Good beers cheap: Zywiec Porter

The first of an occasional series, mostly for the hell of it.  I like Garrett Oliver's point that with beer, an average person can enjoy the best in the world without going broke.  Still, there's a bit of snobbery with us too -- often "rare and expensive" is understood to mean "good."  And it's true: there's good beer, and there's cheap beer.  But sometimes good beer comes relatively cheap.  Case in point:

 Zywiec Porter (9.5% abv, 550 ml bottle, $2.49 at Ale Jail in St Paul). It's a Polish beer from the Zywiec brewery.  Apparently a brewery with some history, though with the oddly Engrish -- or maybe just marketingese -- slogan on the bottle: "Faithful to the Tradition; Recipe Since 1881."  Okay, which recipe exactly?  (Zyweic is owned by the Heineken Group, though seems a bit unloved -- the Heineken website's holdings list has it as "ywiec".)

There's some confusion on ratebeer and the like about whether this is "really" a porter or not.  This is an example of a historic style known as "Baltic Porter" -- that is, beer in more or less in the roasty, dark, English-derived style we know as "porter" but bigger and usually fermented with lager yeasts at cold, lager-appropriate temperatures.  As a consequence, Baltic porters typically have the smooth, lager characteristics of strong bock beers combined with the roastiness of porter ales.

As for Zywiec itself.  It's dark brown though not opaque; brilliantly clear with garnet highlights and a brown/tan head. In the aroma it's got a hint of caramel, backed up by clean maltiness and a whiff of alcohol.  The flavor is roasty/malty and lager-like with a firm bitterness.  It's coffee-roast, plum and raisin at first, then hints of caramel sweetness, and finally a long bitter finish.  ("Smoky and molasses" says the wife; she's right of course. "I like it," she adds. "Why are you taking that down, is this going on the blog thing?" Umm, yes.) It's 9.5%, so there is a bit of alcohol warmth too.  I'm guessing there's a fair bit of sugar in the "recipe since 1881" -- it seems lean going down, though it remains a bit sticky on the lips afterward.

Raw assessment: good beer.  Rescored on the "good beer cheap" curve for the fact that I picked it up for $2.49 (500 ml) at Ale Jail in St. Paul: awesome.

Hook Norton

Today the snow was falling. Hard. Fletty’s scotchy/chili fest cancelled. Buses not running. Drifts up to my waist, and enough snow piled up in the back that only a two-foot run of my back fence is still visible. So what to do? Get some work done. Make pizza dough. Drink beer.

That's my grill under there.

I picked up a couple of Hook Norton’s beers at Ale Jail, and I’ve been meaning to try them.  It’s an Oxfordshire brewery I’ve heard a lot about, but I’ve never had the opportunity to try the beers before, and I’ve never seen them around here.

• Hooky Bitter (bottle, 3.6%)  Beautiful "juicy" orange hop aroma.  Hint of sweet malt.  Medium copper color with a slight haze (bottle conditioned; I kicked up some of the yeast sediment.)  Low head.  Aroma is great, quite a lot like Fuller's actually.  Mouthfeel is also great: light, very easy to drink.  Backed up by clean malt flavors -- slightly dry/toasty malt with a touch of caramel-like sweetness.  Then bracing hop bitterness which carries through to the finish. The hop is much more in the aroma and bitterness than flavor, though some orange and grassy-hay like notes come through.  Wish I knew what the hops were here -- Challenger and first gold maybe? 

• Hooky Gold (bottle, 4.2%)  Light in color -- golden, with a fluffy white head.  Same orangey/juicy aroma with a touch of caramel-sweetness.  They say they've included American hops, and this one does have a touch more of tangerine-like character.  Not grapefruit or pine though.  The hop aroma is really up front.  It's a quenching beer, with soft, fat malt in the first sip, and then drying and bitter in the finish.  Hop flavor is much more pronounced in this beer.  Some fruity esters, but most of the fruitiness is coming from the hops.  Orange/tangerine in the flavor as well.   (No it's not the suggestion from the oranges on the table, try it and you'll see.)  Top notch, this is a great beer.  It has something of the same hop character as Mirror Pond from Deschutes.  Maybe it's Cascades they've layered in?  Lovely.  Will have to remember to drink more of this and try to come up with a clone recipe if I can...

Fitgers Brewhouse. I really like it again.

For those of us not lucky enough to live in Duluth, Fitger's Brewhouse beer was a treat. Whenever someone was going up there, they offered to bring back growlers, and they usually had a bunch of friends willing to take them up on the offer.

Duluth, early fall.

Maybe a couple of years ago, there was some grumbling that maybe Fitger's had lost a step. True? I don't know. Maybe they really lost some degree of wonderfulness. Maybe people just got jaded. Who knows.

Duluth, later fall.

This fall we were lucky enough to get up there twice. And I got to hang out at the Brewhouse, actually for the first time. Don't know why it took me so long, except that we've always just been though Duluth on the way to somewhere else.

Anyway, I don't know if it was just that I was so glad to be out of the Cities, or hanging out by the lake or what.  But I really, really liked the beer, and I got to try pretty much everything. Here's what we had -- or at least what I took notes on -- during the last trip:

The wife and I were clearly born in the
wrong era.

• Mariner's Mild (3.6%).  Really nice -- I wish more brewpubs did a mild.  This one is estery, with hints of chocolate.  It has just the right mouthfeel: light, soft, almost watery but with complex flavor to back it up.  Immensely drinkable.  The esters in the aroma got a bit too much as it warmed up for me.  But one of the best commercial mild's I've had.
• Ely's Peak Pale Ale (Don't know abv).  Served on cask.  Low hop aroma, but big spicy hop flavor.  Nice.  Highish carbonation for cask ale.  Juicy malt, with a touch of crystal malt sweetness.  Hops not over the top -- fresh, "green" and firmly bitter.
• Starfire Pale (6.0%).  My favorite of the beers.  Less bitter, but with a lot more hop flavor and aroma than the Ely's Peak.  American hops, not sure of the variety but I'd love to know.  Relatively big, but it doesn't seem like 6%, nicely attenuated.

Along the way we also had a bunch of the other beers.  The Lighthouse Golden Ale (4.4%) was really nice -- these beers get a bad rap as "starter beers" for people who don't like beer, but this was crisp and clean, with a delicate malt flavor.  The  El Nino Double Hopped IPA (7.0%) was good, but I liked the Starfire better.  There was a porter and a stout as well. 

Pining for British Beer

Pete Brown's November v-blog is out and he's talking about new beers and breweries around London.  It's always interesting to me to drop in on the discussions of British beer writers talking about beer and the beer renaissance in Britain.  Maybe it's just my age -- I'm old enough to remember when you couldn't get craft beer in any bar more upscale than the Viking.

When I came-of-beer-age, England seemed like one of the world's beer heavens.  The American craft beer movement seemed like a way to find our own path back to that beery tradition that we lost.  So it's always with a bit of a shock that I remember that Britain is having its own beer renaissance.  All of the debates about whether CAMRA's pushing the right strategy for this or not aside, the British renaissance is ... well, very British.  It's mostly ale, and as this v-blog shows, there is a lot of interest in innovating, with a lot of it coming at session-beer strength.

Sorry to get all misty-eyed about this.  I can't help it.  I spent two periods during my, um, formative years in England.  Both were during what I'm sure Pete and others would call their own dark years of beer.  But the look and the smell and the variety of the beers--and so many on handpump still!  What really mists me up seeing this is the realization that the first time I was there I was too young to enjoy the beer, and the second time I was too poor.

Oh, and Peter Amor has another v-blog on fermentation.

Artenbru: Good idea. Will there be another?

So ARTENBRU.  It's taken me some time before I could get to this with a rational mind, but here it is.  Rather than bitch, a few points about what (in my opinion) went right and what went wrong, and what might have to happen for there to be another go 'round.

It was kind of a good idea, if one that I was totally fuzzy on until only a short time before the event.  The organizers' goal, I think, was to bring together the innovative brewers of the Twin Cities with the innovative graphic artists of St Paul's Lowertown arts quarter, all in the pleasant atmosphere of the Black Dog Cafe.  The brewers made beer, the artists made posters, and all was lovely.  The homebrew would be tasted, and the posters that went with each brew would be seen, and the audience would get to see how collaborations like that could be cool.  Oh, and there would be $2 pints of some local commercial beers as well.

The thing was always a little sketchy, in a kind of charming way -- somewhere between art-scene flakiness and "Hey gang!  Let's put on a show!" idealism.  I'm usually a cynical bastard, but some measure of that is probably necessary for good ideas to ever see the light of day.

It all fell to hell when someone figured out that you couldn't actually serve the homebrewed beer without risking the Black Dog's liquor license.  So no homebrew to taste, and no collaborative teams to talk to.  There were some brewers there, and some artists, but you kind of had to find them yourself and figure out who went with whom.

Clint Luger's winning poster, from the ARTENBRU site.
Too bad I haven't tried the beer, brewed by Steve Fletty.

Oh, but there were a ton of people.  It was like a college party gone bad.  They started giving away the commercial beer they lined up--at least I think so.  I gave up when I saw the line and the frenzied looks on the faces of those up at the front of it.  Figuring that we had jobs and could skip the line in order to pay $5 for a Summit, the Bishop and the Actress and I did so pronto.  Then we all talked to the artists (or the ones we could find) for a while.

Despite it all, I still like the idea and I'd love to see the event work if it ever happens again.  So here are my thoughts and suggestions.  Have others?  Feel free to add in comments if there's anything I missed!

1. Make the brewers happy.  The no-serving homebrew issue was a severe bummer, as that was an integral part of the whole idea.  If there is to be an Artenbru 2, this has to be worked out.  There are ways -- you just can't charge entry fees for that part of the event.  The brewers that I talked to were mostly good sports about it ("More IPA for me" said Curt -- um, I mean "Dr. Stock").  But if anyone's going to go down this road again, this issue has to be worked out first, not last.
2. Make sure the artists are happy too.  I'm not sure if the artists felt as let down as the brewers, but several of them were not there, or at least did not seem to be.  And several of the posters were not for sale. Too bad since the artwork was really first rate for the most part.  Clint Lugert's poster for Fletty's historic British IPA was fantastic.  "Cork Leg Nelson" did the graphically simpler but really cool images for Kris England's beers, and this was probably the most commercially oriented artwork -- I mean that in a good way; it could have been the basis for a whole brand for a commercial brewery.  I really liked Lucas Glusenkamp and Bud Snead's designs as well.  (Check here to see many of the posters)
3. Too many people, or at least too small a space. I say this with great love for the Black Dog cafe.  But holy hell.  If it's gonna be like that, find a bigger space.  Or else go for a smaller, and more committed beer/art crowd and stay at the same space.

Two happy codas though.  Tired of battling artiste elbows, a bunch of us skipped out and headed for Heartland instead. The Heartland bartenders (who get no love on the website) have been outstanding both times I have hung out at the bar there.  They've got some wicked concoctions going on back there, including their own infused liquers.  Bar menu ain't bad either!  Also, I just got called by Nick, one of the Artenbru organizers, who informed me that I won the drawing for $15 at the Ale Jail.  I guess not that many people put in the extra $ for the drawing!  Guess I can't complain too much...

Where the Wild Beers Were

October 17 was the...is it the third?...annual Where the Wild Beers Are.  Or at least the third in the Twin Cities.  The founders and organizers of the event, our-fearless-leader Jeff Halvorson and ex-St. Paul guy Tim Stendahl, also have a parallel event in Brooklyn.  (Tim confided that the beer scene is better in the Twin Cities, but shh...don't tell the Brooklyn hipsters that, they might get mad and wave their glowstics and man-scarves at us.)

A nice little crowd at Stub & Herb's appreciates a pour of sour beer.
The gathering loosens up as the day goes on.

Thanks once again are due to Stub and Herbs for hosting the event on their patio. Rather than do a formal evaluation of the beers (well...maybe a few...and I actually wrote them down rather than mumbling into my phone...old skool), I thought I would share a few pics and say how much I enjoy the atmosphere of the event. Halvorson and Stendahl have done a really smart thing in making this collaborative. Sour-and-wild beer lovers are few, those willing to plan ahead are fewer yet.

Kris-10 and ERok take charge at Pouring Station 2

Rather than pay a gate fee and drink what's available, they pull together a few nice beers, and then ask everyone to bring a commercial version themselves. That's the entrance fee. You get a designated number of "tastes" depending on how much you bring. The beauty of this is that it puts the quality of the event in the hands of the participants. The geekier the beer crowd, the better the beer. It's like the difference between a seminar and a lecture class. And even with the smallish crowds this event brings, there's more beer than a reasonable human can get through without a lot of Tums.

The crowd loosens up, but stays intently focused on good beer.
Michael (left) is still not entirely sure about the "sour" thing.

The crowd loosens up as the day goes on. Interest is really intense during the announced pours of the special-est of special beers early on. (Look at the faces in the first picture).  But things loosen up as the day goes on.  The conversation wanders, but people really do appreciate the beer. I hate to say this, but it really is a very much more "European" spirit than a lot of beer festivals. I also love that it allows people to try a range of beers that they have often never had before.

Halvorson and Stendahl lined up a couple of kegs to start things off. I chose the Oud Beersel Framboise over the Flat Earth. Nuff said, except that the framboise was lovely and it complimented the day perfectly -- sunny but with a chill of fall in the air. The beer was a lovely deep pink, with a well-balanced tartness rather than a full-on sour acidity. It comes across like a raspberry lemonade, very refreshing.

Quite a few of the memorable beers were classic sour beers as well. The Oud Beersel Oude Geuze Vielle was sadly lightstruck, but was probably nice once. The Drei Fonteinen Oude Geuze 1999 on the other hand was nice, funky, sour and slightly vegetal, but deep and refreshing. The Cantillon Iris 2006 was very floral, hoppy-bitter, quite sour, and really delightful.

Some rare and often vintage beers make it to the table.

Other beers were wild experiments I would not have expected. Allegash Confluence 2009 is like a bright pils with a tart edge provided by what I think is Brettanomyces Lambicus. The Odell Sabateur was deep brown, with a strange mix of chocolate and sourness battling for flavor. It was kind of like a Flemish style chocolately porter, if you can imagine that.  Really weird, in a good way. Several brewers had their own twists on collaborations with Belgian production brewer De Proef, and it was nice to see the range and try them together. All very different, and I don't think I had a bad beer out of the bunch. De Proef does not have a "beer geek" reputation, but they've got a nice niche going with the collaborations.

One of several De Proef collaborations.

Other beers I had didn't quite fit the bill, but were worth trying anyway. Brooklyn Local 1, pale with some haze (it's been open a while by the time I get to it) and orange highlights. Not really sour or especially wild -- its really like a saison. This is one of the issues with a self-organized event: sometimes beers outside of the obvious "wild" range will sneak in. But I wouldn't have otherwise had it, and I'm glad I did. Same thing for Lagunitas' Little Sumthin' Wild, despite the name. It's like a Belgian IPA. But then, sometimes the stomach needs a break from sour.

Autumn Brew Review Review

Oh man.  Where did October go?
Now that we are in November, it's time to revisit some of the Twin Cities' beer events from October.  And the Autumn Brew Review is by far the biggest.  And a great time.  Especially if you go early, and avoid the crush of the crowd later.  I wasn't there late enough to find out which beers and brewers got the most-popular votes, but here are some of mine.  For me the dominant theme here is beers I was really surprised by.  I've gotten rather jaded as a lot of "experimental" or "artistic" or "extreme" beers are also not pulled off particularly well.  But there are some exceptions, and it's such a nice thing when a beer brings an idea together with technically excellent brewing to just blow you away.

Early crowd, lovely day.

Best beer: Jubel (Descutes).  10% abv, 55 IBU.
What a revelation.  Deschutes is distributing in Minnesota now, but it's relatively new.  So I know I'm late to a (now very large) party with this.  But I've been really impressed with everything that I've had.  But this was something altogether different -- it was one of those beer revelations that happen a handful of times in life.  It wasn't "oh, that's good."  More like my tasting note, which just says "SUPER GOOD."

Sadly, I only had half a pour.  Descutes had this on tap, and Nicole got it.  I was hesitant.  The writeup had all of the big-beer cliches that I've come to be wary of, all jumbled together.  "Behold something so deep and crimson and swirling with spice, malt, earthy fruit and oak that it is barely tethered to the term beer" they said.  Then they added that it is aged in Pinot Noir barrels.  Sounds like an overly elaborate, overly sweet, overly alcoholic trainwreck, thought I.  "We'll run out, you sure you don't want a pour?" said the Descutes guy.  Nah...I'm trying to stay relatively sober since I have to pour for Dark Horse later.

To say I was wrong doesn't come close.  The thing about this beer is that it wears its size very well.  Unlike every other huge "special" beer monstrosity I feel like I've had recently, this one is ... well attenuated!  It's tasty, it has a lot going on.  But it has no alcohol club hidden behind it's lean body.  No overly sweet finish to make you want to scrape your tongue.  It's just lovely.  Which is probably why the modal review of this incredibly lovely beer on Beer Advocate is something like a B+.  ( "Seems like they were targeting and old ale or an English Barleywine" says one numbskull.  No, because then it would taste like every other "special" beer that I guess gets you out of the B range in these people's sugar addled heads....)

Sorry for the rant. This beer is incredible.  Buy it if you can.  And thanks a million for blowing my expectations out of the water, Descutes.  I need that from time to time.

Best brewery: Dave's BrewFarm (Wilson, WI).
I had met the eponymous David Anderson a few months before, at the second-round judging events for the American Homebrewers Association national competition in Madison.  We were all way too tired to take him up on his offer to show us around if we stopped by on our way back to St. Paul.  They have a really interesting stable of beers though, and they are all very well brewed and very tasty.

"Wheatless Wonder" is kind of a neat idea: can we make a beer that's like a weizen but with all-malt?  It's a nice, approachable beer, and a lot more interesting to taste than to describe probably.  Nicole was very taken with this one.  Their hoppy "Lupulo Noir" was a very smart twist on the creeping trend of black IPAs.  Here, it's pils malt, deeper caramel malt and chocolate, alongside a host of hops -- but not all of them usual suspects for this beer (think both Amarillo and Northern Brewer).  Oh, and a Belgian yeast strain.  I really liked this one, and what I liked most was the surprise of it.  Like Jubel, in lesser hands this could have been a trainwreck.  But Dave has a deft touch as well as an experimental spirit, and it was both surprising and elegant instead.

The dandelion and clover saison was, they said, "our fairwell to summer."  But in truth it was both summery (saison) and leaning toward fall (noticeable hints of the brown sugar and Victory malts they list in the overview).  They had a host of other interesting beers lined up that I didn't get to try as well.  Oh, and did I mention that they are a wind-powered brewery?  How cool is that?

It's a happy little beer.

Best beer concept: Jazz series, Bell's Brewery (Kalamazoo, MI).
Bell's put out a series of variations on the Biere de Garde style this fall.  Here the idea was to draw inspiration from the idea of the Jazz trio.  Normally I wouldn't get to try them all in sequence, but this was a perfect opportunity.  Le Batteur ("the drummer") was the dryest, crispest and lightest of the three.  Le Pianiste ("the pianist") was the most classically "to style" of the three, and my favorite.  This one had the toasty Munich malt notes that went along with the dry finish extremely well.  Le Contrebassiste ("the bassist") added in notes of roast and smoked malts.  While I liked this one less well, it was a great set of beers taken together, and a way to explore a style largely ignored by American craftbrewers.

The author in an agreeable state of mind.  People love the Dark Horse shotgun tap handles.
"Where's Dark Horse?"  It's in Marshall, MI.  "Where's that?"  Near Battle Creek.

To top the day off, we had the pleasure of pouring for Dark Horse, another of my favorites.  By that point, it was starting to get a bit late in the day and the beer-geek crowd starts to give way by sheer force of numbers to a crowd that cares a bit less about the beer.  Some were legitimately (and quite rightly) upset that they missed Dark Horse's excellent Double Crooked Tree IPA, poured through a Randall of both Cascade hops and orange peel.  Say what you will about gimmicks, but this actually brought a lovely floral/citrus punch to an already great beer.  Others, especially later on didn't care what they ordered.  "Hook me up, bud!"  Okay, here's a nice Imperial stout!  (And to be fair, the stout too was lovely, nicely attenuated, less brutally roasty than some of the Dark Horse beers.)  Proud to say we ran through three kegs in not much time.  Of course I like to think that was due to the magnetic personalities and deep beer knowledge of myself and Nicole rather than the other assets of the two comely young ladies that were pouring before us.  Anyway, hope some of you got there and had as good a time as we did.

What were your favorites for the year?  Any obvious ones I missed?

Bringing it to the people

Apologies in advance for the double Anglophilia of these last posts.  But it's now the end of October, and so it's time for the second set of video blogs from British beer writer Pete Brown, and the brewer Peter Amor.  So I thought I would share, along with a few words about why I think what they are doing is a great idea.

First, Pete's video blog.   (Sadly, I have to link to them since vimeo won't allow them to be embedded.) The idea is to go around to different regions of the UK, trying craft brews (and also cask ales) and talking about them.  The idea is sort of two fold.  It promotes regional and craft brews, as well as promoting cask ales.  At the same time, it's meant to introduce people who may not have a lot of experience with these beers to their flavors and aromas.  (Okay, maybe that's three four more than two goals.)

I was excited about the first entry, and very thirsty after.  This second one is really good too.  He's not always terribly smooth in front of the camera (who is?), but he does a good job I think of expressing some of the joys of drinking these beers, and I really like his attempts to talk about the actual flavors and aromas of the beers in a non-technical way, tied more to the drinker's experience than the ingredients or the brewer's perspective.  This is amazingly hard to do -- ever tried to actually tell someone what the hop character in your favorite IPA is like?  What do you say once you get past "piney" or "citrusy"?

But what I really wanted to mention in this post was the accompanying video blog by Peter Amor.  These ones are different.  They are not about any particular beers, but rather they are about the brewing process.  The first entry seemed a bit stiff to me, but this one I think is great.  It's a very concise overview of the brewing process that is aimed at the layperson, but is both technically right and informative, without getting into extraneous detail.  Again, that's really hard to do!  A bit of Google-ing shows that Amor got his start brewing for Guinness before starting the Wye Valley Brewery in 1985.  Especially in this second video blog, I think Amor does a terrific job of showing the process and getting across the main technical details from a brewer's perspective, without making it seem like a lecture.

So great idea.  Good for them for trying to bring the love of beer to a wider audience.  And glad we are starting to see some of the same thing in the US; props to folks like Michael Agnew for helping to do a similar thing locally as well.

Beer Styles

There is an interesting discussion going on within British beer blogs about styles and whether they matter right now.  The overview of where this discussion is coming from is on Pencil and Spoon, linked here, Pete Brown provides a more skeptical take here.  As is often the case, the really interesting back and forth happens in the comments.

I'm a BJCP guy, but I don't read the style guidelines as gospel.  (In part because I know many of the people responsible for putting the document together and I know the debates they have among themselves.  And I know that someone like Gordon Strong is not dogmatic about the styles, even though he is an evangelist for them in a certain way.  This gets theologically complex...)  What I will say is that it's worth noting that a good portion of the discussion gets caught up with the Brewers' Association proliferation of styles, which has always struck me as stupid.  I know it has a purpose in the industry, but it just reeks of "everyone gets a gold star!"

Regardless, I responded to the discussion on Pete Brown's blog, and I thought I would add the text of my comments here, since it sums up what I've been saying privately on the subject for some time.

I really don't understand the way that a lot of the discussion tries to distinguish between creativity and styles. (And let me say right out front that I agree, it is stupid for the BA to have so many styles -- it seems designed for the sole purpose of handing out as many medals as possible.) 

Styles are not the rigid things that they are made out to be. Sure, some styles (often German ones) are narrower -- proper German style pilsners have certain characteristics, fall into a narrow gravity range, and so forth. But they are evolving things, and for most of us there is no rule to say we have to or even should brew rigidly to style. 

So why bother with the styles? Adrian Tierney-Jones was right to point to novels. I think painting is a better metaphor. There are certainly artistic styles that are recognized. Most artists want to make their own mark, and yet understanding the styles and how they evolved is important to most serious painters. Also note how even the innovators spend a lot of time mastering the tricks of different styles before they figure out how to make their own break from them. Picasso did a lot of copies of older masters. Rauchenberg and others have more recently done their own copies of Picasso! 

To take Pete's example in a different direction, cooking is similar. Maybe the average cook can do seven (or whatever) recipes. But if you are aiming to be a chef -- that is, make a mark with your own twist on cooking, for example in your own restaurant, then knowing the tricks of given cooking styles and flavors (which themselves emerge in different regions as a result of different climates, crops, and cultures) is important. Admitting that there is a recognized style of Southern Italian cooking (or Thai, or Gujarati or whatever) is not the same as saying that nothing new can be done. 

The point is, beer styles are a way to start a productive conversation with beer drinkers and brewers. It's hard to have a conversation without any common language or set of working concepts. No one has to brew "to style" but knowing some common points of reference is still a good thing.

On finding great things when you don't expect them

Sometimes the nicest things come when you don't expect them.  Like driving all day and ending up at a motel pretty much in the middle of nowhere,  hungry and tired and ready to murder your family.  And then getting a beer and a pork sandwich that are so good they bring a tear to your eye.

Could this just be the result of low expectations?  Maybe, but for whatever reason, the starts aligned this night.  We're in Lebabon, Indiana.  That's just past Indianapolis for most of you that care.  We've driven all day, starting out in DC, and making it this far by 8:30 pm, when we can't go further.  We've also taken a wrong turn, argued, and battled traffic in a construction zone for the last half hour.  Nicole books a Holiday Inn Express room via iPhone, exit 40 off Highway 65.  We check in.  I'm very hungry and in need of a beer.  Kids are teetering on the fine edge between humanity and what happens when you don't feed them.

Nicole asks the desk clerk about the barbecue place we see down the street. (There's also a KFC, a White Castle, and a Taco Bell.  Expectations sink lower.  To be fair, there's also a Subway and a pancake place.)  The guy at the desk says that the barbecue place is alright, but we should go to the bar and grill just down the way.  Perfect.

Is it a warehouse?

Wait, is that it?  Looks like a warehouse.  We pass it, go to a rundown old downtown.  Nope.  Turn around -- and yep, that's it.  The sign is only visible from the other side.  It's called "The Warehouse."  They can't get a lot of highway traffic this far from the exit, but it is a huge open room, almost empty.  Spirits revive at the thought of food, but expectations aren't much higher.  But there is a booth open, and the waitress is about the nicest person in the world.  And they have the Cardinals game on.  (Also, puzzle placemats for the kids, with a thing asking what the nine planets are.   Bit out of date....)

The waitress asks us for drinks order first. They don't have Stella despite the table tents touting their $2 Stella drafts.  But they've got Bud....Oh, and also Hoegaarden and Guinness on draft, she says. Nicole has a Hoegaarden, I get the Guinness. Guinness comes in a proper 20 oz glass.  Hoegaarden comes in half liters for God's sake, and I'm jealous. It isn't till later that I learn that the Hoegaarden is also $4.  Both are fresh. To review: Four dollar half liters of Hoegaarden at the local bar and grill in Lebanon, Indiana.  Things are looking up.

The food is slow.  But the menu is much better than I dared to hope for.  And when the food comes, it's fantastic.  Charlie gets the chicken fingers off the kids menu.  They actually look like bits of chicken.  I get the pork tenderloin sandwich, with lettuce, tomato, onion and pickles.  It's not the breaded/frozen/fried thing that you usually find, but a fresh, grilled tenderloin.  It's really good.  Nicole has the catfish hoagie.  The catfish is light, flaky, and very peppery.  Sam gets the pulled pork sandwich which I usually avoid on principle.  But this is the surprise of the day.  It's a heaping bunch of pork, nicely smoky, not dry but not greasy, sauced very lightly.  It's not up to NC pork standards but it is not far off.  Nice bit of coleslaw on top.  

Dark bar, big beer, flaky catfish, happy wife.

This place is a gem.