What Summer Beer’s All About

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)

Still Smutty After All These Years

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)

Magic Hat Wacko: B-b-b-beet juice?

A rep from Magic Hat just popped by the store to taste us on the brewery’s new summer offering. It’s called Wacko. Why? Who knows… but maybe it’s got something to do with the bright red, almost fruit-punch-like color of the beer. The color comes from the fact that the recipre calls for beet juice. What? Yep, beet juice. A lot of beers take advantage of beet sugars, but juice? For coloring? Strange, strange stuff. Typical Magic Hat, of course.

The beer’s actually pretty good and doesn’t taste anything like beets. I sipped the thing warily, not being a huge beet fan myself, and I was pleasantly surprised. The beer’s just a beer, nothing too extravagant about its flavor profile. Light, easy to toss back, a porch-drinkin beer with a subtle hoppy bite on the finish. Everything you want out of a summer beer, in other words.

Try it. It’ll be here soon. Don’t be afraid that it’s brewed with beets. Don’t be afraid of the summercamp punch color. Be afraid of how easy it is to swallow. Be very afraid.

dJp

Tags: backporch drinkin, beet juice, craft beer, Magic hat, seasonal beer, summer beer, wacko
Category: Beer Reviews, The Beer Blog | Comments (5)