posted on 1 July 2009 by dan
Yesterday brought with it two singular excitements: Tony and I undertook Boozy Milkshake Day Part II and George, an esteemed dT alum, popped over to my house for a bit. What with this being the beer blog and with the spirits blog being a whole separate blog, I’m going to leave the story of boozy milkshakes to Tony. The George-bit has more to do beer, so therein we find our subject. B.G. on George: he left our ranks a little over a year ago for UCLA law school; in town again for a wedding, he called us up for a bit of a reunion, “bearing gifts from the left coast.”
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.
Tags: American beer, craft beer, DIPA
Category: The Beer Blog | Comments (0)
posted on 27 June 2009 by dan
We waited and we waited, but it’s finally arrived: Mad River’s Steelhead Double Dread Imperial Red. It’s the most recent entry in the brewery’s High Gravity series, an uber-limited series of full-throttle brews.
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.
Tags: California, double imperial red, imperial, mad river, red ale
Category: Beer Reviews, The Beer Blog | Comments (0)
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 5 June 2009 by dan
At the Eastern Standard last weekend, I got in this conversation about local beer with Tyler (as in, Tyler “The Second Glass” Balliet - that’s him, there on the left with the winning smile). The Standard might very well be the ultimate cocktail bar in the city, but their beer list isn’t exactly inspiring any jealousy. A couple Harpoons on tap, Miller Lite, and Czechvar. That last option inspired this:
“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
Tags: beer, czechvar, local
Category: The Beer Blog | Comments (0)
posted on 3 June 2009 by dan
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
Tags: BRAND NEW, double imperial red, mad river
Category: The Beer Blog | Comments (0)
