Far away and home again
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 Coors, 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.