Which gift turned out to be two bottles of Pliny the Elder for Tony and I. Never heard of Pliny? You must never been to BeerAdvocate; the BA’s over there hold the DIPA in the same esteem winos hold Caymus or Dom. It’s damn near impossible to find anybody with even lukewarm reviews, nevermind critical. Like anything else hoisted up on a pedestal of such great heights, I’m immediately skeptical, so to actually drink this like-mythical brew doubled as both a drinking pleasure and an intellectual experiment. Of course, as mentioned above, it was Boozy Milkshake Day (the sequel). The scales obviously tipped a little toward the former. I just drank the bastard, frankly. Here, in retrospect, I’ll try to even it out a bit.

And it’s good. It’s very good. Anybody following along these past couple months probably caught wind of my frustration re: American IPA’s going for that over-the-top hop quality (rhymes!); the coolest thing about the Pliny is that even though it’s a double IPA (doubles usually equating to double everything - hops, alcohol, etc.), it manages to seat itself in balance. It doesn’t pull you one way or the other, doesn’t rip your tongue free of your cheeks in an effort to impress. Actually it drinks more like a pale ale, in terms of bite and slice.

As much as I love to knock things off their pedestals, I just can’t bring myself to do so in this case. If you can get your hands on it, I’d highly suggest not blinking, just buying. Pliny’s brewed by Russian River, out in California. Nothing gets shipped out to us in the east. Why am I writing about a beer we can’t get? Well… I don’t know, really. You can’t buy it here. But it is beer, and we deal with beer. So, if you ever find yourself Cali-ways, find a pint, find a bottle; tell ‘em dT sent you.

For those of you just hopping on the dT blog-wagon, we’ve been waiting (sort of) patiently for its arrival since a tasting over at the Cambridge Common a couple months ago, when the M.R. president promised us a slice of the High-Gravity-pie. We tasted the then-current Serious Madness Black Ale back then; we gushed and sputtered over it. Which led to our Double Dread anticipation.

Was it worth the wait? Abso-effing-lutely. I waffled with sampling it for this posting, it being limited and whatnot, but in the end, I caved and bought a 4-pack. The side of the pack claims 8.6% booze, but it’s hardly noticeable, what with the sweet malts and the prickly hops tap-dancing about on the palette. It manages to refresh, despite its weight and claims at heavy-headiness.

The coolest bit of all, though, comes at the top of their brewery description: “…we were astounded to see light literally dance and refract in its ruby depths.” Aside from that being a poetic and beautiful and apt description, it also reveals considerable information re: the integrity of M.R. in general. Any true art controls the artist as much as the artist controls it; the Double Dread reflected something unexpected back to the brewers. What else could you ask for from a beer? This is craft beer epitomized, people. Dig it.

Whether or not that sounds appetizing comes down to whether or not creme brulee sounds appetizing in the first place. Me, I dig it thoroughly, but then I’d order the creme brulee off a menu at a chicken shack. If you’re like me, trust me trust me on this beer. Sip on it, close your eyes; you’ll swear you’ll need a spoon. The back of the label reading like a philosophical equation of history, the only clue to how S.T. arrives at the brew is the inlcusion of dark caramel malt and vanilla beans in the recipe. The sum is more than its parts. This ain’t your typical vanilla beer.

Tony and I sipped on a pint just to see if anything’s changed since it came out last summer. This year’s tastes almost the same as last year’s batch, except that its got this bitter kick on the finish that, in context, conjures up a dark chocolate glaze. The nose is just as intoxicating, that vanilla apparent as soon as the bottle popped. It’s that combination of smelly nose and thick vanilla stout that manages to mask the 10% alcohol in the bottle. Don’t be fooled: sweet, yes, but also brawny enough to lay flat the unaware.

We got this is in last year and couldn’t keep it on the shelf. Right now, we’ve got ten cases or so in the basement and a promise of further availability, but… well, future availability is enlightment: fun to talk about it, difficult to acheive without constant perserverence. Dig it while the diggin’s diggable.

There’s an Australian in my house. A few years ago, my fiancé lived with her in Costa Rica, both of them working for a Peace-Corp-ish program, chopping down jungle pathways, dancing with locals, the like (you haven’t seen sexy until you’ve seen the picture of my fiancé holding a machete, a wary Costa Rican hovering in the background). Now, the Australian  is on a sort of world tour of similar programs; she’s kicking it off with a six week stay at our house. Which is pretty cool. It’s like having an ambassador-in-residence. I’m learning all sorts about the other end of the world - mostly tidbits like how they have 30 different words for drunk and refer to spaghetti bolognese as “spag-bog”. Which language idiosyncrasies tickle me immeasurably.

The relevance to dT’s humble little blog here being that she’s pretty willing to reinforce the whole stereotype of the hard-drinking Aussie (see above-mentioned 30 words). She’s never heard of the majority of our humble American craft brigade and she’s more than agreeable to some consistent experimentation. New night, new beer - or two or three new beers. So, last night, I came home from our beer tasting and found her 4 in to a 6 of Brooklyn Summer. Here she is: sitting on my back deck, eyes closed and head-nodding to some sweet, lilting down-under music.

Brooklyn makes good beer. Hailing from Wiliamsburg, that uber-hipster neighborhood in the eponymous NY borough, the brewery boasts a 20-year history of quality offerings and the Summer lives up to the catalogue. What with its light body and that bready, feisty yeasts, it perfectly satisfies the promise a summer beer implies: refreshing, easygoing, backporch drinkin’. After how many summer beers now? it’s this one that finally ropes in that oft-tongue-tipped analogy: this beer’s refreshing - and with the same doughy quality - as the last drops of vodka sauce mopped up by the last bite of a dinner roll.

But that’s not really what summer beer’s all about.

What all summer beer’s about, has nothing to do with the profile, or the brewery’s history; a summer beer’s about the moment between analysis and judgment, moments such as this: titling back the bottle on my backporch, jawing with my Australian boarder, listening to music and to crickets, cool whispers of an early summer breeze shushing in the air. She plays a song. I play a song. Time kind slides by into the night and it gets later, but we don’t notice.

“You’ve never heard of this band,” she tells me. “Nobody in Australia, really, heard about this band yet.” The song is nice and simple and relaxing. If there’s such a thing as man-at-rest, it would describe me just now, the Brooklyn Summer cocked and pouring between my lips and everything serene as the music drifts. The day seems weeks away and the winter, years, at least. My heart, languid and easy, th-thumps in drowsy rhythm, a gentle syncopation with that puh-limp… plimp of raindrops from the roof into the gutter.

“It’s a nice song,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says and nods. “Yeah, it is.” We sip our beers. There’s nothing left to say; nothing’s left in need of explanation. We aren’t an Australian and an American, here. We’re two people laid out on the backporch and everything is nice.

dJp

1) Named after, and located in, a city out-of-towners can’t pronounce? check…

2) Housed in what used to be a shoe factory? check…

3) All brewing overseen by a local boy (his name’s Jon Curtis)? check …

4) Brewpub features New England clam chowder with chowder spelled with an ‘aah’ instead of an ‘er’? check…

and, finally, the most relevant to our discussion,

5) Offers a beer whose label appeals to Red Sox Nation? check… and check.

Which label adorns their newest beer, Homerun American Pale Ale. Dig on that old-timey young lady in a baseball skirt-uniform that all y’all Bostonians will recognize as aping the Red Sox getup. All blue and red and white, with just a hint of cleavage tossed in to… y’know… hook the guys. I dig it, that hometown flavor. See it there, to your right?

So, what’s up with the brew, then?

Here’s what’s up: pours out a healthy, rich brown and a plush beige head; sweet malts balance out well against the sharp hops; finishes with a similar interplay, but finishes quickly. Overall, it’s a solid APA. Is it fantastically complex? No, not really. Does that have anything to do with anything? Nope, not at all. Sometimes, it’s the simple things that satisfy.

We could drink on this all day long. Perfect backporch drinkin’… and plus, anybody taking a peak in our recycling bin will know exactly where I’m from. We’re drinking Boston, here, ladies and gents, and that makes the whole experience that much more gratifying.

dJp

“I drink a lot of Czechvar here,” Tyler told me - the Standard’s right down the street from his house.

“Really? Czechvar,” I said. Not that there’s anything wrong with Czechvar, but given the option… Harpoon every time.

“You gotta understand,” Tyler said, “I’m from Wisconsin - I grew up, there’s breweries all over the place. There was a brewery across the street from my preschool. And we’re talking legit breweries, tiny little places, run by like an old biker and his daughter or something. Then I move to Boston, what’s here? Harpoon? Sam? I mean, they’re cool, but they’re not really… I don’t know.”

And I follow. I dig on Harpoon - the Leviathans are some fascinating, well-thought-out beers; I dig on Sam - their Summer’s one of my favorites and plus, how can you not respect the pioneers? But Tyler’s distinction is more than fair. These aren’t local, hometown breweries any more. They’re national now, players in a larger game and God bless ‘em for it, that’s the point, to grow. I’m proud to say Boston’s home to two forerunners in the craft world… but it doesn’t change the fact that drinking on either one of them isn’t a uniquely personal experience anymore. “And what else is there, really?” Tyler said, gesturing at me with his glass. “Everything else is out west, or in NH, or somewhere. Where’s the neighborhood brewery?”

Ah, the neighborhood brewery… The whole concept lies at the heart of what fascinates me most about beer, really. Tyler nailed it right on; he gets it. Yeah, yeah, the flavor profile - you go on, if you want, talk about the hops profile, about the quality of the head, about ABVs and IBUs and whether or not it compares to other IPAs or IRSs or what-have-you - and that’s cool. That’s what makes it so much fun to drink and think about and I talk about all that, too. But what makes beer truly compelling (and by beer here, I mean the concept of, I mean BEER, all caps) is the story behind every bottle you crack. Dig it:

All across the map, these breweries pop up,  helmed by brewers (or brewesses(?)) backed by nothing but their own faith in their craft, persisting on sheer will and determination, curled fists shaking defiantly at the false idol that is watered-down macros… and they’re succeeding at their revolution, gaining ground every day. And why? Because of these communities that pop up around them that have the same faith in the brews as the brewers themselves. They support them to the bitter end. Say what you want about Wall Street and foreign conflicts and the electoral college; the heart of America lives and breathes in that kind of local pride, in a dedicated community rallying behind, believing in, the little guy and the little guy’s dream.

(of course, it helps when the little guy’s dream gets you drunk and tastes fantastic)

I don’t know any other culture quite like it, so nationally pervasive, but based on this fierce regional loyalty. There’s sports, I know, but that loyalty strikes me as divisive - Sooners fans knifing Longhorn fans, bar-fights in Chicago kicked off by kids in Cardinals hats. It ain’t like that here. I got turned on to Victory by my Philly friend; I turned him on to Berkshire. Because listen: all these breweries everywhere, with all their commonalities and all their distinctions, with all the fire of their hometown crowd… they’re all making beer, they’re all making BEER. And as a culture, we get that. We’re down to share and get shared at.

dJp

There’s 3 options: retreat further in, find some dank corner in some dank basement cool enough to justify his habit (which means hanging out in basements); crank the AC up till the knob breaks off (which means bankruptcy by electric bills); or, just slurp it down regardless, cursing the sunlight (which means adopting this miserable Dickensian persona, losing friends, etc). Yea, pity the poor stout drinker.

But rejoice! I got the remedy, I got the remedy. The 4th option, stout drinkers: Black Velvet… and, no, I’m not hitting on you.

What you need:

1) One (1) bottle of stout - or, I hear, porter works well, too… Pretty much, it just needs to be black, what with the cocktail’s name) - we used a bottle of Sam Smith’s Imperial Stout (see: above pic on left), but that’s really only b/c it was the closest to where we’re sitting.

2) One (1) bottle of some sparkling wine. What kind of sparkling wine depends on personal preference, but I wouldn’t go at anything expensive, since you’re just pouring it on top of a beer. We went with Segura Viudas Cava (see: above pic on right), on the assumption that something slightly sweeter than Champagne might play nicer with a beer.

3) One (1) pint glass (that would be the pic in the middle, there).

Pop the cap, pull the cork before you even begin to think about mixing it up. The recipe we used called for a simultaneous pour, even though an online search yielded a variety of recipes, differing only in the mixing method: beer first, wine first, both at once. I’d stick with the at-once option. Once combined, any mixing would just kill of all the foam and bubbles, so best to let gravity take care of it for you. But, to each his own, though, as it goes. The only constant guideline is that you shoot for a 1:1 ration - which is just a guideline, of course, so feel free to toy with proportions. We did. We ended up with a little more wine than beer; Jeff estimates it at 3:2,, but then, Jeff once estimated he had $8 worth of change in his pockets and he only had 30 cents, so you can do with that what you will.

The resultant cocktail preserves the dark coffee and roasted flavors you’d expect in a stout, and the sparkling wine cuts through the body and lightens it up, plus adds this refreshing bite to the finish that gets you ready for the next sip. Which qualities mean perfect summer drinking w/o sacrificing any of that stout-ness. So, stout drinkers: Drink it in the sun, drink it in the park. Get grinning with all the rest of us idiot. I have your salvation, and it is good.

dJp

You really should be pumped about this. As you may or may not recall , a few weeks back I wrote about Mad River (and I’m assuming you don’t, you hopefully having better things to do than commit my posts to memory). The brewery came to town for the Craft Beer Conference and hosted a little get-together over at the Cambridge Common.

During which get-together the M.R. CEO Eric Spieth promised me we’d get an allotment of the next entry in their limited High Gravity Series - a double imperial red (!). Now, in the ole game we play, reps promise this and that and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t, so generally I take these things with a grain of salt. But Spieth strikes me as exactly the kind of guy that should dominate the business world - genuine, grateful, generous (not to mention passionate re: his product). I believed him.

And with good reason. It’s all about to become a reality.

Our rep who handles M.R. gave me a little tap on the shoulder yesterday and - ever so hush-hushedly - informed me the DIR should be in soon enough, definitely before it gets too hot out. Then he gave me a little nod and I gave him a little nod and he put his finger next to his nose and sidled off backward. If he was wearing a hat, he might have pulled the brim over his eyes as he stepped into the shadows. It was a very Deep Throat moment (uh, in the Woodward and Bernstein sense).

So get puh-puh-pumped. It’s en route. It’s coming. I’ll let you know.

dJp

I posted this originally during the Craft Beer Conference week, but, well… I had another glass of Orchard White last night and it’s so gosh darned tasty and whatnot, I feel the need to move it up to the top of the blog. And so, without further ado…

So, it’s Craft Beer Conference week here in lovely Boston, which means we’re flooded with brewers in town. Good, good stuff. We’ve been bar-hopping all week, trying out the newest brews and this that and the third. Everywhere we go, it’s been on lips: The Bruery finally has MA representation.

The Bruery’s Orchard White is often cited as the number one beer coming out of the States today (depending on who you ask, of course - some people might tell you that distinction belongs to Budweiser). It’s a witbier, a style most are familiar with through Blue Moon, or Sam White, or some other such you find people tossing citrus rings into at bars. Derived from the Belgian word for white, these brews are so-called because, while they’re not perfectly white, they’re much, much lighter than the palest pale ales. Brewed with spices, they blast the tongue with citrus and the like.

But this Orchard White, it’s something different. First of all, there’s a bit of lavender in the recipe, and you can taste it immediately. Second, it’s bottle fermented and unfilitered, like most in the style, but somehow comes out wearing those characteristics on its sleeve. Where lots of witbiers can come out tasting manufactured, this Bruery brew tastes like a Belgian Saison Farmhouse. Jeff put it best: it’s like taking a bite out of the Belgian farming countryside. And that’s good. It’s very good. Every sip is chewy, different from the last. If you want a beer experience unlike any other you’ll find in an American Witbier, pick this up. It’s only 10 bucks for a full 750 mL. You won’t be disappointed.

dJp

For instance, Belgium. A country steeped in the brew tradition, the Belgian tastes run towards the subtler end of the spectrum. The IPAs we call fascinating, they might call over-hopped. But a few breweries over there have been experimenting with the style, largely for export - the Belgians won’t have it.

So dig this Gaspar, a Belgian IPA offering. It claims to be the hoppiest beer in Belgium, which is a loaded statement if there ever was one. I checked out the reviews on Beer Advocate, just to get a sense of what people thought about it. And it’s funny. The collective BA impression is that somebody must be lying to them somewhere along the line, what with the beer not being as bitter as the IPAs they’ve come to know and love.

Here’s the thing, though: this is a hoppy beer, no doubt about it. But the hops here aren’t the same American hops found in the US. These are Belgian hops, more citrus-y then flat out bitter. If you go into this beer knowing that, you maybe won’t set unrealistic expectations for it. You can sit back and just enjoy it on its own merit, rather than comparing it unfairly to something American.

And it’s easy to enjoy it, that bit taken care of. It bites your tongue with those citrus hops teeth, but it’s all wrapped in this coat of lingering sweetness. Most of the real bitterness comes at the finish, rebounding back over all that sweetness, so even after you’ve swallowed it, your tongue is teased with this rotation of alternating flavors. Very cool.

If you can get it out of your head that all IPAs are created with the same intentions, you’ll dig this beer. You’ll dig it for what it is, not for what you want it to be.

dJp