posted on 30 November 2009 by tom
Anchor Brewing Company has been producing quality beers for over a century. Started by German immigrants after the California gold rush in 1896 Anchor became known for Steam Beer which was brewed without the use of ice. Anchor has been a trusted name in beer long before the craft beer explosion of recent years. Beginning in 1975 Anchor began brewing Liberty Ale and Anchor Porter to go with their already popular Steam Beer. This same year Anchor produced their first Christmas Ale. Now in its 35th year Anchor Christmas Ale is anticipated each year like Black Friday, Santa Claus, and Eggnog… Well at least to those in the beer community.
Just as people get a new Christmas tree every year each Anchor Christmas Ale depicts a different tree on its label. The bottle states “since ancient times, trees have symbolized the winter solstice when the earth, with its seasons, appears born anew.” So this seasonal ale is not just for Christians but pagans, Jews, and gentiles alike. While the tree motif remains constant the beer itself is different every year. As if brewed in Santa’s workshop the ingredients for each seasons Christmas ale are kept secret.
The 2009 Anchor Christmas Ale pours dark brown with hints of red when illuminated. Hints of chocolate, nutmeg, and other holiday spices are evident when sniffing a fresh poured glass. The dark color of the beer shows up in the taste. It has a strong malt and yeast character with the suggestion of chocolate and coffee flavors. As you get farther down into the glass a stronger bitterness becomes evident with a subtle taste of hops. Overall this is a wonderfully balanced beer that has just the right amount of winter flavoring without overwhelming the palate.
Available in 6 packs and 1.5 liter bottles, Anchor Christmas Ale makes a great gift or great drink while wrapping presents. Make sure to ask about our selection of cellared Anchor Christmas Ales from years past. Compare the 2009 edition with older Anchor Christmas ales. This beer if aged properly remains drinkable for years, changing character with each passing season.
Tags: Anchor Brewing, beer, Christmas Ale, Pagans, Trees
Category: Beer Reviews, The Beer Blog | Comments (0)
posted on 8 August 2009 by dan
We got calls for weeks - countless, endless calls for weeks. The collab brew by Stone, CBC, and Brew Dog. It’s called Juxtaposition and it’s a black pilsner, which you really don’t see all that often. It might very well be the Second-Coming of Suds, judging by the hype bubbling around it.
And it’s finally in. We got a case. Let me say that again, in no uncertain terms: we got A case. As in, one. This stuff is so closely guarded, I’m a little surprised we didn’t have to sign a waiver.
The irony’s rich here, in a couple ways. First of all, here I am, a blogging about beer, managing a shop, and I can’t even try the stuff. I mean, I could, but I’m not going to, because any bottle I drink is one less bottle for you guys to pick up. Second, look up Juxtaposition: it means putting two things side by side, thus illuminating any similarities/differences. What with me not sipping on the stuff, it’s a bit hard to do a compare-contrast. You know? Bear with me here.
Here’s what the reviewers on Beer Advocate have to say about it. And, actually, here’s what the reviewers have to say about it also. It seems like the whole collaboration tip confused the Advocates a bit; how exactly do you categorize a beer that comes from three different breweries? Note, though, it gets an A minus on both postings. Which is good. Very good.
And which brings me to the reason I’m posting this up on our humble little blog, even though I haven’t tried the thing yet (besides, of course, letting you know we have it in). The reason being this: to talk a bit about the recent blossoms of collaborations between breweries and how mind-numbingly awesome the whole concept is.
Craft beer walks a fine line. On one hand, it’s an art, of sorts, one that passionate brewers the nation over dedicate their lives to because they, frankly, love beer; on the other hand, it’s a business. Of course it is. Everybody needs to get paid, after all. To see breweries - companies that, in the most business-oriented sense, compete for every slim dollar beer geeks can afford to spend - to see these breweries get together and craft a beer together… that’s a wonderful thing. That’s transcendent of the typical mindset, wouldn’t you say?
If drinking beer is a total sensual experience, one that is meant not only for the tongue, but also the eyes and ears and nose, then, really, it’s an experience in the larger sense. Any and all associations called up by what you know of the brewery, of the brewer, of the style - that all comes in to play. So, drinking on this bottle is a bit like tasting the intersection between all the varied points on the brewing map. It’s tasting the passion that goes into every bottle. It’s the finite point where beer exists for beer’s sake. It’s a metaphor, g-dammit.
Or something like that.
Anyway, like I said, it’s uber-limited. We have a case. Actually, by now, it’s considerably less than a case. If you want it, come and get it, but hurry. Hurry hurry hurry.
Also, as a parting note: what’s up, Christine - how is you?
Tags: Brew Dog, CBC, collaboration, Stone
Category: The Beer Blog | Comments (1)
posted on 28 July 2009 by dan
Canton, MA. Small Mass town.
My experience with Canton (prior to, what, a week ago) revolved around their 12 and under travelling soccer team circa 1992. I was a goalie for the Medfield Blaze. Can’t remember the Canton’s team name, but I’ll tell you this: those little brace-faced, freckled, hair-tousled bastards could play soccer. Dreaded the matches. Dreaded them.
Of course, I’m 17 years older now. I haven’t played soccer in… well, actually, I think it’s been 17 years. Maybe it was those fiesty Cantonians that drove me away. Not bitter; don’t even like soccer any more.
But then, last week, we were visited here at dT by a gentleman named Peter. Formerly a worker in the construction field, he and a colleague got hit hard by the recession, took stock of their surroundings, and decided that opening a brewery might be the best way to weather the economic storm.
They picked a site out in Canton, right smack in the middle of the Blue Hills nature reserve, hence the name: Blue Hills Brewery. They’re the only brewery in the whole valley down there; their rationalization for the site being that all them NYers driving out to the cape will pass right by. Pretty smart, methinks.
They brewed their first batch a few days before 2009, just in time for the Craft Beer Conference. The brews are hitting the shelves now, and they number four so far: an IPA, a hefe, a red, and a watermelon. The first three, we’ve got. The last, we’re getting this week.
It’s good, good stuff. If IPA can be considered the benchmark for a brewery, if only because of its ubiquity blah blah, Blue Hills stands heads and shoulders above the rest. The hop content isn’t of the smack-you-in-the-face tip and it maintains an eminent drinkability from first sip to last.Traditional in style, magnanimous in quality.
The hefe, on the other hand, is something totally different. Toss away what you know about the style; this one’s amber in color, only barely cloudy, and the banana notes are subtle, hidden behind a malty richness. On the first sip, I thought, “What the…” But I finished it in minutes flat. Dig it: perhaps it ain’t your traditional hefeweizen, but that means nothing compared to how it tastes.
I’ve heard great things about the watermelon, from Jeff, no less, who has a negative attitude towards fruity beers of that ilk. If he digs it, it must be diggable.
Check these guys out. Seriously. Plus, Peter tells us that they have plans to plant their own hop garden and (Peter being an architect and all) they want to build a sort of beer garden/cavern in the Blue Hills out there. Get on board early, friends. Dig it dig it dig it.
dJp
Tags: Blue Hills, hefeweizen, IPA
Category: The Beer Blog | Comments (0)
posted on 18 July 2009 by dan
I looked up excelsior (the word, not the beer - the beer I just drank… we’ll get to that). Apparently, there’re two meanings, equally correct. By the first, excelsior refers to the finely shaved wood used to protect fragile objects in packages. By the second, excelsior means ‘ever higher’. It’s New York’s state motto. Both of them derive from Latin, but how one word tumbled through time and birthed these two wildly different meanings, I couldn’t tell you.
I’m guessing that when Ithaca calls their special release series Excelsior!, they mean the latter definition - it certainly doesn’t taste like wood chips. And, plus, Ithaca is in (wait for it) Ithaca, NY. I’m sure you catch the connection. Then there’s the exclamation point at the end (I wasn’t being cute with that - it’s part of the title); hard to imagine anyone getting that excited about wood shavings.
So, does the beer take you ever higher? It depends on your perspective, I suppose, but I’m going to play the hops-in-America card again to convince you that yes, yes it does. Higher and higher. Dig it:
Anyone who’s read our little beer blog even once or twice might be hip to the American craft world’s tendency to equate bigger with better and that bigger usually means bigger hops. There’s this tendency, it seems, to assume that if a beer overflows with bitter or citrus hops, then it’s a good beer. There’s an implication that hop flavors are an end in and of themselves.
Which we rail against a bit here at dT. Listen: we love hops. Those bitter pinches on the tongue - they can contribute to complexity in a very beer-specific way, an exercise of flavor you won’t find duplciated precisely in any other food or beverage. But to rely on hops and only hops is akin to making Kool-Aid with triple the powder the recipe calls for: sure, that “fruit punch” tastes great, but overload draws way too much attention to how sickly sweet the stuff really is.
Hops should be thought about the way Ithaca thinks about them in the Alphalpha, the current entry in the Excelsior! series: as a bridge between the initial wave of flavor and the finish; as a contrast to lusher, sweeter flavors brought by the malts; as a single note in a whole symphony of flavor. The bitter flavors can push and pull your tongue away from all the other qualities of a beer, a pleasant stress in your mouth. That’s what we call complexity.
The Alphalpha includes alphalpha honey in its recipe, and the honey presents itself most obviously up front, as soon as the suds hit your teeth, a percolating sweetness of honey fizzed up with beer foam.Then, the hops close in on the sides of your tongue (think: that scene in Star Wars, the walls closing in…). That bitter hop character contracts all the plump honey down to a single point and the beer slips effortlessly down your throat, widening from the grapefruit-y hops back to honey, fizz-less now, pure and delicious.
It’s a wholly symetrical drinking experience, beginning in one place and working itself back again; it satisfies the promise of beer’s ability to spin a narrative for your taste-buds. There’s the pleasant origin with just the suggestion of turbulence, a sharp conflict in the middle that gives way to change, and, finally, the sweet, sweet resolution that satisfies, leaves you wanting more. Give a little burp: the whole thing gets played out again.
So, does Ithaca live up to its claim at rising ever higher? I say yes. I say this beer takes steps to frame hops in the way they should be framed. I say, drink it, dig it, and transcend the typical. I say there’s more to beer than hops hops hops hops and Ithaca proves it with the Alphalpa.
dJp
Category: Beer Reviews, The Beer Blog | Comments (0)
posted on 4 July 2009 by dan
Every month, we go through our import beer selection and pull out-of-code beers off the shelf. Today, Dave, who is dT’s beer connoisseur, hobbled into our backroom holding a few bottles of Bavaria. “Anybody want a Bavaria, out of date, warm as hell?” he asked. “Well, I certainly do,” I said. Because it reminded me of when I fell in love with imports. To wit:
I fell in love with imports when I was in Belgium during a summer in college, mostly because I feel the need to satisfy glaring cliches. I was with a friend whose parents were from the continent - a father from Scotland and a mother from Belgium. His maternal grandmother still lives over there, in a little seaside town called Oostende, so we stayed with her for a few days between Amsterdam and… well, we went back to Amsterdam after that. We went other places, too, I swear.
Anyway… Robert (being the friend I was backpacking with) had been there a couple times and had met a whole group of Belgian foot soldiers that hung out in the local pubs, so we went and met up with them. They introduced us to a whole range of fun drinking games like: drinking, running around in circles and then drinking, and drinking. Anybody out there who thinks they know how to hold their booze, go hang out with Belgian foot soldiers for a while and then come back and talk to me.
One of the bars they took us to claimed to have over three hundred beers on tap. I couldn’t tell you how accurate that count might be, what with the aforementioned drinking “games,” but if it wasn’t three hundred, it approached it. But that’s not even the best part; the best part was that the far wall was covered in small taps that you could walk up to and sample from, so as to assuage the casual customer unwilling to use the random-guess method with their extensive menu. So, I sampled. And sampled. And sampled.
Which has exactly what to do with Bavaria, you might be asking yourself (and rightly so). It’s this: of the three hundred beers there, well over half were from Belgium, as you’d expect - the rest were from all over Europe. The slightly miffed bartender (so slightly miffed due to me asking what I could try that wasn’t Belgian, but was close by, which wasn’t exactly tactful, especially coming from a flat-faced, naive obvious-American clearly under his own country’s drinking age)… anyway, the slightly miffed bartender said if I wasn’t going to drink a Belgian beer, I might as well drink Bavaria from Holland. Okay, said I, and ordered a Bavaria. It spilled over the top of the glass when the bartender slammed it down in front of me and stalked off shaking his head.
To this day, I’m not sure if he recommended Bavaria from some heartfelt belief in the beer or from some heartfelt desire to get rid of me, but it doesn’t matter. Because that Bavaria was the brew that opened the gates for imports to me. It’s not because it’s an amazing beer; actually, I think it’s fairly simple and straightforward, even though it’s infinitely satisfying. It’s because Bavaria stradles the line between what I had known and loved in the American craft world and the stranger Belgians I had been sampling.
Belgium operates in a self-contained world, and rightly so. They make the French wines of the beer world - steeped in tradition and reluctant to cater to American palettes. Which is all well and good, considering the amazing beers they produce, in styles that no other beer-producing area has been able to duplicate precisely (although, not for a lack of trying). But it’s hard for a newbie to the beer world to make the leap. Bavaria, on the other hand, has the crispness of macro beers like Bud and Coors, the depth and complexity of American crafts, and enough nuances to be wholly its own. The overwhelming yeast qualities sit nicely behind hops, making the drinkin’ experience both relaxing and invigorating.
Of course, at the time, I just drank the thing. But, of everything that happened to me that night, I remember most distinctly trying that Bavaria and thinking, “oh, so imports don’t have to be strange.” And once I realized that, imports had a more appropriate context. I owe it all to you, Bavaria.
And, as an aside: that warm bottle, out of date? Not bad in the least. I finished it quickly.
dJp
Tags: Bavaria, Holland, imports
Category: The Beer Blog | Comments (0)
