All posts by escowles

Belgian “Research” Project

Beer,

We’re going to be living in the Netherlands for a few months next year, so we’re planning on taking advantage of being next-door to Belgium to sample some hard-to-find brews and maybe visit an abbey or two.  Belgian beer is a domain roughly as complex as French wine (see e.g., A Beginner’s Guide to Belgian Beer).  So I thought I’d do some “research” before we went.

Background

I have had a couple of Belgian beers before:

  • Tripel Karmeliet and Maredsous 6/Blonde: I had both of these in Oakland on a business trip, and was really impressed by the complexity and maltiness.
  • Chimay Tripel: I picked up a bottle of this shortly thereafter (when I couldn’t find Tripel Karmeliet or Maredsous locally).  This has a lot in common with those, if maybe a little spicier.
  • Saison Dupont: I tried this after my not-so-gentle introduction to Saison, when I saw recommendations online to start with a milder variety like Saison Dupont.  This struck me as almost Champagne-like, with a ton of aroma and flavor I didn’t associate with beer at all.

Continue reading Belgian “Research” Project →

Re: Beer chauvinism!

Beer, ,

I think it’s pretty strange how some people get worked up about who makes the best beer, and other silly questions like that.  Obviously, it’s so subjective you’d never get people to agree.  On any given day, depending on the weather and what I was eating for dinner, I might have a dozen different favorites.  More than once, I’ve had a taste of a beer in one situation, and thought it was the best thing I’d ever tasted, only to pick up a bottle a few months later and find it pretty underwhelming.  You might as well argue religion and politics.

That post and the comments do talk about something a little easier to quantify though: actual availability of craft beer.  Within a mile or so walk of my house, I’ve got two grocery stores, a specialty wine/beer shop, and a handful of restaurants with beer on draft.  Of those, the specialty shop obviously has the best variety, with a decent selection of local and national craft beer, European imports, etc.  One of the restaurants has a couple taps from Swamp Head, brewed here in Gainesville (note to local restaurants: we go there all the time, in part because of this).  I’ve got two other specialty shops in town that I go to more often, mostly because they’ve got a better local craft beer selection, but also because their service is much better.

So I count myself lucky to have the selection I’ve got.  I’ve got friends in big cities with tons of options I don’t have.  But then again, lots of Americans don’t have anything within an easy walk of home.

Visiting Ommegang

Beer,

The other big event of my summer vacation was visiting Brewery Ommegang near Cooperstown, New York.  We’re both big fans of their beers, so we thought it would be great to go see where they’re made, and hopefully get to taste any special brews they had on tap at the cafe.

Alas, the cafe was closed due to unspecified “plumbing problems”.  So we knew as soon as we arrived that we weren’t going to stay for lunch, and there probably wouldn’t be anything special to sample.  So we took the standard tour which ends with a tasting of their standard beers (Witte, BPA, Hennepin, Rare Vos and Three Philosophers).  The tour was reasonably well done — walking around the outside of the brewery, getting a decent look at the goings-on inside (even if it’s mostly just big tanks), with a good overview of the brewing process and a constant focus on how Belgian-style brewing differs from the regular American brewing.  I’ve taken a few brewery tours and brewed a few batches myself, and I still learned a couple things (like they store their spent grains in a giant cow-patterned silo because they sell them for cow feed, and their kegs aren’t bottle-conditioned so they’re really quite different from the bottled beer).

The tour suffers from Ommegang being an uncomfortably middle-sized brewery.  I’ve taken the tour at a giant brewery like Guinness, and they’ve got a giant, slick production with museum-quality exhibits, movies about barrel making, and a gift shop that wouldn’t be out of place at Disneyland.  And I’ve toured a few tiny breweries, where you can wander freely around the brewery floor, and the tour guide is taking time off from brewing to show you around, and the older guy in the tasting room turns out to be the master brewer.  But Ommegang is a little larger, and obviously growing quickly.  They’re too big to let you wander around while they’re busily cranking out product, but they’re not big enough to have given up letting you watch them actually brew beer.

The tasting at the end of the tour was well done — out on the patio on a nice summer day, with a very good description of each beer, what they’d pair well with, etc.  The gift shop was crowded, but did have great prices for the standard Ommegang beers and nice glasses.  We headed into Cooperstown for lunch, and found a nice pizza place on Urban Spoon.

In all, I’d say it’s well worth the trip, but frustratingly fell short of the awesome experience I was hoping for.

Family Beer Tasting

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We went to visit family in upstate New York and brought some local beer to share.  We started with Swamp Head’s Saison du Swamp, which we’d been thinking of as a gentle introduction to saison.  But it was a much bigger shock than we’d expected.  We followed it up with a couple Cigar City beers: Sea Bass (which is very sour and funky, even compared to the average saison) and 110K +OT.

While we were there, we also had a few local beers: Saranac Summer Ale is a light, easy drinking Hefeweizen, and Southern Tier Crème Brûlée Stout is a crazy stout with an amazingly accurate crème brûlée flavor.  We also had some family homebrew: a wonderful strawberry mead, and a chocolate raspberry stout (which I liked a lot more than the Southern Tier).

A Paean To Cigar City

Beer,

It came to my attention recently (when Untappd gave me a badge for being such a fanboy), that I’ve had quite a few different brews from Cigar City recently:

Vuja De (6/21)
A very dark saison, practically black.  But still very light and easy-drinking on the first evening of summer.  A collaboration with St. Somewhere (and it shows — this reminds me of their Pays du Soleil).  Very tart, but balanced by a sweetness — but not malty sweet: the bottle mentions cane sugar, so I think that’s where it’s coming from.  The sweetness provides a nice counterpoint to the very tart, cherry twang.  A second drinking yielded more mixed results: we both soured on the blackcurrant flavor.

Tocobaga Red Ale (6/18)
Definitely hoppy, with a piney finish. Balanced with a smooth and mild malt.  Wouldn’t have liked this a year ago, because of the hoppiness.

110k+OT Batch #4 Imperial Red Ale (6/17)
Very dark with highlights of dark red. Full malt with a strong balance of hops, both aromatic and bittering with a long smooth bitter finish.

Continue reading A Paean To Cigar City →

Latitude 48 Deconstructed

Beer

I heard about the Sam Adams Latitude 48 Deconstructed pack a couple months ago — an IPA brewed with 5 kinds of hops coming in a 6-pack with the normal beer and then 5 versions brewed with just one of those hops.  It sounded like a great way to try out the individual hop varieties, but I hadn’t been able to find it locally.  Luckily, my wife is more resourceful, and gave me a pack for my birthday.  So of course we had to do a 5-way tasting.

Unsurprisingly, they varied immensely.  Both in flavor and in aroma, they ran the gamut.  So on to the hops:

EKG: We both liked this the best, very mellow, earthy.  Herby, with a definite Henna taste.  Smells like wort, probably because we’ve brewed with these before.  “The comfort food of beer”.

Zeus: This reminded me of Swamp Head’s BigNose IPA or Bell’s Two Hearted Ale, especially the aroma, which is very sweet and almost floral.  Very strong start of citrus, sharpness and pine, but finishes more mild.  “Punch-you-in-the-face”.

Continue reading Latitude 48 Deconstructed →

American Craft Beer Week

Beer

As part of American Craft Beer Week, our local brewery (Swamp Head) and Cigar City from Tampa had a “taproom takover” (I’d call it a “tasting room exchange”, but that’s not as alliterative). So we got our choice of eight CCB beers on tap.

The smallish tasting room was already packed at 5:00pm, so we got a pint of Florida Cracker Wheat Ale, and a growler of Table Saison.  It took me nearly 15 minute to get those, and I almost changed my order halfway through to add another couple of growlers.  I should have done that, because by the time I came back to get more growlers, the crowd was much worse, and three of the kegs blew while I was waiting to get a couple growlers, including both the beers I wanted.  So I had to take my third and fourth choices (Jose Marti Porter and Maduro Brown Ale).

Luckily, I’ve never had a bad beer from Cigar City, and these were no exception.  The Cracker Wheat Ale was a great cloudy hefeweizen, with just enough spice and citrus to make it interesting.  The Jose Marti was inky and intense, with a little sweetness and not too smoky.  The Maduro was a great brown ale, with a big malt and lot of subtlety to match it (and I found some 12 oz. bottles at Tipple’s, so we can get more).  The Table Saison was not as sour and bold as their Sea Bass, but a more mainstream farmhouse, very light but with a definite sourness, almost like a kolsch.

We’re going to round out Craft Beer Week with Victory‘s V-12, which should be muscular enough to go well with chili.

I May Be Doing This Wrong…

Beer,

Dinner did not get off to a good start.  I was going to make lasagna, but for some reason that didn’t seem like a good idea when walking home in 90° heat.  So I decided I’d take most of the ingredients and make a pasta bake instead, since that seemed like it would be lighter.  That was going OK until I knocked one of my Guiness glasses off the counter, sending shards of broken glass all over the kitchen.

Then we decided we’d rather have beer than wine, so I opened a bottle of Lectio Divina.  When I opened the last bottle, the cork blew out of my hand as soon as I looked at the wire cage funny.  So this time I carefully held the cork down with one hand and loosened the wire with the other.  But then I had trouble getting the wire cage off and forgot to hold the cork down for a second, and it exploded out of my hand, sending the cork into the next room and cutting my thumb with the wire as it zoomed by.

And then I stained my favorite white shirt with the pasta sauce (that’s my own fault, I should’ve changed my shirt…).

At least the beer was good and all but one of the kids liked the pasta bake.

Beer Bread

Beer,

I made another batch of beer bread today, using a leftover bottle of Sam Adams Double Bock.  It was basically undrinkable, but it makes for tasty bread.

The bread is the simplest I’ve ever seen: mix flour, baking powder, sugar and salt, pour in a bottle of beer, mix until combined, knead just enough to get a ball formed, turn it out onto a baking sheet, brush with egg, and bake.  And it’s good (got rave reviews last time).  The sickly-sweet double bock makes for a great bread, not too sweet, but goes very well with honey.

World of Beer

Beer,

So I was eating the best hamburger I’ve ever had from a restaurant today (at Burger 21, a new-ish place in Tampa) thinking that it was going to be hard to top.  Down the street was a beer shop I’d read about online called World of Beer.

Luckily, World of Beer did indeed top the burger: they had nine coolers side-by-side, full of beer from around the world, with very few duplicates or empty spaces.  I’d estimate 350 unique bottles.  5 of the coolers were European beers (2 coolers just for Belgium!), so that was great.  Unfortunately, it was local beer I was looking for.  I bought their last 3 bottles from Saint Somewhere.  Other than that, they only had two other Florida beers, both IPAs which I’m not interested in.

So I had to make do with a couple of Belgian abbey ales and some Scottish wee heavy to round out the cooler for the trip home.  And of course, now we’ll have to go back.  The bartender said they were going to open up a shop in Gainesville, but who knows how long that’ll take…