Tag Archives: Diary pages

Posts with scanned diary pages

The Trappist Dance Card

March 29, 2011 Phil 3 Comments

I’ve struggled for a while to come up with a similie for this. It might be the Beer Geek equivalent of an Adventure Freak climbing Everest and swimming the Channel in one weekend. Or, in Geek terms, of watching a whole season of The Wire in one sitting — with the commentary on, rather than the audio, or playing Sam & Max Hit the Road right through from memory without getting stuck. What I mean to say is: we pulled off a rather special Nerd Milestone, and it was bloody marvellous.

The big Belgian abbey ales are rightfully famous, particularly those made at the Trappist monasteries — the number of which in the brewing game has varied over the years, but currently stands at seven. And I’d venture to say that a good majority of Proper Beer Geeks haven’t had one of each in their ‘career’ — owing largely to the scarcity of Westvleteren, especially — let alone all in one night.¹ It was way too much fun. The group I did this for / with had been doing occasional tastings at Malthouse for about two years and we’d mentioned the possibility of this a few times before. Finally, we got all our ducks in a row. I was almost-embarrassingly giddy with excitement and was way too distracted with hosting and tasting duties to take proper notes. Thankfully, one of the group acts as “scribe” for the choicest and weirdest comments; he’s planning on doing a blog post of his own about it, so I’ll share that when I can.

— La Trappe Bockbier

We started with La Trappe, partially since they were only relatively recently ‘let back in’ to the Authentic Trappist fraternity, after a brief falling-out over them contracting-out too much of the work. The only non-Belgian brewing monastery (being from just over the Northern border, in the Netherlands), their stuff is now pretty damn ubiquitous (they are the largest producer, though only by about 20% over Chimay and Westmalle) but we managed to find this one, a bock not normally seen on local shelves — it gets Double Bonus Uniqueness Points for being the only Trappist lager. It made for a nice start, an excellent point of comparison (since doppelbock is, broadly, the German cousin of the famous Belgian abbey ales), and a pleasant autumn sipper all on its own. To me, it just seemed like proper doppelbock; rich with a date-ish fruit flavour, and packing a strangely not-unwelcome mustiness.

La Trappe cap — La Trappe Bockbier, bottlecap

— Achel ‘8’ Blond

From the biggest to the smallest producer — and the one which, in my experience, most Beer Nerds have particular trouble remembering when they try to list off the Trappists. Adding to the ease with which it slips the memory, Achel only got back into the beer-making game in 1998. The Germans had looted / salvaged their brew gear in the First World War and they never fully recovered until, in a rather-charming move, they were helped back onto their feet by Westmalle (the monastery from which their founding monks originally came) and Rochefort (a monastery founded by their own monks in turn). This was a zesty, charming blond/e (depending on your preference), somehow sweet and dry all at once. It did seem odd that a re-founded-in-the-nineties brewery would be so old-school in their packaging, though, but maybe the point was to hark right back to the early 20th Century. I did feel extra peculiar taking a photo of a blank white bottlecap — but I couldn’t not get the full set, once I’d started.

— Orval

Orval. Just “Orval”. Weirdly, for a bunch of Catholic monks, there’s no uniformity in the naming of each monastery’s different beers. There are abritrary-ish numbers, colours, and the single-double-triple ladder. Orval has no need for that, and their sole commercial² beer screams uniqueness in other ways, too; it’s dosed-up with the usually-wild and usually-meticulously-avoided Brettanomyces yeast, something which lends flavours often described as ‘barnyardy’ or ‘saddle-ish’. If you look up the chemistry of these things, you’ll see that ‘Band-aids’ and ‘antiseptic’ are also listed among the commonly-evoked sensations — and they were very-much the lead roles in the one other bottle I’ve had of this, some time ago. Not so much that it was rendered unpleasant, but enough to make me a little anxious; nervous to have another in front of company. But damn, it was delicious. Still very different, but gorgeously sherberty and dry and zippy and delightful. A lot of that is probably down to it being conspicuously fresh, which usually means that the hoppiness is still quite forceful and the Brett-ish funk hasn’t ramped up much yet. There’s no need to necessarily fear an older bottle, though; consensus seems to be that it ages in waves — there must be some dizzyingly-complex chemistry going on, as different yeast strains play off against each others’ work over time — so the scary-chemical side comes and goes. It’s a dice roll, for sure. But a totally worthwhile one.

— Westmalle Tripel

Speaking (as I was, above) of naming systems: Westmalle’s one is strangely influential outside Trappist circles. Their original “Enkel, Dubbel, Tripel” approach named their beers according to their positions on an ascending scale of strength — the words, perhaps obviously, simply mean “single, double, triple” although “first, second, third” is probably more in the spirit, since their Tripel wasn’t necessarily three times boozier than their Enkel. Eventually, though, the second two words came to connote not just strength but also the particular character of Westmalle’s beers — their Dubbel happens to be dark, their Tripel is golden. So a ‘Tripel’ is no longer just your third-strongest beer (whoever you are); it should really be one like Westmalle’s. And speaking of that, we found it quite confrontingly gunpowdery — the flowery perfume quickly giving way to a hot taste. Perhaps owing to its relative lightness, it wore its high strength the perhaps most prominently of our set. I’m kind of sad to note this — but it must be true of one of the group, after all — but this was probably the least-well-received beer of the night. In the company it was in, that’s not the bad thing it could be, of course; is there such a thing as “praising with faint damn”?

— Westvleteren ‘12’

Maybe the anticipation and then overshadowing of this had something to do with the consensus on the Westmalle… This is far-and-away the hardest-to-get Trappist. They produce fractionally more than Achel but have charmingly-peculiar purchasing regulations in place — though the rumour of a mandated Oath to the Pope that you wouldn’t on-sell what you buy is disappointingly false; they instead just print a discreet “Do not resell” plea on your receipt. Between the brewery gate and this end of the World, the price skyrockets in a way that definitively proves demand: we bought two bottles for NZ$60 each, which was us getting a good deal with which we were delighted. But demand isn’t the point for the monks at Westvleteren. Trappist monasteries are obliged (as a matter of doctrine) to be ‘productive’ in some commercial way to support themselves and some charitable works, and one assumes that the bigger brewing operations (like Westmalle and Chimay) are rationalised on the grounds that more money equals more charity. Westvleteren don’t go in for that, brewing only enough to “be able to afford being monks”. Hell, they don’t even spring for labels, instead cramming all the legally-required text onto the bottlecap. Now that’s frugal.

Despite (and probably partially because of) their protestations and reluctance, though, their beer is legendary. Which always brings that peculiar sort of nervousness to your first encounter with it, when you’re never sure how much of the Emperor’s New Beer phenomenon might be propelling the mystique or quite how you’ll ‘come out’ as not liking it, if you don’t. But damn, I had no such worries with this. I can honestly say that it didn’t remotely disappoint; it was stunning and wonderful and everything I wanted it to be. It took me ages to take my first taste, because the aroma was just bloody lovely enough. My feeble notes list chocolate and fruit characters and a definite Weet-bix-ish / Milo-ish maltiness. Which doesn’t come close to capturing anything. Suffice to say I’d happily go in on another sixty-dollar bottle. And I earn even less money than you probably think.

Westvleteren ‘12’, bottlecap (again)

— Rochefort ‘10’

And then we threw this into a massively unfair Tough Act to Follow situation, but it performed very well, bless its pretty blue bottlecap. Rochefort ‘10’ is the biggest of their three, which are all essentially rungs on a ladder of heftiness, rather than a trio of distinct varieties — in choosing their classification scheme, they’ve opted for a combination of seemingly-abritrary numbers with colour-coded caps. (My math might be off here, but I suspect that their ‘6’, ‘8’ and ‘10’ are references to ABW — alcohol by weight, rather than the more-usual alcohol by volume.) It was really delightful, and an interesting point of comparison between the previous and the next of our set. We really liked the winey, porty, sour-fruity character and while there was some malt in the aroma there wasn’t really any chocolate flavour in the taste, at least compared to the Westvleteren. My notes record us as comparing it to a bottle of Cab Sav that you left open and forgot about for days, but you liked enough / were thirsty enough that you just thought ‘fuck it; I’ll have it anyway’ — or an overloaded fruit bowl that you find on the turn after coming home from holiday. In a good way, you understand.

— Chimay ‘Bleue’

And finally, the last slot on our Dance Card went to an old friend. The Blessed Blue was certainly my first exposure to Trappist beer, and I’ve really never tired of it. Also, naturally, there’s the consideration that by this point of the evening we should probably be sticking to things more familiar than exotic if we’re to be remotely fair. Judging by the timing of the similies involving near-rotten fruit bowls with the Rochefort above, we got that about right. After six varied and powerful beers, though, this still held its own. Compared to the two which preceded it, its body was considerably lighter (reflected also in the drop in strength from 10.2% and 11.3% down to ‘just’ 9%), and the port-winey-ness milder than what you get in the Rochefort, but the spiciness came more to the front of the stage and put on a hell of a show. In the end, since we are at the end, there is a damn good reason that Chimay Blue is a classic.

Trappist Dance Card, bottlecap trophies — Trappist Dance Card, bottlecap trophy collection

Diary II entry #83, The Trappist Dance Card

1: “Dance Card” isn’t too foreign / old-timey an expression, is it? Such things really did exist — in some wonderfully weird forms — and something about the phrase just stuck in my head while planning this.
2: Like the other Trappists, Orval also make a patersbier (charmingly known as Petit Orval) for the consumption of the monks themselves. Much lighter in the booze department, these things are usually restricted to the monastery (and the obligatory adjacent tourist-distracting café / gift shop). Since I’ve finally knocked off this milestone, and since I have a longstanding Midstrength Obsession, I’m dead keen to try them. I’ll have to put a nigh-impossible Patersbier Dance Card on my To Do List.

Actual Diary entries

Nøgne Ø ‘Aku Aku Lemongrass Ale’

March 26, 2011 Phil Leave a comment

Hanging out at the bar at Hashigo was doing my addled brain some good, so I stayed for another. Dom, the owner, had had his wedding party that night as so was in with a crowd for a few afters and he was having one of these while I was having my ‘Black Magic’.

I still can’t properly pronounce the name of the brewery, but it seems to go something like “Nurgh Nuh”. My militant Mongrelism / proud Cosmopolitanism usually leads to a certain savviness with these things, but these Nords have so far beaten me; I ordered by pointing, instead. For shame.

It’s not my first of their beers, either, compounding the embarrassment of not being able to actually vocalise their name. Scotty and I ordered one on the Malthouse tab when we were there on our staff party day nearly exactly a year before (one of many discoveries of Rather Spookish Timing made while scanning the pages of Diary One, last night). That was an ultra-weird thing called ‘Sahti’ — packed with juniper, honey and whatnot; fermented with three yeasts; made with a mash of several grains. It was awesome, in the literal sense. Well, Scotty and I thought so. We are big fans of the Weird. Everyone else thought it was several bridges too far. To each their own; more for me.

Contrary to the appearance caused by that and even the mere name of this, Nøgne Ø do also produce a lot of non-bizarre beer also; I just haven’t had any yet. I guess the more-whacked-out stuff just catches my attention, and that of the people in the import-export game, more readily.

But anyway, this isn’t overpoweringly strange. The lemongrass is fantastically fresh in the nose, and provides interest-maintaining herby edges to the flavour. It’s probably unfair to compare across vast temporal distances (especially with my half-useless memory, no Diary entry to point to, and the possibility that it’d been neglected and forgotten in the Malthouse fridge for too long), but I massively preferred this to ‘Taiphoon’, a likewise lemongrassy golden ale from England’s Hop Back Brewery. ‘Aku Aku’ just rode that difficult line of weird-but-not-too-weird very well. The important core of “tasty golden ale” was still there, it just has some well-chosen background music playing as it does its thing.

Verbatim: Nøgne Ø ‘Aku Aku Lemongrass Ale’ 2[6]/3/11 4.5% on tap @ HZ $11 Dom himself just had one too; today was his wedding party. These guys give me pronunciation headaches, but I like their stuff, especially the weirds. Their Sahti (sp?) was awesomely odd, this is sedately so. Nice warm gold, lemongrass easy on the nose, and in the nice mild [body] (not “thin” in the pejorative). Gentle herby edges. Enough to be interesting. Recognisably just a nice light golden ale at heart. In a good way.

Nøgne Ø 'Aku Aku Lemongrass Ale', tap badge

Actual Diary entries

Golden Bear ‘Black Magic’

March 26, 2011 Phil Leave a comment

The night before writing this up, I was going through the neglected second half of Diary One and getting it all scanned. I found my first mention of Golden Bear in the entry for Beervana 2009. It’s hardly auspicious; a pale ale of theirs is down as the day’s only dud — its one-word annotation is simple: “Pleh”. Not exactly a promising start, but one swiftly remedied as their subsequent mentions have either been moderately or glowingly positive.

And for this ‘Black Magic’, we’ll be somewhere in between “moderate” and “glowing”, I think. The name turns your mind to the recent Unnameable Trend, but the beer very-definitely isn’t black; it’s certainly very dark, but it’s a rich brown through which you can actually shine a light. The not-quite-black shows up in the flavour, too — there isn’t the roasted toastiness of a porter or stout, or ‘Black IPA’, come to that. What you have instead, especially as the hops start to pile bitterness onto the back of the palate, is a smoked Toffee Pop.¹ It really is delightfully peculiar.

I was out for a wander and a beer or two since my non-nocturnal friends, with whom I’d been having dinner for Robyn’s birthday, had all retired for the night. As I noted in the Diary, I’d taken along a bottle of Dogfish Head ‘Midas Touch’; several of the people at the dinner were also at a beer tasting I hosted a while back where I had massively talked it up. Though never a “beer person”, Robyn’s always willingly tried whatever George and I have (increasingly desperately) thought she might maybe-maybe enjoy. It’s been a long time coming, but she did rather like it. Which just goes to show you that all is not lost; no one is unreachable. Beer’s just that diverse, I guess — though you might have to reach for an obscure-and-expensive bottle of an imported recreation-of-an-ancient-brew to get there.

Verbatim: Golden Bear ‘Black Magic’ IPA 2[6]/3/11 on tap @ HZ 6.4% $10 After dinner for Robyn’s birthday, at which we re-tr[i]ed Midas Touch; delish. And Roo liked it! At last! Anyway, this, weirdly, isn’t Black IPA. It’s brown. Very dark brown, but definitely not black. Malt comes through very toffee / choc / caramel — smoked Toffee Pops, given that late bitterness, maybe. That does build nicely, too. Quite a peculiar thing.

Golden Bear 'Black Magic' IPA, tap badge

1: Note for aliens from other jurisdictions: I mean the biscuit, not the Damien Rice song, which I hadn’t heard of until it occurred to me to write a clarifying footnote. It (again the biscuit, not the song) is a delicious little thing — a small crunchy puck of lightly malty goodness, covered in a relatively-gooey caramel (nicely variable with temperature, so a from-the-fridge one is massively different from a hot-day-picnic one), and then entirely encased in a thin shell of chocolate.

Actual Diary entries

Budweiser

March 24, 2011 Phil 4 Comments

Poorly-justified trademark nonsense and brandwank that flies in the face of the plain meaning of words are rather topical at the moment — for the avoidance of doubt or subtlety, I’m looking at you, D.B. and Moa — and so it is the perfect time to finally enter into my Diary the arguable Granddaddy of such: Budweiser.¹

The beer itself is basically universally reviled among the geeks. It’s pretty much synonymous with mass-produced bland fizzy water. They brew it with rice for fuck’s sake; if nearly a third of your grain bill is rice, you’re intentionally minimising the flavour of the end result, or cutting corners to save money to the point of absurdity — or, you know, both.

I was always faintly embarrassed, therefore, that I had never personally tried this thing that my Nerd Brethren hated so passionately. I spotted it in the fridge at Public,² ascertained that it was the genuine article (rather than a “brewed under license” clone, as we so often do here in the Little Country at the End of the World), and then popped next door after work. In the interests of fairness, I tried desperately to avoid reading their preposterous label text and focus on the beer, first. I’ll repeat that, here.

It is piss-gold. That is absolutely the word for it; everything you ever heard about it looking like urine is true — although, as someone who used to work at an organisation who published helpful guides about these things, I can tell you that it does look like the whiz of a healthy person who drinks around about the right amount of water, if that helps at all. The nose is either absent or pleasantly-but-very-mildly fragrant. Nearby flower arrangements in the bar were particularly numerous (or convinced I was a Bumblebee, or something) and were rather perfumed, themselves, but I can at least say that the beer was basically lacking in the godawful rotten funk I get from most bog-standard mainstream lagers.

I found it difficult to taste anything much, initially; the over-riding sensory impression of ‘Fizziness!’ drowned out all other neural activity for quite some time. It was dry, but weirdly grainy and sweet at the same time. The dreaded ‘Macro Funk’ did slowly emerge as I went / as it warmed a little, but it was certainly a good distance from being the worst beer I’ve ever had in my life. To use a classic Faint Praise metric, I’d instantly choose it over a local clone of Heineken or Amstel, for instance.

But damn. Any time with this beer just amounts to time to savour the utterly absurd boasts on the label. Starting with the attempt at implying Worldwide availability / domination with the buckled-belt logo’s “Europe; Asia; Africa; Australia”: the word you’re looking for to go in that last slot is Australasia, you monkeys. (Or Oceania, if you’re feeling modern.)³ And then there’s this:

We know of no brand produced by any other brewer which costs so much to brew and age.

The only way for that not to be an outright, ridiculous, intentional lie is to keep the man who writes the label text in a very small box, cut off from the world. I can, off the top of my own rubbish-memoried head, probably name a hundred or more beers which would make a falsehood of that sentence — unless they aren’t talking in per volume terms, which would just make them history’s worst-ever statisticians.

Nevermind the pathetically-sad registration, by local giant D.B., of the word “Radler” for a beer which isn’t even a Radler;⁴ this is the most abysmally lame brewing trademark. They mimicked a brew which had been released in the U.S. the year before (1875), verbatim-copied its name — which was just an origin term, in German — and legally locked it up for themselves. It should’ve never been awarded, and later courts should’ve booted it out summarily, or at least forced them to abide the concurrent marketing of things under the same name which happened to be actually from the place that the word implies.

This is the problem with brandwank. This is it in a little brown bottle. The beer isn’t inherently abominable; it’s just not, whatever you’ve heard. I was as surprised to learn that as anyone would be. It’s limp and bland, not liquid evil. But the yards-thick, completely fucking ass-faced aura of marketing horseshit which surrounds it makes me thank the non-existent gods that I didn’t hand over any of my own money for the one I had. I’d feel sullied and cheap and stained to the core if I did — but I’d still very-swiftly whisk one from a barbeque chilly bin that otherwise only held Tui and Beck’s.

Verbatim: Budweiser 2[4]/3/11 @ Public $8, but shouted. Awesome. 4.9% “Bud Heavy”, says their American, since Bud Light is so ascendant. I can’t believe I’ve never had one. The pale straw colour is the first impression (well, after the brandwank-drenched label). 355ml. And you really do have to say “piss gold”. The nose is grainy, and very faintly perfumed; could be the flowers in here, even. Feel isn’t as thin as I’d assumed, but very fizzy. The usual Macro Funk isn’t as bad here as in many I’ve had; Heineken is certainly worse on that score for example. Strange combination of dryness + light sweetness in the body. Not horrific, certainly. Oh, the Funk does build a bit. But not my worst ever.

1: Rather than being anyone’s Granddad, Budweiser would rather introduce itself to you as ‘King of Beers’. And then expect you to curtsey, presumably. I’m enough of an anti-monarchist that that’s hardly helping it endear itself to me, but the main problem is that actual-Budweiser was long known as “the beer of Kings”, so Anheuser-Busch’s slogan is double-pronged dickishness.
2: Or [public] — with a unique, mysterious, and unreproducible p-u ligature — if their typographer is to be believed.
3: The question of what isn’t and isn’t a “continent” (and thereby how many there are) is a tricky one, but absolutely no one except Anheuser-Busch follows the ‘Budweiser Label Model’.
4: And fuck; don’t get me started. Or at least beware, if you do. There’s a court date looming. I’m sure I’ll have more to vent about it — one way or the other, depending on the outcome.

Actual Diary entries

NZ Craft Beer TV ‘Mash Up’

March 24, 2011 Phil 2 Comments

It is basically true that boys will take any excuse for a roadtrip. If the proposition also includes visiting basically every operating craft brewing in the entire country, it becomes quite literally amazing that what became ‘NZ Craft Beer TV’ didn’t exist sooner. But now it does, which is handy. Luke Nicholas (perhaps inspired by his time with Sam from Dogfish Head and his documentary-making crew) hopped in a van with Kelly Ryan (his colleague / returning expat / new hire / underling from his Epic Brewing Company), a Camera Guy and a Sound Guy — and they hit the road.

Proper ‘episodes’ will hopefully be on the interwebs — and perhaps the actual-teevee — soon, but along the way they were also working on a nearly-all-in “collaboration brew”. (Because why not?) We had a big ‘Meet the Brewers’ night at work recently, so Luke and Kelly were in town, and among the goodies brought along on the night was a preview keg of the beer: ‘Mash Up’.¹

Kelly, who was blogging along the way, wrote up the story behind ‘Mash Up’ in a long-form and well-worth-reading post. I had a peculiar pang of paranoia (or perhaps just vanity) when I got to the part wherein he explains why they chose to brew a hoppy pale ale, predicting that the choice would bring charges of one-trick-pony-ness. I’ve accused Luke having a one-trick-pony past — although, ironically, I brought it up because I thought his collaborations (with the aforementioned Sam and with Kelly himself, back when he was at Thornbridge) were lately rescuing him from that. But as he says, pale ale is as good a bet as any since it’s a) a massively popular trend, and b) a great way to show off something we do so very well here in the Little Country — namely that we grow freakin’ gorgeous hops.

But I still think it’s rather too generous to call this a “collaboration”. It isn’t, in any normal sense — and probably couldn’t ever be, realistically. Luke and Kelly have instead kept part of their brain ticking over as they traveled and met umpteen brewers and beer-industry-folk and have made a fair crack at capturing the mood of the local scene as they saw it, with pretty-solid justifications for each of their ingredient choices. Personally, I’d have thought it was a perfect opportunity to keep a running collection of handfuls of each brewer’s favourite malt, or a single pellet / flower of their most-loved hop, or whatever. Those could’ve been biffed into a full-size brew of ‘Mash Up’ as a token-but-real representative from their respective homes — without materially effecting the recipe. Something along those lines could’ve made the “collaboration” aspect more weighty, but after all it’s their show, not mine.

And the result is unarguable, anyway. From the preview keg that we had, I can report that this stuff is delicious. If this is ‘liquid zeitgeist’ for the New Zealand craft beer community, then we are in damn good shape. The appealing pale colour — just look at the thing shine, almost outclassing our beer engine’s freshly-polished brass bits — is an effective advertisement for a simple malt character which leaves plenty of room for the hop flavours to really shine, but which in no way wimps out or falls apart into annoying thinness. Oodles of zesty freshness comes from those hops, but they’re not overdone and don’t seem like they’re fighting in the glass; the flavours of each just nicely mingle together and make for a bloody lovely pint. The whole thing holds together like an enjoyably civilised conversation with three affable chaps in comfortable surroundings. I’m sometimes not a big fan of hop-forward pale ales on handpull, but this went like gangbusters.

Verbatim: NZ Craft Beer TV ‘Mash Up’ 2[4]/3/11 on handpull @ MH. The day after Meet the Brewer night, shout[ed] by some going-back-home whisky nerds. The “collaboration” aspect is a paper-thin veneer; consultation writ loose as they travelled around. And am I being paranoid or vain if I think the “one-trick-pony” comment in the write-up (on them selecting pale ale) might be directed at me? Anyway, this is tasty. Lovely simply malt character, and nicely-done selection of hop notes. Zesty + fresh. Actually really-well-suited to handpull. It’s definitely-not a Time-magazine style averaging,² and they missed a golden opportunity for using a Token Handfull of each brewer’s favourite malt. But hey. We can’t all be Exec. Producers. And this is, all on its own, rather lovely.

1: Depending on how much you know about brewing, it’s possible that the name is funnier than you think. It’s not just a repurposing of the word for a remixing and mucking-about-with that applies to half the pop-culture stuff worth watching on YouTube — mash is also the word for an early stage of the brewing process where the grains are all thrown together in hot water, ready for fermenting. I do love a good punny name, I do.
2: I think this is an instance of my Rubbish Memory, a recurring annoyance which is after all why I started keeping a Beer Diary in the first place. I thought I could recall a recent Time cover with a computer composite ‘average’ face of humanity. But the best I can find is a similar thing they did in 1993, but that wasn’t what I had in mind — which likely means that I’m thinking of the wrong magazine, and that I’m crap at the Google.

Actual Diary entries

Bear Republic ‘Big Bear Black Stout’

March 22, 2011 Phil Leave a comment

I’m at a bit of a loss with the name of this one. Something in it seems superfluous, certainly. It’s those three b-words in a row. I can make it work with any two of them,¹ but all three together just unexpectedly trips me up like an abandoned skateboard in darkened hallway.

The Wellington weather was beginning its turn towards the grey-and-drizzly, providing a nice excuse (as if I really needed one) for staying for another and continuing on my recent run of tasty dark beers. Triple-B was on tap and when something both interesting and imported appears in front of you at Hashigo it’s best to jump in without delay; these things don’t often last long.

After the doubly-peculiar goodness of ‘Black Emperor’ (it being a lager and conspicuously-hopped, both of which set it apart from the majority of dark craft beers it otherwise superficially resembles), ‘Big Bear’ is a bit closer to straight-up-and-down stouty stuff. It’s boozier than usual at 8.1%, and that strength also manifests in a definite sweetness — the taste is as big and full as the overloaded name would imply / require, but the traditional burnt-and-bitter edges are softened right off. This is a friendly animal of the ursine persuasion, for sure. You merely need to keep one eye on your pic-a-nic basket; you don’t have to immediately run for your life — or frantically wrack your brain trying to remember whether you’re supposed to run from a bear or stand your ground or throw some toothpaste to distract it, or whatever-the-hell confusing and forgettable ‘survival advice’ people on the TV keep giving us.

If anything, it’s too friendly. For all its bigness and solidity, I drank mine way too easily; the clumsy name was more of a mouthful than the glass. The obvious solution of going for a bigger vessel would quickly get reckless, given that it’s stronger than the average beer — just to throw in one more Yogi reference before moving on.

Verbatim: Bear Republic ‘Big Bear’ Black Stout 22/3/11 also on tap @ HZ. 8.1% Shitty weather outside (i.e., my type of rainy drizzle) and an Odd Day, so more good beer. It seems like one of the Bs in the name is superfluous, but I’m not sure which. Any 2 seems to work. This is proper serious, but not at all scary. Quite an easy nose, but my previous may have something to do with that. Nicely full, sweet-edged body. Rich, but not burnt + bitter. My only “complaint” isn’t one at all: it’s way too easy to drink.

1: “Big Bear Stout”; “Black Bear Stout”; “Big Black Stout” — they all seem sensible. And they certainly seem sufficient, you’d have to say.

Actual Diary entries

Golden Ticket ‘Black Emperor: NZ’

March 22, 2011 Phil 1 Comment

If you’ll forgive me going all self-referential for a moment,¹ I’ll quote myself from Twitter:

So Golden Ticket ‘Black Emperor: NZ’ is rather good. The phrase “pleasantly surprised” is a double understatement.

I was at Hashigo, and conscious of the usual delay that exists between me writing a Diary entry as I try something and it winding up actually online, here.² I wanted to give this a little plug for its inherent goodness, but also because of the circumstances. I wasn’t kidding when I said “double understatement” — pleasant isn’t a strong enough word for a beer this tasty, and suprised was similarly inadequate; I had hated Golden Ticket’s previous two releases. The entry for their second beer (‘Summer Babe’) is by far the longest in my first Diary, and it’s fairly full-flightedly ranty.³ But a few people had insisted that I should give them a third chance — a rare thing, if ever there was — and I’m glad I did, especially since I had missed the original edition which had preceded this local-hops variant.

At first glance another member of the Unnameable Style of hoppy-but-black / black-but-hoppy, ‘Black Emperor’ throws an interesting curveball in that it’s a black pilsner rather than a hopped-up porter or blackified IPA — so it’s lager, rather than ale; it’s from the parallel universe where the Unnameable beer you’ve started to enjoy but have barely gotten to know yet suddenly shows up sporting a sinister goatee. Beer, in its awesomely sprawling variety, will always confound any sort of broad generalisation about these things, but the Standard Line is that lagers are crisp and short where ales are more rounded and long. As many issues as can be taken with such a distinction, it’s not entirely wrong, at least — and this peculiar beer seems a decent exemplar of it.

So it’s a case of a recent trend for Something Different made An Extra Bit Different Again, which really does make it enough to jettison all worries about style names out the window, so the tearing-your-hair-out which would otherwise ensue doesn’t ruin the enjoyment of your pint — let alone your entire day. It’s simultaneously rich but crisp and refreshingly sharp, and it’s coffee-ish but equally-bristling with hoppy zing. It is, in short, interesting. And I rate interestingness very highly indeed — it just accompanies tastiness so very well, don’t you think? Black Emperor was — as I said — a pleasant surprise in having both. I’m looking forward to seeing what they do next.

Verbatim: Golden Ticket ‘Black Emperor: NZ’ 22/3/11 on tap @ HZ 4.8% An interesting one, for a few reasons. Firstly, I like it. And hated their previous two. This NZ-hopped version is, I’m told, better than the original, so maybe they’re in a steep climb. And after all this Black IPA talk (I wrote up ‘Hop in the Dark’ last night), this is black pilsner. So the Spock-with-goatee lager-alternate-universe brother. Proper black, espresso bubbles. Big rich coffee flavour, nice fresh hoppy zing. It’s an interesting excerside in lager v ale, and the usual line basically holds up: the body is lighter, the finish shorter, the edges sharper.

1: Well, even if you won’t; it’s me that has the keys to this thing.
2: Currently, for recent entries, t≈13 days; I’m writing this up late at night on April 4 (by my reckoning).
3: I really should link to it, I know. But it’s stuck in that increasingly-tragic Not Uploaded Yet grey area that has befallen the latter half of Diary One.

Actual Diary entries

Croucher ‘Patriot’

March 19, 2011 Phil Leave a comment

So here we are again with the ‘Black IPA’, which I’ll just go with calling it for now (the brewery themselves went with ‘American Black Ale’) and which it seems is cementing itself as quite the trend — though to take a stab at for how long would be patently foolish, as always.

I like these hoppy-but-black / black-but-hoppy beers, as I’ve said a few times before. So I was excited to try Croucher’s ‘Patriot’, since I’m usually rather fond of their stuff — their ‘Vicar’s Vice’ is the only counter-example that comes readily to mind; it was just very much Not My Thing, but it seemed pretty well received by plenty of others, so I’ll just chalk that one up to the blessed subjectivity. Oh. Oh, wait — he says, flipping through his Diary a bit — there was also ‘Mrs. Claus’; I didn’t like that at all. But apparently the little memory-management trick I pulled on my future self by sneaking it into a double-whammy entry worked quite well. Which is nice to know. So let’s press on quickly and pretend we didn’t remember, future-future self…

But this. This impressed me pretty quickly. I was sufficiently enamoured of my first try of it — on Saint Patrick’s Day — that I took a quick snap of my taster glass. And I realise that you don’t all have anywhere near the particular kind of odd brain that I do, so please just trust me when I say: that’s rare. I had my first proper full pint — and thereby made a Diary entry — a few days later. Then had two more pints that day. And have had several more since; its differentness doesn’t outstay its welcome. Compared against its siblings in the Unnameable Style, I found it a bit lighter and thought it was deliciously Jaffa-ish,¹ which is probably down to the usually-distinctly-orangey Amarillo hop they used. Really rather delightful, and easily capable of making friends with people ordinarily shy of both the very-dark and the conspicuously-hopped. Which is something of a clever trick, to say the least.

Verbatim: Croucher ‘Patriot’ 19/3/11 5.5% on tap @ MH, shouted by a regular. I am really liking this Black IPA trend, whatever we wind up calling it. This one’s all about the Jaffas, with the very orangey Amarillo hop in abundance. Very smooth; weird but not overwhelming at all. Much better than Croucher’s other recent one-offs, so I hope it joins the roster; which is rumoured. On the name issue, Croucher have gone with “American Black Ale”, which I don’t like because of the breezy “American = hoppy” assumption. This will be a tricky style to name.

Croucher 'Patriot', taster — Croucher 'Patriot', my first taste of

Croucher 'Patriot', tap badge and style name

1: Note for aliens from far-flung lands: I mean the chocolate-and-orange flavour of the eponymous candy, rather than the presumably-just-oranges flavour of the actual orange variety — nor do I mean to imply that the beer somehow tastes like a historic port city in Israel. Damn I love the many and varied things you can learn from a Wikipedia Disambiguation Page — and I positively adore the fact that there exists a page entitled ‘Disambiguation (disambiguation)’.

Actual Diary entries

Dogfish Head ‘60 & 90 Minute’ IPAs

March 11, 2011 Phil 1 Comment

And really, how better to follow a charmingly old-school, relatively-sedate IPA than with a pair of hop-mad ones; two rungs on a ladder of crazypants by the mad geniuses at the Dogfish Head brewery. My flatmate Ollie and I each had a half-glass of their ‘60 Minute’ IPA and ‘90 Minute’ IIPA¹ — the time references how long the brew is boiled for, and they just keep biffing more hops in every minute, on the minute.

There are two others in the range; a stronger, stickier ‘120 Minute’ (way up at 18%) and a ‘75 Minute’, which is a 50-50 blend of the 60 and the 90 which is then barrel aged, with yet more hops. These two are much more readily-available, though — the 90 Minute was the original, but it’s the 60 Minute which is currently their biggest-seller. I’ve had them individually before, and they make for a hell of a side-by-side comparison.

Both are positively a-sploding with classic Northwest-U.S. hop flavours.² 60 Minute is generously described as the ‘sessionable’ one of the set, but that’s probably only true relative to the others; it is still 6% and pretty wonderfully solid, all on its own. The 90 Minute is then instantly recognisable as the same idea, just with the volume turned up considerably — from how you might have it when unselfconsciously dancing around the house on your own, straight to something that’ll instantly annoy the neighbours. But to hell with the neighbours. You just have to crank things up stupidly occasionally. And this beer does that. Maybe you couldn’t have it every day, but maybe you wouldn’t want to. It’s that one day of madness and excess that you enjoy ridiculously, but which you couldn’t indulge in too often — lest you run out of money, liver cells, close friends, or chances at diversion from the criminal justice system (whatever you burn through most readily when you party just a bit too hard).

They’re both bloody marvellous and choosing between them is so agonisingly difficult that I personally just recommend you do as we did, here — better to break the rules with a Gordian Knot kind of move than to wind up like Buridan’s Ass, if I can just crazy with the references for a moment. These are the sort of beers that inspire that enjoyably-geeky sort of rambling and blathering, as you can see from the near-nonsense in my notes.

Verbatim: Dogfish Head ‘60 & 90 Minute’ IPAs 11/3/11 6% + 9% both 12 floz. Ollie and I are having half each, on the occasion of the new job. 60 is happiness all day, every day; 90, one massive hit, once a day. It’s Sophie’s Choice. I love how recognisable the progression is. 90 is just that leap upwards in aroma, sharpness + intensity — and just straight up the nose to the forebrain. 60 is the preacher saying “Can I get a flavour?” and waving his hands. 90 is the response from a thousand-strong congregation.

1: Those links are highly recommended, by the by. Both feature pretty good notes, and nice little videos featuring a bit of backstory about the beers and the brewery — including some high-tech and no-tech gizmos, and the origin of their otherwise-rather-odd name. You can see Sam’s easy and infectious enthusiasm in the videos, too. Despite being one of these new-fangled beer celebrities (what with his documentary series and its collaborations and all), he seems to remain a thoroughly-lovely chap — we briefly worked behind the same bar at the beer festival last year, which truncates the hell out of my Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (Beer Nerd Edition) paths.
2: The hop varieties are from the Northwest, at least. Dogfish Head itself is in Delaware. But any mention of Delaware just makes me think of Wayne’s World, and thereby proves distracting.

Actual Diary entries

Emerson’s ‘1812’ IPA

March 11, 2011 Phil 4 Comments

My impromptu round of Kegtris was apparently enough to earn me a second pint, this time of the also-just-tapped Emerson’s ‘1812’. The fashion for hop-tastic IPA being what it is, old-school classics like this are often unfairly passed-over. “Old-school” is obviously a fairly relative term, given that ‘1812’ isn’t old in IPA-itself terms — but it’s still pretty grandfatherly in the New Zealand craft brewing sense. It was an early example of local beer getting ‘noticed’ on the international stage, too; Michael Jackson (the beer and whisky writer, not the ‘other’ one, obviously) selected it for his 1998 book Beer (which was about as definitive, in its day, as its maximally-simple title suggests) and it’s even one of the dozen that also make the cover.

There are a few stories about the name. 1812 the year is a bit too early to be anything-much to do with the style itself,¹ so it’s often suggested that there’s some slightly-too-clever reference being made to the beer’s hoppy ‘overtures’ (hur-hur, very punny), but there’s also the odd-and-maybe-related fact that 1-8-1-2 are the last four digits of the brewery’s phone number. All this numerology and allusion-chasing is enough to make me remember just why the fuck I gave up on watching Lost.

But no matter. It’s a catchy, simple name. And a charming beer; a nice counterpart to modern, flashy, boistrous pale ales (as much fun as they no doubt are, when the mood for them strikes). The malty body is delightfully smooth (particularly off the taps, I thought), and there’s a very pleasant, gently-building marmaladey fruit character comfortably mooching around in the glass. Just a bloody marvellous sit-and-sip kind of a pint.

(And no, the bar didn’t get lighter inbetween this and the ‘Rapture’ that preceeded it. Rapture was on the front taps, and I was a little rushed by the General Populace surrounding me, so I didn’t muck about and obsess as much as I ordinarily might. With the 1812 on tap at a much-quieter end of the bar, I set up a proper long exposure shot. Hence the blurry people. I do like my new toy, I really do.)

Verbatim: Emerson’s ‘1812’ IPA 11/3/11 on tap @ MH, also. Further reward! And a chance to show off the camera, since a few stoppers-by were seeing me do some updates + having a tinker. If memory serves, this was a very early notable New Zealander. And it’s very tasty. B[y] current standards, it’s astonishingly mild, of course, but it’s always good to go old-school occasionally. Smooth malt body, nice, almost marmaladey fruitiness in there.

1: At least when it was known by that term. But from the opposite angle, 1812 is quite a bit too late to have much to do with the origins of beers vaguely of this sort (whatever they were called) and/or their export to India.

— La Trappe Bockbier

— Achel ‘8’ Blond

— Orval

— Westmalle Tripel

— Westvleteren ‘12’

— Rochefort ‘10’

— Chimay ‘Bleue’

Tastings and ramblings and whatnot