Fresh beer, fresh year

Hola Amigos!  Long time since I rapped at ya.

Been meaning to update but a lot has been going on, especially the Upper Mississippi Mashout last week.  I'll post about that soon.  Till then, a few things in no particular order.

1. While the Mashout was fun and adventurous, I'm really kind of bummed that I did not get to the Muddy Pig for their hoppy beer festival.  The idea is great -- they devote a substantial amount of their really substantial tap space for a certain kind of beer (here hoppy beers, duh) and offer smaller servings of them so you can sample your way though a bunch.  I went to the stout fest last winter and it was really great.  Particularly since there are a lot of the more brutal American and Imperial styles of stout that I'd much rather have a small pour of than a large one.  I think everyone I was around this weekend was sick of me saying "boy, I wish I could get to the hoppy beer thing at the Pig."  So...anyone go?  Any standouts I should look for?
2. I mostly keep personal life off the blog.  It's not facebook, man.  A-non-a-mouse.  But I have been waylaid with the problem of helping my mother move yet again.  This is only relevant because for the last few months she has lived extremely close to the Happy Gnome in St Paul.  And I'm realizing while this has been a hell year from hell, I have really liked slipping away for a pint or two.  Because when the going gets low, the low go for a beer.
3. Speaking of the Gnome, they still have on tap the Dark Horse One Oatmeal Stout.  It's really really really good, and if you have not had it, go out and get it while you can.  Limited...looks like DH are planning to do a set of five stouts, though I have not had the others.  This one says "chocolate, coffee and caramel flavors" in the menu blurb, but it's really also plum, raisin and "sultana" as a pal of mine would say.  Yes, it's good enough for a trip.  Get it.
4. Speaking of a pal of mine, one of the goals of this blog was not just to get down my own ideas but to also give a forum for the community of folks I'm already connected to.  Lots of those folks have lots of ideas too.  I wanted to get this blog off the ground -- not that anyone's reading it, but you have to start somewhere.  But expect to see other voices beginning to chime in here over the next month or so.



Pint and lunch and empty bar at the Gnome

5. And speaking of getting down my own ideas, I've got a few beery thoughts that I've been stewing on recently.  I've resisted doing a "mission statement" like some bloggers do since I have to be disciplined enough in my professional life that I don't really want to do it here. But I do like the blog format and I am committed to actually saying what I think here even if others aren't likely to like it.  So here's as close to a mission statement I'll get: this blog will be beer related.  I promise that I'll try to think though things before I commit them to the blog.  But it's a blog after all.  If I say it I mean it, and I'm happy to talk with you about it further.  Too cryptic?  Anyhow as my buddy Jim Anchower would say, Adios.

Geary's

Well where the hell did that year go? No idea. The year was mostly crap punctuated by some nice moments. Coincidence that most were beer related? But let's not get philosophical. I was going to, but I decided to wait another week to post just so the moment would pass.

I've been meaning to try beers from Geary's since they've become more readily available around the bottle shops in my area. D.L. Geary Brewing is located in Portland, Maine. It's one of the family owned breweries profiled in Brian Yeager's Red White and Brew -- actually one of the more interesting stories in the book. As for the beers, I've had their flagship pale ale many times on the East Coast, but have not had the chance to try their other beers.  Mostly they do English-style beers, or at least on the more English side of the line in the styles that have (now) both American and English roots.

Geary's London Porter (1.045 OG, so roughly 4.5% abv).
They list this as using their "Hampshire ale yeast".  The website lists the malt bill as pale, crystal, chocolate and black malts, with Cascade, Willamette and Goldings hops.  (Aha...wait you say.  English style but with Cascade?  Believe it or not, I've used almost this same hop mix in my porters for years, and it comes out really nicely.  My inspiration for this was Summit rather than Geary's.)  The beer has a nice, fresh, estery aroma, a hint of chocolate, and a touch of alcohol despite the modest gravity. It's a dark-but-not-quite-black "porterish" color with a low, off-white head.  For some reason, my notes say "better flavor balance than the pale ale I think" -- which is odd, since I haven't had Geary's pale in some time.  But thankfully I got more specific -- no hop flavor to compete with the chocolatey malt, and the brown-sugar sweetness of the aftertaste.  It's a very flavorful beer, but the mouthfeel is lean -- full on the tongue and then thinner after you swallow it with just a touch of coffee roastiness.  Really nice -- one of the best porters I've had.  (I see on their website they are touting the fact that the New York Times tasting panel voted it the best porter in the world.  I think they are bozos mostly, but on this they at least picked one that won't disappoint.)

Geary's Hampshire Special Ale (1.070, or about 6.5-7% abv).
The aroma of this one is big, fruity-orange, what some British writers call "juicy" -- like a really extra huge version of Fuller's.  Obviously it uses the same yeast strain as the porter, though it comes across much differently here without the chocolate notes from the malt.  This beer is deep copper in color, with an off-white head.  It has some sweetness up front but a long, hoppy, bitter finish.  It's a very layered beer in flavor -- sweet, then bitter, then drier on the finish.  It's not at all cloying despite its strength.   Geary's website lists the malts here also as British pale, crystal and chocolate, but the balance is much more to the pale and with only a touch of chocolate at most.  I wouldn't have thought there was any just tasting it.  Hops are listed as Cascade, Mt. Hood and Goldings.

Geary's Wee Heavy (1.080, or about 7.5-8% abv).
This one's big.  It's also the only one of the range that I wasn't sold on.  The aroma is really, really nice:  plums, raisins and rum-raisin, a rose-petal note from the alcohol, a hint of pepper and spice cake.  In other words, complex and wonderful.    It's deep brown color with some red highlights, but browner than I expected.  Very low head.  But it also had a much bigger blast of hops than I expected. The website, which I see now, says "mellow hoppiness." Uh... actually it's quite bitter.  Puckering on the finish really. Almost harsh.  Some sweet malt peeks though and a hint of roast, but mostly the harsh/earthy hop finish. I would have loved less bitterness, though of course it might have seemed too sweet then.  But not to be an ass, but that's the beauty of the style isn't it?  It's supposed to be malty-sweet without being cloying; the classics have figured out the balance, right?  Anyway, taken on its own terms, ok but challenging.  Best to think of this not as a Wee Heavy but as a less huge version of a UK Barleywine.

Anyway, let me know what you all think.  Anyone see any of their other beers around these parts?

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...