Tag Archives: the session

What’s In Your Cellar? (Session #73: Beer Audit)

Beer

This month’s Session topic is a beer audit: what you have, and what it says about what you drink.  Our “cellar” is actually a wine fridge (that used to contain wine, honestly!) and our kegerator.  Usually, there’s a keg or two in our kegerator, but we’re out of CO2 and the bottles have taken over.

I’ve never done an audit exactly, just checked on a few bottles I was planning on sending to friends.  But I wasn’t surprised that my beer breaks neatly down into four categories:

1. Belgians

We brought more than a case of Westy and Cantillon back with us when we came back from our stay in the Netherlands.  Our stock has dwindled to a few bottles each of Westy 8, Westy Blonde, Cantillon Grand Cru Bruocsella, and Poperings Hommel Bier.

2. Locals

Of course, local beer is well-represented, with a few odd bottles from Tampa breweries like Barrel-Aged Big Sound from different years, a bottle of Pays du Soleil.  From our local brewery, Swamp Head, we’ve got a couple bottles of their first release of Saison du Swamp, somewhat more bottles of the second release, and a half dozen of their Batch 300 Tripel.

3. Homebrew

Of course, our hyper-local brewery (i.e., us) is well represented.  We currently have 20 bottles of barleywine, 35 bottles of cider/mead, 4 bottles of our first try at mead, 7 bottles and a gallon growler of our quad (the growler was filled from the tail end of our last keg after our we exhausted our CO2 tank), and 1 last bottle of our saison.

4. Stuff In The Fridge

And then there’s the stuff in the fridge.  It’s not really the cellar, but some of it sure does hang around a while.  Right now, there’s a selection of year-rounds and recent seasonals from Cigar City (Jai Alai, Maduro, Cubano Espresso, and Sugar Plum), plus an uninspired amber called Rollin Dirty they brewed for the Tampa Brew Bus, some Magic Hat Pistil, a few bottles of Michelob Amber Bock we picked up for our mother-in-law who doesn’t even like saison but brought some from down from Hill Farmstead for us anyway.  There are also a few singles: a Holy Mackerel Special Golden Ale, and two bottles that have slowly migrated to the back: a Shiner Octoberfest and a Magner’s Pear Cider that nobody wants to drink.

 

So, I think there are a few key takeaways from that list:

  • To start with the obvious: the selection is pretty well driven by where we live and where we’ve traveled.  Not just in where the beer is from, but also in the dominance of Belgian-style beers.  Having lived right next to Belgium last year, and living in Florida where there is a strong selection of Belgian-style beers, really shaped what I drink and what I value.
  • There are very few aged or even aging-worthy bottles.  We plan to age our barleywine for quite a while, obviously.  The barrel-aged Big Sound should keep, and I suspect the Grand Cru Bruocsella will last long enough for us to experiment with making our own lambic before we try making some kriek with it.  But the rest of the beers should really be drunk soon.
  • Most of our keeping beer is in our wine fridge — which used to be full of wine.  We were really not big beer fans a few years ago, when we mostly drank French and Californian wine, and maybe the occasional Sam Adams with pizza.  Then I had my first sour beer — Lost Abbey Sinners 09 followed by Cigar City Sea Bass — what an introduction to sours!  Now there are only two bottles of wine in the house (a local dessert wine, and a Merlot we picked up this summer at a winery in New York).  So that’s a pretty big change.
  • Drinking local: and one thing about the beer and the wine: we’ve gotten quite a bit of it directly from the brewery.  That’s true of the Westvleteren, Cantillon, Cigar City and Swamp Head beers, and both bottles of wine.

The Session #68: Novelty Beers

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This month’s topic for The Session is novelty beers.  Several of the breweries I like make some weird stuff all the time, but I don’t think I count a regular saison made with cucumbers or with a ton of herbs added to the barrel a novelty beer.  Those are a little offbeat, but well within the normal range of beers, especially for saison.

No, I think of novelty beers as beers you’d pretty much only drink as a gag.  I remember going to a garlic-themed restaurant called the Stinking Rose — they had garlic ice cream on the menu, with a note saying they had it for completeness couldn’t really recommend it.

And that’s about what I think of novelty beers.  I’ve seen Cave Creek Chili Beer in the grocery store, but I was never tempted to drink it, even though I have a friend who grew up in the small Arizona town where it’s made.  When we went to the Chocolate Museum in Cologne, we picked up a bottle of chocolate beer that was just passable.  And I was pleasantly surprised by Bandwagon’s Raspberry Jalapeno Ale, which was very good for a novelty beer.

But I think the most novel novelty beer I’ve ever had, and probably the most interesting to drink, was Indra Kunindra from Ballast Point.  This is a collaboration with a homebrewer, that used Madras curry and a bunch of other spices.  The base beer was a stout, so there was a lot of body and sweetness, but the spiciness came through strongly, making for a very intense slow-sipping drink.  And it even had a little bit of lingering heat to it.

I don’t think I’m going to use curry in any of my brews any time soon, and I certainly don’t expect a big national trend of curry beers to get started.  But it was very different and thought-provoking.  And that is the promise I see in novelty beers.  Sure, they are often not very good.  They are sometimes just cheap crap to give dad something to buy at the gift shop.  But every now and again, they expose you to a new element you could see using in other beers, and make you think about a possibility you’d never have given a chance otherwise.

The Session 65: Drinking Alone

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I should be blogging about tasting our new saison, or the new beers I’m trying in upstate New York where we’re spending July.  But those posts aren’t getting written, so they’ll have to wait.

On a more timely note is The Session — loosely-organized beer blogging on a monthly topic.  I’ve only just heard about it, and I find this month’s topic fascinating: drinking alone:

The way I see it is that I love beer and pubs and I don’t see why I should only go to the pub when I’m with other people.

Am I weird for going to the pub alone?

How do you feel about going to the pub alone? Do you feel it’s necessary to be around friends to spend time in a pub?

As it turns out, it’s rare for me to go to pubs or bars at all, and even rarer that I’d go alone.  Partly this is due to my own laziness, and I’m sure it’s partly due to the general social pressure against hanging out alone in public, especially where eating and drinking are concerned.  Though the social pressure against drinking alone is most acute in public, it’s definitely there in private too.  If I’m home alone for the evening, I might have a beer or two, but it’s definitely the exception not the rule.

But there have been a few times, mostly when I really wanted to try some beer you could only get at the pub.  The most recent example I can remember is when I took a trip to Cologne.  It’s a city famous for its local style of beer, and for the most part it’s not bottled or exported at all.  So you pretty much have to go to the pub to get it.  And since my young children are generally in bed by 8pm, that left a few hours each evening where I could venture out by myself and grab a few glasses of Kolsch, as Wind graciously volunteered to hang out at the hotel with the kids.

I was glad to have the chance to try a few more Kolsches, but it wasn’t much fun.  I’m quite introverted, and really not up to chatting with strangers in the pub.  So I mostly fiddled about on my phone, reading the news or playing games.  Not a terrible way to pass some time, but much less comfortable than hanging around a hotel room.

It really brought home for me the fact that drinking is a social activity, like eating really.  You can enjoy it uncritically or poring over every detail and hint of nuance.  You can enjoy it with two people or twenty.  You can enjoy the most exotic, expensive and rare, or the plain, wholesome and everyday.  But removing the social aspect really changes the experience, reducing it to just fulfilling a need.

I was thinking about all this when I went to a sour fest in Tampa last month.  The situation is very different from your typical pub, since there were some couples and groups, but many more people by themselves.  And the focus was more clearly on enjoying and analyzing the beer, and even I found myself chatting and joking with the servers and other attendees.