A carnival of technology

O’Hara’s Irish Stout

This was a treat to find: a stout from Ireland that isn’t Guinness.  I don’t want to knock on Guinness too much—it’s lifted my spirits and melted away weariness and despair on many an occasion—but the truth is that it’s really kind of thin and bland.  And it’s also the only stout that many people know, and that white-topped black tap handle is a soothing sight in the neighborhood dives where the other taps all say “Bud” or “Coors.”  I like stouts, but I wish that Guinness were a better stout.

Now here’s a stout.  I used one of those Sam Adams science glasses, since I ran out of regular pint glasses (note to future self: turn on the dishwasher before you leave tomorrow), and I think this was the right choice: the smell was delightful, winey and nutty and a bit of that bare, charcoally roasted odor, lurking away in the corners.  It feels creamy, with a sharp tickle from the carbonation; it has a strong roasted malt taste, of course, but there’s also a sour undercurrent, a fruitiness challenging the dominance of black coffee and char.  It finishes dry, with just a hint of bitter hops coming through the taste of the malts.  Even with such a full taste, this beer is quite quaffable, and quite tasty.  This is the taste you should think of when you think of a stout.

Dominion Millenium Ale

“Premium Ale Brewed with Honey”  The Millenium ale is brewed in the barleywine style, so-named because it’s made with barley but as strong as wine.  These are beers made for sipping in front of a roaring fire, so of course I cracked one open on a 70° day in late April.  At least it gave me an excuse to use a snifter and feel all fancy.

The beer poured a murky golden brown with barely any head.  It was aged in oak barrels, which comes through a little bit in the aroma, along with a sweet, fruity smell of plums and dates, and alcohol.  I did not enjoy the first sip.  It was a surprise: the smell didn’t hint at any bitterness, and I expected something mostly sweet and fruity, along the lines of a Belgian dubbel.  I braced myself for the second sip, and, forewarned and forearmed, it was much more enjoyable.  There’s a strong, earthy bitterness combined with a syrupy, fruity sweetness and flavors of vanilla and oak.  I can’t pick out the advertised honey, so I assume it’s an extra sweetness lost in the sea of mollases-thick malts.

And then there’s the alcohol.  I didn’t really notice it much in the flavor, but I started feeling a little tipsy about halfway through the bottle and decided to look up the ABV.  10.5% according to Old Dominion, 11.4% according to Beer Advocate.  Either way, it’s pretty strong.  This is a good beer for sipping and pondering when you don’t need to operate heavy machinery or do anything important for the rest of the night.  The style and strength make it ideal for aging, allowing me to overcome my seasonal mismatch by sticking the other five bottles in a closet until next winter.

My only complaint with the Millenium is the amount of hops.  Old Dominion doesn’t make an IPA, so the hops are probably just there to try to balance the very sweet flavor of the rest of the beer rather than to prove something, but I think they went a shade too far.  Hopefully that’ll smooth itself out in a few seasons.

No country in history has had quite the impact on the world as England.  America tried: even after the Monroe Doctrine has faded into the annals of history, we still treat most of the Caribbean islands like orphaned nephews that need a watchful eye, going so far as sending in the Marines on one of them as recently as the 80’s; and our own 50th state is a reminder of a messy overthrow of a sovereign nation, a scenario all too similar to our treatment of the American Indians a century after we thought the shame of the trail of tears and other atrocities was behind us.  But England didn’t just mull around in some self-declared imperial backyard: they built an empire.  As if Mary Worth raised an army, their conquering and meddling altered the course of nations and cultures on every continent, leaving an impact that, even after the sun finally set over their horizon, will be felt for centuries to come.

India is perhaps the most interesting of the English conquests, because despite having nearly four centuries control over the land inhabited by one of the world’s oldest cultures, England became more Indian than India became English.  Besides simply borrowing from the Indians’ ways outright, leaving a curry shop on every corner in London and turning tea into a national drink, the English made their own innovations to adapt, even within that greatest of English pastimes: getting shitfaced.  The gin & tonic grew out of an effort to prevent malaria, essentially adding alcohol to bitter medicine to make it worth drinking and keeping at it even after more effective alternatives were developed, and the India Pale Ale was created to keep beer fresh on the long, hot voyage around Africa.  Before the mechanics of spoiling were understood, English brewers found that two parts of beer could prevent it: hops, a natural antibiotic, and alcohol, a natural anti–pretty much anything.  Shortly after the booze inventors were able to control the roasting of barley accurately enough to create a clear, pale ale, they made another variety for export that was higher in alcohol and included much more dry hopping, a technique that adds the hops in the later stages of fermentation, producing a beer that, while certainly altered in flavor, doesn’t include all of the bitterness of the hops while still enjoying their bacteria killing properties.  So the Brits figured out a way to get beer to India, the Brits stationed in India got a taste for the stuff and wanted to keep drinking it when they got back home, and thus was born the India Pale Ale, the IPA.

Fast forward to today.  The British empire has collapsed, the world is recovering from the new threat of nuclear annihilation that overwhelmed international relations for the last few decades, and prohibition is now a dim enough memory for American brew crafts to finally emerge, creating a new culture bored with beer of the like so valiantly sought by Burt Reynolds and looking to traditional styles for inspiration.  The problem is that we Americans tend to make a hash of anything we touch.  In the case of the IPA, American brewers too often turn it into a pissing contest with hops the metaphorical penis.  It’s a challenge to make the most unenjoyably hoppy pale ale that can be produced.

Like David and Chris, I don’t appreciate a glass full of lawn clippings.  This doesn’t mean, however, that I dislike all modern attempts at an IPA: I don’t wholly reject bitterness, or even excessive hoppiness.  My problem with IPAs is one of balance.  One of my favorite IPAs, the Dogfish Head 90 Minute, named for the amount time spent in the dry hopping process, I appreciate because, despite weighing in at nearly 100 IBUs and a 9% ABV, it’s very dry.  The hops are countered with not too much malt, and in all it’s an appropriately complex, bitter and enjoyable beer.  The problem I have with most IPAs is that they manage to make both the hops and the malts overwhelming, creating something at once syrupy sweet and unpleasantly intense.  And all of that leads me to Saturday’s selection:

Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA

This beer is IPA machismo at its worst.  Even while pouring it the smell was nothing but bitter hops, no hint of sweet barley or spice or anything else.  The taste had a little more to say, but not much good.  The sensation reminded me of one time that I ate a spoonful of a habanero salsa: the flavor was something amazing, lemons and limes teaming up with the sour parts of tomatoes and dancing across my tongue, carrying with it just a hint of soapy cilantro and a faint suggestion of cinnamon.  And after about half a second my mouth felt like it was going to explode.  When this beer hit my mouth I felt a strong taste of lemons and oranges and spice, but before I could even decide what was happening I was attacked by an onslaught of grassiness and thick, heavy malt.  As the beer made its way to the back of my throat it turned to ash and bile, leaving a lingering bitter taste that made my tongue recoil and took several glasses of water to erase.

The taste of the hops started to fade as the alcohol numbed my tongue, which gave me an opportunity to think about everything wrong with the malts.  The sweet, caramel taste of the barley is anathema to the bitter goal, and there’s no effort to balance the two flavors.  This is a bad beer.  I don’t know if anyone local still reads this, but if you do, feel free to claim the other five bottles in the pack.  If you don’t they’ll probably find their way into a stew.

Way to go, Sierra Nevada.  You won.  Now fucking knock it off.

I didn’t make it to the Booze Barn this past week, and I’ve already drunk the good stuff available at the local groceries and that bar that used to be a Taco Mac, so this is an inadvertant cheap beer mini-series.  It may not be the last of it; I’m sort of bad at planning ahead.

Moosehead Lager

Moosehead claims to be the oldest independent brewery (i.e., not owned by Moslon or Labatt) in Canada.  Susannah Oland, an immigrant to Nova Scotia from England, founded The Army and Navy brewery in 1867 with her brown October ale.  A few years after that Susannah’s husband died, she sold the brewery and bought it back, the brewery burned down twice, and Susannah passed away herself in 1886.  Her sons rebuilt, the brewery exploded, and the son who escaped that tragedy packed his things, moved to New Brunswick and rebuilt again with the help of his own sons.  The brewery finally managed to thrive at this point.  It grew, changed its name, added new styles to the lineup, overcame trade barriers that had confined it to the Maritimes, and eventually ended up where it is today: a large Canadian beer brand that isn’t Molson or Labatt and, among other products, makes a North American–style Pilsener that isn’t anything to write home about.

There isn’t much to say about the beer itself.  It’s light, kind of watery and tastes like corn and grass.  There’s nothing particularly offensive about it, but nothing to recommend it, either.  Turning the page.

Genesee Cream Ale

The most notable thing about Genesee is that it’s becoming the next PBR among hipsters.  And really, it’s perfect for it: High Falls is among the ten largest breweries in the US but not one of the big three, the upstate New York location (I do not care how you define “upstate,” and neither do the Williamsburg hipsters who draw the line somewhere around 181st) gives it a similar ironicism as Pabst’s Milwaukee—a place where people bowl and eat greasy food and drink pale American beers because they enjoy it—and it’s a beer that, if you didn’t steal one out of your dad’s fridge in the basement when you were nine, it’s easy to make up a convincing lie that you did.

A cream ale is a lagered beer that uses top-fermeting yeast like an ale, like the German Kölsch or altbiers, but like an American lager is made more often for value over taste.  The Genesee bottle claims it has the “flavor of a fine ale and the smoothness of a premium lager.”  The style at least lives up to its name: though it’s a very light, clear yellow, it has a thick, creamy feel very unlike a Pilsener, and a little more going on taste-wise than a big-name lager.  It tastes mostly of barley and corn, but it’s more sweet than bitter and has a little plum-like fruitiness.  There’s a hint of hops, and it finishes with a lingering chemical aftertaste that only a $2 pint ever has.  So yeah, it’s not real great.  I’d take it over a Pabst, though.

In the queue to come I have some kind of high-gravity ale from Lithuania, a barleywine from Virgina and an IPA that I’m a little wary about from Sierra Nevada.  Hopefully I’ll remember to go shopping tomorrow so I don’t end up drinking a Bud Lime by Tuesday.

St. Amand French Country Ale

St. Amand is a bière de garde, basically the French version of the Belgian saison.  The underlying philosophies are similar—folks get mighty hot and thirsty working out in the fields all day, so a sensible farm ought to have some beer handy—and the beer is traditionally, and this one particularly, brewed in French Flanders, putting it even closer to Belgium.  But the French take on brewing winter beer for summer consumption is sweeter, maltier, and doesn’t go nuts with the spice cabinet like its Belgian cousin.  The result is something better suited for sipping over a two-hour lunch than something to swig between swings of a hoe.

St Armand came in a thick, brown 750mL bottle with a champagne-style cork.  The label has a brief blurb on the style, a list of ingredients (“pure artesan well water, barley malt from the Champagne region and hops from Alsace”), and a mention of the alcohol content, 5.9% by volume.  It pours a coppery brown with a big, off-white head and smells sweetly malty with some orange.  The sugars from the malt give the beer a slightly syrupy feel.  It tastes sweet, orangey, just a little bit grassy and bitter and finishes mostly dry.  In all this is a fairly straightforward beer, but a tasty one, a good drink for a meal at the end of the day.

So that’s a week.  Out of the seven, there were only two that I didn’t enjoy, so I’d say I’m doing pretty good so far with the selections.  Let’s see how weird they get in the weeks to come.

Terrapin SunRay Wheat Beer

Terrapin is a smalish brewery based out of Athens.  I like some of their beers, in particular the Rye Pale Ale and the Wake ‘n’ Bake coffee stout, so I thought give this new one a shot.  The bottle has a funky image of the terrapin mascot frolicking on top of a sunflower, and it mentions that the beer is brewed with tupelo honey.

The beer pours with very little head, even after giving the bottle a good swirl, and the head disappears except for a ring around the edge after a minute or so.  It’s straw colored with a little bit of an orange tint, and beautifully cloudy, like a glass of golden pale fog.  The smell is full of honey, wheat and bananas.  It feels light in the mouth, starting with a surprising bite from what carbonation there is, giving way to a taste that about matches the smell—wheat, bananas and a distinct taste of honey—and finally fading into some grassy, earthy notes and a lingering sweetness.  I didn’t taste any clove or spiciness that would also come from what apparently was hefeweizen yeasts.  I think that flavor may have lost its way in the honey, but I didn’t really miss it.   SunRay is lighter and smoother than a Hefeweizen, and Terrapin never claimed that it was one.  It’s certainly worth a try.

Black Sheep Ale

Another 16.9 oz bottle, this one doesn’t have as much to say as yesterday’s.  There’s the name of the beer, a bit on the side that says they’ve been making for a while and think they’ve gotten pretty good at it, there’s an address in Yorkshire, and a description: “Crisp, dry & bittersweet.”  The website has a little more to say, noting the use of Golding hops and the Yorkshire square method for fermentation, a process developed in the early 18th century that’s mostly fallen out of favor, Black Sheep and Samuel Smith being among the exceptions.  According to Internet, Black Sheep overcame some of the difficulties of the slate squares by using stainless steel “round squares” that maintain the double-chambered shape but aren’t as much a pain to clean out.

Black Sheep Ale isn’t black—it’s more a deep gold, bordering on brown—which makes this the second in an accidental series of black-named beers that aren’t black.  It formed a couple finger of head that thinned quickly but hung on through to the bottom.  The smell isn’t really much special; it smells like a pale ale, malty but not roasty.  The taste is more or less like a pale ale, too, but with a couple of flourishes.  It has a rich, thick, but not heavy feel that reminds me of Samuel Smith, so I guess at least something about the round, metal stone squares is doing its job.  And second is the sweetness.  The beer starts out malty with a creamy, fruity (kind of raisiny) sweetness that sneaks past the drier, earthy flavors, and fades into a lingering, bitter finish.  In all, though the aroma is lackluster, the tastes are well put together and no part of it’s overpowering.

Broughton Ale’s Black Douglas

Sir James Douglas, aka Black Douglas, was one of the heroes of the Braveheart wars, bff of Robert the Bruce and all around a Scotsman that you wouldn’t want to mess with, unless you’re looking for an ass-kicking.  He died attempting to fulfill the Bruce’s dying wish, that Douglas should carry the Bruce’s heart to the holy land to be buried.  This final quest didn’t go very well on account of the holy land being under pretty solid Moorish control at the time.   Since the fight for Scottish independence didn’t go too great either, Black Douglas is something of an underdog, a man who had courage and fire in his heart but could never quite come out on top, making him a perfect figure for praise in the songs and legends of the Scots, or really any group of people that had to deal with the English.  None of this has anything to do with the beer.

The beer came in a half-liter bottle (though not labeled in metric for whatever reason), and I poured it into a Guinness branded sort-of-pint glass I picked up somewhere since it happens to be the right size.  While the namesake might lead one to expect a deep, black stout, it’s a Scottish ale, and more red in color, somewhere between the pomegranite shades of an Irish red and the murky, reddish-brown of a porter.  It poured with a thin head that disappeared quickly, but it kept a strong aroma of malt and berries throughout.  The distinction of Scottish ales among the beers that use similarly heavily-roasted malts is that the malts, after being roasted, are cooked to the point of carmelization, leaving a lot of unfermented sugars in the final product.  The beer had some of the roasty characteristics of a porter, but a sweetness that offset the heavy taste of the roasted malt.  It hit the tongue sharply but quickly faded into a rich, murky, sweet flavor that stuck to my mouth for a little while.

There isn’t a lot of complexity to this ale, but it has a solid flavor and feel, something to revive worn spirits and warm weary bones.  It’s simple, but it’s enjoyable.  The extra sugars offset the darker, charred flavors, and while the alcohol is certainly noticable, it’s not overpowering.  In all I think this is a pretty well put together beer.  I like it.

Magic Hat Circus Boy

Magic Hat is a brewery in Burlington, VT whose beers have recently been showing up here and there in the Atlanta area.  That’s about all I know about them, so I decided to give their hefeweizen a shot.

“Hefeweizen” is German for “yeast wheat,” which makes no sense, but more or less just means that it’s a beer brewed with malted wheat and left unfiltered to give it a cloudy look.  It differs from witbiers in that the Belgish are allowed to use spices and stuff, like coriander and orange peel, whereas the flavor in a hefeweizen depends entirely on the wheat, yeast and hops.  Or at least that’s what a hefeweizen is in Germany; American-made ones are often quite different, and Circus Boy is one of those.

Those sciency Sam Adams glasses seem to share a few properties with a weizen glass, so I used one of those.  The first thing I noticed upon opening the bottle (12 oz.) was that Magic Hat apparently prints things beneath the cap (“Waste Time, Collect ‘em all”).  The second thing I noticed was that, though the packaging insists that this beer is unfiltered and kraaa-zy like some kind of circus freak, it didn’t seem very unfiltered.  It was cloudy, just not as cloudy as I would expect; I could still see through to the other side of the glass.  The beer formed a moderate head that thinned quickly and stuck around like that for the rest of the glass.  The smell is pretty much all malt.

The taste is almost all malty sweetness and citrus (mostly orangey) from the Amarillo hops, with a little bit of bitterness.  It has a little heavier feel than yesterdays lager, but other than that it’s similarly smooth and refreshing going down.  And that’s about it.  There aren’t any of the hints of clove or banana that I would expect in a hefeweizen; it’s just a sweet, clear ale that happened to be brewed with wheat.  It’s not bad, it just seems kind of middle-of-the-road.  Based on this beer and the fancy, hip-looking packaging, I get the feeling that Magic Hat spends more time on marketing than on making beer.

Here’s yesterday’s beer.

Samuel Smith Pure Brewed Lager

Samuel Smith makes some of my favorite beers, in particular their imperial stout and the Taddy porter, but I’d never tried their lager.  I usually find lagers, especially the pale varieties, to be pretty boring.  At worst I associate them with the popular American Pilseners, and at best with the Reinheitsgebot, struck down in 1987 but still proudly followed, that restricted experimentation for German brewers.  This isn’t to say that lager beers can’t be interesting, I just more often find that they aren’t.

The Samuel Smith lager, poured from a 12oz brown bottle into a Pilsener glass that more or less looks like the one on the bottle, was clear and golden-colored and had a thin head that disappeared after the first couple of sips.  The aroma was rich and clean and like those beer commercials that show ingredients instead of swimsuit models: rich grains, flowery hops, everything pure and clean.

The taste was about the same as the smell: grainy, a light sweetness, a little bit flowery and a little bit bitter, and in all just clean, refreshing and well-balanced.  I liked it.  I guess “session beer” would be the term to use here.  It isn’t heavy like a stout or a porter, and 5% ABV is about average: a little higher than you’d find in Utah, but not as strong as something like an IPA.  This isn’t a beer that demands to be slowly sipped and pondered, but it’s tasty, light, and good for just drinking and enjoying.