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...

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.