Racecourse ‘Phoenix’ Golden Ale

September 16, 2010 Phil Leave a comment

Re-creating old recipes is a neat idea, I think. There are some wickedly wonderful bookish types and homebrewers who archive old brewery notes and get themselves the chance to resurrect and sample long-dead brews. There are also outfits like Dogfish Head who tee up with archeology boffins and go distinctly older-school than that.

Then there are relatively half-assed approaches which are mostly exercises in marketing; in getting your ‘brand story’ off the shelf, as it were. This, sadly, is one of the latter — and I say that even though l liked it.

The rep. said it was made using “wild yeast” collected from behind the original racecourse itself. Scotty was fairly sure — and both of us hoped to hell — that he meant wild hops. But that’s just the thing. They’ve traded brandwank for substance; there is a damn good reason that hops are farmed. They, like all crops, would rather not work so hard. Left to themselves, they don’t crank out the mad levels of flavour or bigness or both that people would like. (The World isn’t here for us, after all.) So when you use wild hops, you don’t get much out of them. And it shows, here; the beer is well-made enough, but it’s very mild. That said, it’s preferable to basically every bog-standard lager-thing out there. It just doesn’t have the fun, lush loveliness that you can get from a nice golden ale.

Verbatim: Racecourse ‘Phoenix’ Golden Ale 16/9/10 Sample from a truly-clueless rep. a few weeks ago (who couldn’t tell his yeast from his hops). 330ml ÷ 2 w/ Scotty 5%. Brewed at Wigram, but apparently a recreation of an old classic, a la last year’s Waitemata Sparkling Ale. Or WAITEMATA SPARKLING, I should say, in new-Book terms. And it’s similarly perfectly bland. Not an insult. Faultless, but unremarkable. I’d take it over any macro lager, I mean. Apparently made using wild hops (or yeast, the rep. worryingly erred), which would account for some absences of zing; these things are farmed for good reasons.

Actual Diary entries

Brew Moon ‘Hophead’ IPA

September 16, 2010 Phil 1 Comment

I’m still kicking myself that me and my friends didn’t know about the Brew Moon Cafe when we were on our South Island roadtrip a few years ago. They’re in the charming-enough little town of Amberly, in North Canterbury, and we stopped there (we stop a lot, on our roadtrips) to see the statue of Double-VC soldier Charles Upham, who once farmed nearby. Now that I do know about this place and their beers, I really must go back.

‘Hophead’ is a lovely beer; it’s not a crazypants kind of over-done / attention-grabbing IPA, it’s just a solid bottle of yum. And I can’t help but notice this Diary entry’s place in the timing of this blogthing; I’d just reached frustration-point with the fact I wasn’t carrying Diary I with me and so couldn’t remember which note-worthy beers already had been appropriately noted. So there’s a weird sort of particular satisfaction in putting this note up, I must say.

Verbatim: Brew Moon ‘Hophead’ IPA 16/9/10 500ml÷3 with Scotty & Peter. $9ish from Rumbles, 5%. We randomly had this a while ago, but I can’t remember if I Booked it, I really must get these online. And it’s pretty tasty all over again. Good orangey-coloured body, fruity hops and just general good-drinkin’ yumness. Not a mucked-with loopy IPA; just a perfectly-solid one.

Actual Diary entries

Wigram Imperial Stout (with Mojo coffee beans)

September 10, 2010 Phil Leave a comment

Firstly, hopinators. Basically a backwards filter, these are last-minute flavour infusers you can stick in the circuit between the keg and the tap — making you a great big nerd, and giving you a chance to muck about a bit. Homebrewers make them out of water filters (plugged in the wrong way round), and the Dogfish Head brewery famously made one they called Randall the Enamel Animal, leading to the semi-popular generic name ‘Randall’ for such gizmos. Our Overboss likes to call ours the Modus Hoperandus, which is pretty cute and appeals to my Law Nerd side, but me and my flatmates preferred simpler names like Dennis (as in ‘Hopper’) or David (as in, er, ‘Hasselhopp’).

Wigram Imperial Stout and Mojo coffee beans — Wigram Imperial Stout, in and on the Hopinator

Secondly, what you can do with them. The obvious use for these gadgets is increasing the hoppiness of a hoppy thing. But that’s also the least-creative use of them, if you ask me. It’s occasionally fun, sure — and the Wig & Pen IPA (brewed by the man who built and installed the Modus itself, no less) was perfectly suited to such — but the more-random stuff is just more My Thing. So you can crank a wheat beer full of strawberries, a golden ale full of kiwifruit, a traditional IPA full of mandarins, or, as here, a stout full of coffee beans. The latter has an absurdly-beneficial aesthetic effect on ours, gloriously hewn from steel and glass as it is. (Weirdly, despite their usual — and shared-by-me — fondness for Steampunk-ish things at Dogfish Head, you’d have to say that ours is much more in that mode; it just should’ve been brass…)

Thirdly, this particular thing. If there was a Heaven, this would be one of those Matches Made There. Wigram is a charming little battler of a brewery, with moments of genius and moments of naff — like most operations, I suppose. Their Imperial Stout is definitely one of the former, and is in the British Imperial mold rather than the Russian, so has a massive dryness absurdly-well accommodates the flavours from the coffee. It’s big, dry and fabulous. It is Stephen Fry.

Diary II entry #5, Wigram Imperial Stout and Mojo beans

Verbatim: Wigram Imperial Stout & Mojo Beans 10/9/10, guest on the Hopinator, loaded with coffee 8%. Transforms the Modus from a murky fishtank of hop flowers into a pillar of obsidian; like a tube of captive midnight. The stout is serious, dry and delicious — ‘British Imperial’, they say, lacking the sweetness of a Russian ~. But whereas I found the Townshend #9 a bit limp, this is big and dry and fabulous. Like Clive James, or Stephen Fry. Doesn’t feel boozy at all. The dryness and the coffee are just made for each other.

Actual Diary entries

Yeastie Boys ‘Pot Kettle Black’

September 8, 2010 Phil Leave a comment

‘PKB’ — as it quickly became known; the full version of the name is meant to highlight the seeming-contradiction in a beer being both hoppy and dark — was the first Yeastie Boys release. It also — appropriately enough — went on to contradict their usual modus operandi by returning for batch after batch (slightly tweaked, each time). It’s now intended to be available year-round, in these fetchingly-labelled 330ml bottles.

The rumour around Beer Nerd circles was that this first bottled batch had its hops ‘backwards’, with the result that there was less emphasis on the citrussy American Cascade hop front. I’m not sure whether it’s true or not — there is a disturbing little trend, even among properly-geeky craft brewers, of ‘covering up’ these little accidental variations that happen from time to time — but even if it is, from my tasting of this first-batch bottle, it’d only mean this was effectively another minor ‘remix’, and still a delicious, conspicuously-hopped, rich dark ale.

Deciding how to style-tag ‘Her Majesty’ was difficult enough, but this one complicates things in its own way, too. In both cases, I’ve opted for ‘Porter’, and Porter is how PKB was initially pitched, although always with things like “American-style” or “hoppier-than-usual” appended to the front. Truth is, this really deserves credit for being part of the emergence of what will amount to the newest craft beer style: Black IPA. More and more breweries are experimenting in this direction, with frequently-delicious results.

Verbatim: Yeastie Boys ‘Pot Kettle Black’ 8/9/10 330ml from Stu himself @ Beervana time. 6% The first bottled Yeastie, and the rumour among the beer nerds is that the hops are backwards, lessening the Cascade focus. (In this batch, at least.) Seems plausible, but that would only ever relegate this to “delicious Porter” — [with] a touch more zip + zest than usual. Ooh, it grows, though.

Actual Diary entries

Mussel Inn… Pumpkinsomething

September 8, 2010 Phil Leave a comment

I totally forgot the name of this thing, but the only mention of a pumpkin beer on the Mussel Inn’s awesomely / terrifyingly retro website — it just screams Microsoft FrontPage, which was last released seven years ago — is one they call ‘Happy Jackal’ (I’m not sure why).

Dogfish Head’s Punkin’ Ale was a surprising find, for me, at Beervana; despite hating pumpkins, I freaking loved it. So this draws inevitable comparisons against that, and I’d have to say that the Dogfish one does win, hands down — but there’s hardly any shame in that. This just lacks the smoothness that a good pumpkin ale can get you. My brewer-nerd friends point out that the actual pumpkin basically boils / ferments away to nothing, so these beers are all about that texture, and the spices you throw in with it — they’re more pumpkin pie than pumpkin pumpkin. Mussel Inn’s offering certainly has those spicy flavours in abundance, and the lighter body does leave it as a perfectly-respectable and interesting quaffer.

And wow, if you write “pumpkin” eight or nine times, it starts looking really weird.

Verbatim: Mussel Inn Pumpkinsomething 8/9/10 — woot! — ?%, also gifted. ÷2 from an old-school Mac’s bottle w/ Haitch. Definitely spicy + especially cinamonny. H freaked out that I knew what Big red gum was; she’s not used to my Cosmopolitanism, still. I have to compare it to Dogfish Head Punkin Ale, which I had at Beervana, and must say this isn’t a patch on that, which I was surprised to find enjoyable. Much less body, here. Lacks that fullness + smoothness. Ah! Turns out that Punkin is named for the Punkin’ Chunkin’ Fest! Drinking the remainder faster, I discover this works better as a quaffer than a sipper; like a spiced wintery lager.

Actual Diary entries

Mussel Inn ‘Pale Whale’ Ale

September 7, 2010 Phil Leave a comment

You do meet some choice people, in a job like mine. (You meet some intolerable ones, too, but I prefer not to write about them, here.)

Three people wandered into our pub the day before Beervana, and when I commented on the Mussel Inn shirt one of them was wearing, it turned out that they all actually worked there. Coincidentally, we’d just taken delivery of a few cases each of three of their beers, so I had to show them the write-up I’d done to introduce them in the Book. (I also like how it makes for a nice example of how my writing style gets quite a bit more ‘loose’ as the small hours creep on and the feeling of “I should really finish this” creeps in.)

Golden Bay’s legendary Mussel Inn has been brewing and serving craft beer forever. Or at least since very shortly after time itself began — if there is a God, and if he rested on the seventh day, he was probably there, enjoying a well-earned pint. If they’re at all able, beer geeks should all make pilgrimage at least once in their lives[…].

They were chuffed, and we had a good old-fashioned geek-out for a while, and the next day at the beer festival, they brought over a little swag-bag of unlabelled bottles — a few beers that aren’t usually available other than at the pub itself. Bloody lovely of them. The beer, itself, was lovely and straightforward. The name comes from a nice little joke that a whale is a big body and a long tail, and the beer does live up to it.

Verbatim: Mussel Inn ‘Pale Whale Ale’ 7/9/10, gift from Mussel Inn people @ Beervana, after we met at my pub and they saw my write-up. 500ml shared with Neil. 6%. Hazy light apricotty brown. Slightly sweet + muted-fruity nose. Body is decently big + smooth. Quite a good length on the flavour; “big body, long tail” = whale, they say. Cute. Not perfect, maybe a rough travel, but very tasty. Must visit…

Mussel Inn introductory blurb, Malthouse Beer Book

Actual Diary entries

Yeastie Boys ‘Her Majesty 2010’

September 6, 2010 Phil 3 Comments

And so begins Diary II. I’m kinda surprised I lasted a week since the birthday-closing of Diary I. But this was a hell of a way to kick things off; with a big, mad, not-concerned-with-style kinda thing.

The Yeastie Boys are no one-trick ponies; they can make crazy hoppy pale ales, delicious easy milds, and things like this that escape classification and just are what they are. Somewhat reminiscent of Emerson’s too-scarce ‘Taieri George’, this is a dark, smooth beer with oodles of chocolate and spice flavours, which is almost worryingly drinkable for its rather-high strength.

They make a ‘His Majesty’, as well, but this one is dedicated to their wives (and the largely-unsung women of the craft-brewing world in general) and apparently made to their tastes — which also makes this another useful thing to help dynamite silly notions of what is or isn’t a “girly beer”.

Verbatim: Yeastie Boys ‘Her Majesty 2010’ 6/9/10 on tap @MH 7.5%. Welcome to the new book! An anniversary-ish beer seemed appropriate, and so did one that doesn’t respect style guidelines. “Belgian Imperial Porter” or Brown is people’s best bet. But why bother? It is what it is, and it’s good. Big, dark + spicy. Hides its booze worryingly well. Very wintery, almost Eastery with all those spices. Brewed for their wive’s tastes, apparently. Another counter-example to usual silly notions of what might be a “girly beer”, then.

Rambles and rants

My entry for the People’s Blog

October 20, 2009 Phil 4 Comments

The weekly blog on the Malthouse’s website has a semi-regular feature called ‘The People’s Blog’, where regulars and hangers-on and (occasionally) staff are invited to / dragooned into writing a little blab about their “two favourite Malthouse beers”. I was one of the “volunteers” for the second edition of that, and so this probably rates as my earliest, most-official piece of Rambling About Beer:

It’s chronically unfair to ask me for my “two favourite” Malthouse beers since I’m a fairly fickle and promiscuous drinker with tastes that vary pretty wildly depending on the weather, the plan for the evening (or morning…), what my previous beer was and general whims. But okay. Let’s play along and pick two enduring favourites, at least.

Emerson’s Bookbinder (Dunedin, 3.7%). Absurdly flavourful for its moderate weight, Booky serves brilliantly as an after-work restorative (and actual book-binding is damn hard work, I can assure you) or as a sessionable fuel for long hours of talking nonsense with friends and generally laughing asses off – which won’t leave you too blurry in the small hours, or too hungover the day after. It’s a reminder that, if you’re clever enough, you don’t have to climb to boozy heights to make a tasty beer, and that often there’s merit to be had for finding that perfect balance between your malts and your hops. Both factors run nicely contrary to some frequently-silly fashions, and are worth celebrating. So raise a glass. Then another.

Cooper’s Sparkling Ale (Adelaide, 5.8%). My first good Australian beer, upon which I luckily stumbled while beer-shopping for an Australia Day while off at university in a forty-degree Canberra summer. Hardly “sessionable” at 5.8% (not that that stopped me…) but a truly gorgeous golden ale with a wonderfully easy, fruity, lively and lingering taste that can be a great way to ease lagerheads into other styles, or to bring those who don’t consider themselves “beer drinkers” (maybe because lagerheads just offer them lager…) into the fold.

With its optional ritual of rolling the bottle to kick up the sediment, it’s also a great introduction to the joys of natural, unfiltered, bottle-conditioned (and so, arguably, “real”) beer. It’s effortlessly delicious.

Continue reading My entry for the People’s Blog →

Actual Diary entries

Beer and Food and Philosophy

April 5, 2009 Phil Leave a comment

With good beer goes good ramble, I’ve always thought. Two of my regulars at the Malthouse — Clare and Jula — were of a similar mind, and organised for a group of people in likewise agreement to meet up at their place one Saturday afternoon (the timing was tricky, given the vastly different hours we all worked). It was ridiculously civilised; we sat around their kitchen table and talked about some tricky questions of ethics and metaphysics all tangled up in the notion of what counts — and what doesn’t count, and why — as a “person”. We were all coming at that from strikingly different angles (for myself, it was basically the main obsession of my philosophy degree…), which made for a spirited and fascinating conversation.

And, it went bloody-well with:

Singha Lager
Wigram Hefe
Emerson’s ‘Little Red Rooster’
Belhaven ‘Twisted Thistle’
Peak Brewery ‘Monkey Point’ IPA
Belhaven ‘Wee Heavy’
Emerson’s ‘Taieri George’, and
Black Sheep ‘Riggwelter’

You can see by the photos that most people did as they were told and also brought some food to go with their choice of beer. Falling into my deservedly-stereotypical role as The Guy Who Knows Nothing About Food, I failed; I can’t even tell you what those things are that the others provided. I therefore shifted a little into the role of Slightly More Beer Nerdy Nerd, and picked the order of service, at least.

My own beer for the occasion was Emerson’s ‘Little Red Rooster’, a ‘Brewers’ Reserve’ series release that had just come out at the time and was available on the fill-your-own at Regional Wines & Spirits. It was a rather-lovely little Vienna Lager; the increased caramelly maltiness accounting for the colour and name, and providing a nicely interesting body. My new place in Mount Victoria is a very short walk from that shop, which makes for some delightfully-dangerous pay day shopping sprees.

Unnumbered Diary entry, Beer and food and philosophy

Actual Diary entries

Yeastie Boys ‘Kid Chocolate’

March 25, 2009 Phil 3 Comments

After the Silage Debacle, this was an incredibly-welcome change. The third Yeastie Boys release was a charmingly un-fashionable mild — great big hop-fueled high-booze things were very much in fashion, so the Yeasties staked their claim to being Plural-Tricked Ponies very early on.

It is weird that we got to the point where mildness could be a vaguely revolutionary thing, but this stuff was too enjoyable and mellow and good for any sort of complaint about the state of craft brewing in general to bubble very far up the brainstem. That’s what these things do, when they’re done well; they shut you up. Or at least, they shut up anything overly-animated and just let you sit and quietly talk nonsense with your friends. Like you should do more often, whoever you are.

Verbatim: Yeastie Boys ‘Kid Chocolate’ Mild 25/3/09 staffie at Malty $8/pint 3.6% The third YB, and a mostly forgotten style. Sessionable brown ale. Lovely chestnut colour, almost no hop presennce, as per style. Nice smooth malt-driven quaffer. Slightest nudge of choc. Another oddly-named good thing.

Beer Diary

Racecourse ‘Phoenix’ Golden Ale

Brew Moon ‘Hophead’ IPA

Wigram Imperial Stout (with Mojo coffee beans)

Yeastie Boys ‘Pot Kettle Black’

Mussel Inn… Pumpkinsomething

Mussel Inn ‘Pale Whale’ Ale

Yeastie Boys ‘Her Majesty 2010’

My entry for the People’s Blog

Beer and Food and Philosophy

Yeastie Boys ‘Kid Chocolate’

Tastings and ramblings and whatnot