Back for a second ‘season’ — are more-or-less arbitrary division, but we watch a fair amount of (good) TV and can’t help but think of things like that — George and I sat down a little while ago to talk about collaboration in craft beer.
Alaskan Winter Ale
The best-laid plans and all that, right? Four different U.S. imports arrived in the keg fridge at work in the early stages of last winter, and all four had glorious great big ostentatious American-style tap handles. I quickly hatched a plan (not just within the bounds of my own head; I told the right people and made the relevant notes) to put them all side-by-side on the 4th of July. It just seemed to make sense. But these things had a way of undoing themselves and I’d show up to work in the days preceding the Americans’ collective birthday and find that one or other had been cracked, with or without its marvellous handle, and placed in some random corner of the taps. Sigh.
But. But — it turns out that if the proverbial man with the best-laid plan (and possibly the mice) is extraordinarily stubborn, faced with a quiet weekend night shift, and entirely comfortable with spending a few hours in the keg chiller, shuffling hefty things into organised piles in a zero-degrees-Celsius environment — the Zen Art Of Kegtris1 — then you might just witness a resurrection of that plan. And, as you can see from the handles arrayed behind my glass, that’s exactly what happened. It was, in its own way, beautiful. If I do say so.
The reshuffle was a Saturday night, and I was (uncharacteristically) also working the Sunday — which is when I had this, as a little reward for getting everything done and ready for “tomorrow”, the 4th. I’ve entirely forgotten which lovely friend of mine I happened to bump into before work who shouted it for me as I mooched around before my shift — I’d turned up early, even further out of character and probably due to the disorientation of the schedule change.
It made for a great start to my workday, not least because 6.5% ABV in a light and sweet and gorgeously perfumed little ale helps to put a bit of a shine on your face, if you skipped breakfast. Comparisons to local-oddity ‘Captain Cooker’ from the Mussel Inn are meant as sincere and complimentary. They’re both charmingly peculiar, enjoyably different, and really interestingly tasty. And seriously, the tap handle is a fucking great big snow-covered tree. With a weirdly adorable eagle on the top. I still can’t believe the Powers That Be were content to leave that sitting in a dark cupboard, but I’m glad I overruled them.
Original Diary entry: Alaskan Winter Ale 3/7/11 From the four, all properly in place at last. Much paler than we expected, light amber. Smells like Christmass + shortbread, candy sweetness. Made with spruce, which help justify the already-awesome tap handle. Has that Captain Cookery sweet perfume. 6.5%-ish. Lovely start to a Sunday at work.
1: Which really does seem to be a ‘me’ word — a fact that makes me deliriously proud. I do hope it catches on. If it does, I’m totally adding “neologist” to my CV.
St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout
My Canada Day last year then continued with this, a Quebecker Oatmeal Stout, there at my desk at home (with the Diary itself and my rather-lovely Hashigo Zake bottle opener visible behind it, and it perched on ludicrously-extravagant Moa Beer leather-and-felt coaster). And, just for a sense of continuity and appropriateness I’m now — as then — listening to The Tragically Hip, who I’ve been fond of for ages and to the extent where it appears as a data point to those not-insignificant numbers of people who assume me to be Canadian.
This is a massively well-renowned stout, and it was being consumed by someone to which oatmeal stout is a kind of wintery, liquid Kryptonite.1 But it and I just didn’t get along fantastically well. Its company was pleasant enough, but it should’ve been like a fireside chat with Stephen Fry himself, given the circumstances. This just didn’t have the glorious smoothness that is half the reason I go so wibbly for a good oatmeal stout,2 and there was a faint tinge of metal that made it reminiscent (not entirely unwelcomely) of a thick foil bag of chocolate-chip cookies.
It just seemed a little past its prime — though the Best Before date was impenetrably Hieroglyphic, smooshed and encoded. Consensus from a few at Hashigo was that it probably had been around for a while and had come via a third party somewhere, this not being one of their ultra-cautious imports. While neither a disaster nor a complete swing-and-a-miss, certainly, it simply wasn’t quite what I wanted and seemed unable (in that time and place) from making good on its promise. Mercifully, in the same takeaway-shopping trip, I also bought another ‘Péché Mortel’ from the equally-Quebeçois Dieu du Diel!, which was completely delicious and undegraded and thereby rescued the evening convincingly. Now I just want another of those.
Original Diary Entry: St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout 1/7/11 continuing the theme. $9.5 @ HZ, 341ml only 5% Another hundreder,3 which didn’t immediately grab me. The smoothness of the oats (and of the online praise), just isn’t so much there. I initially thought I just had it too cold. But it’s still having the same sharp uptick ride on the palate. Not unwelcome, just unexpected, unplanned. Slightly metal? Can’t decipher the best before. “12 B? 30 / J2010” Hopefully the latter isn’t it… Not sure. Smells like a bag of cookies. [2nd Péché Mortel was way better.]
1: Damnit. Now a Superman reference seconds after talking about Canadian music has the Crash Test Dummies firmly stuck in my head.
2: See, for example, Liberty’s stupidly-fucking-fantastic ‘Never Go Back’ — or, if you think that might be cheating a little, with its hugeness, just look to Firestone Walker’s ‘Velvet Merlin’.
3: By which I mean it scored a full 100 on RateBeer.com. I probably use that word as short hand because I really loved Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (in which it means something very different).
Molson ‘Canadian’
I do plan on going through the ‘backlog’ of the pen-and-paper Diary, still. The Great Rethink wasn’t me walking away from that so much as it’s just me giving myself room for other things as well. I’ll probably be a little more fast-and-loose with some of the intervening entries — I do have nearly ten months to catch up on, after all. Sheesh. (Onwards!)
It was minutes past midnight, as the basically-anonymous 30th of June transformed into the 1st of July — Canada Day.1 I had a few ideas burbling in my head for the much-more-famous Fourth of July and so felt some sort moral obligation to celebrate this national day further North, too. I’m a sucker for Occasion Beers, and national days make excuses for such — Australia Day being my personal favourite, for various reasons.
Molson isn’t any kind of craft darling; it’s ultra-massive mainstream golden lager. But I can happily report that it’s not crap. Were it smuggled very-slightly back in time and into the ‘Chosen One’ Choosing Session we’d had a few days prior, it would comfortably take second place: no real trace of faults, but no real substantive charm, either.
But what it does have is the single-greatest health warning / mandatory Take It Easy message I think I’ve ever seen: “Great Beer. Great Responsibility.” It’s mere inches away from quoting Spiderman, which makes me very happy indeed, giant nerd that I admittedly am. Obviously, the logic of it doesn’t go through, since this is very definitely not “great beer”, but it’s a rather delightful way of putting things, all the same. I’d suggest that other people adopt the phrase, but it turns out that they went and trademarketed it, the hockey-loving bastards. Beer-and-trademarks is becoming a truly depressing ongoing theme — though this is a very minor instance of it — and doubtless one I’ll have to get back to and give a proper going-over one day.2
Original Diary entry: Molson ‘Canadian’ 30/6/11 →3 1/7/11 Happy Birthday Canada! I’m a sucker for an Occasion Beer, and had never had this, so here we go. Doesn’t really deserve a reputation as a Budweiser of the North. Is perfectly clean and easy. Would be a very comfortable 2nd place in the above, for example. Only the merest hint of funk on the nose, otherwise a good example of lawnmoweresque blandness-as-a-virtue.
1: The Blessed Wikipedia assures me that, here in New Zealand and Australia, the first of July is ‘International Tartan Day’, which I hadn’t previously heard of — though it does seem to have a nicely defiant origin, which I could probably get behind.
2: It got something of an airing in the write-ups of Invercargill ‘Sa!son’, Budweiser, and the Stoke beers, among other random mentions here and there. (If you were curious / couldn’t find the “search” box.)
3: Good thing I changed post-dating regimes. God knows what I would’ve done with that.
The ‘Chosen One’ Choosing
‘Boundary Road Brewery’ needs scare-quotes around it, because it’s not properly a thing. It’s a sub-brand of Independent Liquor, who were recently acquired by Japanese supergiant Asahi, and they’re trying to position themselves as a “craft brewer” alongside the pseudo-craft imprints of D.B. and Lion (i.e., Monteith’s and Mac’s)1 and elbow their way into New Zealand’s long-standing mainstream duopoly. Part of their launch campaign was to open one of their beers up for a bit of a public beta. The ‘Chosen One’ would exist in three possible variants, which they’d maybe send you (and 998 others) if you answered a quiz correctly, then you could vote and the favourite would go into full production. Not, I have to say, an inherently terrible idea — think of it, generously, as an idiot’s version of the Garage Project ‘24/24’ phase.
My friend Martin Craig — of the lamentably-now-parked NZ Beer Blog — somehow became taster #999+, side-stepping the quiz and just getting an ‘Official Beer Tasters’ Pack’ in the post, unrequested, and he hit upon the idea of a blind-ish tasting. We’d try the three candidates, with two other Independent-brewed mainstream pale lagers, and throw in a control: Mussel Inn ‘Golden Goose’, something of a darling of the local scene, sentimental favourite and — let’s say — the Thinking Drinker’s golden lager.
I’ve done a few rather-official blind beer tastings2 over the last year and I’ve had a bucket of fun and learnt a whole pile of learnable things, but I just can’t shake the oddness of them. Time and again, I’d be sitting there, attempting to fairly judge something on a several-point scale, and stuck wanting to know what the beer said about itself before really feeling I could say much about it.3 It’s probably down to my history as a bartender, that ‘consumer’-ish focus, and it’s difficult for me to shake. (And I suppose I don’t think it should be shaken.)
Blind tastings are good for many things, and they excel at one thing in particular: fault detection — the technical merits (or lack thereof) can leap out of a sampling glass, when you don’t know what you’re getting and your loyalties and sympathies are all quieted. But this? This was an ordeal. It wasn’t entirely blind — we knew what our six beers would be, but they were shuffled and properly anonymised, at least — but it was a cavalcade of awfulness. Perhaps this was karmic payback for my All-the-Trappists tasting last year; this was The Crappest Dance Card, if you like.
Mercifully, Golden Goose stuck out like a sore thumb. Or rather, it stuck out like the only non-injured digit on an otherwise horrificially-mangled and apparently-diseased hand. I was briefly worried that it wouldn’t, that my fondness for it would prove more imagined and circumstantial than real or deserved. But no. All five Independent beers were awful, stuck in that truly tragic territory were more flavourlessness would be an asset, so highly did they stink of faults. On balance, the potential ‘Chosens’ were worse than their existing stable-mates, which didn’t bode well for Independent’s ‘craft’ excursion — and nothing I’ve tried of theirs, since, gives me reason to hope otherwise — and absolutely nothing about them gave the impression of a genuine attempt to market-test three different ideas.
It’s brandwank all over again, I’m afraid. There’s nothing sincere about any of this, it seems. “Craft” here is a cloak, a gimmick, and potentially an unfortunate thing for those of us with a love of actual craft beer — if Joe Public is finally moved to see what “this craft beer stuff” is all about and he picks up some Boundary Road, I couldn’t blame him for being scared off (or at best just underwhelmed). Independent Liquor make under-license local clones of famous foreign names like Carlsberg and Kingfisher, an act of brand-first wankery of the highest order, and they make a dizzying variety of RTDs, some of which come in a three-litre box, for fuck’s sake. If your portfolio includes both of those things, then I submit you are an Industrial Alcoholic Beverages Manufacturer. You just aren’t within shouting distance of being a “craft brewer”.4
It’s all so boringly predictable, too. Geography, for example, seems to be a weak point (or at least a strange obsession) when the brandwankers attempt to dress up mass-market industrial lager as ‘craft’. While Monteith’s (or their ad agency) couldn’t quite figure out how to work their GPS, and Boundary Road / Independent seem to have trouble looking at a map — or out their window. The bumf keeps insisting that they’re “nestled in the foothills of the Hunua Ranges”, but no; they’re in an industrial park no more than two kilometres from State Highway One, in the Southern outskirts of Auckland. Google Maps is hardly a secret spycraft gizmo, so that sort of myth-making is just insulting and pointless. But they just can’t help themselves.
With Asahi-money behind them, ‘Boundary Road’ are going to make a real run at the New Zealand market — and are doing fairly well, sales-wise, from what I can gather. But it’s just so cynical and fundamentally crap that I just can’t cheer them on even when they give the Current Big Two a fright or a poke in the ribs; they’re not on “our side”, and they’ll be perfectly happy as one member of a Future Big Three if they can swing it. They’re demonstrating more of the same zero-sum thinking as the mainstream guys always do, rather than the rising-tide-lifts-all-boats market-growing outlook that is so characteristic of the actually-craft sector — on a good day.
Original Diary entry: ‘Chosen One’ Choosing 28/6/11 with Martin @ MH. #1: Slightly hazy. All others clear. Colours all damn close. Straw nose. Big feel. Bitterness evident. #2 Brings grimness to the nose. Much thinner. More metal? Coarse bubbles. #3 Less grim, but not pleasantly straw like 1. More metal in the nose. Tinned fruit. Middling body. More to it than 2, but not all in good ways. #4 Stinks. Fumes, eggs. Sour in the face. Thin. Cardboard. Hoping it’s the older one… #5 Half the nose of 4. Something wrong in the flavour. Thin, too. #6 Head retention strikingly ok. Sugary sweet. Oddly unnatural. Sweet apple.
Unblinding: #1: Golden Goose, #2: ‘A’, #3: NZ Pure, #4: ‘C’, #5: Frontier, #6: ‘B’.
1: I almost feel bad, lumping Mac’s and Monteith’s so closely. They are near-identical efforts, branding-wise, but I think it does have to be admitted that many of the Mac’s beers are reliably non-horrible and the sorts of things that a “beer drinker” can console themselves with in a mainstream-tied venue. I don’t think I can say the same of the Monteith’s beers.
2: I was on the panel of one for Consumer magazine, and the most-recent annual Capital Times one.
3: To elaborate, but not derail things completely: I don’t feel like I can rate a beer without knowing how it positions itself, because that’s how people ‘judge’ beer in their daily lives — against its claims. Something that “does what it says on the tin” is a laudable thing in itself, when you’re handing over money. Beers are judged in classes, but outside of formal competitions these are usually pretty loose, so it’s hard to critically evaluate something that is “pale ale” without knowing if it’s trying to be, say, rambunctious or sedate. Huge hoppy flavour would be a bad thing in a beer that said it was mild.
4: Admit it, the odds were slim that a post with a ‘brandwank’ tag wouldn’t include a mention of Moa — but in this case they truly brought it upon themselves. In January 2012, they put up a post on ‘Craftwashing’ — which is indeed exactly what this is — but couldn’t save themselves from pissing a lot of people off with a needless swipe at contract brewers and a hefty dose of irony in that they themselves come damn close to breaching the spirit of their own Third Commandment given how strenuously they distort the role of their “figurehead”, Josh Scott. If you are as drenched in disingenuous marketing as Moa are, you simply don’t get to lecture the likes of ‘Boundary Road’; people in glass houses should perhaps reconsider their projectile-throwing hobbies.
Overdue Housekeeping
It’s been an absurdly long time since I last posted, and for several reasons — ranging widely from the rather-lovely to the tooth-pullingly-annoying. Time, certainly, for a bit of a catch-up (in the Hello-Again / Long Time No See sense) before the proper catch-up can start to happen in the other sense.
I’ve had a bit of rethink, also, about the peculiar post-dating regime that I’ve used here since I started — where the date of the actual pen-and-paper Diary entry would be used for the date of the blog post, no matter when it was actually / eventually uploaded. That plan was born out of my primary thought that the Beer Diary webthing would be an handy online version of the physical document. But I’ve often wanted to write more ‘topical’ stuff — and frequently resorted to shoe-horning it into the discussion of whatever-was-next in the book1 — and then the podcasts came along as well and things just got unwieldy and strange and headachy. The sampling-writing-posting calendar mismatches were a common source of puzzled questions, and on one memorable occasion caused the surreal situation where some geniunely-lovely praise was accompanied by a charmingly-outraged ‘How on Earth haven’t we seen this before? He’s been blogging for seven years!’, when I’d only been going a few months.
So nice timing, really; with the podcasts in-between seasons2 and a lack of activity for a while, I can change gears and change the plan. Posts will just get whatever date they get when I with the Big Blue Publish Button, and historical Diary entries that get uploaded — and I do plan to keep going through them, steadily — will just be labelled obviously-enough. As one last fit of oddness (of that kind, others will remain), I’m going to arbitrarily give this post the time-travelling date3 of my birthday last year so that it stands out in the Archive like the gear-change it is, and since the Diary has its origins as a particuarly-awesome present.
I’ve been distracted of late, but keeping this blog has been a massively rewarding experience and I’m delighted to feel a bit of momentum behind getting back into it. I recently left my long-running job at the Malthouse, and have had a bit of time to figure out What’s Next. (Embarrassingly-much of which was taken up by ‘Do I really want to revise the post-dating scheme on my website?’; I’m a chronic over-thinker.) Securing more time to write is key, and I’m also lucky enough with the timing that I get to go to The Great Australasian Beer Spectapular in Melbourne next weekend which will doubtless give me yet more of a prod and plenty to ramble about. So yes: Hello again. Nice to see you after so long.
1: Or, on one or two occasions, actually choosing which beer to drink and diarise based largely on its ability to furnish an excuse to write about something in particular.
2: I do have two episodes ‘in the bank’, as it were, and will endeavour to get them up before I go away for the weekend — not least because the theme of ‘s02e02’ is also my destination: Australia.
3: I’m actually writing this in the small hours of Monday, 7 May 2012. While drinking tea and listening to The Three EPs by The Beta Band, since you ask.
Beer Diary Podcast episode 9: 2011 Year in Review
Hardly rushing in to things, we here present our 2011 Year in Review, recorded mid-February and published in the first few days of March. The Oscars for 2011 releases only happened this week, after all, and we don’t have their kind of budget — or Billy Crystal. Instead, we took vague inspiration from the “Golden Pints” lists that popped up around New Year’s, and take the chance to look back on the year past to pick out some themes and some favourites.
Continue reading Beer Diary Podcast episode 9: 2011 Year in Review
Beer Diary Podcast episode 8: Strong Beer
My profuse apologies for the inadvertent summer hiatus. Inspired by the impending holidays — impending, that is, when we recorded — we have a little bit of a ramble about Strong Beer (partially also to balance the ledger after our Midstrength Beer episode). There are a lot of ways to be a strong beer, and equally-many reasons to enjoy one. And then there’s a fair amount of silliness in the field, too. But the point remains: there’s a beer for every occasion that might otherwise bring wine or whisky to the front of your mind.
Beer Diary Podcast episode 7: At the Masons Arms with Kieran Haslett-Moore
After a Garage Project beer at Hashigo, George and I ventured out to the quiet outer suburbs to join Kieran Haslett-Moore in his in-house pub, the Masons Arms. Over a few of his beers (accompanied by a platter of delicious things he’d largely also made himself), we talked about the many roads to being a satisfied beer geek, pondered the idiosyncrasies of the Wellington craft beer scene and the wider industry at large. Towards the end, we picked up on the topic George and I had talked about last time, and discussed a few weirdnesses of beer award shows.
Continue reading Beer Diary Podcast episode 7: At the Masons Arms with Kieran Haslett-Moore
Liberty / Mike’s ‘Taranaki Pale Ale’
If it weren’t for that Firestone, we’d have just had ourselves a three-peat of Liberty beers here in my Diary. Unlike the others, though, this has Liberty’s Joseph Wood in Collaboration Mode. It’s an emerging trend in the local scene, and Joe’s one of the keenest participants, it seems — he worked with Yeastie Boys for their ‘Warrior’ and ‘Monster’ beers, was part of the hophead ‘Four Horseman of the Hopocalypse’ supergroup (with Hallertau’s Steve Plowman and Epic’s Luke Nicholas and Kelly Ryan), and joined in with the NZ Craft Beer TV ‘Mash Up’ project. Hell, he’s even said he’s keen to collaborate with me, in what could be the greatest-ever excuse for a summer roadtrip. In a sense — in, I pause to stress, a positive sense — he’s something of our industry’s Timbaland, in that regard.1
So here we are with a Taranaki Team Up; New Plymouth’s Liberty and Urenui’s ‘Mike’s’ / White Cliffs. Fortunately for all concerned, they brewed this one at the latter, which has nearly ten times the capacity of the former. Because if this had been overly-scarce, things could’ve easily gotten all Mad Max as us beer geeks squabbled over the dregs. It was a crowd-pleasing thing of oomph and deliciousness, loaded with that kind of enthusiastic fruit-bowl boistrousness that we’ve come to love 8 Wired’s ‘Hopwired’ IPA for. The comparisons to that really are inescapable and rather strong, but — just as I said with the also-striking resemblance between Three Boys’ Oyster Stout and Emerson’s Southern Clam Stout — you’d be very hard-pressed indeed to find something more worth emulating. TPA has popped up a few times since, and seems to have slightly drifted towards the ‘healthy bronze’ end of the colour palette, rather than its initial ‘luminous gold’.2 But it continues to be great fun, continues to be somewhat-dangerously-drinkable (given its heft), and will hopefully make a few more appearances over the summer.
As my notes lament, I was meant to be bartending at Matariki (speaking, as I was quite-recently, of beer festivals), but some administrative snafu best left forgotten meant that I’d just be doing my regular gig that day. My pint of TPA helped compensate very nicely indeed — not least because it (and the batch-to-batch Hud-to-Hud comparison that Stu from Yeastie Boys had arranged for a few of us geeks to celebrate the second edition of the equally-boozy ‘Hud-a-wa”), put an uncharacteristically-cheerful shine into the start of my work-day, bless it.
Verbatim: Liberty / Mike’s Taranaki Pale Ale 25/6/11 7.1% on tap @ HZ, after Hud-to-Hud batch trial with Stu, Martin, Tim, Amy, Shannon & Annika. Another improm[p]tu geek con. They’re all off to Matariki, and I was meant to be. Sadface. So a pint + a pie before work. Hazy, pale peach. All the big-crazy fruit salad, a la Hopwired. Fruitier than a row of tents, says Martin. It’s like Emerson’s Southern Clam after Three Boys Oyster; name one token more worth emulating.
1: If I hadn’t already compared one of his beers, the staggeringly awesome ‘Never Go Back’, itself to Samuel L. Jackson, that’d be even more apposite and more obviously-positive. There was a time, which probably just coincided with me watching more movies, where he just seemed to be in everything, and awesome in everything — stealing the show in tiny little bit parts like right at the end of Out of Sight. The man’s been in over a hundred films, for God’s sake; Wikipedia feels obliged to put his ‘Filmography’ on its own page, and just look how many cram into each year.
2: My photo doesn’t quite do it justice. Perhaps because of the lighting in Hashigo, or perhaps because mine was from fairly far down the keg (if I remember rightly), and things can get extra-hazy with hop-loaded goodness — just like they did with my ‘Taranaki Session Beer’, coincidentally enough. Alice Galletly had a similar problem, lamenting that her plastic-on-a-picnic drinkware didn’t do it justice. But just check out Kevin McLellan’s photo — Alice and I ain’t lyin’; that stuff was gorgeous.
Uploaded, at last: 4 December 2011