, yesterday was a bit rainy and gross outside, though I highly recommend the Berkshire Botanical Garden, even on a rainy day. As my girlfriend put it, "rain is really nice; it's just too bad it's so wet."

This is a small portion of the Berkshire Botanical Gardens. Well worth the admission fee and the time.

Of course, after an afternoon of traipsing around the botanical gardens, and other "aggressively quaint" towns in Western MA, it was a delight to come across the Barrington Brewery & Restaurant, just outside Great Barrington, MA. I've seen their beers in stores here before, but I have to say, I'm really confused by their branding. The label on the ESB I bought clearly says Berkshire Mountain Brewery. And they seem totally OK with this discrepancy - both appear on the aforementioned website. Weird.

Berkshire Mountain Brewers. Or is it?

The label, if I may, also shows a beer and a sun behind it - a clear advertisement of their status as the first brewery on the east coast to go 100% solar to heat the water for their beer. It's an admirable step, and I commend them for it. If only their beers weren't quite so unbalanced.

I purchased an ESB and had it with dinner two nights ago. It had a nice copper color with a fluffy head that stuck around a lot. It didn't, however, have much of an aroma at all. Flavor was nice and refreshing at first, with a great breadiness on the front of each sip. On the back end, though, it was very bitter, and the bitter and sour notes obliterated all else on the palate. After a glass of it, though (a nice 22 oz. bottle has a little under two glasses), the beer got more beery tasting, and I started to pick up a lot more pine hops and some (still quite muted) citrus. As a result, I kind of thought maybe it was just me, or just that particular beer.

So when we drove by the Barrington Brewery & Restaurant, I wanted to go in to try out their beers on tap - maybe the beers just open up better when they haven't been stuffed into a bottle? I ordered the Ice Glen IPA, and found it very refreshing, but similarly one-note to the ESB. It was aggressively bitter and very floral. While I might have detected some malt sweetness that might have come from their roasting of the grain (the beer was a very attractive copper color), the bitterness really got in the way.

Barrington Brewery & Restaurant. Ice Glen IPA, straight from the tap. I wish my phone took better photos.

The head did leave a really nice lacing on the glass that I found very attractive. Unfortunately, the IPA didn't end up opening up like the ESB, which became a little more piney toward the end.

I always like to see a little bit of lacing on the glass. That's purty.

My girlfriend, on the other hand, had a try of the Blackbear [sic.] Stout, which poured jet black and obscured the black lettering on her pint glass. It had some wonderful dark-roast coffee aromas, which was promising. The first thing that hits is that roasted malt and bitter chocolate flavor - it's all of the complexity of deep chocolate and coffee and really burnt caramel, which is pretty amazing given that they were able to tamp down a lot of the traditional malt sweetness that usually makes beers of this color very syrupy and cloying. Unfortunately, what I didn't like about this beer was a very thin mouthfeel - usually something like this just feels a little more substantial in the mouth, maybe a little creamier, and I wasn't getting it.

Is it Barrington Bresery or Berkshire Mountain Brewery?

Is it Black Bear Stout or Blackbear Stout?

Of the three, I would drink the stout again, and I'm still eager to go back and try their other beers. I will say this: they both went really well with the mozzarella sticks we ordered, and the bar itself is very rustic. The bartendrix was smiley and efficient, and commanded authority in the room. And when a passer-through asked if she had any wheat beers, she smiled and said "no, but I can put a slice of lemon in yours, if that'll make you feel better." Now that's someone I want pouring my beer.

Beeramisu and other delights

I don't cook with beer enough. Generally speaking, I'll happily crack open a beer while I'm cooking, but it's rare that the beer goes into the pan or pot, instead of into the chef. Chili is one dish that I put beer in. A few weeks ago, I made one with one of the Revolutionary Rye Ales I reviewed previously. My girlfriend thinks my chili looks too much like stew. She is wrong.

Mmm... Chili...

So when I discovered a way to use beer in a dessert, I was psyched to try it out. In launching forward to St. Patrick's Day, Serious Eats published a recipe for beeramisu.

Beeramisu, pre-devouring.

Take a regular tiramisu, swap out coffee for stout, swap out madeira for Bailey's, and you've got yourself a deliciously booze-tinged dessert. Instead of Guinness, which I find a little watery (I mean, hello, it floats on the top of a black and tan), I used Black Hawk Stout. On its own, Black Hawk is creamy, rich, and bitter, with very little carbonation. It's ink-black, with deep caramel and burnt sugar flavors, so I thought it might substitute in well for the coffee. Indeed it did.

It wasn't exactly easy to slice, but the flavors were nice.

The recipe I used from Serious Eats could use some tweaking: I'd cut back on the Bailey's being sprinkled over each layer, and go with more of the stout, as the final product needed a little more bitterness than a six-count dunk provided. This dessert got devoured, and rightly so: it's fantastic.

On a completely different, but just as delicious, note, I happened across three bottles of Coedo beer and was struck by how much these really looked like a Japanese knock-off of Chimay.

Japanese attempt at Chimay?

I drank the Beniaka this past week and was rather stunned by how nice it was. It's not the typical Japanese lager that makes one think fondly of Coors. Instead, it was a nice deep red, and had wonderful layers of caramel malt sweetness.

Apparently, brewed with sweet potato.

According to its website, which I will not send readers to because it is loaded with nonsense music and flash crap (google it if you must), "this premium lager features an aromatic sweetness in its amber tones [and is] a rare combination of high quality malts and 'Beniaka,' the roasted Kintoki sweet potatoes of the Kawagoe region." I'm not sure I tasted sweet potato, but I definitely tasted sweetness, and a depth of flavor I wasn't really expecting. I'm looking forward to trying the other two sometime soon.