feste_sylvain | Entries tagged with beer

Be careful: there are two similar (but not identical) beers from the good folks at Cape Ann Brewing. One is "Fisherman's Imperial Pumpkin Stout", and the other is this one, "Fisherman's Pumpkin Stout". I hear good things about the artisanal Imperial Pumpkin Stout, but that's not what I've got here. The Imperial is significantly stronger, so if you get that one, split it with friends after dinner.

This appears to be of milk-stout strength and body (as opposed to a Guinness "extra stout"), but there are many subtle flavor notes in here. You actually have to search for the pumpkin (you'll find it, but only if you search).

It's a bit of a novelty, but certainly a good beer: potable, medium-bodied, flavorful, and would go with many meats or pies.

You'll want a stout glass or a pint glass for this, so your nose can enjoy as much as your tongue. No need for a stein, as it can be served at cellar temperature with no problem. And in fact, you won't want to refrigerate it, for fear of trapping the aromas.

Smoked. Doppelbock.

Rauchbiers can be done delectably or really badly. When done right, there's the hint of wood-smoke that makes certain fish or meats just about the closest thing to paradise. When done wrong, there's a sour tang that makes you wonder whether it's possible for an active beer to turn into malt vinegar.

Bocks, the pride of spring, the "goat that knocks you on your butt", tend to have sweet notes like "caramel" or "toffee" or, in extreme cases, chocolate.

Blending these two in one beer would be crazy, right?

Y'know those chocolate-bacon bars that have no right to work, but instantly become your favorite thing ever? This is like that.

First pour has far more head than I expected; perhaps I should have chilled it rather than going for cellar temperature. But I didn't want to chill the flavors down to where I couldn't detect them all. Well, forget that; this thing is so complex, there is no way you're going to distinguish them all unless you're the kind of person who can detect both vanilla and garlic notes in a whiskey you like.

Which brings us to the body: this is just shy of being called "thick". Perhaps "full" is a better word. This is where the double-bock shows its stuff. This has good mouthfeel, which allows the smoked malts to deliver a coat of flavor. (This is odd for a rauchbier, which tend toward the light-bodied lager styles.)

I like this.

Despite the dual German characters of this beer, I could see this going with an English meat-pie or even a French-Canadian tourtiere. Best drink this before the weather gets warmer, because it will warm you all by itself.

Oh, did I mention the 9.6% ABV? As they say, "the goat that knocks you on your butt". Sweet. Smoky, to the point of savory. I'm going to have some more.

After our anniversary barbecue at Blue Ribbon (most excellent), we dropped in at Marty's in West Newton, which has an extremely deep beer selection (and wine selection, and...). I found something interesting: Mayflower Brewing makes a limited-run seasonal Thanksgiving Ale.

Unlike Christmas ales, which are an Olde Englyshe Tradition of roasted malts and spices, there really isn't a traditional Thanksgiving ale (despite the Puritans explicitly mentioning running out of beer on their 1620 trip¹). Fortunately, this Plymouth-based brewery doesn't let a silly thing like "lack of tradition" stop them.

This is nice. It's a copper-colored ale, half-barley and half rye malts. They aged it in oak (which is becoming quite the Thing among microbreweries now). Rather than taking any big swallows, this has enough flavor that it's much better to cover the tongue and swallow slowly. It's lightly bitter, but full-bodied. I'm picking up caramel notes, something which pretends to be spice (but this isn't a spiced brew), and the oak comes thru in the finish.

Okay, there's no point to calling your limited autumnal ale "Thanksgiving" unless you make something which will go well with a heavy turkey-based meal. Oh, this will do just dandy for that. It will work with the dark meat, it will work with the light meat with gravy, it will work with the stuffing, it will work with the garlic mashed potatoes, with the corn pudding, with the butternut and parsnips, and with both the mince and pumpkin pies. It won't hurt the green beans almondine. It is strong enough in body to stand up to the heavy feast, and smooth enough not to overpower any side dish in it.

Did I mention it has a creamy texture? Huh, no I didn't. It has a creamy texture.

Oh, this one's a win. I'll be getting more for Thanksgiving proper.

¹ "We could not now take time for further search or consideration, our victuals being spent, especially our beer." -- William Bradford

I'll admit: I erred. I served this at cellar temperature, and it really should have been chilled. The rest of these bottles are going into the fridge. I don't care how many noble hops are in this pilsner; pilsners should always be served cold.

But I did the right thing by pouring this into a pilsner glass. This is one gorgeous beer. Very pale yellow, but perfectly clear, with just enough effervescence to keep an aromatic head. And the aroma is quite complex, so you want the wider rim of the pilsner glass to let that out.

The foretaste is bitter, and the backtaste is bitter. This is one of those times when I wish my palate were able to distinguish more notes, because I could tell that the blend of hops was delivering more than I was getting. But the overall blend is quite good, in a bitter way. (I warned you about the bitters, right?)

This is the kind of late spring or early summer beer that would go great with just about any kind of appetizer or entrée.

But this is light-bodied, so if you were after a beer you could really chew, this ain't it.

I'd give it 7 out of 10, but I'm not really sure what my units are.

(Sponsor me in the BARCC walk.)

I received this beer on my birthday from

taura_g, but it was bottled a full year before that, conditioning in the bottle. Upon popping the cork on this 750ml bottle, the carbonation exploded, and I quickly had to move the bottle over the kitchen sink. The first pour into the pint glass was 100% head.

Well.

I cleaned the kitchen counter, and finally got a chance to taste the beer.

Wow.

Okay, the good folks at Victory (in Pennsylvania) brew in the German tradition, but this is an English "India Pale Ale" recipe. To that, they use their American hops (in high concentration). So this is a real mutt of a beer. It is very bitter, but complexly so: there are fruit notes, and even some hints of rosemary.

The color is coppery, and more than a bit cloudy.

Funky.

The body of this beer is heavier than one would expect from a Pale Ale, but not overly so. But many of the barley notes have become... funky.

Not in a bad way. But in a very definite way.

There is plenty in this beer to like, but I'm somewhat stumped as to what kind of food would go with it.

Hold on; I'm going to take another swig.

The foretaste is almost creamy; the backtaste is bitter on the sides of the tongue.

The feeling I get from it is cozy, but not warming. IPAs are generally quenching, but this has a bit of body to it. Still, this would be fine to drink during the warmer months.

If you like beer which is bitter, complex, and funky, you will definitely like this.

My wonderful wife

tamidon has been complaining that I've got too many absolutely excellent beers taking up space in her (new) refrigerator. She has a point; I acquire beers that are way above everyday drinking, and then fail to find occasions to drink them. So you, dear readers, get a beer review of Ommegang Hennepin.

Ommegang is a brewery dedicated to Belgian-style brewing in Cooperstown, New York. And they're frankly quite good at it. Hennepin is a bottle-conditioned "Saison Farmhouse" ale with plenty of sediment which I wisely left in the bottle. I chose a snifter-style glass to contain the head and still allow plenty of nose. This is a golden ale with a hint of cloud (see what I said above about sediment), and the first thing that hits the tongue is a pincer maneuver of pleasant bitterness on the sides of the tongue. This is rapidly followed by citrus notes from the hops, and a good gulp from the ale's body. This would never be mistaken for a lawnmower beer. It is not quenching so much as filling.

I had mine to chase down a dinner of Spanish sausage quiche (with broccoli), and it performed excellently at that. A heavier or darker beer would not have accented the cheese and eggs as this did. (That said, a darker beer would have gone better with red meat.)

At 7.7% alcohol, it is best to take time drinking this. But even as I approach the end, the nose is still piquant. This should be served at approximately 50F, below cellar temperature, but above refrigerator temperature. Take it out of the fridge at least half an hour before popping the cork. (Yes, cork.)

I am now detecting other flavors, but I am unfortunately too tipsy to identify them properly. Let's just say that this is a complex ale, well worthy of being enjoyed on its own, or with "light" fare such as fish, eggs, dairy, or earthy desserts.

This is apparently the 13th year that Sierra Nevada has made a wet-hop ale. "Wet-hop" means that the hops are delivered lickety-split from the fields to the brewery, so that they haven't had a chance to dry. This is supposed to impart some sort of hop-sap to the ale.

And there is definitely something. "Harvest" is a heavily hopped pale ale (some call it an "American IPA", but I don't truck with such oxymoronic appellations). It has an excellent coppery color and a light head, but the head does give it a complex nose. There are some fruit notes here, and something resembling rosemary.

The mouthfeel does carry some of that IPA dryness, but the swallow has a decent body. And then, after the bitter pale ale impression, the complexity hits again. sip Yes, there are some earthy notes to this. (We say "earthy" because it sounds better than saying "dirty".)

This is not heavy, and absolutely not light; it would stand up to fragrant cheeses, but a steak might overpower the subtleties in it. I think it would go well with a pasta carbonara with duck prosciutto, but my tastes may be skewed.

Not an everyday beer, but definitely one that belongs in a well-stocked beer cellar.

Among the many happy things at

roozle and

sunspiral's famous End of Summer party was Weyerbacher Quad.

The good folks over at Beer Advocate gave this merely a B+, but this set of reviews contains several bad ones from people who were disappointed at Quad's lack of head (just barely carbonated), many sweet notes (not overly hopped), and very high alcoholic content (it's a Quad, fer Pete's sake!). If you consider these features, rather than bugs, you may find it as excellent as I did.

It is a very complex beer, with every sip giving different notes from different tastes. And you do want to sip this, as drinking it like a lawnmower beer will knock you flat very quickly. To emphasize the nose, use a tulip glass or even a wine glass. This will also make it easier to share one bottle with a friend or two (see the aforementioned "knock you flat").

This is brewed in Pennsylvania, and the party attendee who brought it obtained it in Troy NY. I will have to look around for a local provider.

The world is facing an imminent hop shortage. Hops are a weird-ass weed with cone-like green "flowers" which are used as both a bittering agent in beer and a preservative. While the majority of beer nowadays uses some hops, a few resurgent styles (most notably "India Pale Ale", or "IPA" for short) use a lot of them.

The real problem, IMHO, is the unobtainability of many non-standard varieties in the coming shortage. As any good farmer, or anyone involved with the "local produce" movement knows, it's important to keep a wide variety of strains of any given crop out there. With a few natural (or economic) disasters hitting the growers of some less-common varieties, we may see some homogenization of the kinds of hops available in the future, which would be a Bad Thing.

But as far as beer goes, I'm actually hopeful. Many of my friends who don't like beer actually don't like hops. Historically, they are not alone in this: King Henry VIII went so far as to ban the use of hops in beer in England during his reign. But hops are not required in beer. As I said at the start, they are a bittering agent and a preservative. I once made a batch of beer using ginger and cardamom, which aren't bittering at all, and were less of a preservative, but the batch was so popular that I didn't have to worry about shelf-life past the ingredients' abilities to preserve.

Most dark beers use less hops anyway, and many brewers may well come up with recipes which use no hops at all.

So much good may come out of this.

[EDIT:] Thanks to

missionista's comment, I found the Gruit Ale website. I've only had time to skim so far, but it appears to be a resource I'll be using later.

Current Music: In Heaven There Is No Beer -- Polkacide

The three beers that we served at Thanksgiving included Wachusett Winter Ale. This is a locally brewed variant of Scotch ale (others include Paper City brewery's "Winter Palace Wee Heavy").

This is less hopped than most beers and ales, and the malts were caramelized before the wort. This means that the ale is actually a bit sweeter than you'd expect from something which contains alcohol. It also means that it goes great with poultry in general, and turkey in particular.

Without the major bittering agents, you can serve this at cellar temperature (around 50F) for maximum nose. We used tall pilsner glasses at Thanksgiving, but a good old pint glass or even stein will do just fine to transmit the aromas.

I've been pleasantly impressed with Wachusett; their Country Ale and Nut Brown Ale are both excellent table beers, complementing food. The same is true of the Winter Ale. The rich red-brown color is a pleasure to see, and its full body almost qualifies it as comfort food.

Today, December 5^th, is the 74^th anniversary of the Repeal of Prohibition. Wachusett will only be shipping the Winter Ale thru the middle of January, so seek this one out.

Strictly speaking, this is not a beer, but a barley wine. Emphasis on "wine".

Cambridge Brewing Company (at 1 Kendall Square) has this as a seasonal offering, so get there quick before the season ends. Knowing that these tend to run at 12% alcohol (remember that I said "wine"), I ordered the 6 oz stem glass.

Clarity: None. This was a glass of amber cloud.
Tartness: Lots. I could swear I tasted notes of raspberry, knowing very well there was no fruit juice in this.
Body: Moderate to high. It is barley, after all.
Legs: Get out of here, snob.

What this brew did was make me glad to be alive, thankful that I was sentient, and blissful that I could experience this.

And what more do we ask from beer?

I'll admit that I skew toward the odder flavors of beer, but it's important to know the "standard" beers and ales from any given brewery. So instead of Mercury Brewing's excellent Oatmeal Stout or India Pale Ale on their Ipswich label (or any of the craft beers on their Stone Cat label), I'll tell you about their flagship.

First, don't worry that you're getting something which is just a more expensive version of the bog-standard lagers from a nation-wide megabrewery. The color tends more toward amber than gold. But more obviously, this ale is cloudy. You shouldn't serve this in a (tall) pilsner glass or a pub-style pint glass; this is a job for a stein.

Serve chilled, and pour slowly right down the center. Let the head foam up a bit. Do this right, and you should be able to pour a twelve-ounce bottle (or twelve ounces from a growler) into a sixteen-ounce stein without slopping over.

This is a good nose. The hops are definitely present, but not on a full-frontal attack the way they are with an IPA.

The body is not quite full, but nobody will insult this ale with the euphemisms "clean and crisp". It is dirty. And it's good dirt. This is barley sediment at its finest.

Ipswich Original Ale would go well with any meal of definite flavors, but if you're eating something with subtle flavors, you should put off this ale until after dessert. It's not exactly heavy, but it gives "medium" a good name.

I like it.

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Berliners have been putting fruit juice in beer for, oh, a good long time. It took some tinkering, but many microbreweries have settled on the notion of a filtered wheat beer as a base for their fruit juices.

In general, beers with fruit juice should be served chilled (cold, even) on hot days. They work as sidekicks to barbecues.

Wachusett Blueberry is a prevalent example of that here in Massachusetts. This is a right decent quaff with enough blueberry to notice, but not so much that you're tempted to pour it on ice cream.

Sam Adams Cherry Wheat is actually brewed with cherries, instead of just having cherry juice added after the fact. This works in all sorts of hot weather.

The delightful

wren13 brought me back a couple of beers from her recent excursions. Ithaca Beer Co. makes an Apricot Wheat which unfortunately reminded me of some peach wine spritzers on first taste. Fortunately, it wound up tasting more like beer and less like spritz as the bottle went on; unfortunately, the brewers were being too gracious when they tried to describe this as having a "hint" of apricot. It is quite obvious, I'm afraid. But if you don't tend to like hops, you may well like this. (

hammercock has pointed out that she likes things like cherry lambics exactly because they don't taste like beer.)

But the other beer that

wren13 brought me (bless her!) was Abita's Purple Haze, which is a raspberry wheat "brew". (I don't know why they uniformly call their works "brews" instead of "beers"; maybe that carries the wrong cachet down in Louisiana.) This is a stronger-flavored wheat beer in the first place, rather than the nearly-transparent forms used by Wachusett and Ithaca. As a result, if the berry concentration is higher than a "hint", the beer doesn't fall down underneath it. I like this one much better.

It's summer. It's hot. Stouts and porters are pretty much out of the question. We can enjoy the fruity beers for a few months, until the pumpkin ales of autumn put a lid on it.

This is the fourth of four colonial recipes which Jim Koch experimented with. Yes, it's called a "root beer"; yes, it has sassafras and wintergreen; no, you can't let your kids drink it. This stuff is cranked up to 5.5% alcohol.

In addition to the familiar sassafras and wintergreen, this recipe has vanilla, honey, molasses, and licorice. I gotta tell ya: the whole molasses-in-beer thing faded away for a reason. I found the black-strap molasses used in the "George Washington Porter" to be overwhelming, but the lighter molasses used here is still... intrusive.

Of course, this is after working my tongue around the licorice.

So the overall effect comes on something like this:

Ooo, root beer! There's the sassafras, just like A&W!
Hunh! Kinda strong.
Woa Nelly! What's with all the licorice?
Hey, a bunch of other flavors in a complex combination.
<swallow/>
What the heck is that aftertaste? Molasses?

I'm sure that the early Americans were going for a beer which was as complex as some of their breakfast breads (with all the honey and spices that went into those). But simplicity generally wins out, which is why modern (non-alcoholic) root beer is stripped down to just the sassafras and wintergreen.

Oh, one last thing: this recipe calls for a late addition of caramelized sugar, so the slightly-darker-than-nut-brown hue literally comes from an early use of "caramel coloring". Given the sweetness, it's easy to see how this old recipe was altered for children.

So, out of the four old recipes, two were total winners, and two were, um, historically important.

Beer #3 in the "colonial recipes" series is the "James Madison* Dark Wheat Ale". This is actually the second dark wheat ale from a New England brewery I've had in the last year, the first being Magic Hat's Saint Gootz.

This ale is actually lighter than Saint Gootz, but it is still pretty much the color of the bottle. The mahogany color comes from the smoked roasted barley added to the rye in the wort. Thus, I waited until we started feeling the nippy weather before drinking it. Good move, as it turns out, as this has significantly more body than most wheat beers.

I left the wonderful unfiltered wheat sludge in the bottle, and poured into a Belgian-style stemmed beer glass. This was possibly overkill; a pub-style pint glass would have worked just as well to reveal the woody nose. However, a stein or (worse) leaving it in the bottle would have been a major error. When drinking good beer, it is not necessary to clothespin your nose shut.

Unlike the more, er, "vigorous" priming of some of these recipes, this one remains well carbonated during an extended and deliberate nursing. As a result, it carries the creamy after-taste wholly appropriate to a dark beer. And while many American beers (inexplicably) brag of a "clean, crisp taste" (a euphemism for no taste at all), the wheat base of this ale creates a "dirty, crisp taste". Good dirt. Gardening dirt. Without the grit.

Think of your favorite dark whole-wheat bread, freshly baked, and still warm. Now flip the temperature, and transmogrify it from solid to liquid.

That's what this beer is like.

Nothing against the hippies' Saint Gootz, but this is a lighter body on a dark taste.

Recommended.

* By the way, President Madison was not only a brewer, as many estated folks were back then, but he considered beer so important to the national well-being that he considered a National Brewery to go along with the National Bank. Fortunately, the plethora of local breweries convinced him that this was unnecessary. Otherwise, Budweiser would be a protected subdivision of the Post Office.

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Continuing my reviews of the Samuel Adams breweries traditional American beer recipes, #2 of the four is called "George Washington Porter", the beer he stained his wooden teeth black with.

First off, this beer was a tad over-primed, which is a polite way of saying that it foamed like mad upon being opened. Perhaps this unfiltered porter simply had more active yeast bottled than is usual.

But one side-effect of this little mis-hap was I had to quick-slug down a couple of gulps before I was truly ready. Thus, I was quite surprised by how thick the molasses is in this brew. Then I got hit with the major licorice back-bite. And when I say "licorice", I'm not simply describing the "hints" or the "nose" of the after-taste; there's real licorice in here.

I transferred the rest to a wide-mouthed Belgian-style beer glass, the better to get the aromas. This is a thick, dark beer, but a bit hoppier than most porters (sorry,

jbsegal), but the molasses is really the dominant flavor here.

This is tasting history. Tastes shift over time, like styles, fashions, accents, cultural mores, etc. The original martinis were never "dry", were made with sweet vermouth, and were often served in sugar-rimmed glasses. This beer is a meal all by itself, but the molasses is apparently of the black-strap variety favored 250 to 300 years ago. Our "refined" palates probably won't take to this.

This is probably the wrong time of year to be drinking this. A beer this heavy should be drunk in the late autumn or winter. But frankly, I prefer a spiced Winter Warmer or even a smoked porter to this. I will, however, consider using licorice in a future dark batch.

As an academic exercize, this beer is a resounding success. But I don't think I'd seek it out just for a drink.

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Jim Koch (pronounced "annoying Jim Cook") has done it again. This time, he has resurrected four colonial-era beer recipes, and presents them at $10 for four bottles. Now, I don't expect the rest of you to be as interested in these as I am, so I'm going to review all four of them here so that you can decide whether they'd be worth more than twice what you'd pay for a Right Decent Beer.

No. 1 of the four is the Traditional Ginger Honey Ale. In addition to the two weird ingredients in the name, it also has lemon zest.

While the fore-taste is that of a nice unfiltered hefeweizen, the back taste has an almost medicinal hit. But I don't mean that in a bad way, just in a surprising way. Remember those honey-ginger cough drops? If not, the hint of "medicine" may be absent for you.

The effect of this is a full-bodied but bright taste. I would therefore not recommend drinking this with dinner, but it would be excellent after dinner with or in lieu of dessert.

Koch tells us in the liner notes that "ginger beer ferments very quickly; Thomas Jefferson and his wife brewed 15 gallons of beer every two weeks on their Monticello estate." It also ferments very thoroughly; this stuff comes in at 5.5% alcohol.

Hmmm. It appears to be hopped. I was hoping for unhopped, given the presence of ginger, but this just adds to the complexity.

My, this is good. Worth the extra money? Maybe occasionally. Yes, definitely occasionally.

Today is hot. This occasion will do just fine.

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I picked up the beer for tomorrow's Thanksgiving feast. There were only a few stray Sam Adams lagers in the house, so I went and got some Z Street Mocha Java Stout, Gritty's Christmas Ale, Harpoon's Winter Warmer, and two that I just tried tonite.

Smuttynose Winter Ale: this brewery has a long run of excellent beers, and this one is no exception. Yes, this is made with roasted barley, but they went the extra few yards and used Trappist ale yeast. Served chilled but not cold, it should be left on the tongue so that as it warms, more subtle notes reveal themselves. Relatively light body, but definitely a cold-weather brew.

Stone Cat Pumpkin: Mercury Brewing is responsible for those good Ipswich growlers, and their Stone Cat label harbors some excellent recipes. Unlike Shipyard's pumpkin ale, which brought out the pumpkin and spices at the expense of body and hops, this is a very dark brown ale. It is hard to distinguish the pumpkin from the rest of the brew, but its presence means that you haven't tasted anything like this before. This should be served at cellar temperature, and would actually go well with dessert.