A carnival of technology

So I went to Iceland last week.  I had some money and some vacation saved up, I was already hopping on planes and going places on account of Chris’s getting hitched (congratulations!), and I just wanted to get out of the country for a while and see something new.  Here is my self-indulgent attempt to document the trip.

One bit of common wisdom about the Scandinavian islands is that Greenland is made of ice and Iceland is green.  This is a gross over-simplification.  Iceland is the Alaska of Scandinavia: it’s a barren, inhospitable land, full of active volcanoes, frequent earthquakes from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge a few miles east of Reykjavík, and, by the standards of a travellin’ Southern boy, some really awful weather.  A day over 50°F is a good day in the summer, and the varied landscape of oceans and rivers and glaciers and volcanoes ensures a constant, brutal wind nearly everywhere on the island.  The most common sight is a lava field, craggy rocks reminiscent of the American southwest, covered in the only green that so much of the land can support: moss.  Agriculture consists of a handful of hot spring greenhouses and a whole lot of pasture.  The only creatures that can survive on this island are sheep, some curious-looking hairy horses, a fox or two and a bunch of stubborn Icelanders.  To say that the island is green is very misleading.

Icelanders have a reputation of being awful drivers, but I didn’t see it.  Maybe I’m just used to bad driving.  They seemed to make do pretty well in a country where pretty much anything outside the one city is a poorly-maintained country road.  The speed limit is a reasonable 90kmh, and I didn’t see anyone crash or veer of the road or cut someone off even once.  One thing I found interesting with their traffic signals—and maybe this is something they do elsewhere in Europe, I don’t know—is that lights would do the usual green, yellow, red thing, and then the red light would add a yellow again just before the green, letting drivers know when to get ready, and, by encouraging everyone to jump the light a little bit, ensuring that no one ever ran a red.

I have a weird knack for blending in a lot of the time when I travel.  If I stay somewhere long enough I’ll be asked for directions or advice or whatever one asks a local, but here it meant that a lot of people assumed I could speak Icelandic.  Of course it’s reasonable to address someone in your native land in your native language, but it seemed a little weird when in a knickknack shop for tourists, stuck behind people unable to figure how to spend a Euro or a dollar, to get to the front and be greeted by a cheerful “Get ég hjálpað þér?”  I feel like I should have at least learned the numbers.  I think I let a lot of people down with my constant English apologies.

Iceland has better Mexican food than New England, but it’s still not quite up to par.  I guess it’s a little hard to get some of the herbs and spices, like cilantro or adobo, but at least one place there knows how to swing a pepper.  The Indian dude must have had some connecs; that daal I had for lunch one time was delicious.

My first meal in Reykjavík was in a vegetarian restaurant full of people in keffiyehs, copies of an English language alt-weekly spread around and Joanna Newsom on the stereo.  I’m not sure if that says more about Reykjavík or about me.

Since I was too lazy to write anything on Monday.  Today we have a beer from Michigan that was quite pleasant and a beer from California that I was expecting to hate.

#44: Third Coast Old Ale

Internet says that Old Ale is a separate style, but I’m not convinced.  The Bell’s Brewery website further confuses things by calling it a barleywine, and it seems a lot like a barleywine, so I’m going to think of it in those terms.  It poured a hazy, dark orange, with a smell full of yeasty bread, apples, oranges, and, just before you start to think that maybe is this some Belgian abbey concoction instead, a gust of grassy, flowery hops.

This is a pretty nice tasting beer.  It’s thick and feels a little syrupy with a caramel taste, some oak flavor, a lot of malts and a bit of a sour, roasty edge.  The hops are sharp but not too intense, and there’s a hot alcohol feeling that sneaks it’s way through the flavors.  Overall it’s a big, sweet sipping sort of beer.  I think I’ll revist the rest of the six-pack in the winter.

#45: Arrogant Bastard Ale

And now something from the other side.  I’ve never had anything from the Stone Brewing Company, but in what I’ve read about them I haven’t seen much to like.  For one, they seem like the sort of brewery that mistakes hops for creativity, and for another their marketing schtick is just infuriating.  There’s a rule of thumb in advertising: don’t talk about the competition.  It makes your product appear unable to stand on its own merits, and, worse, it makes people think about the competition during the impression for your brand, so if you decide to bring up the other guys you’d better have a good reason for it.  Arrogant Bastard doesn’t directly attack the competition so much as it does their connoisseurs in a virulent appeal to elitism.  I agree that there are some pretty bland popular beers out there, but drinking them doesn’t make you a bad person.  Drinking them doesn’t even make you unable to enjoy other, more complex beers.  Some of those big-name beers have a bit more going on than the “tasteless fizzy yellow beer” credit they get, and there’s more to answering tastelessness than razing a field of hops.  I started with pretty low expectations.

My dread was confirmed as I poured the bottle and I caught a strong, distinct whiff of pine tar.   But it disappeared quickly, leaving a beer that really didn’t smell like much of anything, so maybe that was just a fluke.  I took a sip, and…nope, there’s the hops.  And that’s all there is.  It’s not something as intensely unpleasant as my experience with Sierra Nevada’s Torpedo, but I couldn’t find anything to like.  It was very bitter and astringent, there’s hardly anything to balance it, and that oily taste and feel of the piney Cascade hops stuck around well past its welcome.  As it warmed up a sweet malty flavor started to emerge, but not nearly enough.  I can drink this beer; it doesn’t make my throat close up or make me want to spit it out, but I’m just not happy about drinking this beer.  I kept a glass next to me while writing this, and every now and then I’d pick it up, forget what I was drinking, not smell much of anything in particular for a warning, and wham! another senseless, unhinged hop punch.

I like hops, but I don’t like hops in a vacuum.  The first beer of tonight’s reviews had a lot of hops, and it would have been poorer without them.  They added some different tastes that barley and yeast alone can’t provide, and they kept the big wallop of malt from being undrinkably thick.  Even beers with a strong hops focus can be pretty nice, but geez, dial it down a notch or two, and use some more interesting hops, something that doesn’t just taste like trees and dirt.  Club soda and bitters is more interesting, and more pleasant, than this beer.

If this were another beer I’d just shrug it off as unremarkable and move on, but the ad copy that accompanies this one makes it maddening: the accusation that I’m to blame for not enjoying this garbage instead of whoever thought it’d be a good idea to remove the malt taste from an IPA of the worst American sort, the idea that rejecting a company out-of-hand is any less blind brand loyalty than simply drinking their products, the sneering, holier-than-thou attitude backed by nothing more than the abuse of a curious European flower.  You were right, Arrogant Bastard: this beer is not for me.  Because it sucks.

The Third Coast Ale really was quite nice; I don’t want that idea to get lost just because I have another reason to hate California.

Oops, I guess I have a bit of a backlog now.  The bar where I drank the last of these was pretty dead, so let’s see if I can’t turn some incoherent notes into sloppy paragraphs and catch up a bit.

#41: Smuttynose Hanami

Smuttynose is another brewery whose beers have just recently started showing up on the banks of the Chattahooch’.  They’re from New Hampshire, and I’m pretty sure I sampled some of their wares during  moments of lucidity on that awful New Year’s trip a while back, but I can’t remember which ones.  So for this project I just picked out what looked like the strangest.

Cherries are thought to originate somewhere in the Mediterranean—Italy or Turkey or somewhere in there—but it was the Japanese that figured out that, besides being a tasty fruit, it’s a pretty dang pretty tree, so why don’t we throw a party when it starts to bloom.  Thanks to a century-old gift from Japan, we in the US have our own version of Hanami, the cherry blossom festival in DC.  Appreciating the cherry blossoms got kind of awkward when we started bombing the shit out of each other, but that’s not the kind of thing that just goes away.  For once a year the National Mall is litered not with plastic bottles and burger wrappers, but with pretty pink flowers.  The Smuttynose beer doesn’t have much to do with the flowers; they just used the fruit.

I’m a little wary of cherry-flavored beers, because children’s cough syrup ruined me.  The one I remember best, Lindemans Kriek, I absolutely can’t stand because it makes me think of Dimetapp.   But Hanami won we over in a couple of ways: it’s a cherry-flavored ale instead of a cherry lambic, so the cherries are a flourish and not the focus, and the cherry flavor is more tart than sweet.  Hanami has a sweet barley taste with a little bit of hops, and the cherries add a sour note that it keeps it interesting.  It’s pretty nice.

#42: Ayinger Celebrator

I’m not very familiar with bock beers, so this was something new.  A bock is basically a strong German lager, and a doppelbock is even more so, a dark, thick, powerful product of the Reinheitsgebot that has something to do with goats for some reason.  I got this one in a four-pack, and these bottles have a lot of heft.  They’re thick and brown, and each one adorned with a little plastic ram hanging from a red string.  This beer is certainly serious about whatever it is.

The beer itself is dark brown, and it smells like a dark ale, lots of roasted malts and hops and chocolate.  It’s full of flavor, bready and slightly sour malts, molasses and a big hop bite, but somehow it stays smooth and creamy and very drinkable.  This is a big beer that manages to stay just on the side of subtlety.   And it’s tasty; I like it.

#43: Guinness 250

There’s an old Irish proverb that I’m either paraphrasing or just made up: no matter how far or how long you travel, you can always find a comfort at home.  I took to Guinness pretty early on, and not just because I’m fake Irish.  The small, divey bars throughout Atlanta tend to keep on tap some varieties of Budweiser, and Miller and Coor, and 420 on tap if you’re lucky, or Pabst Blue Ribbon if you’re close to Little 5.  And Guinness, the big, dark-handled tap in the corner with the funny-looking nozzle.  I often drink Guinness, and honestly, it’s not all that good.  There’s a world of difference between Guinness in a can or a bottle—regardless of what kind of plastic they shove into the container—and Guinness on tap, but even then, despite its reputation among those that prefer the Bud, or the Millers or the Coors of being a big, bready meal in a glass, it’s kind of bland, kind of watery.  It’s a fine beer for drinking a lot of beer with some friends over a pizza and a baseball game on the big TV, but if you’re looking for a beer for thinkers and poets, a beer with feeling and a flourish, Guinness isn’t the place to start.

But it’s hard to hate on Guinness.  They too often make the best beer in the bar, those toucan ads make some pretty neat art and are powerful enough that I still, somewhere in the back of my mind think that drinking the stuff is a healthy endeavour, and the head of the brewery in the 1950’s, after he got in a (presumably drunken) argument over some sort of senseless trivia, created the Guinness Book of Records so that bars could keep it on hand and cleanly settle future arguments over ridiculous bullshit.  I guess it’s kind of like Jack Daniel’s: I don’t think so highly of the actual product, but there’s so much storied history in the producer that I can’t help but love them.  Guinness 250 is a milestone in that history, marking the 250th anniversary of Arthur Guinness sigining, at £45 per year, a 9,000 year lease for the brewery at St. James Gate.  I bet that landlord is feeling mighty stupid.

The first thing that’s clearly different about Guinness 250 is that there’s no nitrogen.  There’s no downward cascade of tiny bubbles, just a black beer with a fluffy white head, matching the tap handle without any intermediate settling, and rather than staying big and thick to leave a tan curtain down the side of the glass, the head eventually settles into a few thin puddles.  And then there’s the smell, oh my goodness.  There’s a big burnt barley smell with a strong sour edge, and the taste is more of the same.  The roasted malt is something bordering on imperial, and the carbonation lends a big, sharp kick.  It’s a straightforward beer, but it’s big and crisp, and it tastes like a stout ought.  It’s really a shame that this is only a one-time thing.

#40: Beamish Irish Stout

Food pairing: a pizza.

Beamish is one of the “big three” dry Irish stouts, the others being Guinness and Murphy’s, and like the other two it uses the technology first thunk up  by the thinkers at St. James Gate.  My previous beer post neglected to mention an instance when a can is better for the drinker than a bottle: the ntiro can.  Before sealing the can, they toss in a plastic ball full of liquid nitrogen.  When the can is opened, the drop in pressure causes the nitrogen to come out into the beer through a small hole, filling the beer with tiny bubbles that give it a smooth, creamy texture without the bite of a beer that’s only carbonated.  The widget is too big for a bottle opening, and a bottle would probably pop under the pressure anyhow, so we instead have a can that’s meant to be poured into a glass.

And pour it into a glass I did.  It starts out with that creamy-brown cascade of downward-flowing bubbles so familiar from Guinness, and after half a minute or so settles into a jet black with a big white head.  It’s hard to avoid comparisons with Guinness, since that’s what I’m so familiar with, and this is a lot like it.  It smells and tastes of bitter, roasted malts and has a creamy texture, but everything seems a little a bit more.  It doesn’t feel quite as watery as a Guinness, and there’s more of a sour malty taste, and more of a sweet taste.  It’s simple but drinkable, and of the three I like this one the best.

Whenever someone says to you, “but it’s a dry heat”?  It’s bullshit.  Effective sweating also means that anything over 90° feels like the inside of an oven, and regardless of temperature this weekend has been an attack on my mucous membranes I will not soon forget.  I don’t think I could live in any climate zone that doesn’t have “humid” in its name.  I quite honestly prefer the sensation of drowning in the air that one meets in a southeastern summer.  Both situations are going to require some external aid, either simply for cooling or to prevent dehydration after the natural process of cooling, but at least with one you know what you’re getting into.

Much like bars, I prefer casinos when it’s late at night and they’re full of sketchy drunks.  The flow of money doesn’t even matter; it’s just such a relaxed, inviting atmosphere.

I do not understand the appeal of slot machines.  Gambling of any sort can be distilled into a set of numbers in the house’s favor, but slot machines remove all of the comfort of interaction.  Push a button, don’t win any money.  It takes away the abstraction of the game, the decisions that fool you into thinking you can win if you just try a little harder, leaving only naked mathematics and some bleeps and bloops and flashing lights.  I have never liked the idea of slots, and now I can say that with the authority of experience.  I like roulette.  It’s a guaranteed loss and a fascinating array of ways to get there.

I will abandon my principles for a double-double.

Fifty ounces is a heckuva lot of beer.

Vegas is just another bullshit town.

There’s a unique joy in getting drunk before noon outside of an airport.

Nevada is on Pacific time, not Mountain.  This only strengthens my notions of Mountain Time as the empty time zone, a place that is home to Ted’s buffaloes (maybe?) and little else.  And maybe El Paso?  I can never remember.

Like the lady at the cashier counter said, “It can’t be all that bad.  You’re still smiling.”

So that was Vegas.  Congratulations to Chris on his upcoming martitals.

# 39: Oskar Blues Ten Fidy

Canned beer has kind of a bad rep, some of it undeserved, kind of like screw-top wine bottles.  If packaged right, there’s no difference in quality from cans and corks and metal caps, but still, it just doesn’t seem as classy.

Beer cans had a very bad start.  The first beer cans weren’t the convenient pop-top aluminum cans of today, but more like the cans of pinto beans and pumpkin pie filling that are gathering dust in the back of your pantry.  The American Can Company, partnering with Gottfried Krueger Brewing of Newark, produced the first canned beers, “keg-lined” with an enamel coating to keep the beer from reacting with the steel.  They were lighter than glass bottles, more durable, stackable, but required special tools to open.  All a bottle needs is something with a lip—a belt buckle, a door handle—and the leverage is already there, but these thick steel monsters demanded a church key in every kitchen and tackle box.  American ingenuity and spunk eventually overcame this problem, producing first the pull tab, bane to barefoot beachgoers, and eventually the attached tab on a thin aluminum can we still use today, just in time for hair metal and the New Romantics.  But convenience is still its downfall.  Canned beer is meant to be, or least most often is, drunk from the can, so even though the inside was coated from the very start, sticking your nose and lips right into that metal top can give beer the metallic taste that everyone was always looking for.  Just pouring it out first fixes that, but who’s going to pack pint glasses along with the folding chairs and cooler full of cans?

So I was a little surprised to see an imperial stout in a can.  “Pack it in, pack it out” suggests that Oskar Blues feels that campers deserve fancy beers, too, and that seems like a nice sentiment.  I’m not camping, so I used a glass.  It came out thick and tarry black, hardly any carbonation, and it smells like super-roasty malts and coffee.  The taste adds some cherry-like fruitiness, and some vanilla.  It’s huge and creamy, and all the flavors blend together nicely on top of a base of roasted malts, big and charred and bitter but not overwhelming.  This is a pretty nice beer, not as complex as some imperial stouts, but a solid and tasty take on the style.  I’m still a little weirded out by the can, though.

This beer thing is getting difficult.  It’s not that I no l longer enjoy drinking the beers—I do enjoy drinking beer—it’s just become increasingly hard to write about them.  Like last night, I couldn’t scratch together two hundred words for one of the best beers I’ve ever had, and easily the best that’s less than $10 for a six-pack.  The problem I’m finding is that it’s hard to write about good beers unless they’re also really weird beers, and I burned through too many weird beers early on.  I need to either pick up something I know I’m going to hate (Arrogant Bastard?); something with enough of a story, innate or potential, that I can spend a post talking about that instead of the beer itself, or something just completely off the wall.  Something to kick me out of my funk  Somethng to make notable the usual aspects of usual beers.

I’m stuck in a rut.  After a particularly bad store-bought meal last night, I shouted my woes into the æther and joked that, since I seem to mostly eat pasta when I cook for myself, I need to find another country to fixate on.  Some took this as a call for suggestions, and Mexico and Thailand were presented.  I am grateful for that; they both give me some ideas for future meals, and in the short term it made tonight taco night.  But then I thought some more: what would be the best drink for tacos?  Mexico brews some beers, of course, and most of them are pretty bland.   The cheap Mexican beers that get imported tend to taste like cheap American beers, the biggest difference being that people like sticking limes in Mexican beers for some reason.  But there’s something else curious about Mexico and beer, something I learned about from the Americans.

The last place I lived was in a Latino neighborhood, and, since it was near the highway and had only recently citied up, there were billboards everywhere.  One in particular, the one over the taqueria, unfolded the tale of American beers trying to tap into a new market.  It started fairly simple: Budweiser added lime, which I guess saves a couple of steps and the risk of cutting a finger.  Then Miller added lime, but they called it Miler Chill.  Isn’t there a Spanish word for that?  Couldn’t they have gone with Miller Fresca or something like that?  Whatever, it’s their beer.  Maybe they’re really trying to market to white people who like tacos.  But there was one part of the inappropriately-English tagline that stood out, “chelada-style.”  Huh?  I didn’t think much of it, though, until Budweiser raised the stakes with their own “chelada,” Budweiser & Clamato (?!).  Ok what in the hell, that sounds gross, something’s going on.

The chelada of Bud and Miller is short for michelada, a sort of a beer-based Bloody Mary.  But while adding clam juice to the tomato juice is something that only crazy people do to a Bloody Mary, clamato seems to be norm for this Mexican drink.  Tomato juice and clam juice and beer sounds just awful, but maybe I’m just being too uptight.  I don’t know what clamato tastes like, just that I think clams are gross (they’re a filter).  So why not try something new, right?  You only live once.

Digging around on the Internet revealed only chaos, a cacophony of michelada recipes, each one more horrid than the last.  Some demanded Worcestershire sauce for authenticity, some used Maggi seasoning for the same reason.  There were shouted disagreements over the fruits, the spices, what brand of hot sauce to use, but, tellingly, never over the beer.  I decided to base my attempt around a basic Bloody Mary formulation.  I took a picture of what ended up in the drink, along with whatever else I didn’t feel like moving off the counter.

See what I mean about the pasta?

The beer is Dos Equis Lager Especial, and it will be mixed with Clamato, lime juice, Tapatío and Pickapeppa sauce.  I’ve come to terms with clam juice, but I’m still going to let Worcestershire sauce squick me out.  Quit putting seafood in things, all of you.  It came out looking like this:

Pasta sauce this time, being used to hold the rest of the cilantro

Anyway, it doesn’t smell fishy, so maybe it won’t be so bad.  The first couple of cautious sips go ok, but as I drink a little more it tastes like something’s wrong.  It’s not even the clam juice (or least not all of it’s the clam juice).  There’s a vinagery sourness to the whole thing that I really don’t like.  I made another attempt with some different ratios and ingredients—less lime, normal tomato juice, lots more spices—but no, same problem.  I just can’t imagine a situation where I’d think mixing beer and tomatoes would be a good idea.

Oh well, now I know.  So how about just the beer, instead?

#38: Dos Equis Lager Especial

It’s really not bad.  It has a good bit of a grassy, hoppy taste, but there’s also a sweet flavor to it, and it’s a little bit flowery.  The sweet taste makes it feel less crisp and clean than a usual Pilsener, but at least there is some flavor, and it’s a welcome chaser to a big mouthful of hot sauce.

Ok, enough of those American Belgians.  Tonight I am having a stout.

#37: Dominion Oak Barrel Stout

I was curious to see how Old Dominion makes a beer when they’re not celebrating their birthday.  The barrels mentioned are used bourbon barrels, and this stout is additionally flavored with vanilla and some hops and some actual chunks of oak.  The smell reminds of Heath bars: there’s a big caramel aroma, and toffee, and vanilla.  And there’s a whiff of something sharp and acidic, like the smell of a porter.  The taste starts out with a big, bready flavor and a litte bitter twinge that moves into the chocolate and candy, and behind that a light woody taste and just a hint of bourbon.  The sourness from the smell flits in and out and ends up sticking around on the finish.  This is a fantastically complex stout.

#35: Abita Abbey Ale

This one is from Louisiana.  My only other encounter with Abita has been their Purple Haze, a raspberry beer that I don’t much care for, so I’m a little apprehensive about how they plan to make a dubbel.  It pours a slightly-murky brownish orange with a big head, though not nearly as big as that one from Allagash.  This is a normal kind of big head.  There’s a very strong fruity smell, like sweet cherries, and cloves and bready malts.  The taste is smooth and fruity, lots of malt and sugar and fruitiness and spice, and it finishes with a kind of lemony sourness.  There’s not a lot of subtlety to it, but it is mighty tasty.  I like it.

#36: Avery: The Reverend

This is another beer from Colorado, and the bottle goes a bit heavy with a kind of rockabilly religion, namedropping “The Reverend Luther Tucker” and talking about the eighth day on a background of funky stained glass.  There’s an ingredient list as well, and it looks like they aim to make a quadrupel with only the basic tools: water, barley, candy sugar, yeast and hops.  Using a tulip glass again (really this whole thing was just an excuse to get those out), it comes out orange with a big, fluffy head.  I don’t smell a lot of fruit in this one, and the crazy belgian yeast smell, though there, is very subdued.  Mostly it’s a sweet barley smell, and as I inhale deeper I catch a pretty solid whiff of the alcohol as a soft, dry burn.  Bodywise this beer is almost on the easy-drinkin’ side, with just enough of a syrupy feel to slow you down and give you a chance to remember that it’s 10% ABV.  It’s bready with a bit of a taste of cloves, vanilla and orange, and there’s a little hop bite that hides the alcohol’s heat.  This beer is pretty good, a strong, sweet ale deconstructed and presented without embelishment.  I’d rate it better than the Allagash, maybe not as interesting as the Abita.

So it looks like I’ve gone right through week number 5.  Country count-off!

• EE. UU.: 17
• Belgium: 5
• England: 3
• Canada: 2
• France: 2
• Scotland: 1
• Jamaica: 1
• Lithuania: 1
• Ireland: 1
• Germany: 1
• Denmark: 1
• India: 1

And I don’t even know how to sort these styles anymore.

#34: Allagash Grand Cru

This is Allagash’s winter beer, but I chose to drink it out-of-season for a different reason.  From the bottle (emphasis mine): “We brew this deep-golden colored Belgian-style ale each year in limited quantities.”  Belgium is home to some really out-there strains of yeast and a lot of beer-oriented history, which most famously culminates in rich, strong, complicated ales with little or no hops, probably some spices and a whole lot of flavors good for sippin’ and thinkin’.  So of course we in America think we can do the same thing.  There are a lot of ales brewed in the New World claiming to be “Belgian style” or “abbey ale,” so I think it’s time to survey some of these attempts, find perhaps some hubris, perhaps some genius.  Let’s see how the Mainers did.

Things certainly start out promising.  The beer is a slightly-cloudy orange with a huge head that smells malty, a little musky, a little boozey, and like funny-shaped fruits from dusty, foreign lands.  Hurray, I think Allagash imported the right yeasts.  It tastes thick and sweet, and seems to have some cloves, some orange, and something peppery.  The musky smell turns into a musky taste that has a bit of a rubbery, astringent edge.  Maybe they didn’t import all the right yeasts.  There’s more alcohol heat than I expected for something in the 7ish percent range, and a lot of tickly carbonation, which together have something of a numbing effect.

Allagash gave it a good try.  It’s not perfect.  I’d rate this beer as a solid OK.