A carnival of technology

Though there is a strange shared conspiracy to create deliniations of the seasons that are official by some imagined authority, weather is a fickle, fluid thing, and to declare a particular day the start of summer for all the hemisphere is absurd.  But still we search for a clean, static delineation of the four seasons experienced in temperate climates, and in America we’ve settled on the four major solar events for these gateways, which, due to the lag between increased sunlight and increased temperature, does fit the seasons roughly into the times of maximum, minimum and in-between temperatures.  Other cultures have other dates, with the Irish perhaps the most optimistic.  Despite the blaze of summer passing over the emerald isle, or maybe because of this murkier idea of summer’s heat, the first of May is held there as the transition from not-summer to summer.  So it’s summer somewhere.

#30: Anchor Summer Beer

There isn’t a lot to say about this beer.  It’s a pale wheat ale, and it tastes light, sweet and a little bitter from mostly grassy, slightly floral and slightly citrus hops.  It’s crisp, it’s refreshing and it’s really kind of boring.

#29: Samuel Smith India Ale

Ok, so.  More often than not I don’t like India pale ales, but my problem is with the execution rather than the idea.  There’s just no sense of finesse in the average IPA, and the result ends up tasting like someone took a box of granola cereal, some pine cones and a pint of vodka, blended it all up and bottled it into a six-pack.  These beers make me wonder what I did to wrong the brewer, whether perhaps I gave him bad directions one time, or stepped on his shoes.  I am very sorry, wronged IPA brewer.  I do not enjoy these violent ales.

On the other hand, there’s Samuel Smith, a beacon of hope.  For one, the Tadcaster brewery was actually around in the 19th century when all of this Indian trade was going on, so there’s a chance that maybe someone wrote down how an IPA is supposed to taste, informing today’s brewers with actual tradition instead of leaving them to fumble around with tripling whatever goes into a regular pale ale.  And I’ve yet to drink anything from Samuel Smith that I haven’t liked.  They make a couple of beers that I think are fantastic, and a few others that I think are pretty nice.  This beer is a test.  If I don’t enjoy this interpretation of the India pale ale, I think I should just admit that I don’t care for the style and give up on it.

There a few hopeful points right from the start.  This IPA is a surprisingly reasonable 5% ABV, so from that it looks like the focus is going to be on the selection of hops and not on feats of strength.  The paragraph on the bottle explaining the style mentions an emphasis on “the aroma and flavour of Britain’s best hop gardens,” and the importer describes it as having “a restrained maltiness.”  I am optimistic.  Today is hot and damp, so it seems as good a time as any to enjoy a British export long ago intended for the sweltering jungles of the East.

The smell is more floral than anything.  There’s a bit of a bitter piney odor, and a bit of a malty sweetness, but nothing comes out as a big punch in the face.  The taste does have a lot of hops, but it’s interesting hops, not just a big blast of pine tar cascade.  It’s bitter, but not too bitter.  It’s also flowery and fruity.  There’s a bit of a caramel sweetness and a peppery tickle.  It feels light and leaves behind a kind of sweet, grassy taste.  This is a really enjoyable, really drinkable beer.  It’s a shame that it’s so damned expensive.

Madrugada Obscura

Tonight’s beer comes from a little west of Ann Arbor and claims to be a “Belgian inspired stout.”  I do not know what that means.  Maybe like an imperial stout?  It’s strong enough for it.  Whatever, snifter time; I’ll give it a shot.

It looks like an imperial stout, and it smells like an imperial stout.  It’s black and has a sturdy tan head, and it smells like roasted malts, cherries and a little sour note sort of like a porter.  So far so good.  As for the taste…holy crap this beer is tart.  Maybe by “Belgian” they mean they wanted to make a Flemish sour and changed their minds partway through.  It’s a big blast of green apples on top of roasted malts, shouting down anything else that might be there.  My first inclination was to check the bottle for a best-by date.  This was bottle refermented, and maybe that just went too far?  I couldn’t find any dates on the bottle, but I bought it from a nicely-set, dust-free display, so as far as I can tell this is this year’s beer.  And besides, this isn’t a something’s-gone-bad kind of sour; it tastes like it was intentional.  Maybe the beer needs to be colder?  I let it warm up a little before drinking, so how about I stick this glass in the freezer and do something else for a few minutes…ok, that helped, but not enough.  The tartness is a little more subdued on the front, but comes right back on the way out, and it doesn’t fix the problem that this sour taste does not belong.  It doesn’t match the heavy, bitter taste of the malts and just ends up making a mess of what might have been an ok stout.  Ugh.

So that’s the end of a fourth week already?  How time flies.  It seems like just yesterday I was complaining about skunky saison and the American hop fetish.  So what have I gotten myself into:

Styles

• Stouts: 3
• Bières de garde: 2
• Good lagers (including one crazy lager): 2
• Bad lagers: 2
• Saisons: 2
• Porters: 2
• Rauchbier: 1
• Hefeweizens: 2
• Dark ales: 3
• Pale ale: 1
• Pale wheat ale: 1
• Cream ale: 1
• India pale ale: 1
• Barleywine: 1
• Tripel: 1
• Bière blanche: 1
• other Abbey ale: 1
• Bière de champagne: 1

And a survey of distant lands:

• US of America: 11
• Belgium: 4
• England and Scotland: 3
• Canada: 2
• France: 2
• Ireland: 1
• Germany: 1
• Jamaica: 1
• India: 1
• Lithuania: 1
• Denmark: 1

#27: Ommegang Biere de Mars

Ommegang is a Belgian Style New York brewery capable of occasional magic.  I remember them best for taking their own abbey ale, which I find pretty boring, and Lindemans Kriek, which I think tastes like cough syrup, and mixing them into Three Philosophers, which I think is fantastic.  I also had their Chocolate Indulgence a couple of years ago when some of the former Taco Macs used it as a chance to get out the fancy glasses, and that was also something pretty special.  A biere de garde is a little farther south than Ommegang’s usual styles, but I have high hopes.  The twist in the Mars is that it’s bottled with a Belgian wild yeast strain that’s supposed to bring the noise and bring the funk, and that sounds like it might be either wonderful or awful.

The first smell is a big whiff of oats that rushed out behind the cork.  Once it made into the glass—orange and clear, all the chunky, cloudy yeasts hanging out in the very bottom—I start to smell the funk, a kind of dull, earthy, musty odor.  It’s not unpleasant, but I’m not sure what to make of it.  The head is big and plans to stick around, and besides the yeast weirdness smells like oranges and nectar.  The musky funk hits a little harder in the taste, leading a wave of citrus and spice.  There’s a little floweriness and bitterness from hops, and though the oats from earlier foreshadowed something thicker, Mars feels light and lively, the sweet orange taste cutting through any malty heaviness.

I’m not really sure what to think of this beer.  It’s light and tasty, but it has that weird funky chewiness from the yeast that sticks around a little past its welcome.  It’s interesting.  It’s kind of weird.

Coney Island Albino Python

This beer is made by the Schmaltz Brewing Company, makers of He’brew, as part of a side-project to raise money for Coney Island.  All of the Coney Island beers are lagers, but they’re all crazy lagers.  This one bills itself as a “white lager with spices.”

The ingredients are conveniently listed on the website, including the spices used, so I don’t have to ramble on about finding hints of cardamom and lavender or whatever.  The spices that are actually used are ginger, fennel and orange peel, and ginger is the most forward of those.  Two of the five malts used are wheat, and Albino Python does have a bit of the look of a wheat beer, a cloudy, orangeish gold with a fluffy head that fades all too quickly.  I do wish there was better head retention with this beer; it’s rare to have a lager you want to just smell for a while.  The malts are pretty subdued, not quite able to push their way around all the ginger on top.  The orange comes through as a sort of citrus hint, making this start to smell more like a wheat beer, along with a flowery smell that, despite what I said, I’m going to go ahead and call lavender.  Maybe that thick layer of yeast at the bottom of the bottle had a hand in it.

And then the taste, wow; it’s like a carnival.  It’s loud and bright and has too much going on to possibly take in at once, yet somehow it’s never overwhelming; it’s a light, refreshing, fun blast of color.  The ginger, again, is the most noticable part, coming through right away and staying as a sour citrus flavor builds at the edges of my tongue.  There’s a little bit of bitterness and a lot of sweet malts, and the fennel finally has a say at the end with a stage whisper of licorice on the finish.  This is a pretty interesting beer.

#25 De Proefbrouwerij Saison Imperiale

If nothing else, this beer proves that it isn’t only Americans inclined to take a random style, double the strength and call it “Imperial.”  Another oddity was the cork: it’s plastic.  This is the first time I’ve seen an artificial champagne-style cork.  It still did its job and wasn’t impossible to remove, but it does look kind of funny.

Anyway, the beer.  This one is a lot different from the other Saison I’ve had, way back on day 1.  While the Dupont was light and quaffable, this interpretation is heavy and thick.  It poured an orangish brown with a white head that stuck through to the end, and maybe a plain pint glass wasn’t the right choice for a beer this strong, but I didn’t find much to think about in the smell.  It was sort of light and fruity, maybe a little bit yeasty, but just in all not very much there.  And then the taste, wow.  It’s like drinking banana bread.  It tastes thick and grainy, a lot of banana flavor, and some raisins and spice to finish it off, all of it very sweet.   As it warms up a little some orange flavors start to come out, it takes on a more silky feel, and the alcohol makes itself more notable.  There’s a lot of subtle little tastes that flit in and out—some flowery bits, some earthy herbs.  It gives you a lot to think about.  This strikes me more as a lighter take on an abbey ale than a heavy saison.  I wouldn’t want to drink this in the middle of a hot field on a summer’s day, but it’s an enjoyable beer.

You have still got a darlint plan
You still can turn to a brighter life -
A pint of plain is your only man.

My goodness, it’s been three weeks and I haven’t had a porter yet.  The “plain” so praised by Flann O’Brien is plain porter, a dark beer not quite as strong as its brother in roastedness, the stout porter.  And it’s a style I rather enjoy myself: there’s a big roasted malt taste, but also a certain sourness and some other flavors too often lost in the kiln with stouts.  Ideally it has a big taste, but not so big that all of the flavor is lost in a sea of char.  It’s a style drinkable but interesting, something to quench the thirst of a hard day’s work, but also warm cold bones and soothe troubled minds.  So, on this damp and dreary weekend, let’s take a look at a couple of porters.

#23: Michelob Porter

Anheuser-Busch has lately been making some new beers that seem to run counter to the usual perception of their brand.  Instead of just a bland lager that proudly lists the adjuncts right on the label, these new offerings are meant to be seen as fine, fancy things.  Maybe it’s the new Inbev influence, or maybe they just decided it’s time to try to court the beer snob market.  Coors has long had Killians and more recently has Blue Moon to appeal to beer drinkers looking for something not so pale and watery, but Coors doesn’t market either of those beers as Coors.  AB-Inbev putting these new beers under their flagship imprints is something a bit different and a bit brave, and I applaud them for it.  Maybe selling something a little different under the Budweiser brand will convince some of the core Bud market that all that poncey funny-colored top-fermented nonsense isn’t as bad as they thought, and just maybe they’ll raise the baseline for beer in America.  I doubt that’s actually what’ll happen, but I wish them luck.

Anyway.  I’m not exactly sure what to expect of the Michelob Porter.  I’ve tried the Budweiser American Ale, which was actually pretty ok, but Michelob is a name that, though established as a classier spinoff of the main Budweiser brand (“draught beer for connoisseurs”), has had a more confusing, inconsistent history.  The current flagship Michelob beer is an offensively dull light lager, and the last Michelob innovation I can recall, a wheat beer from before the Inbev takeover and obviously an attempt to compete with Blue Moon, was at least trying harder but still not so great.  So who knows, let’s see.

It pours like a porter—dark brown with red edges and a tan head—and smells roasty, a little sour and chocolatey, and it tastes pretty much the same.  It has a bit of a grassy hops taste and finishes dry, and it has a creamy texture, though a little on the light and watery side.  In all I’d say this beer is firmly ok.  It’s not something to inspire poetry, but it’s something I could enjoy several of in a night.  So congratulations, Michelob: I enjoyed it, and most imporved award goes to you.

#24: Ølfabrikken Porter

This beer comes from Denmark, which, again, made me a little wary.  This project’s only other Danish beer was not well received, and my own attempts at trying to expand the country list into countries not usually known for beer have not gone well.  But Ølafbrikken offers some hope: there’s a picture on the label to suggest appropriate glassware (appears to be a sort of tall snifter; I used a tulip), a recommended temperature (46-50°F), a note to pour carefully to avoid the yeast used in the bottle refermentation, and an incomprehensible series of Danish words and numbers that seem to indicate that either this beer is either somewhat aged, completely expired or good at least until this winter.  It seems like they’re taking this beer seriously and not just treating it as an alcohol delivery mechanism (and at 8% ABV it does make a pretty strong one), though all of this does make me start to wonder just what Denmark thinks a porter is.  A little bit of research (by which I mean reading some google search summaries) shows that this is actually a Baltic porter, a style created for similar reasons and by similar means by the English to bring strong, dark beers to northern Europe.

This porter pours more like a stout.  It’s a deep black with none of the ruby hints I’d expect, and it has a tan head that starts out sturdy but fades eventually into a ring.  It has the sour smell I’d expect in a stout, but it seems thicker and darker, more like a wine, and the roasted malt smell is more powerful, more like an imperial stout.  It tastes sour, very roasty to the point of a bit of a burnt smokey taste, chocolatey, and sweet.  The ingredient list (which, thankfully, includes a translation) includes cane sugar, which comes out a lot.  It adds a syrupy feel to the usual porter creaminess, and it keeps the heavy malt punch from being overpowering, but it also adds a bit to the heaviness of this beer.  There are hops advertised as well, but I don’t really taste them, and the bitterness from the roasted malts doesn’t need any help.

This is a big beer.  It isn’t quite what I expected a porter to be, but it has a lot of porter taste: roasted malts and chocolate and a sour bite, just more of all that that I expected.  This is a good one for getting out the fancy glasses and thinking for a while.

AECHT SCHLENKERLA RAUCHBIER MÄRZEN!

Continuing my scattershot stumble across lands and styles, tonight’s beer hails from Germany.  It is made of smoke.

The traditional way of malting grains is to soak them for a little while to get them to sprout and then dry them to get them to stop sprouting.  This activates some enzymes and does some other things that let the yeasts go to town.  Sometimes the malted grains are dried in the sun, but more usually they are dried in a kiln.  As a species we have decided that fire is pretty rad, and a kiln can provide a dry heat to quickly get sprouting grains to knock off the sprouting thing, and it can also roast them a little bit for a darker ale, or roast them a lot for a porter or a stout.  The Germans did not use a kiln this time.

This beer is a dark lager, and what makes the Rauch is that they roasted green barley over an open flame.  Similar idea to Scotch, why not.  I open the bottle and pour it into a pint glass, where it looks about the color of a porter though lighter around the edges, a kind of reddish brown with a dark murky center with a head that—oh sweet Famous Amos my beer smells like meat.  I am not exaggerating here.  This beer smells exactly like, cross my heart, a smoked sausage.  There are some sweet and floral notes hiding away in the back, but I can’t concentrate on them over the much louder sensation that this a beer smells like it was once part of a pig.  It’s spicy and a little oily and what in the hell is going on.

I finally gather up enough courage to take a sip.  It’s sweet at first, a light taste of roasted malts, and then all of that disappears in a cloud of smoke and char.   There’s a good balance of sweet malts and bitter hops here, but seriously I cannot get over the smoke.  Things that you drink do not taste like burnt wood.  Meat meat meat meat.

I do not enjoy Rauchbier.

Week three, mother bitches!  Let’s end this one fancy.  I’m breakin’ out the champagne!

Deus Brut des Flandres

The bière de champagne style is a newer style and effort to finally bring Miller’s long-held promise to life.  The Deus bottle, which has the distinction of being the most expensive beer I have ever purchased, came with a little booklet that outlines the ten-step process used to make it.  Belgians love them some steps.  It takes them nine just to pour a beer, and seriously half of those could be condensed into “don’t be a slob.”  So in the interest of not listing some semitechnically-worded marketing material, what makes this beer’s process unique is: a) after being bottled with additional sugars and yeast, it’s shipped off to France to maintain for a while longer, II) they turn the bottle upside down after that and, 3) they cut off the part of the neck where all the yeast settles, add some more carbonation and stick a cork in the rest of the bottle.  The result is an aged, filtered beer that’s supposed to look and taste like a sparkling white wine.  Time to get out a flute and see.

The bottle opened with a sharp pop, and the beer poured a clear, light golden yellow with a big head that quickly settled and disappeared, leaving some steady streams of bubbles sparkling their way up through the glass.  So far it looks a lot like a champagne.  The aroma gives away its secret, full of sweet, earthy barley along with a tart, fruity smell.  It tastes of sugars and malts and honey, but it isn’t a sweet beer; it’s balanced by a bright, fruity flavor, kind of like a sour apple, and some spiciness that I’m not going to try to label, maybe a flavor left by the yeast or maybe actual spices, probably both.  The visible carbonation blends well into the taste, adding a little tickle but not an outright bite.  It tastes and feels quite dry, not unlike a glass of champagne.

This is an interesting drink.  The malt makes it taste pretty obviously like a beer, but it does have a lot of characteristics of a sparkling wine.  It’s fruity, and it’s dry but not bitter.  Deus wouldn’t be out of place at a New Year’s party, or before breakfast and a morning at Tiffany’s, or wherever champagne would be appropriate; and for the beer drinker it makes an interesting new style.  I’d recommend trying one out if you ever feel inclined to pay more than $20 on a bottle of beer.

And thus passes another milestone.  Looking back, here are some styles:

• Bière de champagne/Bière Brut/Brut des Flandres: 1
• Stout: 2
• Belgian-style dark: 1
• Pale wheat: 1
• Pale ale: 1
• Crappy lager: 2
• Bière blanche/witbier: 1
• Tripel: 1
• Dark Ale: 3
• Barleywine: 1
• IPA: 1
• Cream ale: 1
• Bière de garde: 1
• Hefeweizen: 2
• Good lager: 1
• Saison: 1

and countries

• Belgium: 3
• Jamaica: 1
• Canada: 2
• America: 7
• India: 1
• France: 2
• Lithuania: 1
• Ireland: 1
• England: 2
• Scotland: 1

and a more depressing metric that I think is important, of the past 21 beers, 13 of them are illegal in Alabama: 7 of them are stronger than 6% ABV, and 9 came in a bottle larger than 16 oz, which includes the half liter/ 16.9oz size of three.  There’s information in that link on how to contact your state senator if you happen to be Abalamban and would like them to know your thoughts on the Gourmet Beer Bill of 2009.

And that’s enough politics.  Three weeks, woo, yeah!  I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find a hundred new beers when I started, but as I go on I keep finding new styles and new ideas, and I think this crazy plan might just work.  It’s certainly been educational so far.

On the approach of a St. Patrick’s day some years past, the one day a year that I look for meaning in an ignored surname-based heritage, I found myself in a liquor store, wearing green and shopping for supplies.  The lady at the checkout was Jamaican with a thick accent and skin dark as the night.  She noticed my shirt, and we got talking about Irishness and its meaning on such a holiday, as well as her own link to the Emerald Isle, which turned out to be a couple generations closer than mine.

In the early 16th century, after Ireland had enjoyed a few years of relative independence and prosperity as a building Gaelic influence began to displace an apathetic English prescence, and the various earls and viscounts forgot about their summer cottages and fiefdoms, the House of Tudor rose to power and set off another long period when being Irish wasn’t really so great.  Though the emigration during the potato famine is probably the most famous due to the impact it had on North America, there had been a steady stream of unwilling migration going on since the time of Oliver Cromwell, an Englishman famous for being a huge dick when it came to the Irish.  After putting down a rebellion and solidifying the refreshed English control of the island, he began shipping Irish off to Barbados to work the sugar cane plantations.  These Irish slaves and their descendants were shuffled about the British possessions in the Caribbean, and after the Spanish gave up on a little island south of Cuba, the British landowners eventually created a concentration of Irishness in Jamaica.

The island colony gained independence in 1962 under the leadership of Alexander Bustamante, son to an Irish father and Arawak mother, and though the Irish influence has mostly melted invisible into the Jamaican culture and people, as it began to do the moment some poor, sunburned Irishman stepped onto its shores, this unlikely cultural mark can still be found in some oddly placed Mc’s, a tendency to muddle vowels like a boy from Cork, and what I’m getting at is that though the English colonists usually had the sense to keep their dark, heavy beers out of the tropics, I’m not surprised that Jamaica makes a stout.

Dragon Stout

Dragon Stout is brewed by Desnoes & Geddes, makers of Red Stripe and proud sponsors of the Jamaican national bobsled team.  It poured like a stout, brown just a shade shy of black with ruby edges, though there wasn’t much of a head.  And after that things got a little different.  I didn’t find the smell particularly strong, but what was there was more mollases than roasted malt, and it tasted very sweet.  There’s the roasted, stouty malt flavor, with a little bit of coffee-like bitterness, but dominant instead is sugar and cooked fruit.  The taste overall didn’t have that big stout punch, which, given the sweet focus, worked favorably by keeping the beer from getting sickly sugary.

In all this was something a bit unexpected, a bit simple, but not unwelcome.  I don’t think I’d want more than one of these of at a time—the sweetness would be overwhelming after too long and a 7.5% ABV is a bit high to be sessionable—but it made for a nice dessert.