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.

Podcast episodes

Beer Diary Podcast episode 2: Fat Yak and Beer Marketing

April 16, 2011 Phil 6 Comments

Back for a second round, we have a beer which George discovered purely from its advertising. Which leads to a discussion about beer marketing in general; the history, the good and the very-very-bad indeed. We touch on a few recent controversies and try to make some sense of them from each end — George the marketing man, and me the beer nerd. We also offer a few more recommendations for things to seek out, and decide on our first recurring “segment”.

A direct download is available, as before, and there’s a podcast-specific RSS feed. I believe we’re now also available on iTunes, though I’m still trying to figure that one out… I’ve had a couple of requests for some chapter-sized downloadables, too (a bit easier to sneakily listen to at work, perhaps), and I’ll get cracking on those.

Show notes:

(0.40) There are two lost episodes: one very much a ‘tech demo’ / dress rehearsal, the other unfortunately largely superseded by unexpected events. DVD extras one day, maybe…
(1.10) Dinner was Vege Burgers, and they were great. They lead perhaps-ironically well to our Beer of the Week: Matilda Bay ‘Fat Yak’, which I do rate rather highly (as a Gateway Beer and inherently-rather-charming thing).
(1.55) Weirdly, I didn’t screw up the Brewery Ownership Trivia.
(3.20) Cuba Street is great for all sorts of reasons. Non-Wellingtonians, non-New-Zealanders and non-Earthlings should all come visit; each group seems already represented, but the more the merrier. And here’s the billboard in question.
(4.50) The artwork is nicely done, I think you’d have to admit.
(5.10) The classic Australian “pale ales” (however defined), Cooper’s Pale Ale and Little Creatures Pale Ale, are both perennial favourites of mine.
(6.40) Not much Canadian beer in my Diary so far, but some.
(7.05) We showed you the microphone last time. It’s lovely.
(9.05) George is chuffed to see his Nerd Points growing, getting that reference before it was even made.
(10.10) I love Gateway Beer. I even made them their own category on here. We’ll have to devote a Full Length Ramble to them soon.
(11.10) Proposals for T-shirt designs welcome.
(13.30) Beer’s done a lot. It’s had a lot of time to. Arguably, it invented Civilisation itself (an outrageous claim I’ll defend another day) — but it was certainly instrumental in the origin of Marketing as we know it.
(14.45) Pete Brown’s books and bloggings and whatnot are all tremendously readable and useful things. That’ll be your homework, if you’re unfamiliar.
(18.30) Brandwank really is the best word I’ve come up with for the bad end of marketing. It just seems to fit so horribly well.
(20.00) The first Moa I wrote up was their ‘St. Joseph Tripel’, the (non-Diary) entry for which unsubtly hints at this problem. Their Pale Ale and ‘Five Hop Winter Ale’ got Diary entries later on, during the brand overhaul.
(23.00) NZ$138 million, it seems. So not “nearly 200”, but still serious money.
(27.30) God the ‘Moa Breakfast Beer’ saga was depressing. But George (perhaps out of name-based solidarity) would also like to take me to task for unfairly knocking Mr. Lopez.
(29.20) Hallertau ‘Minimus’, if not the first, is still a much classier “breakfast beer”. For all sorts of reasons.
(31.10) Honestly, I didn’t make up the billboard about lesbians. 42 Below also got in trouble (intentionally, of course) for a homophobic (or at least boringly stereotypical) campaign in the mid 2000s. It’s sad to think that shit might still work.
(32.40) I get hopelessly lost in unreliable sources for these things, but: “It ain’t braggin’, if you done it” gets attributed to Walt Whitman, “It ain’t braggin’ if ya can back it up” apparently comes from baseball player ‘Dizzy’ Dean, and you often see “It ain’t braggin’, if it’s true” credited to Mohammad Ali. It’s a great point, regardless of its provenance.
(33.20) No, we haven’t mentioned Radler until now. That was in one of our “lost episodes”. As you can tell, we recorded this before the hearing. There should be a ruling any day now…
(34.45) Even if the trademark attack fails, I suspect there’s a Fair Trading Act case to be made given that “Radler”™ is 5% ABV.
(40.10) Seriously, everything aside, I like Moa ‘Five Hop’.
(41.00) The ‘ladder’ I was struggling to recall goes: Ordinary Bitter, Best Bitter, Extra Special Bitter. Martyn Cornell’s ‘Zythophile’ blog is full of great history, but I couldn’t see anything directly on this question, specifically. I should finally get around to reading his book.
(42.45) Croucher ‘Patriot’ got a fairly-glowing Diary entry, which included potentially-helpful links to just what the hell a “Jaffa” is, if you’re oblivious. It occurs to me that Yeastie Boys ‘PKB’ was one of my recommendations, last time. This “Black IPA” trend really has carried me along happily with it.
(45.50) 8 Wired ‘Underwired’ was more enjoyable in its aftertastes (given the very light feel), but spurs conversations like this — thereby giving you something to talk about while those flavours meander. That’s a clever trick.
(48.20) I’ll have to get a proper photo of the Croucher Pale Ale label text; that “delicious burps” line is just too perfect.
(49.10) Midstrength News finally finds its name, here. Long may it continue. Kegs of ‘Winter Minimus’ have arrived in the chiller at work; expect a report back soon…
(49.50) “Sucking a peanut-butter-sandwich through a straw; that’s hard” is a quote from Hyperman, a game from the mid-nineties which I only ever played once, but which a friend of ours (who could do the voice) liked to quote.
(50.15) Cue the music: ‘Shopping for Explosives’, by The Coconut Monkeyrocket.

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.

Actual Diary entries

8 Wired ‘iStout’ Ice Cream Float

April 15, 2011 Phil Leave a comment

8 Wired 'iStout' Float — 8 Wired ‘iStout’ Float

My brain and I often don’t get along very well. It gives me these peculiar and mysterious and very annoying headaches way too often, for example. But one night, it served me up a dream about an iStout Ice Cream Float, and I was clever enough to take the hint. The label has suggested it since the beer was launched, but I’d never gotten around to having one. Silly, silly me. Clever brain for reminding me, in its feverishly weird way.

I was — in the dream, you understand — just hanging out with the Rolling Stones, initially talking about the lamentable state of music journalism. As you do. We got to pondering the difference between learned skill and natural talent — in music to begin with, but then in beer. I brought up Søren, the wizard from 8 Wired; sure, he’s had a lot of relevant university-level education and doubtless oodles of practice and slog, but it seems equally clear that there’s just something somehow inherently brewerish about the man. He can put you in mind of those musicians who are just that extra bit better than their peers but then also seem more relaxed and effortless at the same time. Since they’re Not From Around Here, the Stones didn’t know who I was talking about, so I set off — from wherever-the-Hell-we-were, in my dream — to fetch some iStout and some ice cream. And then I woke up.

Once properly alive — you know: after coffee — I wandered the long way to work, and grabbed the necessaries, fighting through that particularly-peculiar sort of déjà vu¹ that comes with repeating the actions of a recent dream (without its more-surreal circumstances, of course). It was a Friday shift, and I wasn’t closing, so I knew I’d have some sit-down time to enjoy this when I was done. And I was burbling with excitement all evening; it just seems like such a deliriously decadent thing to do, some fabulous fusion of childish and grown-up treats. Which is how it turned out, really. It didn’t remotely disappoint.

iStout, on its own, is fantastic. It’s massive and glorious and rich and desserty (or at least nightcappy) all on its own. If you’ve never had one, sort that out tout suite. Buy two bottles while you’re at it, so you can have one of these the next night — or straight after, if you’re feeling a bit wild and have nothing to do in the morning (these are 10%, after all). It’s plenty big enough to not be overwhelmed by a generous dollop of good ice cream, and the two make for an awesome adults-only milkshakey masterclass in contrasts and complements. Depending on where you sip from, how much you prod the ice-cream-blob around the glass, or where you stick your spoon, you’re presented with a whole spectrum of flavour — from face-meltingly smooth chocolate loveliness right through to the face-punchingly awesome bitterness of a good Emergency Wakeup Coffee.

I’ll still concede that it sounds like a bit of a crazy thing to do, hurling a lump of frozen dairy product into your pint. But I absolutely insist that you try it.

(EXTREMELY)POSTSCRIPT, March 2024: I recently learned that the above unaccountably and unforgivably leaves out the crucial role played by Annika Corley, then one of my regulars at Malthouse, in convincing me to try this beautiful nonsense. Some time prior to this, she’d been at the bar and asked if we’d make iStout into a float, if she brought her own ice cream. She insisted I try it, despite apparently considerable resistance from me — which is strange to think, now, since I loved a cola float / spider when I was a kid, but it seems I was at that stage of beer geek where I was a bit too precious and reverential about things (I have since evolved, and absolutely love mixing and mucking around with all kinds of beer). I relented, tried it, was amazed, and the idea clearly lodged in my brain prompting the above-mentioned dream a while later. Annika, meanwhile, earned sufficient credit that she later convinced me to try pumpkin pie — and was right, again.

Verbatim: 8 Wired ‘iStout’ Ice Cream Float 15/4/11 $12 @ Reg, Kapiti Choc/Vanilla $3 @ Star Mart. 10% 500ml. I had actual dreams about this. And it’s everything I ever wanted it to be — although the Rolling Stones aren’t here… The bitterness of the stout makes for awesomely unexpected curveballs of flavour to the face. It’s like a grown-up milkshake. I got looked at very strangely, making this. Partially for the ingredients — and camera, book + tripod — but also for the huge idiotic grin on my face. The bitter curveballs seem to be thrown from someone hiding in the bubbles — spoonfulls of foam have it most. Feeling tipsy after having a “milkshake” is odd.

8 Wired 'iStout' Float, close-up — 8 Wired ‘iStout’ Float, close-up

8 Wired 'iStout' Float, serving suggestion — 8 Wired ‘iStout’ Float, serving suggestion

8 Wired 'iStout' Ice Cream Float — Diary II entry #89, 8 Wired ‘iStout’ Ice Cream Float

1: Spookily-enough — and speaking of Oddities of the Brain — I was just consulting the Blessed Wikipedia to get the uppy and downy accents the right way round (High School French was a long time ago) and I stumbled upon the related weirdness of jamais vu. That’s apparently the thing I was talking about rather recently, wherein the known-to-be-familiar suddenly becomes somehow alien and strange; I got it while writing about Heather Ale’s ‘Grozet’ ale, and overusing the word “weird” (ironically).

Actual Diary entries

Lindeman’s ‘Cuvée René’

April 11, 2011 Phil Leave a comment

And now for something completely different. Because gueuze beers are different in a staggering and mind-bending way. Some people are entirely horrified by them, despite otherwise being big beer nerds. Other people would drink them all day and all night and go a bit kittens-with-catnip at the mere sight of one. Myself, I’m somewhere in the middle. (Though it’s the latter people who freak me out more than the former. By quite a margin.)

Brewing is a delightful mix of Bucket Science and Rocket Science — it calls for meticulousness roughly as often as it demands a healthy dose of “fuck it; biff that in and see what happens”. And so while you’ve got brews that call for very-particular strains of yeast, carefully cultured over decades and gently prodded in some desirable direction, genetically speaking — you’ve also got beers that are basically made by quite-literally leaving the windows open and just running with whatever-the-Hell drifts in on the breeze. Then these beers, the lambics, go out of their way to emphasise their oddness by using older, dried (and so less-potent) hops and usually fairly easy-going malts; a subtler canvas upon which the Jackson-Pollock-y crazypants of their random yeasts can shine. Lambics often have fruit (or fruit syrup) added, but a “gueuze” is an unsweetened blend of young and old lambic, and they get a bit… eccentric.

It’s one of those Belgian styles which quickly calls for the word funk. Surprising adjectives flow from people who are praising these things: musty, sour, medicinal, cheesy. The blessed subjectivity is in sharp relief; devotees and detractors will describe them almost identically, really differing only on whether on not they personally find those characters appealing. Tim and I probably enjoyed drinking this more than we enjoyed it, if that makes any sense. It was a hell of a ride: an enjoyably confusing and confronting barrage of sensory assaults clanging around and in a strangely fascinating way, like when forgotten change works its way out of the pocket of your jeans as they go around in the tumble-drier. It’s baffling, but never quite enough to make you give up. Each sip put a pained and alarmed look on our faces, but it was never very long before we went back for more; you just can’t not, somehow. The sheer weirdness of it prompted some hilarious conversation.

Sticking with obviously-positive descriptors for a moment, this had the sharp tartness of a cleansingly-acidic white wine. The fruit flavour in the forefront of my mind was crabapples — and I’m a sucker for crabapples, since I grew up with a tree full of them in the front yard. But there’s just no denying the scarier flavours: an imperfectly-made homebrew cider, the too-clean chemical smell of hospital disinfectant, the spiky aroma of a bowl of lemons just about to start rotting, and the dried-sweat stench of a gym towel that sat neglected in a corner somewhere and missed last week’s round of laundry.

But like I say, people who love them love them. Try one when you’re feeling brave — or give one to someone who foolishly says something like “just get me a beer, anything, I don’t mind; beer’s beer”, if you’re feeling particularly bastardly.

Verbatim: Lindeman’s ‘Cuvée René’ Gueuze 11/4/11 $16 ÷ 2 with Tim @ MH. He had an embarrassing run-in with a Lambic, way back; threw it out, thinking it was off. Ah, our pre-geek days. Lovely hazy gold. Turning-fruit, hospitally nose. Amy freaked out: nappies with lemons growing in. The sterile-chemically-ness is in there. Along with the usual crabapples I like. It is confronting. Hard to imagine the people who’d casually drink it. Tim: homebrew cider. Totally. A glass of gym-towel; dry and sweaty.

Actual Diary entries

Emerson’s ‘Taieri George’

April 10, 2011 Phil 3 Comments

A third appearance, here, for dear old ‘George’. Not because it’d changed a whole bunch, or any other newsworthy reason — rather because the Diary was always about recording bloody-marvellous beer moments as much as it was for keeping notes of the new to guard against my hopelessly-crap memory.

The weather was getting wintery, I’d had a long week at work, and was just keeping to myself and turning my Sunday into a ‘Domesticity Day’ full of neglected laundry and other household stuff that is somehow even easier to fall behind on when you work nights. I wandered to the supermarket in the evening and realised there was room in the week’s budget for a nice bottle of beer — well, it’s more fair to say that I slightly rearranged the week’s budget to make sure there was room. We’d been selling the new batch of this at work, but I hadn’t had a chance to have one yet, so the What To Buy decision was unusually-easy.

Just-about everyone compares this to hot cross buns. Perhaps that’s partially down to the Easter-ish¹ timing of its annual release, but there’s an undeniable similarity in both the spice flavours and the malty bigness. What there bloody-well isn’t, though, is any of the godawful glugginess of a hot cross bun nor any of their horrible here-and-there raisins — an inexcusable waste of grapes, if you ask me. I guess this is the danger in these comparisons — and I’m not sure if my frequent fondness for slightly more whacked-out and metaphorical ones counts as me trying to avoid that problem, or makes me even more prone to it. I guess the point is this: even if you’re appalled by the ‘received tasting note’ for something, taking a gamble might prove rewarding. And: Taieri George is a stonking great pint of seasonally-apt deliciousness, year after year.

Also, there’s a rare-ish glimpse of a beer perched right here (he says, gesturing beside the keyboard he’s currently using, on his desk at home). At-home beers much more often tend to be comforting, sessionable old-standbys rather than the sorts of things which (usually) make the Diary — the actual physical thing-of-which is also right there, behind the BrewDog coaster, in its second incarnation. The original Diary (now full) is on the bookcase, just out of shot. These things really do exist.

Verbatim: Emerson’s ‘Taieri George’ 10/4/11 $9 from NW, at home, after a Domesticity Day and a PKB. The traditional dark, dark ruby. Nice spicy nose; cinnamon + nutmeg — but then, I can’t cook and can never remember the canonical ones. 500ml 6.8% We always say Hot Cross Buns, but this is so much nicer. I mean, it’s a liquid, so it avoids that horrid gluggy stodge, and retains the nice spicey flavours. Perfect on an Autumn night.

1: Seriously, ‘moveable feasts’? What the Hell sort of history-keeping descends to that level? Easter is arguably the most theologically-important event in the Christian story, and everyone’s okay with its anniversary swinging wildly from March 22 to April 25? That kinda freaks me out, as an ‘outsider’. The Wikipedia page on the ‘Computus’ problem makes for baffling reading, leaving me wondering why no one succeed in fixing a damn date — and suspecting that all that peculiar mathstronomy^a was a way to confound the ‘common people’ and maybe also something of a make-work program for monks who otherwise didn’t really have that much to do.^b
— a: You start from the 21st of March (but there’s a schism over whether you use the ‘new calendar’ or the old one) because that’s the vernal equinox (except it’s usually not), wait until the next ‘lunar month’ starts (which will happen at the ‘new moon’, though there’s a fudge-factor built into deciding just what counts, for that) and then you add fourteen days, because that’ll take you to the next full moon (except it often won’t), and then (finally) you look to the next Sunday — that is apparently “Easter day”. I think.
— b: Except the Trappists, of course. They make beer. So I’m more okay with them.

Actual Diary entries

Heather Ales ‘Grozet’

April 9, 2011 Phil 1 Comment

As you’d probably guess, we buy a lot of beer at work. And frequently, it seems we fill in the corners of an order with some half-dozens of especially random stuff. Because why not?

Peter and I were working one Saturday afternoon,¹ and these things were staring at us from the fridge, prompting questions for which we didn’t even have the beginnings of answers. Perhaps the Overboss (being mostly-Scottish) was already familiar with it when he ordered it, or maybe he was just being nostalgic and whimsical. But it was a mystery to us, and the Blessed Internets were contradictory in their reports and thereby less help than usual. So, being good empiricists, we just had one. And being publicly-minded learners-of-things, we also cut in those people with the unanswerable questions. That did carve a 330ml bottle into a half-dozen shares, but what we lacked in per-person sample size, we made up in roundtable (or over-bar) discussion.

Handily, this both mild, and weird — two things which are usually enough to stimulate controversy and conversation on their own. I’m a fan of both factors, in general, but only half warmed to this — I certainly didn’t enjoy it as much as the weirder beers by the same brewery, which also makes ales flavoured with heather and pine. I should elaborate on my Diary note: I don’t only like my weird beers to be very-weird — the favourable comparisons Dave (from Hashigo) and I were drawing for this were to Nøgne Ø’s lemongrass ale, which I’d had relatively-recently — but I wanted this to be weirder. It would’ve suited being weirder; not being moreso tipped the mildness dangerously close to unforgiveable limpness.

And damn, “weird” is another one of those words that look weird when you type them or read them too-many times in quick succession. Appropriately enough, I suppose.

Verbatim: Grozet Gooseberry & Wheat Ale 9/4/11 random bottle @ MH. 330ml ÷ 6 including Peter, Dave & Denise. From the brewery who make the heather Fraoch and the pine Alba. This was controversial in the crowd. Dave would buy a keg, Denise thought it was too… nothing, normal. I’m half way. I like weird, but I want weirder. Nose was better than taste — tinned pineapple, says Pete.

1: Er, Saturday the 9th of April 2011, obviously. As you can tell from the datestamp. But I’m writing this on a Thursday evening in June. Which shows you how bad the backlog has gotten. This time-travelling posting-plan does my head in sometimes, self-inflicted as it is.

Show notes:

Tastings and ramblings and whatnot