A carnival of technology

Today only, two for one special.

Unibroue: Terrible

Unibroue is a delightful oddity, a Belgian-style québécois brewery that’s pretty good at what they do and occasionally shares some neat artwork and trippy French-Canadian folk tales on their packaging.  This is the not a beer with a backstory.  Apparently they got tired of writing everything out twice.  The things this bottle says are: “Terrible” (that’s French for “terrible”), “Unibroue Chambly Québec Canada,” “According to the Surgeon General…5¢ redemption value” “Best before 11-11-2013,” “Dark Ale on Lees, 10.5% alc./vol., 750mL.”  So all I know going in is that is going to be a strong, dark ale, and I should buy another bottle at some point for aging.

The beer looks chocolately brown as it comes out of the bottle, but once it gets all together in the glass it becomes a deep, shiny, inky black.  I’ve seen stouts lighter colored than this.  There’s just a hint of red around the edges to remind you that this isn’t really black, and on top there’s a thick, tan-colored head that after a while fades into a fluffy blanket.  It smells like sweet, dark fruits, plums and cherries and raisins, with a big yeasty aroma.  It tastes like fruit—I can taste a bright apple flavor along with the murkier, darker fruits from the smell—and sugar, and a little bit of spice, clove and some things I can’t quite place.  It feels velvety smooth with just a little tickle from the carbonation, and if it weren’t for the note on the bottle and a tingle in my head I never would have guessed how much alcohol there really is.

Terrible isn’t as complex as some others ales in this style, but this gives you something to think about and makes a tasty dessert.

Highland Cattail Peak Organic Wheat Beer

Highland is a brewery up in the mountans of Asheville that usually goes with a Scottish theme—ales pale and dark, porters, stouts—so this is a bit of a departure for them.  The bottle notes a hint of rye and hibiscus.

It pours a hazy yellow with a thin head and a smell of wheat and a little lemon.  The taste is not quite what I expected.  When I think of wheat beers I mostly think of the citrus and spice of the Belgian styles, but the focus in this is hops.  It tastes dry, bitter, a little herbal and floral and just a shade lemony.  I can’t find the promised rye, and in fact I can barely find the wheat.  That isn’t to say this is bad, just different.  The taste reminds me of the hops of a pale ale, but it has the body and light malts of a wheat beer.  It strikes me as a somewhat unusual take on a wheat beer, but it isn’t bad.  It’s refreshing and something I would drink again.

So that catches things up to today.  Coming up for this week I have another two Belgian ales from America, a stout from Jamaica, another attempt at a saison, something made with smoke and a champagne of beers.  L’chaim.

I’m starting to feel like I’m mostly repeating myself with these reviews.  I’ll try something weirder tomorrow in an effort to vanquish this curse of brevity.

Red Hook Cooper Hook Spring Ale

Red Hook is a Washington brewery, but apparently they have a brewery in Portsmouth, NH as well.  New Hampshire is where this one came from.

True to its name, Copper Hook is a deep, coppery orange.  It smells of roasted malts with some flowery hops scents.  The taste is malty and hoppy with some citrus notes.  There is a little bit of roasty taste, but nothing near the extent of a stout, or even a porter; it’s just a thicker malt flavor than you’d find in a paler beer, and with some caramel sweetness to it.  It has a pretty big feel to it, but the crisp, orangey hops keep it from being overwhelming.  The “spring ale” made me expect something a little lighter, or maybe a little fruitier, but this is more something for a New Hampshire spring: something to keep away the chill of the lingering April frost but with enough brightness to turn an optimistic eye to the warmer days to come.  It’s not bad, kind of a pale ale with a shade of extra heaviness.  Would drink again.

Taj Mahal Premium Lager Beer

The Indians hung out with the British for a few years, and the British are pretty ok at making a beer when they put their minds to it, so I figured this beer at least has a better chance than that Lithuanian thing.  Unfortunately, it seems like the makers of this particular Indian beer got most of their advice from the Americans.

Taj Mahal is a very light, clear yellow with an average head that dissipates quickly into a thin ring.  It smells mostly of hops, grassy and a little flowery, and it has that corn smell reminiscent of an American lager.  The taste is pretty thin.  There’s some grain, some hops, and a little bit of an oily feel that robs it of some of its crispness.  In all There’s really not much to say about Taj Mahal.  There’s nothing particularly offensive, but nothing special about it, either.

Amadeus Bière Blanche

White beers, or witbiers, are a Belgian style of light, spiced wheat ale.  Hoegaarden is a famous example.  Amadeus is a witbier, but it’s from France so they call it something else, in a language that people actually use.

“Bière blanche sur lie, à déguster très fraîche, seule ou accompagnée d’une rondelle de citron.”  If I understand that right, this is an unfiltered white beer, and it’s ok to drink it in your car if you drive a trendy little hatchback.  The defiantly untranslated bottle is giving a hint of things to come.  You know how sometimes a wheat beer like Blue Moon will be served with a slice of orange—and then the beer has no head at all once it gets to you and have to figure out where to pile all of the beer-soaked bits of orange—since it tastes orangey?  Amadeus tastes like lemon.

Though this is a beer on lees (at least I hope that’s what sur lie means), bottled with yeast, Amadeus came in a 75cl bottle, effectively providing filtering by decantation.  Smaller bottles of witbier produce the same effect, making it customary to give the bottle a good swish to mix in the yeasts before finishing the pour, but I don’t know what the ettiquette is when pouring from a bottle that has more than one glass’s worth.  I just left it alone until the end.  So, semi-filtered as it became, Amadeus poured a clear, very light yellow with a big fluffy head.  The smell was almost all sweet lemons, like an effervescent lemonade, with an elusive hint of what seemed like Hefeweizen banana.  The taste offered a little more by way of some spices—I don’t know what, probably corriander, and something that tastes like cinnamon maybe?—but again the theme was sugar and lemon, more sweet than sour.  In all it’s light and crisp and a good remedy to a hot day, but it doesn’t have a lot to say.

Maredsous 10 (Triple)

It can be easy to forget, as an American living in one of the few states which still won’t sell beer on Sundays, that a widespread condemnation of alcohol among Christian sects is a relatively recent phenomenon, and one mostly confined the US.  It was medieval French monks that kept oenology alive through a time when so much knowledge was lost to violent kingdom-building.  Legend says that Irish (or Scottish, depending on who’s telling the story) monks on a mission to Arabia saw how stills were used to extract the essences of plants and flowers for perfume, and after a flash of inspiration and a shift in application, whiskey was born, opening the door to an entire new world of beverages.  In Belgium, a land of grain and strange yeasts, the specialty is beer, brewing being encouraged by St. Benedict, the inventor of monks, for the sanitation of boiling the wort, the meditative toil of the process and the nourishment that beer provides to monks fasting.  After lifetimes of devotion to the creation of drinks in the service of God, some Belgians monks have gotten pretty good at it.  In particular they got good at making unique styles of strong ales, the tripel being the strongest of these.

The Abbaye de Maredsous was founded by Benedctines in the late 19th century, just a baby compared to some of the Cistercian abbeys that produce the famous Trappist ales.  Hopefully they were allowed to copy someone else’s notes to get started.   Maredsous 10  came in a stubby 33cL bottle.  The design of the label has a more modern look than the stark coat-of-arms on their website—more rounded edges, lighter colors—but it’s still fairly sparse.  It tells what it is, how much of it there is, notes that it’s 10% ABV and includes a little logo that reminds me of the mark included on Trappist beers.  Unfortunately the French side of the text encircling it is illegible, and I woudn’t even know where to begin with translating Flemish.  As with Welsh, I’m not convinced that it’s a real language rather than an elaborate joke.  There’s also a brief paragraph about the beer that includes advice to serve it colder than I expected, around 42° Fahrenheit.  I already had it in the fridge and I’m impatient, so that worked out well, and, oddly enough, the somewhat colder-than-cellar temperature did something really amazing with the taste, which I’ll get to in a few more sentences.

I got out the goblet for this one.  It poured a cloudy, brownish orange, with a fluffy, white, sturdy head.  The smell was quite pleasant, and it was fun to stick my nose in the glass and just breathe it in for a while.  The sweet, Belgian yeasty scent was dominant, and beneath that there were sweet malts, a lemony citrus and some other fruitiness that didn’t remind me of any particular fruit.  As I mentioned I drank it a little colder than I’d expect a beer this strong and fancy to be served, and this caused the beer to dramatically transform as it warmed in my mouth.  It seemed to unfold in four distinct phases: it hit my tongue with a silky smooth feel, thick and Christmasy with a taste of nuts and candied dates, and this quickly gave way to a sharp, hot bite of carbonation and alcohol.  As that faded it became crisper and more orangey while a malty sweetness came back into view, and it finished dry with some hoppy bitterness and musky taste of yeast.  It’s not spicey like some Belgian ales, but I thought the rush of different flavors was really interesting.  This beer is definitely worth a try if you come across it.

And that’s week two.  I guess I should do one of those summary dealies.

Styles:

• Saison: 1
• Lager: 2
• Hefeweizen: 2
• Dark ale: 3
• Bière de garde: 1
• Cream ale: 1
• IPA: 1
• Barleywine: 1
• Stout: 1
• Belgian Tripel: 1

Countries:

• Kingdom of Belgium: 2
• United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland: 3
• United States of America: 5
• Republique francaise: 1
• Canada: 1
• Eire: 1
• Lietuvos Respublika: 1

So there’s something.

Rinkuškiai Werewolf

I picked this one up purely for the novelty value.  I’d never heard of any sort of Lithuanian beer, and this one’s got a half–angry blonde chick/half-dog abomination on the label, so hey, why not.  The half-liter bottle proudly proclaims its alcohol content (8.2% ABV), has a little blurb on the back about the history of the brewery—a blurb that’s missing just enough articles to make it sound a little bit off—and on the front, beneath the werewolf, is a warning of sorts, “You must be sure you wanna taste it.”

Well, I guess they got me on that one.  This beer is kind of not so good.  It looks ok at first, a deep orange with a short, off-white head, but the smell is not nice.  It’s a little malty, a little boozy, and a little something else that’s hard to pin down, like roses and benzene.  The taste is simple and cheap.  It starts with with a sickly, caramel sweetness that fades into a musty bitterness, and that’s about it.  I ended up pouring most of it out.

I should have known better.  The werewolf would seem to imply that this is a beer that’ll you transform into something angry and hairy, or that’ll it’ll mess you up like a werewolf might, but what threw me off was another bottle from the same brewery next to this one at the store: Lobster Lover’s, which advertised an ABV of 9 and some.  Eating lobster doesn’t sound very threatening, so I thought maybe this is just some inscrutible Lithuanian heritage thing.  No, I think it’s just supposed to mess you up.  I recommend you shy away from European compactness and grab a forty instead.

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.