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Croucher ‘Hef’, Burleigh ‘Hef’ and Red Hill Wheat Beer

December 22, 2010 Phil Leave a comment

I’m not crash-keen on wheat beers. I mean, I do like several of them very much (Three Boys Wheat is a stand-out example), but I’m rarely quite in the mood — if I want something this light, I usually reach for a golden ale. But that’s just me. It was a stinking hot day, so I indulged myself in a side-by-side(-by-side); I bought the foremost after the Croucher ‘October’ confusion, and had the latter two thanks to my Australian friend Glenn and his duty-free allowance.

I also couldn’t help but put two identically-named beers against each other. I’d have thought that the hefeweizen / Hugh Hefner joke was a common one, but I could only find two others on BeerAdvocate.com.¹ I’m torn, deciding a winner on that score — Burleigh put a stonking great moustache on the label, which is awesome, but I thought the Hef himself was pretty much always clean-shaven, which seems to me like Points Off, then.

The variance among the three was quite striking and made for a pleasantly-random scattergun sequence of sips from each — although what amounted to three standard-sized regular-strength beers in quick succession did catch up on me in the heat. Croucher’s was the darkest, tending towards banana cake rather than the habitual-for-hefe fresh banana note. On occasions that side of it seemed too much or just slightly off, but it wasn’t a deal-breaker. Burleigh’s was much more in that ‘classic’ mode with light, fresh fruitiness, and then Red Hill’s threw in what I thought was a pretty noticeable hop sideline — possibly dragging it out of the traditional form, but interestingly so.

My absolute favourite factoid about German-style wheat beers centres on that banana flavour. Learning about how the yeast just coincidentally made that very-familiar ester was an early Beer Nerdery moment for me (tutored by my biochemistry-majoring friend Toby, out on the balcony of the original Malthouse with a Tuatara tasting tray), but the best bit is that the Germans have been making hefe since long before they ever had bananas imported. So where we normally meet the fruit first and then think that the beer tastes like it, there must’ve been a point in history where Germans would first try this odd exotic fruit and say to themselves “damn, this tastes like wheat beer“. How wonderfully odd. I really must try to track down a historical reference.

Verbatim: Croucher ‘Hef’, Burleigh ‘Hef’ & Red Hill Wheat Beer all 330ml + 5%, latter two from Glenn, so I couldn’t resist a comparison on a muggy day. 22/12/10 I should’ve really done a bright sunny day photo, but I’m hiding inside. I wonder how many other tokens of the Hef/e trope there are… But Burleigh get extra cred for the silly ‘tache on their label. Croucher’s darkest, ambery even, then RH, then Burleigh. Taste + smells go: funky (too much?) banana cakey; then lighter, fresher banana: smoother; then light + with a more-present hop sideline (they grow their own Tettnanger @ RH). This is basically science now, right? Amelia’s right that Croucher’s cakeyness is as if the cake has been in the sun too long — a slightly past-it-ness. I’m still not entirely a wheat beer guy, but they do have their place — hot days. Which I usually just try to avoid entirely. And then, nearly a litre of wheat beer inspired some Proper Science; a 3:2:1 blend. Turned out superchoice.

1: And even then — one (‘Head High Hef’ from Breakwater Brewing) hardly seems an overt reference, and the other (‘The Hef’ from Gardner Ale House) isn’t even made any more. More are quite-possibly lurking on RateBeer.com, but my advanced-search-fu was insufficient to bring them out.

Actual Diary entries

Townshend ‘J.C.’ IPA

December 16, 2010 Phil Leave a comment

So yeah, our Christmas Offerings at work included a beer which had burnt pohutakawa¹ as part of the process, and a beer named after Jesus for no readily-apparent reason. I just loved the irreverence of that. Of course, it didn’t hurt that both beers were really rather lovely, in their very-very different ways.

Martin Townshend’s teeny-tiny brewery outside Nelson is almost exclusively occupied making same pretty-damn-traditionally-English styles of beer. They’re always well made, and many of them have made very popular guest appearances on one or other of our ‘beer engine’ handpulls.² ‘J.C.’ is a fair touch stronger than its traditional relatives, but hides that extra oomph worryingly-well in a body of nicely complex, steadily-building hoppy fruit flavours.

Verbatim: Townshend ‘J.C.’ IPA 16/12/10 on handpull @ MH, shouted by a regular (from my horrid old pub, in fact) — and how much more Christmassy can you get than a beer named after Jesus? This and the previous do make for nicely irreverent Holiday Beers. This is a bit hazy, but a nice muted paleish orange colour. Easier to drink than it should be @ 5.8%, the hops are fresh and light in the body but build a nice big bitter finish.

1: Note for aliens: The pohutakawa is the ‘New Zealand Christmas Tree’. It blooms around the right time, and does so with cute bright red flowery things, and so nicely hits the stereotypical colours.

2: We used to always have two dark beers — ordinarily Tuatara Porter and Invercargill ‘Pitch Black’ Stout — on handpull, which always struck me as a bit of a waste. We’ve lately settled into a pattern of one dark (porter / stout) and one brown (IPA or bitter) — much better.

Actual Diary entries

Epic / Dogfish Head ‘Portamarillo’

December 15, 2010 Phil 4 Comments

I really have turned around on Epic’s beers over the course of a few years. For too long, Luke’s products were just the perfect embodiment of that trend that bored me so horribly wherein More Hops All Other Considerations Be Damned became such a trendy and habitual thing to do. Yawn, I say, despite loving a hop-stupid beer on occasion. I just hate to see one element of a many-faceted thing elevated above all others and paraded about as if it’s the key to everything for all situations.^{1, 2}

‘Mayhem’ met me halfway, being a hop-focussed but actually balanced beer which I really enjoyed, and lately, Luke’s finally gone that final step and made some beers which let other factors entirely take the leading roles. His collaboration with England’s Thornbridge brewery produced a pretty-damn-good stout, and this ‘Portamarillo’ might just be a proper turning point, rescuing Epic from One Trick Pony status. Because honestly, no matter how good any particular pony’s one trick is — yawn.

So. Continuing along the collaboration train, Luke joined forces with Sam Caligione of the famously-experimental Dogfish Head brewery. Working together for part of Sam’s Discovery Channel TV series, they made a uniquely New Zealandish beer by smoking tamarillos over pohutakawa and cramming them into a smooth, boozy porter. Because why not? It sounds ludicrous, but works absurdly well. I drank a lot of it myself, as we quickly went through some two-hundred litres from the taps at work. The porter is relatively light-bodied for its strength, leaving room for the gentle smokiness and a delightfully-random tart fruitiness.

Better yet, they brewed it twice. Double-better-yet, we got to try some of the U.S.-brewed version at work, when we threw a bit of a shindig for the Near Enough Fifth Birthday of the Epic brewery. It was a great little exercise in how much difference little changes can make — the Dogfish version being much smokier, the peculiar ‘sweetness’ you get from heavily-smoked malt stealing the show more from the tart fruit. The U.S. version was only available because Sam had some in his luggage, the Epic batch is still kicking around in bottles in the better sorts of retail outlets; you should get some if you haven’t yet — or just get more.

Verbatim: Epic / Dogfish Head Portamarillo 15/12/10 @ MH, for Epic’s Fifth-ish Birthday. The NZ brew is on tap, and we’ve got a bottle of the US batch to try. It’s an awesomely odd idea: Porter with Pohutakawa-smoked-Tamarillo. The US is darker is body + bubbles and — to me — plays up the smoke more, whereas the fruit is stronger in the NZ. The US has a crazy bitter / spicy late finish, the NZ seems smoother. But I really dig both.

— so then (16/12/10), I was stopped on the street today by a regular who was asking about my blogthing. Which was enjoyably weird. But he also mentioned that Luke’s version was less smoked than Sam’s, because he didn’t want that tail-end astringency. I really must get around to watching the Making Of TV show, but it’s nice to know I was on the right track.

Diary II entry #41.1, Epic / Dogfish Head 'Portamarillo'

1: The same thing, lamentably, happens with my related obsession: Scotch Whisky. There, you get “peat freaks” like you get “hop heads” with beer — indeed, I think there are similarities to be drawn all over the place between peaty whiskies and hoppy beers, but that’s a little too tangential even for a footnote, perhaps. Myself, I love peaty whiskies. But not all the time. Not to the point where in absolutely all cases would I think that a whisky would be improved by more peatiness. So it is with hoppy beer.

2: And don’t you have to worry — at least a little — when you read something adorned with a “Add More Hops” background or a title like “I’m Here for the Hops” or “The Pursuit of Hoppiness” whether you should be discounting (in the sense of moderating-down, not “ignoring”) what they say about beers with a different emphasis? I read all three aforementioned sources avidly, but wish they didn’t position themselves so lop-sidedly. They might defend themselves by saying these things are (half?) in jest — but then, why are all the jokes lined up in that one direction?

Actual Diary entries

Three Boys ‘Aftershock’

December 8, 2010 Phil Leave a comment

The Canterbury Earthquake was certainly one of the stand-out local news stories of 2010. Given the astonishingly-low levels of harm suffered by people, curiosity was very quickly allowed to return to topics that would always be interesting, but would otherwise seem callous to ask about too soon afterward — things like “what’s going to happen with all those Christchurch beers we like?”

The question was quickly addressed by Wellington beer writer Neil Miller, and by journalist / Beer Nerd / Christchurchian Denise Garland — and the short version of the answer is: not much. Amid some serious and widespread property kablooey, the local craft breweries were relatively lucky.

One particularly-interesting effect of the earthquake, though, was this. Three Boys were back at work a few days after the initial tremor, and were in the middle of a brew of my utterly-beloved Golden Ale. An aftershock interrupted them at a crucial time, but rather than letting it ruin the day’s work and dooming however-many litres to go down the drain, they pulled off some improvising that was as impressive as it is mysterious. The result was named ‘Aftershock’, brewed to an appropriately-memorialising 7.1% — and packaged in cute little bottles adorned with a piece of smashed brickwork (plus a few kegs, sadly brickless).

We had it to cap off the Christmas Dinner for our Beer Club at work. One of the attendees had to go home early, so donated me their share. I really like it. I mean sure, I love the Golden, and the “story” behind this is way too cool to resist — but it’s also, crucially, an inherently worthy thing. Light and fresh, flavourful and interesting, far too drinkable for 7.1% — it has a lot going for it. Its uniqueness and its yumness are seperately sufficient for it to be worthwhile; whether your starting point is the former or the latter, you get the other for free. Lucky you.

Verbatim: Three Boys ‘Aftershock’ 8/12/10 donated flute from Beer Club for waitering their Christmas Extravaganza. 7.1% in honour of the Christchurch quake, an aftershock of which disrupted a brew, leading to the creation of this oddity by the seat of Ralph’s pants. Bottles were adorned with broken masonry, even. It’s just unashamedly odd; and Ralph won’t really be drawn on just how he improvised. A boatload of Green Bullet was suspected… Maybe, but the funk isn’t there, in this glass at least. Steph & Johnnie had a skunkier one at Bar Ed, they say. Whatever the hell it is, it’s crisp, tasty + zingy. But most of the attraction is still the utterly unique story — it’d be worth it just for that, but the beer stands up on its own. (Though you do need the story to justify the price…)

Actual Diary entries

Croucher ‘October’ IPA

December 4, 2010 Phil 1 Comment

This totally managed to stump a few people and cause a minor nerd-riot, it did. We had two kegs of it at work, and the first went on through a Hopinator crammed full of mandarins¹ — à la the rather-successful batch of fruited-up Twisted Hop IPA we’d previously done.

When it was all naked and alone on a regular tap, though, it was totally different. Without the citrus (elements of which you’d ordinarily expect in a big IPA), its massively yeasty self was uncovered. The Overboss just assumed the as-yet-unlabelled tap held a wheat beer from Emerson’s Brewers’ Reserve series (which was due to go on soon), and one Proper Beer Nerd absolutely insisted that it was Croucher’s Hef (also a wheat, perhaps obviously) instead. A quick double-check of the keg fridge assured us against the first possibility, and a side-by-side tasting eliminated the second. I’d been standing there pointing out that none of us had ever had a wheat beer with this level of bitterness before, but was also happy to indulge in a little bit of Science, just to be sure.

What we have, instead, is a very different type of Big IPA. And I’m quite fond of very different, sometimes. The fruit flavours in here, to me, were all rockmelony and summery and ‘uppy’ in that barely-definable way. The funky yeastiness was surprising, but people have been IPA-ifying big Belgian tripels for a while now, so just think of this as taking a run at that same idea from the other direction, perhaps.

Verbatim: Croucher ‘October’ IPA 4/12/10 guest @ MH. 7.5% We had this Hopinated a few weeks ago, on mandarins (or tangerines; there was some dispute, for which I — uncharacteristically, but with good reason — absented myself). It was a pretty tasty + worthy echo of Twisted Hop IPA — and this has the same light uppy fruit side all on its own, too (though obviously the oily bitterness isn’t there / as big). The big fruit note, though, is rockmelon. In a nice way. The Dior of beer, says Amelia, since it goes so well with Natalie’s new perfume. The body is surprisingly light, for its strength. Quite a different Big IPA; more summery.

1: Actually, this beer caused two near nerd-riots. The first centered on just whether the things in the Hopinator were mandarins, or tangerines. As my Diary entry notes, I largely absented myself from that argument — an unusual move, for me, but a running joke among my friends (very much of the “funny because it’s true” kind) is that I know basically nothing about food. I had a niggling suspicion, though, that the argument was poorly-stated; I thought there wasn’t a difference. In the non-embarrassing safety of my laptop on my break, I checked. And was alarmed to find myself nearly right; fighting about the difference between a tangerine and a mandarin is like fighting over the difference between a greyhound and a dog. Mandarin is a higher-level term — they come in many varieites (including tangerine and satsuma).

Actual Diary entries

William Bull ‘Red Angus’ Pilsener

November 30, 2010 Phil Leave a comment

There is a particular joy in trying a beer you’ve never heard of before; you’re totally free from expectations. But that does also often give you a moment of extra pause, in case you ’embarrassingly’ wind up liking something that’s not well regarded. I try to resist that, though, since I prefer to emphasise subjectivity and situation as key bits of the beer-drinking experience.

Anyhow, this stuff was rather charming on a sunny day that I’d filled up with mooching in the sun and riding my bike. It was part of a small set of beers that my friend Glenn had luggaged over (as he’s done before, bless him) from Australia when he was in town for work. Despite being something of an Honorary Australian, it was totally unfamiliar to me, and I was pleasantly taken aback by first the odd name, then the somewhat-peculiar label — then the bloody-lovely hazy golden colour, after which followed an inviting-enough (fruity and slightly spicy) aroma, and finally a nicely rounded-out thirst quenching little lager. I still have no real idea how it’s perceived over in the Big Country, but I think it’s totally worth a go — interesting enough to stand apart, but not an excercise in foot-shooting difference for difference’s sake. The label certainly over-enthuses about how unique it is, but that’s a sad fact about marketing these days, more than anything else.

Verbatim: William Bull ‘Red Angus’ Pilsener 30/11/10 at home, gift from Glenn — another mulement! 345ml 4.8% Very odd label, somehow, and a weird slogan: “pure grain fed beer”. 5 malted grains — taste and texture suggest we’re not only talking barley. Which does keep things interesting, but also lends a somewhat ‘homebrewy’ side. It’s a pleasant hazy straw gold; though the nose isn’t as “wild” as billed, the fruit + spice nudges are there. Certainly not bad, and interesting enough to be going on with. Meanwhile, it definitely seems that summer’s arrived. So this suits a day of mooching + biking very well.

Actual Diary entries

Tuatara ‘X’ Anniversary Ale

November 19, 2010 Phil 2 Comments

Still (mysteriously) Wellington’s only local brewery, Tuatara recently arrived at their tenth birthday and celebrated (as breweries understandably tend to do) by making themselves a beer for the occasion. Essentially, they blammed ‘Ardennes’ up a few notches, landing it at a suitably¹ anniversary-ish 10%. It debuted at Beervana and was apparently well received, and we had a few bottles in stock at work to plug the gap in between the availability of kegs.

Despite liking ‘Ardennes’, and also heftier–Belgian–esque beers in general, this just isn’t My Thing at all, which put me in rare disagreement with some usually-similarly-minded folk. But hey, subjectivity, right? For me, it committed the basically unforgivable sin of being just kinda naff; not different enough from Ardennes, other than in the strength — and that strength just rolls all around your face with its syrupy hotness and ruins any real chance for balance, or depth, or character. It’s your birthday, so you should go a bit crazy, but if your only thought for how to go crazy is to effectively pour petrol into one of your existing beers, something is amiss.

And — maybe that strength is to blame — shouldn’t you also make sure all the bolts are tight on an anniversary release? These things arrived with horribly-wonky labels that made you wonder just how dark it was in the warehouse that no one noticed nor cared, and the text on those misapplied labels also shipped with an awesome typo which cited their use of heretofore-unheard-of boble hops.

Tuatara can do great things; when their beers are ‘on’, they are delightful and accessible local takes on iconic styles of beer — although they really need to get around to admitting to themselves (and the rest of us) that their deservedly-popular APA is now part of the family and not a “limited release” as per the label, since it’s been continuously-available for some eight months. But Tuatara are also capable of alarming bits of rushed decision-making, over-stretching (with a side of corner-cutting), and evident narcolepsy at the switch. ‘X’, sadly, is a product of those latter temperaments — which is doubly depressing for a Birthday Beer.

Verbatim: Tuatara ‘X’ Anniversary Ale 2000-2010 19/11/10 10% 750ml shouted by a customer + shared. Essentially an embiggened Ardennes, it’s an over-strong tripel. Similarly dry, Belgish nose, but not alarmingly fumey. Warming in the face, though. Honey-ish, oily texture. Actually oddly ‘normal’, but with that hot, boozy finish.

Tuatara 'X' and its typo — Tuatara 'X' and its rather neat typo

1: I’ve commented before on the “borderline numerology” trend among brewers, particularly in regard their own anniversaries and such. I remember it initially striking me as evidencing a lack of creativity, but I quickly decided I liked the obsessiveness and nerdery of it.

Actual Diary entries

Hallertau ‘Minimus’

November 18, 2010 Phil Leave a comment

A common complaint of mine is that overstrong beers are too much in fashion (or habit), and that midstrength, sessionable numbers are sadly neglected by the local brewing scene. Granted, the stalwart exception to that trend is the utterly bloody marvellous Emerson’s Bookbinder, but still; more options is more good.

A smattering of other sessionable goodies have shown up over the years¹ but none so face-meltingly awesome, if you ask me, as Hallertau’s ‘Minimus’. (The name comes from its over-strength IPA sibling, ‘Maximus Humulus Lupulus’.) We had it last summer, motored through it in short order, and continually begged Steve for some more. It’s just lovely; either a very pale pale ale or a massively-hopped golden ale, and is totally sessionable at 3.8% — a statistically-insignificant nudge stronger than Bookbinder, it makes for an awesome summer counterpart to that wonderful stuff. Fresh, light but stonkingly flavourful, it has both thirst-quenching zip and interest-keeping yum in healthy quantities, appropriately hitting some Maximus-esque hop notes quite heavily. Its second incarnation, which came with a ludicrously-beautiful tap badge, is billed as a “Breakfast Pale Ale” — but even if that is a stretch, it’s not by very much.

Speaking of the badge — which is done in bas relief, and goes wonderfully with Hallertau’s gorgeous pseudo-classical rebranding — I actually had to re-scan this Diary entry to capture the amendment I had to make to note that some complete fuckpants stole it, one busy night. If you’re thinking — as I briefly was, I’ll admit — “hey, fair play, that is pretty cool; you don’t secure it well, you’re asking for it to be stolen”, I should add that they also stole all the other badges from that bank of taps, so their haul includes such pieces of naff as a Tiger and an Export Gold badge, I believe. So I doubt they’re some over-keen beer souvenier collector with whom I might sympathise — well, would sympathise, would consider being, even. More just a random fuckpants, as I say.

Verbatim: Hallertau ‘Minimus’ 18/11/10 3.8% back on tap @ work, with a gorgeous new bas-relief sculpted tap badge. Hallertau’s pseudo-classical branding overhaul is awesomely done. And this stuff is lovely. The world needs more good midstrength. It especially needs midstrength this freaking good. [30/11/10: The badge got stolen!]

1: A few with their own Diary entries, even, but there’s still quite a backlog of historical things in the Not Uploaded Yet pile. Apologies.

Actual Diary entries, Rambles and rants

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

November 15, 2010 Phil 8 Comments

I’m not going to get properly into the whole “grey market” (or “gray market”, if you’re American) debate here. I’m sure I will do so more fully at a later time, when it inevitably flares up again. I’m actually pretty sympathetic to both sides — which is rare.

My own particular concerns are these:

“Grey market” strikes me as an unfair term, which loads the dice against the “unofficial” importers, since it carries its connotations of being kinda black market — but grey market imports are legal.¹ It certainly doesn’t seem like a neutral term that both sides would use, so it’s probably not a good phrase for commentators to go on using as a label for the debate.
The quality concern should be paramount, but I often get the suspicion that it’s used as window-dressing for a more knee-jerkish desire for good old-fashioned control.² The opposition to parallel importing often seems oddly dogmatic — I just can’t imagine some of the most-vocal opponents actually changing their tune and make an exception were some perfect, quality-guaranteeing dream importer to emerge.
And finally, I’m just not invested enough in this debate to become someone’s martyr. I don’t see the “anti-grey” side as being so obviously right that I’d be willing to join a boycott and deprive myself the change to try something I might never otherwise be able to sample. Yes, yes, I know there may be quality issues — but I’m accustomed to navigating them with everything else as well and can accomodate those possibilities as part of the tasting experience.

Anyway: Sierra Nevada’s Pale Ale, on tap in the Little Country. This is a “grey market” import, in case you were wondering why I went for a spin along that particular tangent — it was basically a “test keg”, actually, to see if kegs of Sierra Nevada would start heading this way just like bottles have been for a good few months now.

I thought it travelled very well, though some local Beer Folk seemed to bubble towards the opinion that it’d been beaten up a bit — I suspect an element of that was the somewhat regrettable pack mentality that sets in when someone “noteworthy” makes an early pronouncement (negative or positive), with maybe also a touch of that phenomenon where it becomes moderately fashionable to knock something once it reaches a certain level of success. In the main, it went down a treat; we blammed through that pilot keg in very short order (possibly helped too much by me, on one particular night).

The only let-down was that we didn’t make enough of a fuss about it, and I don’t even really know why we didn’t. It turned out that we actually tapped our keg — the very first in the country — on the actual goddamn thirtieth birthday of the beer. How neat is that? And it was totally accidental, weirdly. I tried to lobby for the awesomely-ostentatious oversized tap handle to be installed, too. The reasoning was that one big silly handle would look out of place among all the normals — but surely that’s precisely why you do it. Sigh. That said, Peter’s note on the blackboard — written “in Californian” — was awesome.

Verbatim: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale! 15/11/10 apparently the first keg to make it to the Little Country. A bit of a travel test, after which it may become a fixture on tap here @ work. Some of the Beer Snobs have already yeah-yeah-ed themselves into agreeing that it hasn’t travelled well. I say nonsense; is lovely. Maybe, maybe slightly muted. But still its delicious self. I suspect people are confusing it with its gruntier relatives.

— and then a lot / too many more the next night. I discovered that the 15th is the brewdate Birthday; so we tapped ours on its 30th! Worth celebrating, so we did.

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale on tap — Diary II entry #35.1, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

1: Greg Koch, one of the founders of the Stone brewery, made a spectacularly arse-faced appearance on the RealBeer.co.nz forum in which he characterised a parallel import of his beer as “black market” and “illegal” several times in a short span. That lost him a lot of my sympathy, and it was very hard not to read his comments without uncharitably starting to think they were decidedly sour grapes, given that they were spurred by a negative comment about his beer. Illegality is a serious accusation to fling at someone so casually — even if there’s a question of whether one of the middlemen had broken a no-exporting deal, that’d just be an issue of breach of contract, not the proper breach of statute that his terminology and outrage imply.
2: To return to Greg Koch (from footnote 1), he quite-casually throws around the phrase “fresh-and-as-intended, or not at all”, which does set me wondering just where he wants to get off that train; what else gets smuggled into “as intended”? I really hope he took Stu’s quoted song lyrics to heart, and calmed down a bit.

Actual Diary entries, Rambles and rants

Emerson’s Brewers’ Reserve: ‘Grace Jones’ Porter

November 10, 2010 Phil Leave a comment

Diary II entry #34, Emerson's 'Grace Jones'

The Emerson’s brewers are here doing their own version of the Barry White joke I made in reference to their Oatmeal Stout. Not that I’m claiming credit, of course. But it’s nice to have a “thinking alike” moment now and then.

Much like the recent Southern Clam Stout, ‘Grace’ does make for another worthy successor to ‘Barry’ — especially given the texture-smoothifying oats they’ve used here (which were obviously also in the Oatmeal Stout, hence the name). They cite the Anchor Porter as an inspiriation, implying higher-than-usual levels of hops which showed up, to me, as a nicely ‘zingy’ edge around all that delicious chocolate flavour.

I do like Emerson’s London Porter a lot, but also wish they’d put something like this into permanent production — it’d be nice to have a bigger, ‘stoutier’ option on the roster, too. Which does of course bring up the question of stout versus porter, since here’s me saying that this is ‘stouty’. I’d just been reading Martyn Cornell’s masterful mythbusting post on the topic, so it was on my mind and lead to an oddly-heated discussion with some of the Beer Nerds. Myself, I’m perfectly happy with the realisation that a lot of what we Nerds have in our heads about the ‘classic styles’ is alarmingly-modern, actually, and pretty much entirely non-historical. That’s not a big deal; the terms are still useful enough — and this happens to our entire language anyway, all the time. I don’t really see why some people get bent out of shape and spend their time so passionately reifying descriptions that were always pretty loose and negotiable.

You can still be grumpy — and believe me, I am — about egregiously silly unilateral attempts to lock up or modify bits of the beer-related lexicon — he says, looking at you, D.B., and your nonsense-faced defence of the ‘Radler’ trademark you know damn well you should never have applied for, nor been granted — without turning into a total anorak who fights for hard-and-fast distinctions where there needn’t be any.

Verbatim: Emerson’s Brewers’ Reserve: Grace Jones 10/11/10 guest @ MH 6% The Beer Club folks had this, and I scandalised them with the thought (from Zythophile) that there just isn’t a principled stout / porter distinction. They got oddly mad + defensive. Anyhow, I’d had this at Nerding one night a few weeks ago; we all liked it then, but I didn’t diarise it. Is lovely. Very dark, with ruby highlights. Apparently inspired by Fullers & Anchor porters. Pretty worthy, really. Massively chocolatey, smooth (oats!), but with a nice zingy edge.

Beer Diary

Tag Archives: Diary pages

Croucher ‘Hef’, Burleigh ‘Hef’ and Red Hill Wheat Beer

Townshend ‘J.C.’ IPA

Epic / Dogfish Head ‘Portamarillo’

Three Boys ‘Aftershock’

Croucher ‘October’ IPA

William Bull ‘Red Angus’ Pilsener

Tuatara ‘X’ Anniversary Ale

Hallertau ‘Minimus’

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

Emerson’s Brewers’ Reserve: ‘Grace Jones’ Porter

Tastings and ramblings and whatnot