posted on 18 June 2009 by dan
Here’s what summer beer’s really all about:
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
Tags: backporch drinkin, Brooklyn, summer beer
Category: Beer Reviews, The Beer Blog | Comments (0)
posted on 6 June 2009 by dan
In a recent post, I wrote about a conversation I had with Tyler (of The Second Glass fame) re: the dearth of mom-and-pop breweries in Eastern MA. Wish I had a little more, uh, clarity at the time. I would have dropped Haverhill Brewery on him. 45 min. up 93, in (obviously) Haverhill, and attached to a brewpub called The Tap, these guys couldn’t embody Boston any more cohesively. Let’s run the list:
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
Tags: backporch drinkin, brewpub, Haverhill Brewery, local, pale ale
Category: Beer Reviews | Comments (1)
posted on 4 June 2009 by dan
Pity the poor, poor stout drinker. It’s the dawn of summer and the sunlight’s shining, the world’s warming. People are bouncing around, getting all public and friendly again, hey-how-ya-doin strangers, grinning like idiots. Witbiers and Summer styles are flying off the shelves. But your average stout drinker… he’s already longing for the bite of winter to justify his fridge full of dark and heavy beer. What’s this poor, poor soul to do?
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
Tags: backporch drinkin, cocktail, stout, Summer
Category: Beer Cocktails | Comments (1)
posted on 30 May 2009 by dan
Listen (and I’m not proud of this): I forget about Smuttynose sometimes. It’s easy to get distracted by all these flashy labels and wild stylistic experiments that hit our shelves like machine-gun fire. In this obsessive hunt for the next new thing, the old standbys can seem a little passe by comparison.
Which mode of thinking is backwards and self-defeating. Yeah, Smutty’s been around for, what, an eternity in craft-beer years and, yeah, they’re established. But the Portsmouth brewers aren’t ones to rest on the laurels of their success. They probably could just sit back and churn out more and more IPA. They aren’t. Instead, they’re ever in the lab, penning new recipes and tweaking old ones.
Which brings me to this year’s Summer Weizen. Our rep from the brewery popped in a few weeks back and he went on and on about this year’s recipe which calls for… wait for it… chamomile. Now, it’s not exactly foreign territory; a few popular brewers (Rogue, for one) have included the tea in their beers, and homebrewers can go on and on about the use of tea in general; but your average casual drinker probably hasn’t come across any of those brews. Therein lies the difference. Smutty Summer’s a staple as it stands, not some crazy new bottle. The addition of chamomile indicates, at the very least, a playfulness you don’t usually find in the more established crafts.
Here’s what the Smuttynose website says about it, in their Brewers Notes. By the way, it’s even cooler that they have a section on their website for the brewers to blog about their creations. Full disclosure and whatnot.
So, given that the whole point of beer is drinking it, not sitting around conceptualizing it… what does the chamomile actually do for the beer? To be honest with you, I couldn’t tell you. I don’t claim to have an advanced enough palate to pick up on the subtleties, not to mention that I’m not entirely sure what chamomile tastes like anyway.
But I can tell you this: in a world inundated with summer beers, the Smuttynose stands out. I dig this beer. Big and fat with a hoppy base and a yeasty body, it leaves a gentle sweetness on the roof of your mouth. It finishes rich and with this natural-harvest quality and the hops hang out unobtrusively on the tongue for minutes after. Wait - does it sound like I’m describing something un-summery? That description paints a picture of a winter warmer, doesn’t it? The thing is, the Summer Weizen somehow manages to refresh the tongue without sacrificing body. Good stuff.
I’m glad that Smutty rep went on and on about this beer. It’s good to remind myself that the established crafts are established for a reason and that innovation and familiarity aren’t mutually exclusive. Get down with this beer. Get back to the roots.
dJp
Tags: American beer, backporch drinkin, seasonal beer, Smuttynose, summer beer
Category: Beer Reviews, The Beer Blog | Comments (1)
posted on 25 April 2009 by dan
Hey, did you know summer’s here? I’m writing this right near the end of April, on a day the temperature’s pushing 80 for the first time all year. But the summer beer’s here, so farbeit from me to argue. Plus, how can you argue with summer beers? Easier to drink than water, the lot of them.
Geary’s has always been top of the pack. A consistetly performing brewery out of Portland, ME, every beer they toss out there at us has this buttery quality on the tongue that’s wildly intriguing and the Summer’s no different. It’s nice and light, but somehow suggests a heavier body. Malty through and through, it’s got a hoppy kick at the end that balances everything out. I could drink beer after beer after beer of this and I look forward to doing just. This, here, is the perfect backporch drinkin beer.
dJp
Tags: backporch drinkin, Geary's, Geary's Summer, Maine, Summer
Category: Beer Reviews | Comments (0)
