Firestone Walker 'Velvet Merlin', or at least its glorious tap handle
Karma is a bitch, sometimes. One day, I upload a podcast in which I make a flippant reference to wishing that trench foot isn’t lost from the world — I’m not even sure why I did; these things just ramble out of my brain, sometimes — and the very next day, I’m faced with a metric crapload of kegs to shuffle around in the chiller when I’m wearing my worn-out leaky hiking boots (rather than my ass-kicking hefty steel-toed factory-worker boots — which are also wearing out, truth be told). It didn’t get genuinely horrific, but it was conspicuously less fun than Kegtris usually is.
But — in yet another of those instances wherein the universe finds a way to reassert the relevance of a Diary entry, no matter how inexcusably belated — some of kegs in that swag were Firestone Walker’s ‘Double Barrel’ Ale, a beer which I’ve liked for ages, and am dead keen to have on tap. All the Firestone beers I’ve had so far have been charming, in their own ways. And this thing was an absolute delight to have as a guest for a little while. As you may be able to see on the awesomely ostentatious and typically-American tap handle, it’s another oatmeal stout, and I (to reiterate) bloody loves oatmeal stout, I do. This was the first to be tapped of a swag of American imports that we had stacked in the fridge, and its awesomeness and the sheer delightful silliness of that stonking-great handle proved a brilliant tease for the four more that were destined to go on together on the Fourth of July.
It was, to my no-surprise-at-all, just glorious. Positioned in a very pleasant middle-ground between the very-light likes of Little Creatures’ one-off oatmeal stout and enjoyably-worrying heavyweights such as Liberty’s ‘Never Go Back’, it’s smooth and silky and decadent without feeling overly or guilt-inducingly so. Nothing leaps out of my memory (or my notes) to really distinguish it from others of its kind, other than its nicely-built goodness. But that’s a fine and lovely thing, just to be doing what you do do well in an un-flashy and self-assured way. This does that.
Basically the only thing even remotely wrong with it is the name. There’s nothing inherently wrong about it — slightly obscure or bizarre as it might be, it does kinda work: “velvet” is certainly a word that anyone who makes this beer should feel entirely free to use, and “Merlin” is the nickname of their Brewmaster, Matt Brynildson. The tragedy is that is was once called Velvet Merkin. And that’s a whole bunch funnier. “Merkin” is seriously close to being an inherently funny word, and is well worth looking up if you’re not entirely sure what it means or why it might’ve been the name for this thing. I have — as you might have picked from the fairly-liberal swearing or from the short-form rants on the topic — a proudly defiant anything-goes approach to the English language and just hate to see people needlessly flinch from “bad words”. It’s the name of a beer, for fuck’s sake; you have to be legally an adult to buy it anyway, and this is such a gloriously outmoded word that it’s hard to imagine anyone clever enough to know it being simultaneously wowserish enough to have it give them the vapors and make them need a lie-down. But they self-censoringly changed the name when it graduated from being a one-off project, and that’s just kinda sad.
Just like oatmeal stout, swearing (and “bad language” more broadly) is one of the joys of life. Both take skill and timing, both are nourishing to body and mind, and both are capable of shocking and delighting — in turns or at once. Mister Fry is definitely with me on the swearing, and I can’t help but assume he’d be partial to a bloody-marvellous oatmeal stout, too. He just seems the type, don’t you think?
Diary II entry #115, Firestone Walker 'Velvet Merlin' Oatmeal Stout
Verbatim: Firestone Walker ‘Velvet Merlin’ Oatmeal Stout 24/6/11 5.5% on tap @ MH, with the glorious tap handle. Revising my July Four plan, but I’ll still jump in while it’s here. Ari Sr. shouted us a round! Loving the oatmeal stout these days. This is nicely placed on the number line between the Creatures and the Liberty. Smooth + light + lovely. Some silk sheets, but not too many. All very well put together, nothing seems to upstage obviously.
Back again for Episode VI — and please do excuse the Rugby World Cup and other related delays in the posting — George and I had a bit of a Beervana 2011 debrief and ponder. He wasn’t able to make the festival itself, but I had a great afternoon and offer some thoughts (almost entirely positive, which is rare for me) on the changes in direction that the festival took this year.
We also have a bit of ramble about the related Beer Awards, where the critical circuits of my brain get a bit more a workout. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement, here; I’d love to see greater clarity, more-interesting categories / awards — and, crucially, a bit of gate-keeping to prevent breweries gaming the system by entering beers in categories that go against their own marketing just for the sake of increased odds of winning. It’s a controversial subject, and we do return to it a bit in the next episode, so consider this Part One of a longer discussion — and jump in below, in the comments.
Just like anything worth doing is worth doing well — a hat-trick of great big black beers, all three of which are weird and wonderful in their own ways, just to pick an example entirely at random — so too is any pattern worth keeping at all equally worth smashing to pieces. So here’s me, leaping off my big boozy plateau into a delightful little mountain stream of midstrength loveliness — and writing up my second Liberty beer in a row, which helps make up for their relative absence from here (as against how often they were mentioned in the podcasts, and in person).
And I do bang on about session beer a lot, I suppose. Certainly more than Normal People. I first had this around about the time we recorded our podcast episode dedicated to mistrength beer, but it unaccountably goes unmentioned. Making up for that, as I put this post together, I’ve finally gotten around to adding a “Sessionable” tag, which will hopefully continue to attract a steady sequence of delicious pints of beer. Also, I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am that I can now describe something other than my beloved Hallertau ‘Minimus’ itself as being broadly “in the Minimus mold”. The comparisons really are inescapable, what with this being a hoppy golden ale / very-pale pale ale and in the same booze-bracket as its friend from further North.
Hallertau have taken to slightly-tweaking Minimus in response to changing seasons / ingredients / random dice rolls / shifting whims / whatever / all of the above, and its ‘Winter’ incarnation had just hit the taps at work the night before. On blearily blinking into the unforgiving daylight the next morning — because it was morning, you understand, not because of over-indulgence: I was, after all, drinking Minimus — I somehow managed to read and comprehend a message on my phone to the effect that NZ Beer Blog’s Martin and Yeastie Boys’ Stu were having a beer at Hashigo and suggesting that I should join in. When I also read, on the Twitters, that they’d just tapped a keg of Taranaki Session Beer and that 8 Wired’s Søren was also on his way in for a pint, the thought of an Accidental Beer Nerd Convention was irresistable. And so off into this frequently-awful overlit thing you all call “daytime” I ventured.1
And well done, all of you that made my uncharacteristically-early start so worth-while. That beer was delicious, deserving of high praise even if I wasn’t such a weirdo about my midstrengthables, and the company was bloody marvellous. If anything, TSB was a touch sweeter than the Winter Edition of Minimus, and Liberty’s Joe had apparently tried some clever trick (the details of which were not entirely over my head at the time, but which have long since turned to mist and evaporated from my brainpan) with his water chemistry to help get around the basically-inevitable problem of the slight ‘gap’ in the palate that happens when you dip back down to this kind of weight. Even if you happened, at the time, not to care about the bonus of Something Sessionable, this is glorious.
It must be said, also, that if you can make a big-ass imperial stout and one of these with equal grace, then you’re doing very well indeed. After a few conversations back and forth, Joe floated the idea of me heading up to the ‘Naki to join in a Liberty Brew Day and maybe doing a ‘collaboration’ (ludicrously one-sided as it’d be, with me playing Second Assistant Who Tries Not To Break Things). Given the range encompassed by this thing and the one right-before it in the Diary, I’m rather deliriously spoilt for choice. (But I do have a few ideas…)
I’m glad I got the physical Diary in the shot, too. It’s been a while since it made an appearance, and I think I lined it up behind my pint after Stu commented that the thing-itself was rather surprisingly smaller than he’d assumed, after seeing its scans on here. My handwriting, just by the way, is tiny — when I started school, there was some horrible mental collision between those oddly-hugely-lined exercise books they make you use and the regular-random-notepaper my Dad let me scrawl in at home. It permanently broke my sense of appropriate scale for the handwritten word, accidentally turning me into a very effecient indeed user of paper. Even two-hour law school lectures wouldn’t see me use more than both sides of a single sheet of A4.
Verbatim: Liberty Brewing ‘Taranaki Session Beer’ 21/6/11 3.7% on tap @ HZ. Mini beer nerd convention by accident, with Martin + Stu + Søren. Towards the end of the keg, hazy barley-sugar orange. After (Winter) Minimus returned to MH last night. What a turnaround after the last three! This is similarly-pitched loveliness, maybe a little sweeter with slightly-less of that inevitable palate-gap, perhaps.
Liberty 'Taranaki Session Beer'
Diary II entry #114, Liberty Brewing 'Taranaki Session Beer'
1: Anyone who bothers to check metadata would discover that my photo is timestamped at slightly-before 2pm. Which you might not think is “the morning”. But you have to remember Warren Ellis’a rule: if I’ve been awake for less than two hours, then it’s morning, no matter what the goddamn clock says. — a: I mean the author, not the musician.
And so here my notes complete a hat-trick1 of ten-per-cent-plus black-and-glorious monster beers. It happened entirely by accident — presumably helped by the contemporaneous feeling that Winter Was Coming — and now also occasions one of those nice coincidences that seem to happen (as I mentioned last time) when I’m this far behind with my rambling-uploadings: as I sat down after work to start putting this post together, I had two other oatmeal stouts. The first was a glass of the absurdly-delicious Ballast Point ‘Sea Monster’ we have on tap at work at the moment, and the second, firmly in the the spirit of “bugger it, let’s give these guys (yet) another chance,” was Stoke’s new one. Given my prior history with their beers (and no other real intervening changes on trying them several times since that almost-infamous Diary entry), I can relatively-cheerfully report that Stoke ‘Bomber’ was largely faultless, but it just wasn’t the sort of liquid luxury that I love in my oatmeal stouts — and I bloody loves oatmeal stout, I do.
But enough about those; they’ll get their own posts soon enough.2
I’ve been regularly praising the beers from Liberty in the podcasts — I often forget to prepare a list in the few days before recording, and Joseph Wood’s beers float readily to the top of my brain when George asks for a suggestion. Up until right now, the only one to appear on here was the Amarillo-hop version of his West Coast Blonde, which I had at Hashigo way back in February, on their genius-and-generous Fundraiser Night. Since then, bottles — bloody-great-big lovely 750ml bottles with that cute newfangled re-sealable plastic enclosure-thing — have been popping up fairly regularly, although the batch sizes are still very small indeed. I had a way-too-enjoyable time, back in May, when I inherited the remains of a some-of-everything tasting session that included a few experimental beers and plenty that have since shown up as ‘proper’ releases. It was a broad range, with interestingness and goodness present in sufficient quantities that I was delighted to be in possession of what were basically just dregs, and it featured some perilously-strong beers; I wound up very cheerfully drunk.3
‘Never Go Back’ is a suitably-dramatic way for Liberty to return here, certainly, and I freakin’ adore it. It’s got a peculiar Samuel L. Jackson quality about it — you know, like how Emerson’s Oatmeal Stout was all Barry White — that makes you just want to use the word motherfucker in an endearing and complimentary way. A big-ass glass of pure blackness, it smells like some kind of overclocked, rocket-fueled Hershey’s chocolate syrup and is ridiculously smooth. The word “velvet” is not remotely out of place, in the label blurb. Compared against something like 8 Wired’s ‘iStout’, I’d say it wasn’t as confrontingly bitter and punchy — by which I don’t mean anything inherently positive or negative, they’re just different; that side of iStout is very well integrated into the whole and is probably a massive part of what makes the iStout Float such a delight. And maybe that’s partly also down to all NGB’s gorgeous oatmeal smoothness, which makes such a big beer worryingly and brilliantly and perhaps-unexpectedly drinkable. The image that came straight to my mind — a mind that supervenes on a brain that had had more than one beer in the >10% bracket, remember — was of wearing silk pyjamas and leaping into a bed adorned with silk sheets… then finding yourself in a heap on the floor on the far side of the room after skipping frictionlessly off the surface. Never Go Back does something like that; it’s so velvety that it’s surprisingly easy, given its massiveness. Well that, and it could easily leave you in a heap on the floor, too.
But you’d be a happy heap. And that’s what counts.
Verbatim: Liberty ‘Never Go Back’ Imperial Oat Stout 20/6/11 10.6% — what a plateau! 750ml ÷ 3 with Tim & Amy. So big and lovely. Boozy, for sure. Fumey chocolate syrup. Powdery cocoa feel to it. Would make excellent stout floats. Definitely velvety, so much so that the body is oddly easy; it’s the silk pjs / silk sheets problem.
Diary II entry #113, Liberty 'Never Go Back' Imperial Oat Stout
Liberty 'Never Go Back', label text
My collection of Liberty Tasting Session Dregs
1: Possessed, as I am, of little-to-no sporting ability, such metaphors are likely rarer-than-average in my ramblings. But I like that one a lot — and used it for my three-peata of Hashigo Diary Entries that concluded with Coronado’s ‘Islander’ IPA — largely because, just as I hoped when I first heard it in my awkward teenage cricket-playing days, the original story involves an actual hat. — a: Not wanting to overuse “hat-trick”, I went with “three-peat” there, instead, just vaguely remembering it from American sports commentary. But then I looked it up. And it turns out that it’s trademarked for commercial uses by some former basketball coach. So, once again: fuck trademark abuse, really. That’s insane. It’s a totally natural and obvious way to bend our beloved English language. Even the many and mongrel authors of the Wikipedia managed to assembled a metric boatload of ‘prior art’. The law graduate in me (buried deep, I assure you; don’t worry), just got a little bit angrier. 2: Given a generous interpretation of “soon enough”, at least. Maybe one on Geological or Cosmological timescales. 3: Just to be clear, the adverb “very” here modifies both the “cheerfully” and the “drunk”.
Well now. It has been a while. Again. The value of t has graduated to the triple digits and is going to need a serious hammering to get back to a civilised size. So: roll sleeves up, make sandwich, brew tea, forget about tea, grab beer, roll sleeves back down because it’s actually kinda chilly, remember about tea, curse bad memory, and back to it.1
I’ve long been a sucker for an Occasion Beer, and brewery anniversaries are a great excuse to try something new and celebrate what you’re all about. They’re results aren’t always spectacular; Tuatara basically phoned it in with their ‘X’ ale, if you ask me (although this year’s XI was a massive improvement on pitch, execution and all fronts — it’ll show up a little later in the Diary). But at the other end of the naff-awesome spectrum is 8 Wired, who knocked the ball out of the park and pretty much brewed the Platonic Form of the Anniversary Beer with their masterful ‘Batch 18’. Sierra Nevada, facing their unquestionably-milestonish 30th birthday, undertook a project of suitable size and scope, and which also nicely demonstrated their (relative) Elder Statesman status in the craft brewing business and the getting-shit-done capacity that that entails.
For a few years, they’d brewed an ‘Anniversary Ale’ for their birthday, basically a variant-edition of the Cascade-heavy pale ale that made them famous — and basically made “American Pale Ale” into a thing at all. With the big three-oh coming up, and since they were never only all about the pale ale, they broadened the scope of the Birthday Project to include multiple brews, in several styles, made in collaboration with all sorts of industry notables. Two of the series made it as far as us: an ‘Imperial Helles’ (a genuinely-interesting embiggened lager that managed to build something relaxed and worthy where a superficially-similar thing like Crown ‘Ambassador’ instead almost drowns in its own wank — I had mine on my 31st birthday, which seemed appropriate enough), and this.
It’s a glorious big-in-every-direction kind of thing; huge and boozy and rich and many-layered. Weighty and thick, it had a peculiar combination of sweetness and savory smokiness that made it like some Mad Science hybrid of birthday cake and birthday steak. My notes inevitably don’t do it any justice; this is another Distracted Diary Entry — not to the point where I had to take a do-over the next day, as I did with after the Random Ragtime Band Incident — since my friends Aran (that’s him in the red hoodie, attempting / succeeding at a photobomb) and Maeve were in town before heading off to pack up one house, move into another, then pop over to Italy to get married. As you do.
Freakishly, just as I finally type this up way too late, they were in the bar again tonight for the first time since. These things happen alarmingly often: Rex Attitude’s second batch appeared just as my tardy notes appeared online, and the same thing happened, if I remember rightly, with Hop Zombie. My slackness does have a weird way of keeping me relevant, somehow (in peculiar senses, at least), but I should take the time to promise (but not guarantee) that I am trying to trim it down…
Diary II entry #112, Sierra Nevada 30th Anniversary Black Barleywine
Verbatim: Sierra Nevada 30th Anniversary Black Barleywine 20/6/11 10.2% ÷ 3 w/ George & Aran (Maeve is driving) George had the Moa R.I.S. before this, fittingly. He says its more Marvin Gaye than Barry White, and Aran has it as coffee made with slightly-too-hot water, slightly sweet-smoky, which suits the BBQ-esque pizza. Cheap licorice, says Aran. The taste v flavouring problem. Licorice kiss ice cream, he says. Ah, distracted notes. Never do justice.
1: That is an accurate sequence for the moment preceding sitting down to write this evening. A full accounting of the process would also include breaks / interruptions along the lines of: read news, clean kitchen, play Bastion, go grocery shopping, watch Futurama, and then remember about the tea (again) and brew another pot. If there was a procrastination event at the Olympics, I’d have a collection of shiny medals by now — if I ever got around to signing up.
It looks rather frightful, that Moa, doesn’t it? Maybe even sufficiently angry-faced that it hardly seems like a herbivore at all, in fact. I honestly still can’t tell if I like the kitsch of it, or if I just think it’s hideous. Something similar happens with the ludicrously-extravagant coasters — just how much money poured into the marketing budget that embossed leather-and-felt coasters got the green light? Like I’ve said possibly too-many times before,1 the brandwank with Moa is relentless, and I’m depressingly unsurprised to report that (as of the time of writing, in mid-October — I’m way behind, I know) it continues unabated.2
Like I said with an earlier pint of ‘Black Power’, the awfulness of the aura of ad-crap the surrounds a Moa beer and trails along behind it like an unforgiveable stench is such that it might get in the way of actually enjoying one of their beers.3 For me, Black Power just wasn’t a worthy enough thing to pierce the fog and make itself enjoyable in spite of all that — but a stonking-great barrel-aged imperial stout? Now that did the trick.
It was helped somewhat by circumstances — not that it really needed much help — in that we had it and several of its siblings pouring at work at once, in a little version of the sort of ‘Tap Takeovers’ that happen semi-regularly at the Local Taphouses (if that is indeed the plural) over in Melbourne and Sydney. And such things are all very fun in and of themselves, of course: excuses and occasions and theme-ifying are some of my favourite things about a night at the pub. But for me, for multiply-peculiar me, a Tap Takeover is extra-special because it means Kegtris — it means a bloody-great Herculian dose of Kegtris, it does — and when it was all done, of course, someone had to make sure that the beers were pulled through and ready to go. Oh, the chore of it all.
And honestly, I really can quiet the fumingly-outraged part of my brain for a little while, with this. It’s just stupidly fantastic: utterly enormous, but not overblown, and it doesn’t come across as trying to do everything at once in a sad one-man-band kind of attention-grabbing — in that (and in its weight, and its barrel-aged-ness — but in not much else, other than its hometown, come to think of it), it’s quite reminiscent of 8 Wired’s masterful ‘Batch 18’. I tried some side-by-side with a little glass of the Scott Base Central Otago Pinot Noir, partially because I assumed (given the founding-family connections) those would be the barrels involved and partially because I just can’t bring the classic Pinot Noir flavours to mind off the top of my head, as ignorant in Matters of the Grape as I am. I’ve since been informed by Dave Nicholls — the brewer, despite what their ad-men might say,4 a (mercifully) excellent chap who just gets on with the making of the beer while largely ignoring the dissonant background buzzing of the marketing machine — that they weren’t the barrels in question, but the comparison was still instructive and I suppose you’d have to have some sort of super-palate to spot, in a 10.2% stout, differences drawn from varying vineyard’s barrels.
There’s a lot of flavour left in those barrels, it seems, and it melds into the stout in surprising and delightful ways; plenty of tart fruit notes, bordering on sour almost, fill in the edges of the beer, taking the whallop out of some of the bitterness and booze you’d otherwise expect from a thing like this. You can’t really tell whether they achieve that through some clever complimentary-flavour trick on the brain, or if they’re just using a more low-brow “Look over here, instead!” tactic. But ultimately you won’t care about the how of it, because the result is worryingly drinkable for the punch it steal conceals in its multi-talented self.
If Moa’s brandwank doesn’t rile you as much as it does me, then just go and get one of these, simply because it’s delicious. But even if you are as infuriated by their ad-men as I am, consider this one worth the trouble, a nice reminder that at least someone there still knows what they’re doing — and a rare and philosophically-instructive example of a situation where the price you pay in conscience (since you’re giving those ad-men a not-inconsiderable sum of money — the thing which is, after all, how they ‘keep score’) might actually be worth it.
Verbatim: Moa Russian Imperial Stout 16/6/11 10.2%, Jesus. Hideous branded glass, as reward for an epic round of Kegtris for tomorrow’s takeover / migration, and all that Moo. The fruitiness from the Pinot barrels do massively set it apart, but are very well integrated. Not just tacked on, you know, like their brandwank. Really couldn’t resist. Enjoying their better beers is a real see-saw. Why does ‘Estate’ = bareknuckle boxing, where ‘Reserve’ = motorcycle? Oh wait. Vice, versa. Shows how superfluous + devoid of meaning, I guess. Wait. The beer. Gloriously huge, but still not overblown. Dangerously drinkable. Whole riots of fun.
Extravagant Moa coaster
"Super Premium Beverage"
Diary II entry #111, Moa Russian Imperial Stout
1: Such as when writing / ranting / rambling about: the ‘Black Power’ chocolate wheat beer, beer-and-marketing in general, their ‘Five Hop’ ESB, or their (two attempts at a) pale ale — the basic point is that Moa are grossly (but deservedly) over-represented on the ‘Brandwank’ index page. 2: Maybe, maybe there’s a touch of irony in all this. Or an attempt at such. Alice Galletly — of the excellent ‘Beer for a Year’ blog, which makes an absolute mockery of my way-delayed posting schedule — mentioned (in passing), her assumption that their “Handcrafted Super Premium Beverage” tagline (visible on the reverse of the Scary-faced Moa Glass, pictured above) was tongue-in-cheek. I certainly hope so. I hope they’re just rubbish at ironic humour, rather than an actual pack of appalling wankers. Perhaps I’m all jaded and cynical, but I just can’t be that charitable. 3: They are now, in this regard, the opposite of how the Stoke beers were when I first met them. Those I wanted to like, but I just couldn’t. They’re dipping their toes quite enthusiastically into a bit of brandwankery, themselves, but I do keep trying them occasionally to see if I can like them yet. But alas; not yet. 4: Criminally, you could diligently read — on a heavy dose of anti-nausea pills — the entire corpus of Moa’s marketing materials and not have any clue who Dave was, what he did, or even that he existed at all. Presumably, a Suit in Auckland thinks that pushing the myth of Josh-as-the-man-who-still-runs-everything is more ‘marketable’. For that, and their likely-myriad other sins, they deserve a kick in the pants.
As the U.S. Hop Crisis — 2nd Edition, after the 2007 price rice / demand spike / availability crunch — starts to make itself felt, with stories of hop-fueled local beers being backburnered and put on hiatus for maybe-years, a tasting session like this seems absurdly decadent; the sort of wanton profligacy that makes a proudly-middle-class boy like me feel slightly squiffy and embarrassed. Thinking back upon it now and writing it up feels weirdly like reminiscing about days spent swimming in champagne, using high-denomination bills to light cigars, and paying the wastrel children of the lower classes a pittance to cart me hither and yon in a goddamn sedan chair. But, like a beer-powered meat-based version of Hedonism Bot, I apologise for nothing. We had a great time, and I’d do it again — though I probably should do so soon, while I still can.
If this new hop shortage really is the big deal that some people suggest — i.e., if it’s not all just tulips in Holland, all over again — it’ll be utterly fascinating to see what distorting effect it has on the beer drinker’s palate. The New New Thing in a subculture like that of the Beer Fanatics is always changing, but it’s especially interesting when change is imposed from ‘outside’ by something like an ingredient shortage rather than just by whatever-the-fuck it is that usually drives the ebbs and flows of these things (in fashion, or pop culture, or any number of other fields). It’s possible that malt-forward beers will have an accidental renaissance, but if I have to put my Predicting Hat on, I’d have to guess that in the (relative) absence of hopness, we’ll see a marked uptick in weirdness. Hopheads seem to correlate rather strikingly with extremophiles, in general — them being peatfreaks with their whisky and ultra-spicy food afficionados, and whatnot — so we might see a surge in the funky and the sour and the generally-rather-freaky. I’d be entirely unsurprised if idiosyncratic yeastiness (with a side order of wood-aged peculiarity, perhaps) was the Next Big Thing — but ultimately, who knows?
Anyway. Simon & Jessie — them who I met way back at a Birthday Dinner for Robyn, and who were there for the ‘Beer 121’ tasting session — had just-recently gotten back from California, and brought with them some swag to share. They all tilted toward the kind of hop-stupid things for which the Americans are (deservedly) famous for, so we decided to do a three-and-three face-off — which, given our shared experience of spending way too long at university (with an average of more-than-one degree-per-person and two out of our five still studying, in our thirties), it quickly became known as a Postgrad Seminar in IPA, or the Double IPA Workshop.
— Epic ‘Armageddon’ (Auckland, NZ, 6.66%)
Epic 'Armageddon'
It’s fair to say that if you find yourself having a beer called ‘Armageddon’ to calibrate and zero-in your palate, you’re in for a pretty big night. This is something I’ve had umpteen times — though usually on tap, since it makes semi-regular appearances at work — and have really grown to enjoy. It’s probably a “little bit of column A; little bit of column B” scenario whether that’s because it’s improved or whether my tastes have just drifted in its direction, but I do remember finding it rather obnoxious when it made its début in the original ‘IPA Challenge’ at Malthouse, way back when. It definitely changed a lot through its Challenge Season Iterations, and has settled into being a suitably big IPA, with an enjoyably multi-note aroma and a solid malty body. Its pieces are well put together, and it does make for an interesting contrast against the Hop Zombie I’d been drinking a lot of, around the same time — Zombie is officially ‘stronger’, but has a lighter body, and/but has more-lush hop flavours that match it very well; the two are both big, they’re just differently big.
— Sierra Nevada ‘Hoptimum’ (Chico, California, 10.4%)
Sierra Nevada 'Hoptimum'
I’d seen ads for this in a few beer-related magazines that made their way into our Rack of Reading Material (thanks to generous / littering foreigners and wanderers) and utterly adored its label art. When Simon & Jessie told me that this was one of the IPAs they’d muled over, I was very excited to try it — but it just didn’t quite do it for me, tragically. The colour was stunning (with its warmly rosy tint), and the aroma (which took a little while to waft out, surprisingly given its strength) was pleasant (if unusually understated). But, for me, it was just too fat, too hot and too bitter — so bitter, on the palate. That’s no Gentleman Lupulus, on the label, that’s the Headless Hopsman — a scary motherfucker out for a revenge that he seems to assume can only be had by laying waste to your tastebuds. But, like I say in my notes, it still does exactly what it says it will. My dislike of it — much like my (apparent) dislike of 8 Wired ‘Superconductor’, which came later at Malthouse’s IPA Challenge (and I say “apparent” because I was off-and-on inflicted by nasty, flu-y, sense-impairing grossness at the time) — mirrors George’s dislike of ‘Rex Attitude’; I can honestly say (to the beer, I mean) that “It’s not you, it’s me”.
And so then back to something more familiar, to re-calibrate — and this must be the only real way to make the great-big Maximus flavours come across as light and refreshing. Originally brewed for the original Malthouse-hosted IPA head-to-head (against Epic’s ‘Armageddon’, no less), Maximus has also changed around a bit and is now steadily available as a member of Hallertau’s gorgeously-branded (and aptly-named) ‘Heroic Range’. Just like ‘Armageddon’, it was once the top rung of its brewery’s ladder in flavour-and-fiestiness terms but has since acquired a few more-full-on stablemates — and, of particular interest for me and my peculiarities, it spawned a midstrength sibling in the shape of the oh-so-lovely ‘Minimus’ (if only Epic’s family expanded in the downward direction, now that would be interesting…). It took us right back to ‘my kind’ of big-hoppy loveliness, after the assault of the ‘Hoptimum’, and that nose — my gawd it smells delicious. As we all noted at the time, it practically made Sierra Nevada’s Headless Hopsman smell like an empty glass that had held beer hours ago.
— Russian River ‘Pliny the Elder’ (Santa Rosa, California, 8%)
Russian River 'Pliny the Elder'Russian River 'Pliny the Elder', label
And then Pliny. About as famous a token of the type as you can get. I do very much like the way they relentlessly hammer home the plea / demand that you have your bottle in its best-possible condition (“Not for saving! Consume fresh or not at all!”, and all that, on and on and over again). It’s utterly-legendary status and the drink-it-fresh commandment make it difficult to ‘judge’ when you have it here at the bottom end of the world — a problem I struck once before — but this was in about as good a condition as you could’ve hoped for: Jessie and Simon were awesomely particular about it. When I check it’s “bottled on” date, I was momentarily taken aback by just how absurdly fresh it was — it appeared to have been bottled on the day before, until I remembered the inexcusably daft middle-endian nature of U.S. calendar notation. But still, the 6th of April is pretty-damn-recent, when you’re drinking on the 5th of June. And it is great. I’m still not convinced that it’s absolutely the best damn pale ale ever to have graced our humble universe, as so many people attest, but it’s astonishingly lovely stuff and remarkably well-balanced and put-together. George speculated that its reputation might, in addition to a bit of the Emperor’s New Pale Ale effect, be bolstered by a sort of Watchmen-esque place in people’s minds, earning extra credit for being gate-crashingly ahead of the curve in its day.
— Mike’s Organic Double India Pale Ale (Urenui, NZ, 9%)
Mike's IIPA
Last of the locals in the lineup was Mike’s IIPA. Bookending a legend like Pliny with a couple of small-brewery offerings seems like an intimidating or unfair thing to do with the little guys, but it was genuinely awesome to see how well they stand up — they Americans really don’t leave us in the dirt on this score, if anyone was worrying. My original plan was to have 8 Wired ‘Hopwired’ in this slot, but the Mike’s makes an admirable substitute (as it’s done in a tasting or two that I’ve hosted, when stocks of 8 Wired were scarce). It throws a bit of that characteristically-American pineyness into the mix, and stands as a big, solid, somewhat-sweet monolith of a thing. There’s a fair amount of truth to the rule-of-thumb that 330ml offerings from Mike’s will be well-made, if slightly mainstreamy (out of commercial necessity), but the big-ass 750ml bottles may well blow your mind. Batch #2 of the IPA certainly held its own in a difficult crowd, and while I continue to not remotely give a damn about the certified-organic nature of the enterprise, it is impressive that they can do what they do with that extra constraint.
— Dogfish Head ‘90 Minute’ IPA (Milton, Delaware, 9%)
Dogfish Head ‘90 Minute'
And then finally — and it was an enjoyable ordeal, heavy-laden with booze and hops as it was — we had a Dogfish Head ‘90 Minute’ to finish. It presented in the same heavy-orange tone as the Mike’s before it, but was shiningly clear. I’ve had this several times before and count it (and plenty of its siblings from the same brewery) among my favourites. Something about it fits nicely with the experimentalist spirit, too — its last appearance on here was as part of a side-by-side with its 60-minute brother. It’s big and glorious and suitably night-cappy, although you may be able to see (if you scroll way up to the original ‘Lineup’ photo) that we actually finished things off with a different-but-slightly-similar Croucher ‘Patriot’, just to reset from all these hoppy pale ales and have something dark with our dessert. We all got a distinct ‘vanilla’ note out of the 90 Minute, although at that late stage, our palates had taken a pounding and we may have been in the thrall of a mass hallucination. This is why you end a great-big tasting with something you already know, I suppose.
But it was a bloody-marvellous evening, all round. Two definite take-home lessons stand out, to my mind: 1) that local brewers really are very good indeed, there really is no need for any kind of Small Country Shyness (not that we often exhibit it, but it’s nice to be reassured), and that 2) beer is a many-splendoured thing; even when you pick a pretty-narrow corner of its spectrum of styles like IIPA, there’s a lot of variety to be had. Beer can be, you could say, fractally lovely stuff — the loveliness needn’t degrade, just because you zoom in closer.
Verbatim: Postgrad Workshop: I/IPA 5/6/11 @ George & Robyn’s 1) Epic Armageddon To calibrate, and ZOMBIE wasn’t around. Toffee-ish. Less one-note than PALE ALE. Massively contentious label text. 2) Sierra Nevada ‘Hoptimum’ Less aromatic, way more bitter in the face. Gorgeous glowing rosier colour. The label is misleading, until you see him as the Headless Hopsman. 10.4% Jeebus. Fat. More aromatic as it warms. But still maybe not the sure thing it should’ve been? Though it does do what it says on the tin. 3) Hallertau ‘Maximus Humulus Lupulus’ The first time it’ll seem light + refreshing. Biggest nose so far. Paler, hazier, peachier. HOPTIMUM now smells like an empty glass. 4) Russian River ‘Pliny the Elder’ Again, with a much better travel provenance. Fresh, too. Bottled on the 6th of April, or yesterday, if the Americans used sensible dates. Fruitier, definitely well-balanced. Geroge is right that it’s Watchmen-y, in that it’d be mind-blowing a generation ago, but it’s still absolutely great, in context. 5) Mike’s IPA Batch #2. Piney + fruity + a bit sweet — though we’ve now got spicy pizza competing. 6) Dogfish Head ’90 Minute’ IPA. Same colour, but clear. Definite vanilla streak in there, now. Weird. Bloody marvellous finisher.
For our first podcast ‘on the road’ (or at least ‘out of the house’), we went to visit the Garage Project in Aro Valley (on 26 August 2011, for the record — this blog has an obscure and confusing, but ultimately meaningful, system for dating its posts…). We sit down with Jos and Pete, have a few beers — though none of their own, far-too-rare as they are — and have a bit of a ramble about who they are, what they’re planning / have done so far, and what has inspired them.
This is ‘anniversary beer’ done right. And good god damn is it done right. I am peculiarly fond of ‘occasion beer’ and so do love it when brewers mark special moments with special beers. But when they’re afterthoughts, or half-assed, or tokenistic, then they’re just sad. Tuatara’s ‘X’ Anniversary Ale last year was one of those (for me, and just to pick the example that comes most-readily to mind) with its bungled packaging and uninspiring recipe — though it has to be said that this year’s offering was considerably better on all fronts, but we’ll get to that in its own turn, soon enough. Suffice it to say, though — as I already have done, twice — that ‘Batch 18’ is no let-down; it’s a freakin’ masterpiece.1
8 Wired really did hit the ground running back in late 2009, with a lovely brown ale (which came to be known as ‘Rewired’, but initially carried the somewhat-awkward name ‘All of the Above’), then an attention-grabbing local-produce-celebrating pale ale (in ‘Hopwired’), and onwards to an ever-expanding frequently-impressively-experimental range of beers. Most-recently, the still-relatively-new brewery’s rise was marked by taking out the “Best Brewery” gong at the beer awards this year — an achievement that was utterly deserved and generated seemingly-none of the usual beer geek grumbles or quibbles with such awards.
But ‘Batch 18’ was in the works long before that. According to Søren’s characteristically-useful label text, the plan was to celebrate an “anniversary” with their eighth batch, setting calendar-based timing aside and leaning instead on that numeral in their name. Things were way too busy when #8 rolled around, so they pushed it back to #18; do it right, or don’t do it at all. I just love that;2 it takes balls to delay something obviously-occasion-based past its actual date, merely in the name of doing it right — just try, those of you with spouses,3 to skip an anniversary and see how much compensatory awesomeness is required in return. This, though? This gets away with it; it’s massive and elaborate and you wouldn’t want to’ve done it in a rush. It’s a big imperial stout, fundamentally, but definitely isn’t just a slightly blinged-up version of their bloody-lovely ‘iStout’. Rather, it’s brewed with two different yeast strains, dosed up with jaggery (a raw sugar, which throws in some interesting flavours and helps kick the alcoholic strength up a few notches), infused with coffee, aged for a few months in oak barrels, infused with more coffee — before finally being bottled up and wrapped in a gorgeous-but-simple label that implores you to a) share, and b) be brave.
So I did, and I was. After I was done for the night, I sat at the bar and poured out five glasses — while admittedly bogarting the biggest glass for myself. We were all struck by the forceful nature of the nose of it, on first whiff. This was not a beer that was shy about letting you know that a lot would be going on in the glass. It doesn’t warn you away, but it does warn you nonetheless. There’s a distinct booziness to it (it is 12.5%, after all), and that must help waft all those aromas up out of the glass. All the components are quite obviously doing something, and can certainly be picked out individually if you try hard enough — but it’s also a deft exercise in Flavour Jenga; they’re piled in a great big stack, but not precariously or without balance. They combine in interesting ways, too, stitching together into interestingly-unexpected notes like the “blue cheese and pears” comparison that Jono hit upon.
I’ve got two more of these, sitting in my stash at work. I should drag one out now (well, not now, since it’s 4.30am as I write this) and have it in celebration of the Champion Brewery trophy, and then I might just leave the other bottle to sit and wait until their calendar-birthday rolls around later this year. Søren was pretty sure that the coffee flavour would ease right off over time, but it was still nicely present in the bottles we had at a Weta Digital beer tasting not too long ago — so there’s an element of Science! to my plan, not just an attempt at delayed gratification and blatant act of hoarding. Thought it is those, also.
Verbatim: 8 Wired ‘Batch 18’ 3/6/11 500ml ÷ 5 with Peter, Haitch, Jono + Katie (the new girl) 12.5% $15-ish @ Reg. Bloody nice idea, well pitched and executed bang on. A little terrifying in your nose, but not in a bad way. Fumey + funky — blue cheese + pears, we think. Definitely hot + lingering on the palate, and you can definitely taste all the components. I said “definitely” twice. That’s telling. It’s a bit crazy, but in a charming kind of way, not (just) an off-putting one.
8 Wired 'Batch 18', blurb
Diary II entry #109, 8 Wired 'Batch 18'
1: Hell, given the elaborate recipe and execution, it comes close to being a “masterpiece” in the older-school sense of the thing that signifies the turn from journeyman to craftsman. But that’s not how the Brewer’s Guild works, these days, despite the name. I have to say that, now I mention it (to myself so far, obviously), I can’t shake the suspicion that it’s a pretty neat idea… 2: I’m a habitual procrastinator, as you might be able to discern from the disparity between the dates of Diary entries and the dates on which they appear, here. When I feel the need to defend myself, usually just to myself, this is the line I run most often. 3: “Spice”?
Invercargill Brewery really is the unsung workhorse of the local beer scene — or insufficiently-sung, at least. I was re-struck by that thought when I was writing about their utterly-delightful ‘Pitch Black’ stout, and I’ll take the chance to just repeat myself now, if you don’t mind. If, while staying busy running contract-brews, you can produce a range that includes a stout, an easy and accessible lager, and a motherfucking saison — then you are a very clever chap, indeed.
Saison is, as a style, well within the realm of the weird — both for its inherent, peculiar, funky and contradictory flavours and for the genuine oddness of some of the devotees it attracts (though they’re not quite as peculiar, in the main, as habitual gueuze-drinkers). One of the local craft beer scene’s elder statesmen, Fraser McInnes (who may not ever forgive me for using “elder” or “statesman” to describe him) is especially fond of them and was, for a while, helping us out at the Malthouse. On a Friday, his going-home time roughly coincided with my half-way-through time, and so I picked this up to share with him when he was done and I was in need of a mid-shift treat.
The seemingly out-of-place exclamation point is, I believe, a reference to the often-forgotten fact that when D.B. registered their now-infamous (and still-standing) “Radler” trademark, they also snagged “Saison” — despite that being equally daft, for the exact same reasons. D.B. did quietly abandon the Saison mark,1 so the Bowdlerised version isn’t really necessary, but it remains a nicely-timed and well-aimed poke in the ribs — clever and funny enough that my Inner Sarcastic Bastard easily wins out over any complaining from my Inner Punctuation Nerd.
And it was delightful. The background-level of peculiarity never got in the way of the deliciousness of it all, which was a very welcome trick for it to pull. It’s gorgeously light and fruity — the label is absolutely right that there’s tangerine and passionfruit flavours kicking around in there, but the zestiness of the thing really made me think particularly of the dry, powdery sparkle you get flying off the freshly-ripped peel of a tangerine on a hot day. We were drinking this in a fairly-seriously wintery patch, but now that the weather has turned back towards the warm-and-sunny, I’ll definitely have to give it another go — the label’s text says that the beer tastes like a “bittersweet memory of summer”, and that couldn’t have been more bang on, really. And there was certainly a properly-Saisonny funk going on in here, too; they hadn’t just wimped out and sacrificed it entirely, for the sake of more mass-market appeal. It was firmly in the background, but it was artfully placed there for balance’s sake, rather than relegated to an out-of-the-way corner, in shame.
Verbatim: Invercargill ‘Sa!son’ 3/6/11 330ml $5.50 @ Reg 6.5% ÷ 2 with Fraser, since this is very much his favourite kind of thing. Nice DB-prod with the name, too. Does exactly as it says; light fruit nose (they say tangerine & passionfruit — which is right, but with the powdery peel of the former, too); zesty body that still manages to be nicely smooth under the lively bubbles. Deftly funky, not fraughtly so. Actually pretty damn lovely. Given the current weather and its suitability for their opposite, their “bittersweet memory of summer” note is perfect. The funk-level is James Brown on the stereo next door — when you were in the mood to listen to him anyway, but too lazy to get out of your chair.
Invercargill 'Sa!son', bottlecap
Diary II entry #108.1, Invercargill 'Sa!son'
Diary II entry #108.2, Invercargill 'Sa!son'
1: God knows what they were planning on doing with it. I’m not sure if they intended on creating some non-saisonny “Saison” — much like their 5%, no-lemonade “Radler” — or whether they were going to try and buy some exotic, foreign-language flair for their “Summer Ale”. In any case, cooler heads prevailed. If only they had with the whole sad Radler debacle.
