Category Archives: Actual Diary entries

Posts with beer notes — usually handwritten, as per the original Diary’s founding mission

Moa ‘Black Power’

May 7, 2011 Phil 13 Comments

It really is difficult to separate the thing-itself from its surrounding fog of incidentals. This is your old-school philosophy headache, right here; what are the properties, and what are the mere relations — and which are the essential properties, and which are just accidental? What the philosophers seem to have unaccountably neglected is that this problem gets massively more difficult when the incidentals in question bug the fuck out of you.

Given the recent sharp uptick in their brandwank, it’s hard for me to fairly approach a new Moa beer. I’m still entirely capable of liking their stuff — and, spoiler alert, I was recently renderly properly giddy by the re-apperance of their barrel-aged Russian Imperial Stout — but it’s probably easier for the older, pre-buyout pre-brandwank bonanza stuff to endear itself, like their ‘Five Hop’ still does. Anything new has nothing (by way of good associations, in my head) to guard against all that bile-raising bullshit seeping down into it and getting damn close to ruining its chances of a fair hearing. But I do try, I really do.

An edict came down from On High which reduced the range of potential after-work freebies, which struck me as a fairly mad idea — but of course it would. Moas (Moai?) on tap were still fair game, and we had this, which was a one-off and another Marchfest offering. It was billed as a chocolate wheat beer, and named ‘Black Power’. And my eye starts twitching, and I can feel the rage starting to warm up in the back of my brain.

“Black Power”? Really? The 2011 Marchfest gave itself the under-title “the craft brewing revolution continues” and returned to a Che Guevara motif they’d used a few years previous. Most of the festival beers go along with the theme, to greater or lesser degrees, but a quick glance down the list of names leaves this one standing out fairly glaringly in the lacking-class department, referencing as it does a still-existing and still-violent local gang. After the Breakfast Beer Fiasco,¹ this just stank of another tilt at conning the media into providing free advertising — mercifully though, as best I can tell, they pretty-much failed. And after the boringly sexist bullshit their marketing department has been indulging in lately,² a “chocolate wheat beer” just seemed nakedly pandering; a simple-minded trick for winning over the women in attendance, given a cartoonish and stereotypical view of what women might drink.

Maybe not. Maybe the name was more genuine, and less tactical. Perhaps it didn’t even come from the marketing department’s Outrage Generation Subcommittee. Given a black beer, it might’ve just been an ill-considered joke, not an attempted con. And quite-possibly the chocolate wheat beer plan wasn’t shallow demographic-chasing; it could’ve just been an honest attempt to make something interesting and do an autumnal merge of the typically-summery and traditionally-wintery. This is a real problem, one of many, with brandwank: it breaks the trust between the producer and the consumer, and makes it damn hard to give credit where credit might be due. All motives become suspect, and design or business decisions just look like yet more bastard ad-man villainy.

Against all that haze, I did try to give this a fair shake. But I just didn’t like it, and I really do think that was the thing-itself, rather than its accidental or relational properties. Wheat should give a certain amount of texture that does go well with chocolatey notes — like it does in the bloody-marvellous Emerson’s Dunkelweiss, and vaguely like what oatmeal can do for a stout — but this was just disappointingly thin. What chocolatey flavours there were tasted too much of just that: chocolate flavour, in the synthetic sense, not the genuine article. Despite the limpness and the underwhelming taste, by the end of the pint it still managed to build up a filmy sticky sugary feeling in my mouth like you’d get from a pint of Red Coke after months of drinking only the Black or Silver versions. As I hinted above, Moa are capable of making a black beer with enough presence to knock your out of your shoes and leave you grinning on the floor. This one, though — much like ‘Moa Noir’, their regularly-produced black lager, if you ask me — is just a little too little to stake out a worthy corner of the lighter end of the spectrum. The relationship between what it could have been and what it was is a little too close to the one between a thing and its shadow; outline recognisably similar, substance very different. But if I start bringing Plato’s Cave and its related baggage into all this, we’ll fly right over our per-session Philosophy Limit.

Verbatim: Moa ‘Black Power’ 7/5/11 from the reduced staffies selection @ MH. On which, don’t get me started. This was a Marchfest offering from Moa, and it seems to be the intersection of stunt naming and pandering styling, in that it’s a “chocolate wheat beer”. I’m lacking in details, there being no official write-up lying around online, but it ain’t no Emerson’s Dunkelweiss, that’s for damn sure. The body is limp, the wheatiness hard to find in the glass, and the chocolate tastes fake, such as there is. It’s like actual-strawberry vs “strawberry flavour”. This is a sad simulacrum of a non-bad idea; a fifteen-year-old’s cartoon version of something that could be worthy.

1: Essentially the first real act of the Rebrand was to announce the “launch” of a “breakfast beer”, which raised the ire of a fairly reactionary anti-alcohol campaigner who — right on cue — described basically any pre-noon (or pre-evening?) drinking as “pathological”. The media had a “controversy” to report on, and Moa quickly assumed their pre-prepared mantle of Battler and Victim and Struggling Local Business and All-round Top Bloke Just Havin’ a Laugh — transparent rag of polyester horseshit though it obviously was, to anyone who cared to look. ‘Breakfast’ wasn’t even a new beer; it was just re-packaged ‘Harvest’, something they’d made for years. The whole sad story was addressed, in some exasperated detail, in episode 2 of the Beer Diary Podcast: Beer and Marketing.
2: For example, just on the subject of their ‘Breakfast’ beer (see above, n1, obviously), it was billed using such phrases as “finally, a beer the ladies can enjoy” presumably for the simple reason that there’s fruit in it. Moa’s marketing people evidently have a way out of touch view of the current relationship between beer (good and bad) and the number of X chromosomes a person happens to have.

Actual Diary entries

Sprig & Fern ‘Harvest’ Pilsner

May 3, 2011 Phil 10 Comments

So yeah, there’s that. If you haven’t noticed it, or the reference escapes you, let’s set it aside for a moment and deal with the important thing first — you know, the beer.

This marks a brilliant return-to-form for lagers in the Diary, since it’s the first one in there since Budweiser. What a freakin’ turnaround. As I say in my notes, it was hardly “pilsner weather”, but I’d been keen to try this stuff since hearing about it last year. It’s a seasonal release by Nelson’s Sprig & Fern which is timed for Marchfest — which, in turn, coincides with the hop harvest. And it’s properly to-theme by using fresh (“green” or “wet”) hops, a trick often used to great effect in pale ales.¹ Marchfest attendees (both nerdy and not) came back raving about this with a uniformity and sincerity that made me fairly confident it wasn’t just Holiday Beer Syndrome. An opportunity for proof arose when Hashigo got themselves a keg, but it was tapped while I was at work and zooming out of the tap. In a fit of excellentness, Dave set me aside a rigger and dropped it off on his way home — just as he’d done for 8 Wired’s Saison-yeast-ified ‘Hopwired’, stand-up gent that he keeps proving to be.

It sat in the fridge with the rest of my Personal Stash for a day or two, waiting for a suitable occasion which it found in the guise of an abnormally-productive day off and an enjoyable evening of Nerding with friends. I plonked myself on the end of the bar and then entirely failed to share very much of my one-litre flagon. It’s one of those beers that justifies selfishness as easily as it would make for evangelising material; something you don’t really want to share, but which could work wonders if you did. All “not sure if this is the right weather for it” worries were quickly punctured with a swift jab of crisp-and-hoppy deliciousness. It was like a trumpet solo blaring out into a quiet autumn night from a suburban rooftop; brash and bold, but clear and wonderful. The Internets are often Not Much Help when it comes to one-off brews and were so with this, so I’m in the dark as to just which freshly-picked hops we’re talking about, but I don’t particularly mind — they’re lush and fresh and fantastic, flavourful enough that they’re not remotely one-note even if it is just a single variety in there. On a sunny day in Nelson, it’d be absolute bliss; little wonder all the excitable, happy-faced reports from people who made the trip over to the Other Island.

But yeah, the other thing.

Dave and his fellow Hashigoans couldn’t help but nod towards the peculiar story of “Chil Pook” on the label. It’s something I’ve avoided mentioning until now, since I’m still not quite sure what to make of the whole saga, but I can hardly let their reference go unexplained. You see, my handle on Twitter is @phil_cook² and so someone registered @chil_pook, in the manner of a seven-year-old’s first attempt to speak ‘in code’, got themselves the same distinctive icon as mine and… and… I’m not sure.

It’s not really within shouting distance of actual satire (with which I’m totally on board, whoever the target, even if it’s me), and if it’s some unfortunate soul who feels I’ve wronged them in some way, then why not say so, under your own name?³ Their posting is sufficiently erratic that we’re left with few clues as to who they really are or what precisely introduced (and occasionally seems to re-introduce) the bee to their bonnet. It’s all just a bit sad, in the end — especially since an unhealthy proportion of their material seems to be variations on a High Schoolish x-is-gay line; I’d have hoped anyone of beer-drinking / beer-giving-a-damn-about age would be past that.

I do find it very strange that I so-quickly attracted my peculiar orbiting stalker, though a few people (some fellow beer geeks, some normals, some in-betweens) have thought of it as a sort of strange badge of honour. I can kind of see their point, but I hope it isn’t wrong of me to still wish for a funnier parodist.

Verbatim: Sprig & Fern ‘Harvest’ Pilsner 3/5/11 1L rigger from Dave @ HZ, had @ MH, after a relatively-productive day off. Hardly pilsner weather, but buggrit. And Happy Birthday Karen! This stuff is legendary among Marchfesters, and now I know why; is delicious! Juicy as hop-goodness; zesty and brash but not too bitter. Halena was dubious of the nose — not being a hop-fiend — but was a huge fan. I’m in the dark about which fresh hops, but then I remembered about the Internets, and then the Internets were no help. Sadface. And with a second pint to get to know, I’m still unsure. Quite citrussy, sure, but certainly not one-note.

1: My first experience of such things was with Mac’s ‘Brewjolais’, a sadly-now-retired rare example of one of the Big Breweries making something genuinely interesting, and my most-recent one (off the top of my head) was Thornbridge’s ‘Halcyon’. Wet-hopped pale ales were probably brought back to the beer-drinking public consciousness with Sierra Nevada’s ‘Harvest’, a beer which proved so popular that they added a ‘Southern Harvest’ which utilises one of the many advantages of living on a big spheroid: that there are two hop seasons, if you’re willing to travel a bit — fittingly, since I’m talking about Marchfest, their other-harvest uses New Zealand hops, getting them on a plane a.s.a.p. in a Carbon-footprint-nightmare-inducing exercise in deliciousness (my Diary entry for which is stuck in the infamous Limbo, sadly).
2: Aggravatingly, when I got around to signing up, both @philcook and @beerdiary had been recently snatched up; one by a spambot, one by someone seemingly in the U.S. who does (sporadically) record their drinking habits and finds.
3: There have been a few peculiar / pathetic / both pieces of anonymous internet slagging-off in the local beer scene, lately. It’s something that deserves fuller attention — and which deserves to wither swiftly and drop off — but I should return to it properly later, and not High Horse things here and now, since my brush with it is (so far) so trifling and lame.

Actual Diary entries

Green Flash Stout

April 29, 2011 Phil 1 Comment

I’m fairly sure that the last half of my notes for this were back-filled the next day. In terms of its appearance in the book, this was a classic Distracted Beer, and a convenient reminder that the actual Beer Diary is still a personal thing, even though it’s (obviously) now (also) a public thing. My presumably-only-barely-legible (if that) scratchings¹ still aren’t really written with public consumption in mind — this thing is. They’re different, the Beer Diary and the Beer Diary, and a scan of the one appears on the other as Proof of Authenticity as much as anything else, I suppose. And just like my photography gets a little loose if I’m having too much fun, so too go the notes.

The tasting at Weta Digital replaced my regular Friday night bar shift, and so my “working day” was over seven or eight hours earlier than it ordinarily would be — you know, an entire normal-person day earlier. I dropped off my rented tasting glasses at Regional, grabbed this off the shelf pretty-much on a whim (having liked stuff from Green Flash, before), and wandered to the pub — by which (in this instance) I mean the Hop Garden, a very-short downhill amble from my house, bless it.

If I recall correctly — it became a long night, so I quite-probably don’t — I plonked this in the fridge and was waiting for Scott to finish, figuring we’d split it. That probably means there was a Renaissance ‘Elemental’ or Three Boys Oyster Stout or two before this, whichever was the current nice-on-a-rainy-day Dark Thing On Tap. And when we did get around to it, it was paired with some mispoured Aberlour whisky. Utterly marvellous as a combination,² but I was clearly well into the territory of the Rule Against Plural Big Beers. Ordinarily that means I wouldn’t have something ‘new’ and ordinarily that means I wouldn’t make a Diary entry — but there are always exceptions: some occasions warrant celebratory beers, and some beer-related moments are worth recording, new-beer or no.

I’ll just have to get another bottle. I remember really enjoying it, and my notes certainly sound like me recommending something very-much “my thing” to myself.³ I just can’t quite squint well enough through the twin hazes of the Overexcitable Day and the Overindulgent Night to get much of a grab on the specifics. I recall expecting it to be bigger-and-scarier — one of those huge, powerful beers that prove a Worthy Fight, maybe — but being delighted by the easy-going, smooth massiveness of it. You could say it was a little bit Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile, perhaps; superficially imposing but actually a big, charming softie.

Verbatim: Green Flash Stout 29/4/11 $14 @ Reg, after dropping off glassware. 650ml 8.8% imported by HZ ÷ 2 w/ Scotty @ HG. A void of dark, classic espresso bubbles. Massive flavour, big ’splosion of black dynamite in the face. Delish. Really smooth, not relentlessly coffee. And we’ve got mispoured Aberlours to go with. Probably a violation of the Rule Against, but who cares? So nice to catch up — and Gen joined in halfway. Best I can say: it was surprisingly accessible, given heritage + strength.

1: Weirdly, I get people not-infrequently remarking the I have neat handwriting. I think this is mostly because my scrawl is tiny, more than anything. And so effectively-from-afar, maybe it has the superficial appearance of tidiness. I’m not quite sure what caused my microscopic handwriting, but it’s led some people to assume that the Diary is quite a bit bigger than it actually is and so be surprised by the appearance, somewhere, of the little notebook itself. To give a sense of scale: in a one-hour lecture at law school, I’d use a single side of A4 for notes, at roughly 18-20 words per line. Yeesh.
2: Speaking of which: not too long after, the crowd I had my Trappist Dance Card tasting with were at Hop Garden for a beer-and-whisky tasting. A timetable snafu prevented me from joining in, but it sounded fantastic. Stu from Yeastie Boys joined in and helped out, given the obvious beer-and-whisky resonance of the just-released ‘Rex Attitude’. I was musing about beer-and-x not long ago, and have since stumbled upon my own plan for a little beer-and-coffee tasting, and am due to join in a beer-and-cocktails evening fairly soon. Details and nerdy photos to follow, naturally. Beer’s been around since the dawn of Civilisation, but still keeps you guessing.
3: Honestly, my memory is terrible. Much of my mental life is like this, as it pertains to reading things I’ve written or just when it comes to finding things around the house. It’s not at all uncommon to be sitting here at my desk and to get the idea that a cup of tea might be nice — only to wander downstairs to the kitchen to find one already there, sitting forgotten-about from a few paragraphs (or a few scenes of a TV show, or a level or obvious checkpoint of a videogame) ago. It’s a good thing I like over-brewed tea.

Actual Diary entries

Yeastie Boys ‘Rex Attitude’

April 29, 2011 Phil 9 Comments

With my beer photos, I vacillate wildly between 1) painstakingly setting something up, mucking about with lighting and re-arranging things far in the background (even when they aren’t mine and when doing so is a nuisance to someone else, I’ll admit), and 2) just getting it done-in-one, cinéma vérité style (if you’re feeling generous; just go with slapdash, if you’re not). My Little Creatures Stout is a nice recent example of the former, this is a classic case of the latter.¹

Firstly, I was just too busy having fun. I was at Weta Digital, hosting a beer tasting at which ‘Rex’ was the Not-Very-Surprising-Actually Special Guest Surprise Seventh Beer — its highly-anticipated official launch was the next morning, so I couldn’t really say I had a “surprise” without it being a rather-obvious one. Secondly, if I did re-shoot this, it wouldn’t be at Weta Fucking Digital, would it? The beer geek population overlaps surprisingly-much with the computer geeks — I’m a professional one of the former, and an amateur of the latter kind, and here I was hanging out with people who were the vice versa, essentially.² One great thing about unashamed geeks is how well we get along with other geeks, whatever their particular domain; we just love that combination of over-enthusiasm and scarily-specialist knowledge, wherever we find it and no matter what it’s about.

‘Rex’ is a seemingly-mad proposition for a beer: a 7% golden ale, with the entirety of its malt heavily peat-smoked in the manner of that which would usually go into a fiesty Islay whisky. Smoked malt is hardly commonplace in beer, but local things like Invercargill’s ‘Smokin’ Bishop’ and 8 Wired’s ‘Big Smoke’ make for nice introductions. Peat smoked malt is something else again, though, with its sharper and simply smokier smoke — and the Received Wisdom is that you shouldn’t use more than a fraction of it in a brew. And how better to test the Usual Line than by crashing right through to 100% and seeing what happens? This is your swift-kick-in-the-pants sort of science — in the fine tradition of Newton sticking a needle in his own damn eye-socket to figure if he was on the right track about the optics of human sight, or of Joseph Kittinger jumping back to Earth from the edge of space to test whether a parachute system for jet pilots was feasible.

It is, I mean to say, ballsy. It was pretty-much impossible not to have an extreme reaction to it; our favourite part of bartending for a while after its release was to watch people have their first taste. In my handwritten notes, I mention hoping that Jed would get some good reaction shots, since I knew he’d be at the launch the next morning. And damn, did he ever. If anything, Stu seemed slightly disappointed that more people at the launch weren’t disgusted by it. I’m not sure how much of that was politeness, knowing he was around, or whether it was down to the self-selectingly beer-geek-heavy crowd we had — or bits of both, of course. But I do like it when something doesn’t mind going out on a limb in the knowledge it’ll be hated in some quarters; that’s basically how the world avoids descending into an amorphous grey goo, after all.

The nose is what gets you, and generates those now-famous reactions. This unassuming little pale golden beer has an aroma that just hurtles out of the glass and charges up your nose, like a crowd of demented pixies wearing golf shoes and in a vengeful hurry to headbutt you directly in the brain. An intense smokiness, to be sure, but one that apparently changed quite a lot over time,³ and one which (to me, at least) lacked the scarier chemical notes from the wilder South Coast Islays — those memorable “burning wetsuit” and “broken bottle of iodine” notes of a Laphroaig, for example. It’s still confronting, because you just easily can’t prepare your mind for it, but the smoke is somehow still light and delicious once you take a few sips; it swiftly becomes good smoke, not scary smoke, a softer version of the “righteous smoke” in BrewDog’s Islay ‘Paradox’, not the sort that might wake you up in terror at night.

The golden ale body is genius, perhaps the masterstroke of it. Other smokey beers I’ve enjoyed have tended to big gloriously big heavy-footed things with a delicious sideline of smoke — 8 Wired’s ‘Big Smoke’, to me, is like having the best porter of your life while you just happen to be relaxing near a campfire. Here, because you’re way up at 100% peated malt, you just clear the stage and let that one element do its thing, with everyone else providing only minimal backup and balance.

It’s a great lesson in the blessed subjectivity: even people who hated it could attest to it being well-made — it is a thing that is perfectly doing what it sets out to do, and that fact changes not a damn depending on who likes it and who doesn’t. And if you didn’t like it, fair enough. I can totally see where you’re coming from, won’t at all try to convince you otherwise and am happy to just have all the more for myself. It is utterly different, and — from my experience on the dispensing-side of a bar — whether or not you’ll like it correlates not at all with any obvious thing about you, your opinion on beer, your opinion on whisky, on peculiar old-school French techno, or on the proper colour for pants.

Verbatim: Yeastie Boys ‘Rex Attitude’ 29/4/11 330ml x 4 ÷ with the Weta crowd, as a Mysterious Something Special for our tasting. Since it was an ‘obvious’ “surprise”, I had to lie. But it was heaps of fun, before + during. Reaction shots are hilarious; I hope Jed gets some goodies. It’s all peat, but without the scary chemistry-set-on-fire side of a South-coaster. The golden ale body is the master-stroke, for sure. So much fun.

1: Or, compare the photos for the also-Yeastie ‘Rapture’ and the just-after-it Emerson’s ‘1812’. I was, in that instance, flustered by the abundance of people around me. For someone who works late nights in a frequently-busy bar, I’m remarkably crap with crowds.
2: We also had a few relative-neophytes to the wonderful world of Good Beer who just jumped in in the spirit of trying something new and hanging out after work. One of them, a self-described “I’m not really a beer person” person, wound up absolutely loving the Twisted Hop’s bloody-great-big Imperial Stout, ‘Nokabollokov’. I love it when that happens; you really never can tell what will work as some particular someone’s Gateway Beer — that’s why you just keep trying.
3: Kick-in-the-pants science, remember? The chemistry of these things is untested; this is it being tested, right there in these bottles.

Actual Diary entries

Defamation ‘Beetnik’ IPA

April 20, 2011 Phil 2 Comments

Stuck in the not-yet-uploaded limbo of the latter half of the first Diary is a stout by my now-flatmate; a big, delicious thing called ‘Cottonpicker’. That was the first time I’d been moved to enter a homebrewed beer into my notes. And this here is the second. You could look at that as a) a fairly shitty average of one per hundreds-of-pages book, or b) evidence of high standards. Personally, I think it’s both, and will look to remedy ‘a)’, now that I know a good few more excellent homebrewers.

And you might not be seeing this more widely-available any time soon, but we’re on the cusp of a bit of an explosion in Wellington-based and Wellington-ish brewing: the Overboss and Over-overbosses of the Malthouse are soon to set up a brewpub-type-thing on Bond Street and beers should soon be available from two new nano-breweries,¹ in the shapes of the fittingly-named the ‘Garage Project’ in Aro Valley, and Kereru Brewing² out in the Hutt Valley. My days of occasionally lamenting or wondering about how this town, of all towns, doesn’t have any breweries within its limits are numbered in the small numerals, it seems. And — speaking of homebrewers, you see — a fair-few local folk are poised to make the switch from brewing in their basements and whatnot to contract-brewing at various places around the country; look for names like ParrotDog and Revolution Brewing very soon.

And not long after, with any luck: Defamation Brewing, the project of David Wood, a manager from down the road at Hashigo and the maker of this — a charmingly-odd IPA made with beetroot. Because why not? I’d tried it a while earlier, and was quite taken with it, when he’d brought some in for a little ‘brewshare’ evening at Malthouse. The weirdness of its ‘pitch’, and its striking colour — which did show up best in a smaller glass, as you can see below — gave it a bunch of uniqueness points, but it stood on its own as a well-made beer on top of all that. Even if you were blindfolded against its striking first impression, the beetroot would still come through in an unexpectedly-welcome earthiness that seems to help set off the significant lively American-esque hop flavours — in the contrasting-and-amplifying manner of that little bit of rock salt on posh chocolate, or (similarly) of the oysters in Three Boys’ masterful stout.

It made for a very nice little consolatory beer after the tragedy that was my particular bottle of Mikkeller ‘Statesman’ — Dave happened to’ve stopped by my pub late in the evening, and I was recounting that sad tale when my perennially-slack memory kicked in and reminded me that a full bottle of Beetnik was sitting in my personal stash in the keg chiller. Perfect timing, and pretty damn good remedy.

With “little guys” like these turning into slightly-bigger-guys in the brewing game, it’s a bloody marvellous time to be a great big beer nerd. The next few months will doubtless see a whole bunch of new names in my little Diaries; bring ’em on, I say.

Verbatim: Defamation ‘Beatnik’ IPA [I still can’t believe I didn’t get the punny spelling right; I love punny names] 20/4/11 donated by David, who was just in earlier tonight. I was sharing my ‘Stateside’ pain, and so thought this might nicely compensate. Big American hops, after all. Beetroot, though? For colour, to mess with people, including yourself. And for that “earthyness”, which, sure enough, is here in spades. Heh. Spades, how apt. It looks like a Kriek Boon, complete with the pinkish foam. Really well made, and bloody interesting. And after ‘Cottonpicker’, we’re now averaging one homebrewed beer per Diary. Two goodies, too.

1: By which we mean the step smaller than “micro”, of course — not actually “nanoscopic”.
2: i.e., named for the native “Wood Pigeon”. New Zealanders seem rather fond of this source of brewery names. Even if you set aside Tui — since it’s not really a separate brewery anymore, and isn’t really a proper beer (please excuse the lapse into snobbery on this occasion), or isn’t the beer it says it is, at least; please, can we set aside Tui? — there’s Tuatara, Moa (with a ‘Weka’ sub-brand), and there was briefly a Kea Brewing. I’m sure other charismatic-and-endemic animals will be seized upon, yet, but I’ve also always thought that “Native Animal Brewing Company” itself would make a nicely postmodern homage.

Actual Diary entries

Mikkeller ‘Stateside’

April 19, 2011 Phil 2 Comments

Gawd, I can remember the depressing blurgh of this all too well. I’m trying my best to catch up to the actual Diary, but the value of t still stands at fifty-something days, and the memory remains uncomfortably raw. I bought this on the same shopping trip that netted the Coconut Porter and ‘Big Swell’ IPA from Maui Brewing, so it was in good company, and the Mikkeller beers I’ve had before have been marvellous. Smart money might look like it was on this being at least enjoyable, but it just wasn’t.

The overall sensory impression was: something is wrong. It’s difficult to pinpoint just how it rang my internal alarm bells, or quite what it most resembled — the plasticky, papery awfulness of a rain-soaked piece of junkmail; the unexpected sudden wrongness of distractedly biting too far down a piece of melon and accidentally eating a big chunk of that thick, terrible skin; the horrific vegetal funk that wafts around the kitchen when you finally get around to cleaning out the bottom drawer of the fridge. Maybe all of those, and more. I suspect that bits of my brain have charitably done a spot of cleaning house, pruning the neurons that remember the specific horror, just leaving enough of the general memory to be going on with.

Not that I’m blaming the beer; I can’t — I just don’t know what the Hell went wrong. There were a few complications in this thing’s life before it horrified me so, ranging from the immediately-recent to the possibly-long ago:

It fountained like crazy when I popped the cap. That’s never a good sign, and could be down to a few things — two possibilities for which we’ll get to — but my previous Mikkeller, the ‘Jackie Brown’ which I had on Boxing Day last year, was also enthusiastically bubbly… Moreso than this, but the memory of the other one being initially-worrying but perfectly fine was enough to stop me freaking out.
Just like that previous Jackie Brown, this was a “grey market import”. Such things have a historical reputation for at-least-imperfect / possibly-outright-dodgy handling, and a rough enough trip over from the other side of the planet could make something go sufficiently wrong to account for both the foam and the yuck. The problem being, of course, that you just don’t know. Maybe something went wrong in transit, maybe something was wrong with this bottle before it left the brewery, or maybe the beer entire is just pants. Who knows?
And this poor, unfortunate bottle in particular suffered a fridge-fall a few days earlier. Sitting at the outside edge of the bottom shelf inside the door, the physics and the leverage conspired against it and hurled it out and onto the floor after my flatmate, in hunger-induced enthusiasm, opened the fridge too fast. Ordinarily, a few days undisturbed would be more than enough to calm it down — but perhaps things were worse than they appeared; maybe the cap was dinged enough to ruin its seal, letting in something funkifying or just a whole bunch too much Oxygen. Again: who knows?

I had to check / bluff / Google the funny-speak (i.e., the Danish) on the label to make double-sure that nothing weird and ripe for mere-subjectivity-based dislike was meant to be going on. But no. Just a nice big American-hopped pale ale, with a dose of oats thrown in for texture, presumably. Sounds fab — more’s the pity about this bottle. Ah well.

Addendum: (My second addendum in as many days, weirdly.) Since this post has been referenced in Hashigo’s ‘Rungs on the Ladder’ newsletter — as Dom was talking about grey market imports, making points which I’m totally on board with — I feel I should be extra-honest and up-front about the provenance of this beer, decoding the note in my handwritten Diary: my ‘Stateside’ came from the New World Thorndon supermarket, and carried a sticker showing it’d been imported by BeerStore.co.nz. I’ve had fantastic beers from New World and BeerStore, and both acting in concert; but that’s just the point, duds like this are the ineliminable risk involved — caveat emptor, bigtime.

Verbatim: Mikkeller ‘Stateside’ 19/4/11 330ml $10 @ NWT, 7% Bought together with the Mauis. And a lesson in the difficulty of ‘reviewing’ something. This was a) a grey import, b) the victim of a fridge-drop a few days ago, and c) a fountain when it opened. There’s something ‘off’ about it, but I have no idea what’s at fault for that. Should be lovely, given the pitch + maker. But it’s not. And that’s bloody depressing.

Mikkeller 'Stateside', funny-speak (i.e., Danish)

Actual Diary entries

Maui ‘Big Swell’ IPA

April 18, 2011 Phil Leave a comment

And then, a few days later, something rather similar — which makes a certain amount of sense in that my Monday was spent dealing with the same nonsense that lead to the unexpected Saturday night off. But it all worked out alright, and was fun in its own peculiar way, and so I cracked open one of these to celebrate.

Plus, here we are with another canned beer. I gave some of my thoughts on them — and on the spelling of Aluminum (no second i) — in my recent Diary entry on the same brewery’s Coconut Porter. That rant (the canned-beer one, not the Aluminum one so much) was prompted by comments made by local beer writer Neil Miller, and this was his Birthday. Perfect.

So soon after the Ballast Point ‘Big Eye’, it was nice to have another big-but-balanced American pale ale. The tagline on the can uses the word “hoppy” for thirty percent of its text, but the beer serves as a nice reminder that hoppiness isn’t exactly the same as bitterness, closely related though they are. It manifests here with all those wonderful classic American pale ale flavours of citrus fruit and fresh, resiny pine — but they’re all just a little more relaxed than they often are. Not tired, like a bad import or anything lacking in freshness, just relaxed. Imagine something already-delicious like Hallertau’s ‘Maximus’ finally escaping the clamour of Auckland,¹ getting itself a beach holiday and just chilling right the fuck out. Rather fitting, really, given its Hawaiian origins.

And damn, they aren’t kidding when they say smooth, either; it’s peachy, hazy golden colour, pillowy soft, excitable bubbles and luxuriously lush feel all put me in mind of Golden Bear’s ‘Bear Trappe’ though the two beers otherwise come from quite different backgrounds and styles. As I said on the Twitterthing when I bought this and the porter, anyone who wants to say there’s no such thing as good canned beer should have to do so to the Maui Brewing Company’s face — and to 21st Amendment, and to BrewDog, and… You get the idea.

Addendum: And then, the day after I posted this, Neil presented a somewhat-more-nuanced position on Twitter:

My definite preference is for beer in bottles but cans have their place. What is in the vessel is ultimately the most important. Some cheap cans can taste a bit metallic but a good can is fine – Big Swell IPA being the perfect example.

Though there’s still an under-current of anti-can sentiment in there — why else the definite preference? — I totally agree with the idea that it’s the beer that counts most. On that, given the inner (non-metal) lining of the sorts of cans usually used, metallic tastes are much more likely to be a brewing fault than attributable to the cans (a point covered, ironically, in the recent New Zealand TV programme for which Neil was a Talking Head). Still, it’s nice to know the fairly-strident lines he delivered in his ‘Beer 101’ tasting session — overhearing bits of which while clearing glasses was what initially freaked me out — don’t quite match up with his considered views on the matter.

Verbatim: Maul Brewing Co. ‘Big Swell’ IPA 18/4/11 355ml can $10 @ NWT 6.2% Reward for a weirdly enjoyable return to lawyering today. Really pretty hazy peachy gold, big fluffy white head. Soft nose of fruit + piney oily sides. Not big and bitter and punchy, still soft and smooth. Lush. The bubbles are totally reminiscent of Bear Trappe’s. And hey, it’s Neil Miller’s birthday, so a good canned beer is apt. It’s like Maximus went on a beach holiday + chilled out.

Diary II entry #93, Maui Brewing Co. 'Big Swell' IPA

1: Well, not that Hallertau live in the clamourous part of Auckland. Or really Auckland at all, as such. They’re clever enough to be a twenty-minute blat up the motorway out of town. But you know what I mean.

Actual Diary entries

Ballast Point ‘Big Eye’ IPA

April 16, 2011 Phil 3 Comments

My memory of this one gets a little hazy. I mean, the Creatures Stout was delightfully light, but it was followed by heavier things — as we continued to ramble, sit around and generally enjoy my unexpected Saturday night off. So far as memory (imperfectly) serves, I had a couple of Three Boys’ magnificent Oyster Stouts, joined a round of whiskies with my flatmate and his friends, and was given a Schneider ‘Aventinus’ that was accidentally opened (instead of the other kind of Schneider in stock). I was, therefore, perilously close to violating the Rule Against, but — as is, admittedly, quite-often the case — proceeded regardless.

I couldn’t not, really. I’d just missed out on a proper glass of the same brewery’s ‘Sculpin’ IPA: a ludicrously-highly-regarded thing of which I only managed an instantly-impressive taste that (apparently) put me in mind of “angry peaches”. The Hop Garden had bought their keg of Sculpin from the fine folks down the road at Hashigo Zake — in the spirit of a rising tide lifting all boats, and in the knowledge that your competition isn’t really your competition in the usual sense, in this business — and there were a few bottles of this in the fridge, so it seemed the obvious backup choice.

The impressions that stay with me through the partial fog of over-indulgence are simply these: loveliness and balance. The hops are met with enough of a smooth body to maintain an enormous amount of drinkability for something so flavourful. And they aren’t all about bitterness for the sake of it; they’re there in their massive quantities for a reason — as a device to deliver deliciousness, not just a way to punch you in the head as an end in itself. Some American IPAs (and some things inspired thereby) can slip into cartoonishness and a weird sort of blinkered extremism that (for me) often (but not always) defeats a lot of the fun. This isn’t one of those, not by a long shot; it’s big, but equally even-handed and enjoyable.

Verbatim: Ballast Point ‘Big Eye’ IPA 16/4/11 @ HG, after a mispour Aventinus. Score! Their ‘Sculpin’ was on tap, but ran out before this, while I was distracted by the above — it tasted, from a sample, like angry peaches; marvellous. This is a lovely red-bronze, 6.0%, 355ml $10.50. Fresh, fruit-laden nose. Very smooth body. It’s utterly lovely. Despite the origin, the style, the strength. Another astute HZ purchase. Clever chaps. Delicious, and balanced, as they are, against their stereotype.

Actual Diary entries

Little Creatures Single Batch Oatmeal Stout

April 16, 2011 Phil Leave a comment

It’s hardly a secret: I loves the Little Creatures, I do. It continues to pain me greatly that only the Pale Ale is available over here in New Zealand — as much as I freakin’ adore it, they’ve long make other brilliant things and have relatively-recently started doing these ‘Single Batch’ runs.

Coincidentally, I was just (before writing this up) listening to the first episode of Radio Brews News, a new podcast from some fine folk over in the Big Country. One of the topics of conversation was another Creatures ‘Single Batch’, a recently-released Märzen. Apparently it wasn’t overly well-received, with the general sense among some of the Beer Geek Crowd (not really shared by those on the podcast) that one-offs should be over-the-top, and anything shy of crazypants is a disappointment. Which, frankly, is bonkers. Firstly, there’s a solid case to be made that a Märzen which knocks your socks off is, at least, not quite right; they’re pretty easy-going things, by design. And secondly, I do tire of that undercurrent of thinking that only the big-and-brash are worth celebrating. There’s a lot to be said for well-made pieces of relaxing and restrained loveliness. Like this.

Also rather coincidentally, I’d recently been talking about Beer-and-x Matching. I know basically nothing about food,¹ so I’m all at sea when it comes to the finally-fashionable field of beer-and-food matching. Perhaps to compensate as much as for the inherent fun of it, I was recently talking about beer-and-music matching on the Twitterthing — so I’m listening to Talking Heads while writing this, for reasons that’ll be apparent if your Music Trivia skill is high enough² — and Pete Brown also brought up the subject of beer-and-books matching with excellent timing and linking it to a discussion of the broderline-synesthesia I sometimes try to hide behind when my ‘tasting note’ comparisons get particularly-loopy. But the best x is as true as it sounds twee to say: good beer goes best with good people.³

And this beer was linked to several. My friend Kirsten bought it for me when she was over in Melbourne for work, going so far as to lie about not being able to get any to bring home and leaving it to send me all geek-giddy when I just discovered it in her fridge. We didn’t get around to drinking it, distracted by good bars and good food as we were, so I thought it’d make a good bar-warming thing to split with Scott at his new pub — though it took us a few months to finally have it. Good thing I’m an alarmingly-patient fellow, sometimes; I was dead keen to try this. But it all worked out nicely; we had some good stories to share, and were joined by my flatmate (and our mutual friend and former colleague) Megan, and my friend KT. Just bloody marvellous.

So it was in good company, but it didn’t rest and try to coast on that advantage; it was delightful all of its own doing, as well. It was a wonderfully deft stout — only 4.2%, and with a light, silky body that still managed to have a real smoothness to it (presumably thanks to the oatmeal). The coffee-in-a-chocolate-milkshake flavour is delicious and not overblown — but still easily enough to warrant the sip-and-savour that a much heavier beer normally calls for or demands. I say in my notes that I was on a good stout run — which I am, and which I can tell you (from flipping forward a few pages) continues a good while yet — but that’s a two-edged thing; this could’ve been eclipsed by other recent beers, if it wasn’t something special. But it was just what I was looking for, exactly what I was hoping it’d be, and totally worth waiting for. Now I just have to find a suitable occasion for my second bottle…

Verbatim: Little Creatures Single Batch Oatmeal Stout 16/4/11 @ HG with Scotty, at last. Related a Good Story About Malthouse, so it seemed apt. 568ml — “pint-sized!”, 4.2%, and that [is] apparent in its lovely-lovely lightness. Deliciously smooth coffee / choc-milkshake wave a few seconds in. Just what I wanted, again. I am on a good stout run. Scott’s bottle-opener, “Freddie”, went well, given Pipsqueak’s logo. It’s deft, and confidently-understated. Plus I got to split it with KT, as well!

Little Creatures Single Batch Oatmeal Stout, brewers' scribble

1: Dinner tonight was scrambled eggs. That’s just about as elaborate a meal as I have ever prepared, or ever realistically aspire to prepare, on my own. Though, in my defence: they were excellent; the Three Boys Wheat I had complemented them wonderfully; and I’m not terrible as a sous-chef, so long as you find enthusiastic ignorance amusing, rather than irritating.
2: If not: Talking Heads released an album called Little Creatures, back in 1985. It and the live-in-the-bottle nature of their first and flagship product combined to inspire the name of the brewery, so the story goes.
3: Helpfully, good people drink good beer, as Hunter reminds us.

Actual Diary entries

Maui Coconut Porter

April 15, 2011 Phil 3 Comments

Either I’m frequently wrong about what I do and don’t like — or I like beer enough that it can turn me around on things that otherwise gross me out. Just to cite two very-recent examples: Yeastie Boys ‘Hud-a-wa” tasted of marmalade, and Emerson’s ‘Taieri George’ is like liquid Hot Cross Buns. Hell, nevermind individual beers: I don’t really even like citrus fruit at all but am frequently delighted by American-esque pale ales.

And then there’s coconut. Barring this — and its part in making the soupy half of a good laksa, and as the sprinkling on the outside of a lamington; two uses in which you can’t really taste it, anyway — I’ve got very little time for coconut. This, though? This is delicious. I’ve had it before, on my Birthday last year, as part of a suite of bloody-marvellous beers which I used to close off the original Diary.¹ So I already knew it, and knew it would make a fantastic follower to the stonkingly-beautiful 8 Wired ‘iStout’ Ice Cream Float I’d just had.

I wanted to have it out of some weird sense of solidarity, too, given that a Certain Beer Writer² had recently been maligning and ridiculing the mere idea of canned beer. That just struck me as needless, outdated, and wrong. As a blurb on these very cans will tell you, Aluminum³ is way better than glass for the storing of beer. It’s lighter, cheaper, more recyclable and utterly opaque — forget the vexed question of what colour glass blocks what types of light best: this isn’t a variously-tinted window, it’s a wall. There’s a stereotypical correlation between cheap-and-crappy beer and cans, sure, but it’s hardly any stronger than the statistical link between beer at all and bad beer. Good beer is still the minority, whatever its packaged in — and to the extent that slightly-more-than-average dodgy beers might be canned than bottled that’s not somehow the can’s fault. And it’s difficult to square anti-can sentiment in people who’ll also say that beer is usually better on tap than from a bottle — kegs are just fucking-great-big cans, made from a different metal, but with all the same advantages for all the same reasons.

Back to the beer. Especially if you followed the footnotes, it’s been a while since I mentioned it, so I’ll reiterate: it’s delicious. Previously-basically-useless coconut finally finds its destiny in providing a gorgeously complementary toasty dryness to the relaxedly rich and chocolatey porter. It’s a softer version of the effect you get with the stronger ‘roastiness’ you might find in a nice stout — which is arguably (though probably not) part the dividing line between porter and stout. You won’t get me near a Bounty Bar, though, so there’s got to be a fair amount texture-aversion going on behind my mostly-anti-coconut stance.

I was never quite sure about a few aspects of the labelling of the can, though. 1) That’s a weirdly-hideous drawing on the front, there. 2) The tagline “Like hot chicks on the beach” hardly seems to make any sense, nevermind the potential gendery sexisty minefield. And 3) “Certified made on Maui”? By who? And how, and why? Was there actually a dispute about this, at some point? I draw attention to these things mostly to point out the sorts of things which pop up in my mind but are quickly forgiven in the presence of a sufficiently-awesome beer. Slagging off Aluminum, or calling it “Aluminium”, though? That I won’t abide.

Verbatim: Maui Brewing Co. Coconut Porter 15/4/11 $10 @ NWT, because cans were recently needlessly maligned, and because it’s lovely. 355ml We bodged it up with Tuatara Porter on the Hopinator, but this is the real deal, and it shows. Light, fresh, delicious. Toasty cocoa / coconut, without any stodge.

Maui Coconut Porter, certification — Maui Coconut Porter, "certification"

Diary II entry #90, Maui Brewing Co. Coconut Porter

1: The latter half of Diary I is still stuck in a Not Uploaded Yet limbo, for which I keep apologising. I really will get around to it, some day. Partially because I’m as much as completeist as I am a procrastinator (imagine the headaches that internal tension causes…), but mostly because there are just some bloody-marvellous beers in there, to which I’m always annoyed I’m unable to refer.
2: Neil Miller. I’m not actually shy about naming names; I just know that him and I are approximately-equally fond of footnotes. [Later edit: on noticing this and a later reference, a More Nuanced Neil appeared than the one who provoked my disbelieving, can-defending near-outrage.]
3: Oh yes: Aluminum. One i. Does not rhyme with Sodium. This isn’t negotiable, and isn’t just one of my peculiar pieces of Occasional North American Idiom.^a Humphry Davy — the chemist who properly isolated it identified its existence (and who hired one of my personal heroes, Michael Faraday) — initially called it alumium (since he got it from it occurs in a compound simply called alum), but soon changed his mind (for reasons unknown) to Aluminum. The change to “-ium” stems from an anonymous review in a non-scientific journal, and comes for the inexcusably-daft reason of objecting to the “less classical sound” of Davy’s chosen name. Seriously? Piss off. Some anonymous literary critic doesn’t trump Humphry Motherfucking Davy (come back when you invent and discover a tenth of what he did, whoever you are); you don’t get to overrule the name given to a thing by its discoverer;^b and half the goddamn Periodic Table doesn’t have a “classical sound” — who cares? So no. No second i. It’s Aluminum.
— a: Which I certainly do exhibit, and which are mysterious (along with my mangled, Mongrelish accent) because I haven’t been on that continent for more than a few weeks of my entire life; perhaps I just watched too much TV, as a kid.
— a: Er, except in rare cases like when William Herschel (otherwise a seemingly cool guy, and doubtlessly great scientist) discovered Uranus and wanted to call it George’s Star or the Georgian Planet, after the king who just happened to’ve recently given him a stack of cash. But then, I’m still unsure “Uranus” is much better.

Tastings and ramblings and whatnot