It does seem to me that (though the traffic in both directions is still painfully slow) the Australians are having better luck at getting good New Zealand beer available over there than we are with the vice-versa, over here. We do manage to get some goodies at work, though, and have more in the pipelines…
Matilda Bay are one of those little-sibling operations owned by one of the giants (Foster’s, in this case), though it as originally an independent West Australian operation — its founders went on to start my beloved Little Creatures (itself part-owned by the giant Lion Nathan). It’s a hotly-disputed brewery in Australian beer geek circles when the “what is — and what is not — ‘craft’ beer, anyway?” definition comes up, as it cyclically does. And when we got this on tap at work, the local beer geeks were typically not massively enamoured of it, to say the least, usually finding it too mild. But I think you have to remember that the hoppy-hoppy end of the pale ale spectrum has been less explored in Australia than over here, and that Cooper’s Pale Ale exerts a massive gravitational effect on the term. So this exists as a Gateway Beer, and is very well suited to that admirable and necessary job — especially when you remember that the same company produce a “proper” APA, ‘Alpha’.
Which reminds me that I really should upload the entries from my October 2008 & April 2009 Melbourne trips; those were my introductions to all sorts of lovely Australian beers.
Verbatim: Matilda Bay ‘Fat Yak’ Pale Ale 10/1/11 on tap @ MH. Fairly sure I had it as part of my paddle @ Taphouse. Not popular with the Nerds — too mild. But I like it since it’s more Aussie stuff making the trip. And it’s inherently worthy enough as Baby’s First APA, which is necessary over there, given Coopers’ gravitational pull on the term. Plus, there’s always ‘Alpha’.
Hearken to a saga of two beers. Two incarnations of one beer — a Draft and Final, or a Beta and a One Point Oh, perhaps — neither of which I particularly enjoyed, one of which I sufficiently non-enjoyed that it became my first Beer Diary beer in years to have its glass tipped out rather than emptied in the usual imbibey way.
Moa’s Pale Ale was a pretty highly-anticipated thing, and I was dead keen to try it. I have a strange relationship with the Moa beers, finding some of them unforgivably naff, which is tempered by some of them being wonderfully interesting — though I see all of them as nobbishly marketed and over-priced. Of this one, I’d heard good things, and so picked one up to enjoy on a sunny afternoon.
My first alarm bells rang at the… sludge layered on the bottom. Given the choice, I prefer my beers bottle-conditioned, ordinarily. But this was ridiculous1 — and was common among all the bottles at the store, and confirmed by the local rep. as nothing out of the ordinary, though he pretty-quickly assured me that they’d already seen it as a bad idea and planned to tone things down for the next batch.
After a difficult pour, the beer settled down enough to present itself with a lovely colour, which I took as a sign that things might be okay after all, but it wound up being the highest praise I could give, review-wise, to the people sitting with me. The nose was all but absent, which is a fairly unforgivable sin for what should be a gorgeously aromatic style — and the one over-riding detectable note was that weirdly-distinctive ‘Moa Funk’ which usually stops me enjoying their milder beers like the ‘Original’ and ‘Blanc’.
And after struggling past the marketing, the sludge, the pour, and the nose, I was ‘rewarded’ with a bog-standard pale ale, at best. Pale ales are the fashionable thing at the moment, so when you’re this late to the game, you had better bring something special, or at least something interesting. This is doubly-so when you’re from the same town, pitched at the same booze, and charging the same (for a smaller bottle) as 8 Wired’s absurdly-fantastic ‘Hopwired’ — nevermind the half-dozen other easily-named examples of the style which also blow this thing out of the water without charging you an arm or a leg, and without shrouding themselves in dickish brandwank. It was that sense of rip-off and disappointment that stuck with me most, through the glass — and it got enough that I just pushed the eject button and biffed the remainder off the side of the deck, unfinished.
Moa Pale Ale, reformulated and on tap
I do know a lot of people who liked the beer, though, so I was hoping that my bottle was an errant failure — though its only distinctive feature was that centimeter of slurry, which was shared by all the others I’d seen, so I suspect I’m being oddly generous in that hope. I did resolve to try the promised reformulated version, though, and finally got a chance nearly two months later.
Calmed down a few percentage points in strength, and with the sediment in the bottled version toned down to typical / tolerable / non-insane levels, I was pleased to see that the lovely colour had been retained, and the ‘funk’ had vanished from aroma. Sadly, though, so had basically everything else; the beer had courageously leapt from being bad to being bland, which is a rather classic Frying Pan Versus Fire scenario. It seemed faultless, and was fairly tasty, but thereby also seemed completely pointless; merely an act of late-to-the-game Me Too Please. It was safe and cautious and inoffensive — and thereby tokened a sad return to form for the brewery, in my mind. After their brilliantly interesting and genuinely brave ‘Barrel Reserve’ series, this feels too much like a throwback to the days of their first three releases: I can just never shake the feeling that ‘Original’, ‘Blanc’ and ‘Noir’ were all designed to appeal (and to extract dollars from) people who want to buy themselves a bit of craft / boutique / obscure beer credibility, but who fundamentally don’t want to actually stray very far from their familiar green-bottle supermarket standbys. Unless you’re drawn to the brandwank like some sort of suit-wearing moth to their ‘super premium’ flame, you could get yourself any of a number of delicious pale ales at all levels of the flavour spectrum, and you’d keep a few extra dollars in your pocket — just as the same had always been true with their lager, wheat beer, and dark lager.
When the Moa beers are ‘on’, they are on. But when they’re naff, they are so tragically naff. And have the gall to levy you with a naffness premium while they’re at it.
Verbatim: Moa Pale Ale 8/1/11 @ Home $8ish? from Regional 7.2% 375ml. Chunkiest sediment ever. Bottle conditioning is one thing, shipping metric tonnes of sludge with your beer is another. I hope I got an errant bottle, because then it fountained, and I actually resorted to using a sieve. I do like the colour, but the aroma is barely anything other than that worrying Moa funk you get in the others. The flavour is okay, but merely okay. Nice pale ale, but you need more whizbang if you’re this late to the game, and implicitly trailing 8 Wired. It’s like almost all the hops went in way too early. Consensus is that it is simply fail. Good thing I carry that pen. We can see where they’re going, but they don’t make it. Unfinished.
Moa Pale Ale; Revised, Revisited 1/3/11 5.2% now, on tap @ MH. Halfway to their revised branding. I promised I’d retry this, so here I am, though they’ve modified it since batch #1, reducing strength, basically eliminating sludge. Weird that they’d change their mind so much so soon. I’m all for people copping to + correcting mistakes, but making one that huge is worrying in its own way. No nose, this time. Glad there’s no funk, but wish there was aroma. Very mild flavour, too. Makes me worry it’s a returned to First Three form; expensive, cleverly marketed and bland enough not to offend. Safe, cautious. There’s nothing wrong with it, at all, but the price would get you better beers at varying levels of punch. Pleasant peachy flavour arrives very late, with some bitterness.
Moa Pale Ale, chunks
Moa Pale Ale, abandoned
Moa, new tap badge
Diary II entry #53.1, Moa Pale Ale
Diary II entry #53.2, Moa Pale Ale
1: In fact, it was enough to put me in mind of Orbitz, an ill-conceived soft-drink-with-globs-in from my high school days. A few of the people I was sitting with were young enough to have no idea what I was talking about; they were the lucky ones. And weirdly, a related series of posts and comics appeared on Penny Arcade around the same time. It seems that Pepsi have rediscovered the with-globs-in idea, which makes me shed a little tear for our lack of progress, as a civilisation.
Still no scanner access at the moment, so another opportunity to hack away at the necessary back-filling of the Archives. This is the second half of the set of beers from the Unfortunate Patch of Missing Photos — some re-discovered in the ‘Beer Nerd Diaries’ album I used to maintain on Facebook, some lost and gone forever.
Beer and food and philosophy — which perfectly encapsulated my “tastings and ramblings and whatnot” mission, though the conversation distracted me from actual tasting notes
The original plan, back in October 2010, was to conduct a complete Great Uploading of Diary I before starting in with the new notes. I’ve done data entry as a job before, in both total-monkeywork and relatively-highbrow modes, so I figured I’d fly through it. But once word got out that I was finally uploading any of these things, people started asking about more-recent stuff and chipping away at Diary entries from years ago got backburnered.
It’s time to continue the back-filling, but it occurred to me that anything slotted in that far back1 would never appear on the front page or the Recent Posts list, so I’ll do little Compendia like this once I’ve uploaded a batch — just for the sake of those of the pathologically curious / stamp-collecty / completist mindset. Like — you know — me.
These entries are all also united (together with what will be a second set of similar size) by an unfortunate gap in my big archive of original photos. A lot of those gaps are filled by lower-resolution copies that were in my ‘Beer Nerd Diaries’ albums on Facebook, but a few were lost completely in a computer failure. Sadface.
1: Indeed, this post itself is being back-dated (as evidenced by the otherwise-anachronistic Sevens reference above) so that it doesn’t park itself for too long at the top of the main page, since I’m also a few weeks behind on Diary II. All this time-travelling postage does make a certain sort of sense, I think, but if I ponder it too long, I get a Philosophy Headache. I therefore just plow on, assuming that I have some sort of Actual Plan buried in the background of my brain.
And then, shortly after midnight and thereby officially into the New Year1 all previous concern about Plural Big Beers was out the window, caught by a snappy breeze, completely buggered the hell off and was gone — as you can see by this thing.2
Toby and I had been tempted to have one earlier in the day, but went for the Emerson’s ‘JP’ instead. So later, once my friends had made their way back to the pub, New Year’s well-wishes had been exchanged, and the ‘What next?’ question returned, there was only one real candidate.
‘Stuntman’ is the loopiest — so far — of Hallertau’s fleet of hoppy pale ales.3 The brewer himself described it as a “stupid beer for brave people”, which I always liked; my note for the Beer Menu at work warns that “hop levels border on insanity, and the high strength propels wave after wave of flavour directly into the brain”. Not to belabour the point, but this is a big beer. It’s so perilously near to being overblown and unfunny that you get the exhilaratingly uncomfortable thrill of standing way too close to a precipitous drop.
The colour is an appealing gold, with a slightly-murky cast that is probably inevitable given the massive pile of ingredients that’d be necessary for a brew of this bigness. The aromas are invitingly citrussy, fruity, floral and foresty — orchardy, in a word. The hoppy bitterness on the palate is significant, to say the least, but at this level of alcoholic strength you’ve got to have boatloads of malt in the mix, so there is a surprising amount of balance to be had here too.
Oh, and the label. That is the best damn beer label in the country, probably in the world. I’m open to being alerted to other worthy candidates, but this sets a high bar. I really must get the t-shirt; it turns out they have made some.
Diary II entry #52, Hallertau 'Stuntman'
Verbatim: Hallertau ‘Stuntman’ IIPA 31/12/10 750ml ÷ 3 w/ Toby & Wendy. 9.5% We’ve been ey[e]ing this up all day. Best beer label in NZ; must emai[l] Steve & ask him to make tshirts. Amelia picks up the sweatiness from the JP, but in a very different way… Piney + citrussy, like some odd sort of a mixed orchard. But utterly awesome. So close to being overblown.
1: Being basically nocturnal, and having worked for evers in an industry where a ‘shift’ usually rolls past your mere midnight, I’m of the habit of continuing to use the date of the day I woke up, until I actually go to sleep. Some clever math is required when I’m awake past two whole consecutive midnights, but such occasions are rarer, these days. 2: And this wasn’t even the actually-next beer after the Rip Tide that it follows in the Diary; smack on midnight, I had myself an Epic / Thornbridge Stout. If memory serves. Which it may well not. (See? Take notes!) You can see from the scan that my handwriting certainly got rather wibbly, and a few ‘typos’ definitely crept in with letters going missing and such. 3: The hierarchy goes: ‘Minimus’ (sessionable at 3.8%), ‘Statesman’ (their every-day APA), ‘Maximus Humulus Lupulus’ (originally brewed for a mostly-friendly head-to-head against Epic’s ‘Armageddon’), and then this.
I normally try not to have too-many ‘new’ strong beers in a single day, but New Year’s is New Year’s, so what the hell? I’d been looking forward to this for a while, and was still happily perched at the bar in the window, so the randoms mostly ignored me and there was room for a slowly rotating roster of friends and workmates to join me.
I was getting concerned about the Plural Big Beers problem because this stout tasted rather fruity, to me, which isn’t entirely usual. Ordinarily, if you had to guess, you’d expect a stout to be dominated by dark, roasted coffee and chocolate flavours — and they are definitely in there, they’re just not being far-and-away the loudest men in the room like they normally are. I thought maybe the fruit flavours from my just-previous pale ale were confusing me, so I conducted a little impromtu tasting panel of anyone nearby — partially also to show off what a lovely beer I had and therefore what a clever shopper I was — and we all basically concurred.
Not quite as massively boozy or as loopily-different as their marvellous ‘Paradox’ stouts, this is still a great testament to the cleverness of the BrewDog boys by being a properly solid strong stout which is set apart from its peers with that complex and fruity sideline.
Verbatim: BrewDog ‘Rip Tide’ Imperial Stout 31/12/10 $10ish @ NWT 330ml 8% 10.40pm and the bar is filling up with randoms. I’m hiding @ the window with Robot, Caleb & Staff as they get their breaks. Pours utter blackness, as you’d hope / expect. Not all coffee / choc, to me; quite a bit of fruit, though that could be IPA holdovers. I’m breaking my own rules about Plural Big Beers on a Night, but it’s New Year’s, so wtf. Raisin-y? Blackcurrant-y? Pieta has it as Black Forest, minus the chocolate. The stouty bigness is there, but its edges are very different, which is oodles of fun. No coffee, says Robot, but it’s like warm good chocolate to her. She’s on Stonecutter, so her ‘fruitiness’ bar will be calibrated differently. Peter, who had a Stonecutter last night (but not right now) favourably compares it to such. Aren’t we all rather clever?
I’m not sure what did it, but New Year’s was uncharacteristically quiet, so I was able to sign off pretty early and just perch on the end of the bar.
My fellow bartender Halena had gotten back from some time in the U.S., and had whipped up some of her deservedly-famous hot wings (despite being jetlagged and staring down the barrel of a long shift). Something Californian and hop-tastic seemed therefore mandatory. Fortunately, one of these was sitting in my personal stash — Amelia had insisted I buy it after seeing the cute label, and after hearing my heavily-accented stab at ‘properly’ pronouncing the name.
It’s a really lovely beer. Gorgeous colour and aroma, with all those obligatory and classic U.S. West Coast hop notes in residence — intense, but not as ‘aggressive’ as some of its relatives can be. Surprisingly drinkable, given its weight and the forcefulness of the initial flavours.
Verbatim: Lagunitas ‘Little Sumpin’ Sumpin” Ale 31/12/10 $9ish @ Rumbles. 355ml 7.3% had on the occasion of Halena’s return from California, and especially because she brought me some heavily-Franked bbq chicken wings. No idea why the upside-down label, but I like it, the art and the name. Very fun to say, heavily accented. It’s quite pale + peachy gold, nice soft bubbles + a big blunt fruity nose. To me, the bitterness starts big and eases off. Which might be a nice change, or might be the hot sauce talking. Stonefruity + light + tasty — with that underlying hopwallop + boozewarmth.
Lagunitas 'A Little Sumpin' Sumpin'', right-way-up, to save your necks
Diary II entry #50, Lagunitas 'A Little Sumpin' Sumpin''
I’d managed to draw the early (3pm start) shift for New Year’s Eve, and the afternoon was nice and quiet for the most part, giving me time to whip around to the other side of the bar and join my friends for a beer. Toby and I couldn’t think of a better First Beer for the day than this, since it had the soon-to-be-dead year in its name, and him and I had shared an earlier vintage back in Melbourne.
The ‘JP’ beers are all different takes on a Belgian style of one sort of other, brewed in honour of J.P. Dufour, who apparently did much to introduce the joys of the beers from his homeland to the local brewing scene. 2010’s edition was a hoppy tripel or Beligianish IPA, depending on your point of view and usual preferences — and it does the hybrid thing very well, much like I remember Green Flash’s ‘Le Freak’ doing.
Wendy commented that it smelled “like a boy’s bedroom”, and I had to totally concede that point and quote her directly. The ‘funkiness’ you get from Belgian yeast was perhaps met by a certain ‘sweatiness’ that seemed to crop up in some of our hops this year. Which also leads to a nice reminder on the way you can describe a beer in very strange terms — and still like it a lot.
Verbatim: Emerson’s ‘JP’ 2010 31/12/10 and how apt to start the end of a year with a vintage-dated thing. 500ml ÷ 2 with Toby, who shouted. 8.6% Belgian IPA / hoppy tripel. I have to quote Wendy, who said it tastes like a boy’s bedroom. The mustiness is definitely [there], and there’s the heat from the booze. Does the hybrid thing very well. And there was that infamous ‘sweaty’ hop batch this year. Again, it’s odd how you can describe something so weirdly, and still like it very much. The JPs are always good, and interesting, which is half the battle. It’s still nice and civilised in here, but I’m sure that’ll change.
Tuatara Porter (with pinot and cherries) and Croucher 'Mrs Claus'
There some beers that you want to like, but you just can’t. Both of these were near-misses, for me, so I lessened their Diary-polluting effect by consolidating them into one entry.
Pinot and porter are usually a great match — Hallertau do a wonderfully-mad ‘Porter Noir’ with barrels home to the usually-wild Brett yeast, and the Dux de Lux did a very nice (more ‘normal’) take on the same a while back. I like Tuatara’s Porter, but maybe it wasn’t ‘heavy’ enough to survive its time in the barrels — it had thinned out a lot, to the point that I didn’t like it at all when we had it flat from the handpull. It was decent when we had it on the regular taps, the lower temperature and the bubbles helping to hold it together, maybe. But here, pouring through a hopinator full of cherries, there was just too much going on and the porter wasn’t big enough not to be overwhelmed. The three sets of flavour — porter, pinot, and cherry — were just all too mild. First thing in the morning, after stewing overnight, it was at its best — but it was just all cherry, then.
And then, after Croucher’s enjoyably-odd ‘October’ IPA, ‘Mrs. Claus’ was a real disappointment. They were going for a Christmassy spiced-up Scotch ale, and I do like my spicy beers and my Scotch ales — but something just went wrong here, for me. Maybe it was just too cinnamonny, or maybe it just wasn’t at all suited to the handpull we had it on — it is tasting better, now that we’ve gassed it up and cooled it down a bit. But I wasn’t able to shake the feeling that I already knew a lovely fruitcakey beer in Renaissance’s stupidly-lovely ‘Stonecutter’, and this just couldn’t compete.
(Weirdly, one of the guys from the Arrow Brewing Company was in the bar on the night I’m writing this up — 28 January 2011 — and so I was reminded that they made an out-and-out Christmas Cake beer too. They had it at Beervana 2010, and Halena and I loved it to bits — it being the only thing we could think to have to follow Dogfish Head’s surprisingly-awesome Punkin’ Ale. So yeah; the offerings from Renaissance and Arrow make ‘Mrs. Claus’ doubly redundant, sadly.)
Verbatim: Tuatara Porter (Barrel-aged and with cherries) & Croucher ‘Mrs. Claus’ 29/12/10 two near misses, on a very quiet day. George keeps harrassing me for ‘dislike’ entries, so here’s one. These are real let-downs. The porter was nice enough on the bubbly tap, un-cherried, but here’s just too much at once, for a beer that lost a lot of body in the barrel. That made it limp + horrid on handpull, and here it just makes it too weak to stand up to all this tart + sour fruit. ‘Mrs. Claus’ is a stab at a ‘Christmas Cake Ale’, and is a spcied 6% scotch ale. I like their beers, but this fails to follow Stonecutter’s goodness — cf Emerson’s Southern Clam & Three Boys Oyster — if you can’t stand up to something already existing, don’t bother. It’s very metallic, too — tastes like the handpull hasn’t been cleared, though it has. Unpleasant, like being stabbed with a cinnamon-edged rusty old knife.
Diary II entry #48.1, Tuatara Porter (with Pinot and cherries) and Croucher 'Mrs. Claus'
Diary II entry #48.2, Tuatara Porter (with Pinot and cherries) and Croucher 'Mrs. Claus'
Scott, the bar manager at Malthouse, dropped some Big News during our shift — something that had been brewing for a while, but which I felt was sufficiently ’embargoed’ that I didn’t mention it directly in the Diary lest I get my act together uncharacteristically quickly and jump the gun by posting it on here. The short version is that, after ten years — an honest-to-goodness decade — he had resigned. He’s off to run the Hop Garden, a new neighbourhood bar opening soon in Mount Victoria, owned by James Henderson of Bar Edward fame. For us, it’s a helluva loss, but their new place is a tremendously exciting prospect, so it’s full of that bittersweet “hate to see you go, but dead keen to see what you do next” vibe.
In the spirit of first things first, though; Big News deserves Big Beer, so I fetched this one out of my personal stash. I’d been looking forward to it for ages, and couldn’t think of a better opportunity or anyone more worthy of sharing it.
This is Dogfish Head in Resurrection Mode, taking a crack at re-creating an old recipe — the oldest known, in fact. The idea was to take the remains of vessels found in the 2,700-year-old tomb of King Midas, run them through all sorts of chemical analyses, and get a reasonable approximation of what the drink they once held was like. So in with the now-standard barley went honey, white muscat grapes, and saffron.
It is suitably wine-ish, and honey-ish, but also still definitely a lovely and peculiar ale. I just loved it, for both its intrinsic and circumstantial properties. I wanted to drink whole pints of it, standing around in the sun somewhere — and still wanted to, even knowing that this is 9% and would swiftly knock me on my arse. It’s light and lush and it feels like what I — a Beer Nerd, after all — wish wine tasted like while at the same time being totally recognisable as ‘just’ a staggeringly interesting golden ale.
Diary II entry #47, Dogfish Head 'Midas Touch'
Verbatim: Dogfish Head ‘Midas Touch’ 27/12/10 ÷2 with Scotty on the occasion of some Big News. 330ml $? from NWT (in my notes, but the internet died) [actually $10] I like it a lot, that’s the main thing. Beautiful golden peachy colour. Scotty through the saffron would be mostly giving colour, then we (proudly) realised we’re both sufficiently middle-class that we don’t know what it tastes like. The grapes come through a lot, making it very winey, but soft at the finish, not acid / sharp. The flavour makes you expect a whallop finish, but it’s just this lovely gentle wash instead. Wonderfully rides that line of Different Enough But Not Too Different.
