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.

Devoid of Flavor

I went on a vacation to Florence after college - it was one of those things that Ivy-league students do. I know full well how pretentious that sounds. You know what? Bite me. :P

Anyway, my friends and I were using the Let's Go series of guides, because Ivy graduates only trust other Ivy graduates or somesuch. The entry for Florence discussed a restaurant that was good and cheap, and yet totally devoid of atmosphere. I think it actually said "totally devoid of atmosphere." Being a curious and contrary lot, we became fixated on what such a restaurant would entail, and decided to go. Turns out it was a great decision - the reviewer had written up the pizza parlor on the ground floor, but the heart and soul of the restaurant, La Mangiatoia, was in the basement, and it was: a. full of locals, and b. amazing, and c. still really cheap. Sometimes it pays to poke around in a review and see what the reviewer meant. I hope you do with my little write-ups. Push back if you think I'm wrong.

On that note, the following blurb was written up by Eric Asimov of the New York Times in this weekend's Magazine, specifically in the Drinks portion. I can't permalink to his blurb itself, so I'm going to rip it and quote the whole thing. Reprinted here entirely without permission:

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Bud Light, Coors Light, Miller Lite: Is There Any Difference?

BY ERIC ASIMOV

Denis Carrier

It's true that the craft-beer movement of the last 30 years has exposed a lot of Americans to the idea that good beer is complex, flavorful and distinctive. It's also true that Americans buy an enormous amount of terrible beer. Six of the 10 best-selling beers in the United States are light beers, including Bud Light at No. 1 (it outsells No. 2 Budweiser by more than 2 to 1), Coors Light at No. 3 and Miller Lite at No. 4. Because huge budgets are devoted to television advertising, industry analysts say that light-beer sales are "marketing driven." Basically, what the beers taste like is less important than the effectiveness of their ads — Bud Light's "Real Men of Genius" or Miller Lite's "Be a Man" campaign or Coors Light's labels that turn blue when properly cold. And apparently there is a need for the latter — sales of Bud Light and Miller Lite have declined for three straight years as Coors Light has shown modest growth.

I recently sampled the best-selling light beers to see if there was any palatable difference between them. The results: Coors Light offered no smell and no taste, but as the label indicated, it was indeed cold. Bud Light, which promises "superior drinkability," had only the faintest hint of bitterness but was otherwise devoid of flavor. Miller Lite was the clear winner. It seemed almost robust by comparison, but still hardly bitter. For added thrills, I drank a Michelob Ultra, the 12th-best-selling brand. Now here was a beer that truly tasted like nothing — no smell, no taste, not even the cold sensation of the Coors Light. If you want to drink basically nothing, Michelob Ultra is for you.

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I love this post for two reasons: 1. it's full of snark, and 2. it's blatantly elitist. As mentioned earlier this summer, about once a year, I drink a lot of Bud Light. I've had all four of those light beers up there, but not all at once, and I'd like to follow Mr. Asimov's and try to do a side-by-side comparison of all of them.

Black Chocolate Stout

This is the first beer anyone totally geeked out on me over. It was a fellow faculty member at a middle school I was teaching at a decade ago, and he was positively giddy over finding Black Chocolate Stout in stores again (it's generally only available October through March).

Being an impressionable young lad, I went out and purchased a four-pack, and was impressed immediately by the full on flavor of flavor. See, up until then, I had been in college, and had been exposed only to the very finest light and chuggable "getcha drunk" lagers that New Jersey could offer. By contrast, the Black Chocolate Stout is a sipping beer.

My camera sucks. In actuality, this beer devours light.

First off, it pours an absolute ink black: a quality not well-captured by the camera on my iPhone, nor by the light-colored things that are reflected in the glass. I mean it - I got the sense I could write on parchment with this beer. In previous pours, I have also managed to cultivate a nice creamy head (with a color not unlike that of the head of a Guinness, but much more flavorful). Somehow, that wasn't happening for me today.

I smelled a lot of cherry and roasted coffee in this beer. Unlike many of the beers I've had of late, both of those aromas were present in the flavor beer too. But wait, as they say, there's more. I ended up getting that namesake bitter chocolate, also some lovely toasted bread and a lot of caramel. This is a beer with a flavor that lasts.

At 10% above, it's not a multiple-bottle kind of a beer (at least, not for me), and there's a considerable alcohol presence as well. I do find that as it warms up (inevitable, given how long this beer kind of insists I wait in between sips), some nice vanilla flavors peek out as well, and the heat in the alcohol makes a winter evening a little bit warmer.

Put it in a box

The boyfriend and I visited Paso Robles and the Santa Ynez Valley this past weekend and enjoyed wine tasting in both regions.  We generally like to visit smaller vineyards, where you might find the winemaker or his or her spouse at the tasting bar.  There's just a better feel to the smaller places, where folks are still very much pouring their heart and soul into the wine.  But I'll get off my soapbox.  I'll be reviewing quite a few of the wines that we purchased on the trip, but I thought I'd start with the most unexpected find: quite good boxed wine.

We were at the Hidden Oak Winery in Templeton, CA.  First let me say that Hidden Oak Winery is located on a beautiful piece of property, with great views of the region, and that we had a great experience in their tasting room.  We found some Merlot there that we really liked and were informed that it came in a box.  Four bottles of wine in the box for the price of 2.3!  You can't argue with that deal, and I've increasingly heard about winemakers attempting to try boxing their wine, despite America's aversion to the boxed stuff based on experiences with Franzia at undergrad.  The thing is that with the box, the wine lasts much longer once opened (assuming you're not going to finish a bottle in an evening) and does not appreciably diminish in quality once opened because of the vacuum seal.

But, is it any good?  We thought that Hidden Oak Winery's 2006 Merlot was good enough to bring home a box.  As you can see from the picture, the Merlot has a dark color, and while you can't appreciate it in the photo, it's a really nice dark ruby color.  It has a relatively weak nose of red fruit.  Now, even though the wine comes in a box it is a 2006 vintage and does require some time to breathe.  When I first poured myself a glass I found a bracing acidic aftertaste.  Luckily, that quickly faded as the wine opened up.  Hidden Valley's '06 Merlot is very fruit forward, with a mellow tannic finish.  The fruit flavors (raspberry, currant, and cherry) are quite nice, and the wine is well structured.  You can tell that the tannins have faded with time, and they balance the fruit nicely.  Finally, it's a fast-moving wine in my opinion.  There's not much of a long lingering finish here, which some folks will like and others would no doubt criticize.  My verdict - it's a good value and high quality, and should pair well with grilled meat and seafood.

Quick Trivial Post

Well, it's no big secret that I'm a big dork. I love beer, I love thinking about beer, and I love beer trivia. And frankly, I love trivia of all kinds. Make that *almost* all kinds.

There's a company out there called "Stump! Trivia" which franchises out questions from a central repository and puts them into the hands of local trivia monkeys across the country. These people sign up often because they like trivia, but more often because they like alcohol and attention, and this is a reasonably easy way of securing cheap access to both.

Case in point, at Cornerstone Tavern in Manhattan, which features unremarkable (but generally inoffensive) food and reasonably attentive waitstaff. And trivia on Wednesdays. Oh right. And $1 Rolling Rock mugs. Recipe for awesome.

There are 13 beers on this table. That cost us $13.

Here's the problem: their trivia monkey sucks. They use Stump! as their source of questions, which means we get nineteen questions and two 10-question sheets over the course of 2.5 excruciating hours. We also get a woman who can't pronounce anything that looks remotely foreign, and who comments that she doesn't have to be smart because she's got a giant rack. I've been three times. Except for the $1 beer, I don't ever think I want to go back.

And I don't have to! We found a better place for bar trivia. Hooray for Drunken Smartass Trivia at Dempsey's Pub. Better questions, better beer, better location, better starting time, slightly higher price, suck it, Cornerstone.