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.
Good old bloody-great-big Imperial Stout. Where would we be without you, then, huh? There are occasions where something as big and lovely and just-about-terrifying as this are just mandatory. Like here, catching up with a good friend and his family, in something of a now-weirdly-traditional Boxing Day Second Christmas.
And ‘Nokabollokov’ is just exactly what I want in one of these, too. It’s thick and gloopy, utterly dark, wonderfully flavourful — smoky, almost meaty in its bigness and richness — and kinda-vaguely-worryingly-easy to drink, given its strength. So it does pay to take it slow, or share — or both.
The scanner only slightly picked it up, but waving this thing around and pondering comparisons to such seemingly-bonkers referents as Oxo™ cubes lead to Diary II’s first spillstain. I thought that was pretty appropriate, for something this stainingly-dark and sneakishly-strong. I’ve been a lotfinnickier with Diary II, so far, but my usual obsessiveness was overwhelmed by the fair-enough-ness of the situation.
Diary II entry #46, Twisted Hop 'Nokabollokov'
Verbatim: Twisted Hop ‘Nokabollokov’ Imperial Stout 26/10/10 @ the Lanes in Yorick Bay. 330ml 8.6% $9ish @ Regional. Toby poured it for me, and reported it being distinctly treacly, which is always a good sign. It’s utter blackness — together with the stark label, it’s stunning. The bubbles are almost scarily dark + crema-ish, but to start it’s worryingly easy to drink. The bitterness builds as it warms + you drink, though — but not to an unwelcome level. Smoked Oxo™ cube, maybe, with caramel, says Toby. Suitably, it’s my first Diary-spill, too.
Borrowing adjectives from another recent entry to describe Mikkeller himself is useful: he’s the reigning rockstar of brewing, a mad roving Dane who probably never sleeps, and who is an absurdly multi-tricked pony — because you’d be damn hard-pressed to find any equally-universal descriptors for his beers. For every boundary-breaking piece of madness, there’s something like this: easy-going and relatively sedate.
But still delicious. I was a little nervous when the bubbles got away from me — my thoughts quickly turned to the parallel importing debate and the concerns about rough travel for ‘unofficial’ imports — but my fears subsided as the foam did, because the nose underneath was perfectly lovely with no worrying traces of funk. It was, instead, very much that lid-just-pulled-off Milo tin scent, all cocoa-y and dry and malty. Less rich and ‘big’ than the other recent Brown Ale of note, Rewired (from the oddly-also-Danish Søren Eriksen’s 8 Wired label), it treads a delightful line between easiness and fullness.
My sister’s daughter Izzy tried a little sip, too. It’s difficult to have an un-sampled glass of anything when she’s around, and she does have a pretty neat palate for a four-and-a-half year old — as a rather spooky party trick, she can usually tell you the grape variety in a random glass of wine. I can’t do that, and I’m nearly eight times her age, and am an actual bartender — albeit an evidently rubbish one, when things made of grapes are on the line. Anyway, she described this as “lemonade chocolate”, which I thought was pretty neat. I’ll have to see if I can teach her to add beer-style-picking to her repertoire.
Verbatim: Mikkeller ‘Jackie Brown’ 26/10/10 6.0% $8ish from Rumbles @ the Parents’ house. Mine was enthusiastically heady, which always makes a person nervous about a random import. It’s a gorgeous rich brown, with a nicely dry malty Milo-tin-ish nose peeping through the light tan head now it’s subsided. That dry cocoa flavour is in the face, certainly. Deftly skates between being quite light + quite rich; it’s full-flavoured without being stodgy. What with this and the similarly-Danish ‘Rewired’, let’s have more brown ales! To compare, though it’s been a while, this is less rich + massive, but focuses in tighter on that nice dry cocoa. But really, I should have another Rewired. You know, for science. Izzy said it’s like “lemonade chocolate” — which I think captures the taste + the feel quite nicely.
My Christmas Day was a rather relaxed affair, this year. Less of my already-smallish family was in town than usual, so things were toned right down, presents were waived entirely, and my sister and I spent a good few hours taking my niece / her daughter for a bike ride and a muck-around in the park. The flatmates were also out of town, so I came back into the City late at night to feed the Cat and treat myself to some nice quiet time with a good beer and a good book. I paired this, one of BrewDog’s ‘Paradox’ series of whisky-barrel-aged stouts, with Surface Detail, the newest book by the equally-Scottish Iain Banks — who himself had basically introduced me to whisky with an earlier (non-fiction) book of his. The hot summer day had turned into a crisp and clearish night, and Catface (evidently happy to have company) plonked herself nearby on the deck and just mooed at me occasionally, as she does. It all went together bloody marvellously; a fine present-to-self.
Malthouse had imported two of the other ‘Paradoxes’ the previous year, and the contrasts among them are a staggeringly awesome testament to the richly varied world of Scotch — each is aged in barrels from a different distillery, and the stout is absolutely transformed in unique and well-worth-finding-out ways. The ‘Smokehead’ version (with somehow-varied whisky barrels suspected to be from Ardbeg) tasted appropriately enormously of smoke — somehow glorious, righteous smoke, like you’d get standing nearby the burning houses of your enemies, I said at the time — and the ‘Springbank’ edition was just propelled into all-around massive flavourful heights, with all sorts of lovely richness biffed in at speed and with purpose.
This one was comparatively ‘confronting’ — really quite a full-on spicy nose to it, with borderline-concerning funky edges that defied pinning-down. It’s a deliciously and seriously complex kind of a thing; something of a fight to get to know properly, but damn well worth it.
Verbatim: BrewDog ‘Paradox’ — Isle of Arran 25/10/10 10% @ Home. $10+? [Actually $15] from NWT. Out on the deck, with the latest Banks book, which seemed apt. We loved the Paradoxes at work, so I had to get this. Very different. Smokehead was righteous fire; Springbank was enormous lushness, this is actually quite confronting. There’s a funky, feisty tartness to it. Spicy, gingery, rough woody. The ‘funk’ in the nose is almost off-putting, but you’re rewarded for getting past it. Not that it’s a struggle, but the clangs on a few alarm bells get ready, at least. Hanging out here with Catface makes for a very civilised end to a nicely understated Christmas.
BrewDog 'Paradox: Isle of Arran', the igloo joke
Diary II entry #44, BrewDog 'Paradox: Isle of Arran'
I’m not crash-keen on wheat beers. I mean, I do like several of them very much (Three Boys Wheat is a stand-out example), but I’m rarely quite in the mood — if I want something this light, I usually reach for a golden ale. But that’s just me. It was a stinking hot day, so I indulged myself in a side-by-side(-by-side); I bought the foremost after the Croucher ‘October’ confusion, and had the latter two thanks to my Australian friend Glenn and his duty-free allowance.
I also couldn’t help but put two identically-named beers against each other. I’d have thought that the hefeweizen / Hugh Hefner joke was a common one, but I could only find two others on BeerAdvocate.com.1 I’m torn, deciding a winner on that score — Burleigh put a stonking great moustache on the label, which is awesome, but I thought the Hef himself was pretty much always clean-shaven, which seems to me like Points Off, then.
The variance among the three was quite striking and made for a pleasantly-random scattergun sequence of sips from each — although what amounted to three standard-sized regular-strength beers in quick succession did catch up on me in the heat. Croucher’s was the darkest, tending towards banana cake rather than the habitual-for-hefe fresh banana note. On occasions that side of it seemed too much or just slightly off, but it wasn’t a deal-breaker. Burleigh’s was much more in that ‘classic’ mode with light, fresh fruitiness, and then Red Hill’s threw in what I thought was a pretty noticeable hop sideline — possibly dragging it out of the traditional form, but interestingly so.
My absolute favourite factoid about German-style wheat beers centres on that banana flavour. Learning about how the yeast just coincidentally made that very-familiar ester was an early Beer Nerdery moment for me (tutored by my biochemistry-majoring friend Toby, out on the balcony of the original Malthouse with a Tuatara tasting tray), but the best bit is that the Germans have been making hefe since long before they ever had bananas imported. So where we normally meet the fruit first and then think that the beer tastes like it, there must’ve been a point in history where Germans would first try this odd exotic fruit and say to themselves “damn, this tastes like wheat beer“. How wonderfully odd. I really must try to track down a historical reference.
Diary II entry #43, Croucher 'Hef' et. al.
Verbatim: Croucher ‘Hef’, Burleigh ‘Hef’ & Red Hill Wheat Beer all 330ml + 5%, latter two from Glenn, so I couldn’t resist a comparison on a muggy day. 22/12/10 I should’ve really done a bright sunny day photo, but I’m hiding inside. I wonder how many other tokens of the Hef/e trope there are… But Burleigh get extra cred for the silly ‘tache on their label. Croucher’s darkest, ambery even, then RH, then Burleigh. Taste + smells go: funky (too much?) banana cakey; then lighter, fresher banana: smoother; then light + with a more-present hop sideline (they grow their own Tettnanger @ RH). This is basically science now, right? Amelia’s right that Croucher’s cakeyness is as if the cake has been in the sun too long — a slightly past-it-ness. I’m still not entirely a wheat beer guy, but they do have their place — hot days. Which I usually just try to avoid entirely. And then, nearly a litre of wheat beer inspired some Proper Science; a 3:2:1 blend. Turned out superchoice.
1: And even then — one (‘Head High Hef’ from Breakwater Brewing) hardly seems an overt reference, and the other (‘The Hef’ from Gardner Ale House) isn’t even made any more. More are quite-possibly lurking on RateBeer.com, but my advanced-search-fu was insufficient to bring them out.
So yeah, our Christmas Offerings at work included a beer which had burnt pohutakawa1 as part of the process, and a beer named after Jesus for no readily-apparent reason. I just loved the irreverence of that. Of course, it didn’t hurt that both beers were really rather lovely, in their very-very different ways.
Martin Townshend’s teeny-tiny brewery outside Nelson is almost exclusively occupied making same pretty-damn-traditionally-English styles of beer. They’re always well made, and many of them have made very popular guest appearances on one or other of our ‘beer engine’ handpulls.2 ‘J.C.’ is a fair touch stronger than its traditional relatives, but hides that extra oomph worryingly-well in a body of nicely complex, steadily-building hoppy fruit flavours.
Diary II entry #42, Townshend 'J.C.' IPA
Verbatim: Townshend ‘J.C.’ IPA 16/12/10 on handpull @ MH, shouted by a regular (from my horrid old pub, in fact) — and how much more Christmassy can you get than a beer named after Jesus? This and the previous do make for nicely irreverent Holiday Beers. This is a bit hazy, but a nice muted paleish orange colour. Easier to drink than it should be @ 5.8%, the hops are fresh and light in the body but build a nice big bitter finish.
1: Note for aliens: The pohutakawa is the ‘New Zealand Christmas Tree’. It blooms around the right time, and does so with cute bright red flowery things, and so nicely hits the stereotypical colours.
2: We used to always have two dark beers — ordinarily Tuatara Porter and Invercargill ‘Pitch Black’ Stout — on handpull, which always struck me as a bit of a waste. We’ve lately settled into a pattern of one dark (porter / stout) and one brown (IPA or bitter) — much better.
I really have turned around on Epic’s beers over the course of a few years. For too long, Luke’s products were just the perfect embodiment of that trend that bored me so horribly wherein More Hops All Other Considerations Be Damned became such a trendy and habitual thing to do. Yawn, I say, despite loving a hop-stupid beer on occasion. I just hate to see one element of a many-faceted thing elevated above all others and paraded about as if it’s the key to everything for all situations.1, 2
‘Mayhem’ met me halfway, being a hop-focussed but actually balanced beer which I really enjoyed, and lately, Luke’s finally gone that final step and made some beers which let other factors entirely take the leading roles. His collaboration with England’s Thornbridge brewery produced a pretty-damn-good stout, and this ‘Portamarillo’ might just be a proper turning point, rescuing Epic from One Trick Pony status. Because honestly, no matter howgood any particular pony’s one trick is — yawn.
So. Continuing along the collaboration train, Luke joined forces with Sam Caligione of the famously-experimental Dogfish Head brewery. Working together for part of Sam’s Discovery Channel TV series, they made a uniquely New Zealandish beer by smoking tamarillos over pohutakawa and cramming them into a smooth, boozy porter. Because why not? It sounds ludicrous, but works absurdly well. I drank a lot of it myself, as we quickly went through some two-hundred litres from the taps at work. The porter is relatively light-bodied for its strength, leaving room for the gentle smokiness and a delightfully-random tart fruitiness.
Better yet, they brewed it twice. Double-better-yet, we got to try some of the U.S.-brewed version at work, when we threw a bit of a shindig for the Near Enough Fifth Birthday of the Epic brewery. It was a great little exercise in how much difference little changes can make — the Dogfish version being much smokier, the peculiar ‘sweetness’ you get from heavily-smoked malt stealing the show more from the tart fruit. The U.S. version was only available because Sam had some in his luggage, the Epic batch is still kicking around in bottles in the better sorts of retail outlets; you should get some if you haven’t yet — or just get more.
Verbatim: Epic / Dogfish Head Portamarillo 15/12/10 @ MH, for Epic’s Fifth-ish Birthday. The NZ brew is on tap, and we’ve got a bottle of the US batch to try. It’s an awesomely odd idea: Porter with Pohutakawa-smoked-Tamarillo. The US is darker is body + bubbles and — to me — plays up the smoke more, whereas the fruit is stronger in the NZ. The US has a crazy bitter / spicy late finish, the NZ seems smoother. But I really dig both.
— so then (16/12/10), I was stopped on the street today by a regular who was asking about my blogthing. Which was enjoyably weird. But he also mentioned that Luke’s version was less smoked than Sam’s, because he didn’t want that tail-end astringency. I really must get around to watching the Making Of TV show, but it’s nice to know I was on the right track.
Dogfish Head 'Portamarillo'
Diary II entry #41.1, Epic / Dogfish Head 'Portamarillo'
Diary II entry #41.2, Epic / Dogfish Head 'Portamarillo'
1: The same thing, lamentably, happens with my related obsession: Scotch Whisky. There, you get “peat freaks” like you get “hop heads” with beer — indeed, I think there are similarities to be drawn all over the place between peaty whiskies and hoppy beers, but that’s a little too tangential even for a footnote, perhaps. Myself, I love peaty whiskies. But not all the time. Not to the point where in absolutely all cases would I think that a whisky would be improved by more peatiness. So it is with hoppy beer.
2: And don’t you have to worry — at least a little — when you read something adorned with a “Add More Hops” background or a title like “I’m Here for the Hops” or “The Pursuit of Hoppiness” whether you should be discounting (in the sense of moderating-down, not “ignoring”) what they say about beers with a different emphasis? I read all three aforementioned sources avidly, but wish they didn’t position themselves so lop-sidedly. They might defend themselves by saying these things are (half?) in jest — but then, why are all the jokes lined up in that one direction?
