Cucapá ‘Obscura’

Cucapa 'Obscura'
Cucapa 'Obscura'

The last of my trio of Cucapá beers, and certainly the pick of the bunch. Which is a little surprising, since you might fairly assume that a Mexican brewer would do the Light & Refreshing better than they do the Bigger & Sippier, given climate and whatnot. (The nerds on Ratebeer.com speak even more highly of their Imperial Stout and Barleywine, further compounding that weirdness, but neither of those were available for me to try.)

The bigger-still body does the best at hiding the niggling metallic note, though you can still feel it in there without trying very hard. The dark, mahogany-esque colour rightly hints at the sticky maltiness that is present in the nose and in your face. Both this, and the previous Pale Ale, are strange, in the fullness-of-body department; they taste ‘bigger’ than the Golden Ale, sure, but still manage to have some sips, or even some parts of individual sips, feel aggravatingly ’empty’.

The three beers are certainly acres better than the usual bog-standard Mexican lager. There is an unavoidable element of damning with faint praise inherent in that summary, but there’s no real reason to avoid it; these are better than their peers, but still not great.

Cupaca 'Obscura' Brown Ale
Diary II entry #10, Cupaca 'Obscura' Brown Ale

Verbatim: Cucapa ‘Obscura’ Brown Ale 18/9/10 4.8% 355ml also $4 from Reg. Very appealing mahogany-brown, despite the ‘Cerveza Negra’ on the label. Nose is sticky malthness, and there’s a decent amount on the palate, despite the now-familiar thinness and metal. (Though this hides that metal the best so far.) Quite probably the pick of the bunch, but they still don’t manage to totally rehabilitate Mexican beer in my mind — despite all being acres better than others. (Faint Praise Problem.)

Cucapá ‘Chupacabras’

Cucapa 'Chupacabras' Pale Ale
Cucapa 'Chupacabras' Pale Ale

So, goatsucker. Really. That’s what “Chupacabras” literally means. Chupar is “to suck”, and cabra is “goat”. Strange name for a beer, you might think.

Wait; it gets stranger. The Chupacabra is a piece of South American cryptozoology, like an Australian Bunyip, or a North American Bigfoot. But unlike those, this one doesn’t have the ‘virtue’ of being old-timey nonsense; these are a pretty recent popular delusion — quite-possibly wholly derived from the awesomely-awful movie Species, which the original ‘eyewitness’ apparently thought depicted real events taking place in Peurto Rico.

But anyway, the beer. I write about beer, right? Well, first things first, it doesn’t suck (at least, not goats). It’s billed as American Pale Ale, but isn’t a typical one, if it’s one at all. The colour tends to the reddish end, there’s not a whole lot of aroma going on, and the fruity flavours are in the sweeter modes than the usual bitter-citrussy ones. Style aside, though, those factors combine into something not inherently bad and the bigger body does bury some of the familiar Cucapá metal flavour.

Cupaca 'Chupacabras' Pale Ale
Diary II entry #9, Cupaca 'Chupacabras' Pale Ale

Verbatim: Cucapa ‘Chupacabras’ APA 18/9/10 5.8% 355ml $4 from Reg. Very reddish ruddy amber. Attractive, but atypical for style, I’d have thought. Not massively aromatic, and with quite a nice big rounded sweet fruity middle bit. Apricotty, perhaps. Very much like something I’ve had, but I’m struggling to recall. Amelia says there’s a not-in-a-bad-way burnt grass aspect; as if she were a really classy cow. How strange. Hints of the metal, but more buried.

Cucapá ‘Clasica’

Cucapa 'Clasica'
Cucapa 'Clasica'

Mexican beer does get a bad rap in nerdy circles. But you always have to be skeptical of bad reputations where far-flung places are concerned; it’s usually not the Good Stuff that gets famous elsewhere, first. Think Fosters, think Budweiser — think Steinlager, if it comes to that. And hey, beer’s a pretty accessibly-priced sort of a thing, so I figured I’d take a punt on three beers from the Cervecería Cucapá that showed up randomly at Regional, the dangerously-awesome bottle store down the road from my house.

Not the classically-pale sort of ‘golden’ that someone like me might expect, this does have a pretty nice orangey-ambery hue to it, and is a decently tasty smooth malty sort of a beer. So already it’s a step or seven up from the Usual Mexican Thing You Might Resort To Sticking Fruit In The Neck Of. But there’s a nasty metallic bite to it that does spoil things somewhat.

Cupaca 'Clasica'
Diary II entry #8, Cupaca 'Clasica' Golden Ale

Verbatim: Cucapa ‘Clasica’ Golden Ale 17/9/10 355ml $4 from Reg. 4.5% Not that ‘gold’; quite a bit of orange / amber in there. Certainly not terrible, which is a welcome change from most Mexican beer available round here. Yeastie Sam is right on Ratebeer; it’s a bit thin + metallic in the body, but the malt flavour is decent. Just needs to lose the metal

Racecourse ‘Phoenix’ Golden Ale

Racecourse 'Phoenix' Golden Ale
Racecourse 'Phoenix' Golden Ale

Re-creating old recipes is a neat idea, I think. There are some wickedly wonderful bookish types and homebrewers who archive old brewery notes and get themselves the chance to resurrect and sample long-dead brews. There are also outfits like Dogfish Head who tee up with archeology boffins and go distinctly older-school than that.

Then there are relatively half-assed approaches which are mostly exercises in marketing; in getting your ‘brand story’ off the shelf, as it were. This, sadly, is one of the latter — and I say that even though l liked it.

The rep. said it was made using “wild yeast” collected from behind the original racecourse itself. Scotty was fairly sure — and both of us hoped to hell — that he meant wild hops. But that’s just the thing. They’ve traded brandwank for substance; there is a damn good reason that hops are farmed. They, like all crops, would rather not work so hard. Left to themselves, they don’t crank out the mad levels of flavour or bigness or both that people would like. (The World isn’t here for us, after all.) So when you use wild hops, you don’t get much out of them. And it shows, here; the beer is well-made enough, but it’s very mild. That said, it’s preferable to basically every bog-standard lager-thing out there. It just doesn’t have the fun, lush loveliness that you can get from a nice golden ale.

Racecourse 'Phoenix' Golden Ale
Diary II entry #7, Racecourse 'Phoenix' Golden Ale

Verbatim: Racecourse ‘Phoenix’ Golden Ale 16/9/10 Sample from a truly-clueless rep. a few weeks ago (who couldn’t tell his yeast from his hops). 330ml ÷ 2 w/ Scotty 5%. Brewed at Wigram, but apparently a recreation of an old classic, a la last year’s Waitemata Sparkling Ale. Or WAITEMATA SPARKLING, I should say, in new-Book terms. And it’s similarly perfectly bland. Not an insult. Faultless, but unremarkable. I’d take it over any macro lager, I mean. Apparently made using wild hops (or yeast, the rep. worryingly erred), which would account for some absences of zing; these things are farmed for good reasons.

Brew Moon ‘Hophead’ IPA

Brew Moon 'Hophead' IPA
Brew Moon 'Hophead' IPA

I’m still kicking myself that me and my friends didn’t know about the Brew Moon Cafe when we were on our South Island roadtrip a few years ago. They’re in the charming-enough little town of Amberly, in North Canterbury, and we stopped there (we stop a lot, on our roadtrips) to see the statue of Double-VC soldier Charles Upham, who once farmed nearby. Now that I do know about this place and their beers, I really must go back.

‘Hophead’ is a lovely beer; it’s not a crazypants kind of over-done / attention-grabbing IPA, it’s just a solid bottle of yum. And I can’t help but notice this Diary entry’s place in the timing of this blogthing; I’d just reached frustration-point with the fact I wasn’t carrying Diary I with me and so couldn’t remember which note-worthy beers already had been appropriately noted. So there’s a weird sort of particular satisfaction in putting this note up, I must say.

Brew Moon 'Hophead' IPA
Diary II entry #6, Brew Moon 'Hophead' IPA

Verbatim: Brew Moon ‘Hophead’ IPA 16/9/10 500ml÷3 with Scotty & Peter. $9ish from Rumbles, 5%. We randomly had this a while ago, but I can’t remember if I Booked it, I really must get these online. And it’s pretty tasty all over again. Good orangey-coloured body, fruity hops and just general good-drinkin’ yumness. Not a mucked-with loopy IPA; just a perfectly-solid one.

Wigram Imperial Stout (with Mojo coffee beans)

Firstly, hopinators. Basically a backwards filter, these are last-minute flavour infusers you can stick in the circuit between the keg and the tap — making you a great big nerd, and giving you a chance to muck about a bit. Homebrewers make them out of water filters (plugged in the wrong way round), and the Dogfish Head brewery famously made one they called Randall the Enamel Animal, leading to the semi-popular generic name ‘Randall’ for such gizmos. Our Overboss likes to call ours the Modus Hoperandus, which is pretty cute and appeals to my Law Nerd side, but me and my flatmates preferred simpler names like Dennis (as in ‘Hopper’) or David (as in, er, ‘Hasselhopp’).

Wigram Imperial Stout and Mojo coffee beans
Wigram Imperial Stout, in and on the Hopinator

Secondly, what you can do with them. The obvious use for these gadgets is increasing the hoppiness of a hoppy thing. But that’s also the least-creative use of them, if you ask me. It’s occasionally fun, sure — and the Wig & Pen IPA (brewed by the man who built and installed the Modus itself, no less) was perfectly suited to such — but the more-random stuff is just more My Thing. So you can crank a wheat beer full of strawberries, a golden ale full of kiwifruit, a traditional IPA full of mandarins, or, as here, a stout full of coffee beans. The latter has an absurdly-beneficial aesthetic effect on ours, gloriously hewn from steel and glass as it is. (Weirdly, despite their usual — and shared-by-me — fondness for Steampunk-ish things at Dogfish Head, you’d have to say that ours is much more in that mode; it just should’ve been brass…)

Thirdly, this particular thing. If there was a Heaven, this would be one of those Matches Made There. Wigram is a charming little battler of a brewery, with moments of genius and moments of naff — like most operations, I suppose. Their Imperial Stout is definitely one of the former, and is in the British Imperial mold rather than the Russian, so has a massive dryness absurdly-well accommodates the flavours from the coffee. It’s big, dry and fabulous. It is Stephen Fry.

Wigram Imperial Stout and Mojo beans
Diary II entry #5, Wigram Imperial Stout and Mojo beans

Verbatim: Wigram Imperial Stout & Mojo Beans 10/9/10, guest on the Hopinator, loaded with coffee 8%. Transforms the Modus from a murky fishtank of hop flowers into a pillar of obsidian; like a tube of captive midnight. The stout is serious, dry and delicious — ‘British Imperial’, they say, lacking the sweetness of a Russian ~. But whereas I found the Townshend #9 a bit limp, this is big and dry and fabulous. Like Clive James, or Stephen Fry. Doesn’t feel boozy at all. The dryness and the coffee are just made for each other.

Yeastie Boys ‘Pot Kettle Black’

Yeastie Boys 'Pot Kettle Black'
Yeastie Boys 'Pot Kettle Black'

‘PKB’ — as it quickly became known; the full version of the name is meant to highlight the seeming-contradiction in a beer being both hoppy and dark — was the first Yeastie Boys release. It also — appropriately enough — went on to contradict their usual modus operandi by returning for batch after batch (slightly tweaked, each time). It’s now intended to be available year-round, in these fetchingly-labelled 330ml bottles.

The rumour around Beer Nerd circles was that this first bottled batch had its hops ‘backwards’, with the result that there was less emphasis on the citrussy American Cascade hop front. I’m not sure whether it’s true or not — there is a disturbing little trend, even among properly-geeky craft brewers, of ‘covering up’ these little accidental variations that happen from time to time — but even if it is, from my tasting of this first-batch bottle, it’d only mean this was effectively another minor ‘remix’, and still a delicious, conspicuously-hopped, rich dark ale.

Deciding how to style-tag ‘Her Majesty’ was difficult enough, but this one complicates things in its own way, too. In both cases, I’ve opted for ‘Porter’, and Porter is how PKB was initially pitched, although always with things like “American-style” or “hoppier-than-usual” appended to the front. Truth is, this really deserves credit for being part of the emergence of what will amount to the newest craft beer style: Black IPA. More and more breweries are experimenting in this direction, with frequently-delicious results.

Yeastie Boys 'Pot Kettle Black'
Diary II entry #4, Yeastie Boys 'Pot Kettle Black'

Verbatim: Yeastie Boys ‘Pot Kettle Black’ 8/9/10 330ml from Stu himself @ Beervana time. 6% The first bottled Yeastie, and the rumour among the beer nerds is that the hops are backwards, lessening the Cascade focus. (In this batch, at least.) Seems plausible, but that would only ever relegate this to “delicious Porter” — [with] a touch more zip + zest than usual. Ooh, it grows, though.

Mussel Inn… Pumpkinsomething

Mussel Inn Pumpkinsomething
Mussel Inn Pumpkinsomething, probably 'Happy Jackal'

I totally forgot the name of this thing, but the only mention of a pumpkin beer on the Mussel Inn’s awesomely / terrifyingly retro website — it just screams Microsoft FrontPage, which was last released seven years ago — is one they call ‘Happy Jackal’ (I’m not sure why).

Dogfish Head’s Punkin’ Ale was a surprising find, for me, at Beervana; despite hating pumpkins, I freaking loved it. So this draws inevitable comparisons against that, and I’d have to say that the Dogfish one does win, hands down — but there’s hardly any shame in that. This just lacks the smoothness that a good pumpkin ale can get you. My brewer-nerd friends point out that the actual pumpkin basically boils / ferments away to nothing, so these beers are all about that texture, and the spices you throw in with it — they’re more pumpkin pie than pumpkin pumpkin. Mussel Inn’s offering certainly has those spicy flavours in abundance, and the lighter body does leave it as a perfectly-respectable and interesting quaffer.

And wow, if you write “pumpkin” eight or nine times, it starts looking really weird.

Mussel Inn 'Pumpkinsomething'
Diary II entry #3, Mussel Inn 'Pumpkinsomething'

Verbatim: Mussel Inn Pumpkinsomething 8/9/10 — woot! — ?%, also gifted. ÷2 from an old-school Mac’s bottle w/ Haitch. Definitely spicy + especially cinamonny. H freaked out that I knew what Big red gum was; she’s not used to my Cosmopolitanism, still. I have to compare it to Dogfish Head Punkin Ale, which I had at Beervana, and must say this isn’t a patch on that, which I was surprised to find enjoyable. Much less body, here. Lacks that fullness + smoothness. Ah! Turns out that Punkin is named for the Punkin’ Chunkin’ Fest! Drinking the remainder faster, I discover this works better as a quaffer than a sipper; like a spiced wintery lager.

Mussel Inn ‘Pale Whale’ Ale

Mussel Inn 'Pale Whale' Ale
Mussel Inn 'Pale Whale' Ale

You do meet some choice people, in a job like mine. (You meet some intolerable ones, too, but I prefer not to write about them, here.)

Three people wandered into our pub the day before Beervana, and when I commented on the Mussel Inn shirt one of them was wearing, it turned out that they all actually worked there. Coincidentally, we’d just taken delivery of a few cases each of three of their beers, so I had to show them the write-up I’d done to introduce them in the Book. (I also like how it makes for a nice example of how my writing style gets quite a bit more ‘loose’ as the small hours creep on and the feeling of “I should really finish this” creeps in.)

Golden Bay’s legendary Mussel Inn has been brewing and serving craft beer forever. Or at least since very shortly after time itself began — if there is a God, and if he rested on the seventh day, he was probably there, enjoying a well-earned pint. If they’re at all able, beer geeks should all make pilgrimage at least once in their lives[…].

They were chuffed, and we had a good old-fashioned geek-out for a while, and the next day at the beer festival, they brought over a little swag-bag of unlabelled bottles — a few beers that aren’t usually available other than at the pub itself. Bloody lovely of them. The beer, itself, was lovely and straightforward. The name comes from a nice little joke that a whale is a big body and a long tail, and the beer does live up to it.

Verbatim: Mussel Inn ‘Pale Whale Ale’ 7/9/10, gift from Mussel Inn people @ Beervana, after we met at my pub and they saw my write-up. 500ml shared with Neil. 6%. Hazy light apricotty brown. Slightly sweet + muted-fruity nose. Body is decently big + smooth. Quite a good length on the flavour; “big body, long tail” = whale, they say. Cute. Not perfect, maybe a rough travel, but very tasty. Must visit…

Mussel Inn introductory blurb
Mussel Inn introductory blurb, Malthouse Beer Book
Mussel Inn 'Pale Whale' Ale
Diary II entry #2, Mussel Inn 'Pale Whale Ale'

Yeastie Boys ‘Her Majesty 2010’

Yeastie Boys 'Her Majesty 2010'
Yeastie Boys 'Her Majesty 2010'

And so begins Diary II. I’m kinda surprised I lasted a week since the birthday-closing of Diary I. But this was a hell of a way to kick things off; with a big, mad, not-concerned-with-style kinda thing.

The Yeastie Boys are no one-trick ponies; they can make crazy hoppy pale ales, delicious easy milds, and things like this that escape classification and just are what they are. Somewhat reminiscent of Emerson’s too-scarce ‘Taieri George’, this is a dark, smooth beer with oodles of chocolate and spice flavours, which is almost worryingly drinkable for its rather-high strength.

They make a ‘His Majesty’, as well, but this one is dedicated to their wives (and the largely-unsung women of the craft-brewing world in general) and apparently made to their tastes — which also makes this another useful thing to help dynamite silly notions of what is or isn’t a “girly beer”.

Yeastie Boys 'Her Majesty 2010'
Diary II entry #1, Yeastie Boys 'Her Majesty 2010'

Verbatim: Yeastie Boys ‘Her Majesty 2010’ 6/9/10 on tap @MH 7.5%. Welcome to the new book! An anniversary-ish beer seemed appropriate, and so did one that doesn’t respect style guidelines. “Belgian Imperial Porter” or Brown is people’s best bet. But why bother? It is what it is, and it’s good. Big, dark + spicy. Hides its booze worryingly well. Very wintery, almost Eastery with all those spices. Brewed for their wive’s tastes, apparently. Another counter-example to usual silly notions of what might be a “girly beer”, then.