But these days, black is beautiful in the beer world. Black IPAs are the particular rage, though every brewery worth its roasted barley is making at least one stout, if not an oatmeal or Imperial or bourbon barrel-aged stout as well. Around this time of year, stout is the way to go. (St. Patrick’s Day is Christmas, as far as the Guinness accountants are concerned.)

So it seems a good time for another ersatz beer competition, falling short of an honest head to head (so to speak) tilt in that we’re at apples and oranges again with a lager and an ale, just as we were in throwing Harpoon IPA against Brooklyn Lager (click here).

Caillech says, "Pour that black stuff here, please."

One hardly needs to spill any cyber ink over the iconic nature of Guinness, the classic Irish dry stout, the best-selling in the world–ten million glasses a day worldwide we are told. It is the virtual Gaia of all the black stuff that has poured forth since. (Although perhaps a more Celtic goddess would be in order–Caillech?)

No time or inclination now for a disquisition on all that parent company Diageo has done in recent years to fiddle with what was basically perfect in search of greater market share. Little of it, if any, gladdens traditionalists’ hearts. Younger generations of beer geeks probably don’t know what all the fuss about Guinness is to begin with and head right for the Knock Me Over the Head Imperial Double Dry-Hopped Stout.

I digress, but the two bottles in question here could serve as Exhibits A and B in a What Were They Thinking? case. Guinness Black Lager simply seems like an idea whose time never really needed to come. Unless you’re a bean counter, looking at all those non-stout drinking but wannabe Irish crowding the bar.

There’s a lot of market share out there drinking lagers. Hence, a black lager with the Guinness imprimatur, introduced to the U.S. market last September. Watch the money roll in.

As for the bottled Guinness Draught, it does away with the widgets in the cans of Draft Guinness but still incorporates the nitrogen gassing that gives the beer its legendary creaminess. But to do this, one is supposed to drink the beer directly from the bottle.

Drinking Guinness Stout from a bottle. Really, need any more be said? This from a company that a few years back would give away pubs in Ireland to those who could take the time and evince the skill to draw a perfect pint from the tap.

I continue to digress, and am probably turning red instead of the season’s green. So back to the beer:

My wife and I frequently end the work day on the deck that encircles our house–she with a martini and two of the four cigarettes she allows herself daily, me with some kind of beer and a cigar. She claims it’s the only time of the day that I talk to her. Not true, of course. (We frequently do the same thing in the morning, albeit with coffee.)

But in what has been a continuing series of what I might call Hit the Deck Tastings, I often force Lynn to sample a beer or beers I’m trying to get a handle on. She has a better palate than I do to begin with, even if not on the same level of beery terminology. But this is good, since she frequently comes up with novel responses to what she’s tasting. So it was with these two.

The only clue I gave her was, “They’re both Guinness.” Then I put the Lager in front of her.

Similar, but not matching: the Guinness Black Lager is on the left

“That doesn’t smell like the real Guinness,” she said, understandably enough, if not accurately. (Both beers really are Guinness, after all, though the Lager is brewed at the company’s new product site, the Great Northern Brewery in Dundalk, Ireland.) She didn’t think it tasted like it, either. “There’s some similarity, but there’s something else going on.”

“That smells like the real Guinness,” she said of the Stout. After tasting it, she merely said, “Yup.”

Could a Master Cicerone do better? And when she said of the Lager, “It tastes like they added seltzer to it,” I couldn’t get the sensory image out of my mind. It did taste like they added seltzer to it.

The similarity comes from the use of some roasted unmalted barley in the mix, as in the stout. And it’s black all right. The beer seems skillfully made, and I’m happy to have tried it; I even ordered one while dining out a few weeks back, just out of curiosity. But I can’t imagine this ever happening again. The beer lacks character; any German Schwarzbier would run rings around Guinness Black Lager, and wouldn’t remotely suggest seltzer.

As for the bottled Guinness Draught, its chances are slightly better, if found like the recent six-pack we picked up–at a ridiculous sale price at Wal-Mart. (Not that I’m eager to admit this.)

At least we’re on more familiar ground here with the easy-drinking roasted and mild chocolately character of a beer we could down all night, if so moved. It lacks the craic of a freshly pulled pint in a noisy Irish pub, the way we really like to drink our Guinness. But, at least, it suggests it, yup.

Name: Guinness Black Lager; Guinness Draught
Brewer: Guinness & Co., Ireland
Style: Schwarzbier; Dry Stout
ABV: 4.5%; 4.2%
Availability: Both year-round, nationwide
For More Information: www.guinness.com

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While disguising himself as the waiter in this video wouldn’t have been a stretch for Cohen the provocateur, the unlucky oaf appears to be a Greek so far identified only as Martin D. No confirmation on whether is still employed, or living.

There’s hope for the latter in that he was quoted in the Bild newspaper, “A colleague should have brought her the beer. But she was so nervous, she asked me to do it for her.” Big mistake.

Sasha Baron Cohen as The Dictator

Mr. D. claims he was jostled by someone behind him, prompting the Merkel dousing. But the wondrous slow-mo replay in the video strongly suggests that Martin was merely inept, and that in leaning over to give the Chancellor her beer, he thereby tilted the tray, sending five other glasses of undoubtedly fine German lager all her way.

Martin also said he was troubled that he uttered an expletive at the moment his life began crumbling in front of him, but he made no claim that his statement or action had anything to do with the Greek economic crisis or how it has been handled by Germany or other partners in the European Union.

Merkel, for her part, was clearly unperturbed, merely whisking away a stray fleck of foam from her cheek and going on to toast her tablemates. She also went on to address the assembly of Christian Democratic Union members gathered in Demmin as scheduled. Her reception was reported to be warm, even if she was slightly damp.

After my pleasing reacquaintance with Pinkus-Müller in February I was happy to recently find what appeared to be a new beer from the brewery, and thought it might be a holiday seasonal. I also thought maybe it had something to do with Mozart’s Exsultate, Jubilate (K. 165), a 15-minute motet for soprano that pops up fairly frequently at Christmas time.

I thought wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong.

But at least the beer was a good choice. It is considered a celebratory beer (and hence makes the cut for this month), albeit one that’s been around since 1966, when the brewery proudly took note of its 150^th anniversary by harkening back to darker German lagers of the early 19^th century. It has been available in the U.S. since 2008.

Mozart

Mozart never entered the picture. Nor is Exsultate, Jubilate a Christmas motet, per se. It’s simply celebratory, too, and is loaded with alleluias, and hence seems appropriate to the season.

Venanzio Rauzzini

Nor was Mozart’s work, written when he was not quite 17, intended for a soprano. It was written for the Italian castratro Venanzio Rauzzini, who had performed in Mozart’s early two Italian operas. Given the contemporary paucity of applicants for the position of castrati, the part is a staple in soprano portfolios, thanks in part to a wow finish.

Might as well include a sample here. I don’t think there are too many beer reviews with Mozart arias included in them, but we try to appeal to all the fine tastes of our readers here. Beethoven’s 240^th birthday is Thursday, but I don’t think he’ll take offence. (Mozart’s birthday is January 27.)

This is only the concluding Alleluia section here, and the sound and image are a little out of sync, but the lovely Cecilia Bartoli overcomes all.

Speaking of synchronicity, it might be timely to crack open a bottle of Jubilate while listening. Imported by Merchant du Vin, the beer comes in a hearty 16.9-ounce bottle.

Pinkus Jubilate is called a dark lager, but it’s more of a chestnut hue. The beer has a beguiling nose, a grassy, herbal, yeasty swirl with light notes of toffee and chocolate. I realized, taking a whiff of this one, that it had been a while since I’d had a good malty lager. I was seduced pretty easily just by sticking my nose in the glass.

The palate is predominately a kiss of caramel malt, more friendly than amorous, as the Hallertau and Tettnang hops kick in brightly for a crisp, clean and lightly spicy finish. It’s not a beer that will knock you off your feet, but it should leave you smiling contentedly.

The Munster brewery was founded in 1816 by Johannes Müller and his wife Frederika Cramer. Barbara Müller is the current brewmaster, and with her husband, Friedhelm Langfeld, represents the seventh generation to run the brewery and its brewpub restaurant. Barbara’s father, Hans, made the decision to go organic in 1980, and the brewery believes it was the first to do so.

The great grandson of Johannes and Frederika, Carl Pinkus Müller, ran the brewery in the 1930’s and 1940’s and it still bears his name. He was known as the “Singing Brewer,” though no word on whether he ever tackled Exsultate, Jubilate.

Name: Jubilate
Brewer: Pinkus-Müller Brewery, Munster, Germany
Style: Dunkel lager, organic
ABV: 5.1
Availability: Year-round, in all but four states (AL, MS, NH, SD)
For More Information: merchantduvin.com

Even that feeble barb is now out the window, as one new beer after another is pouring out of Chico.  (Cascading is probably a better word, since SN did much to popularize the use of the Cascade hop in west coast ales.) Many are seasonals or one-offs, but each can be expected to be sturdy examples of the brewing arts, as were the two new beers that joined the year-round portfolio in 2009: Torpedo Extra IPA and the Bavarian-style hefeweizen, Kellerweis.

The Kellerweis was proof enough to me that the brewery could successfully turn its hand to any style it cared to take on, and it has done it again with the new Glissade.  I’m also impressed that it brewed a pale bock at all, in a time when the fashion is leaning toward bigger, blacker, bolder, more Belgian, more bizarro. Not that I’m against drinking any of these, either!

Still, it’s nice to revisit a somewhat quieter style, although at 6.4% ABV, there’s nothing timid about Glissade.  It’s called a golden bock, and the color is just that, almost gold leaf in a glass. Helles (or light) bocks and Maibocks are traditionally drunk in the spring, and the brewery has just that in mind, a beer introduced in winter that will glide right into springtime.

It certainly glides right across the senses.  The nose is sweet, bready, with a touch of fruit–lemon zest or pineapple that may be coming from the Aurora hops.  There’s a nice zestiness in the mouth as well, the primary malt character mixing with a mildly spicy bitterness.

In short, Glissade is a sturdy if undemanding beer, with appealing subtleties that could be well-appreciated both before or during a meal.  It’s working well in Vermont in February, where we still have a long glide to spring.

Name: Glissade
Brewer: Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., Chico, California
Style: Helles Bock/Maibock
ABV: 6.4%
Availability: Seasonal, nationwide
For More Information: sierranevada.com

Tim and Amy Brady hold the tastings every Saturday evening in the cozy pub of their 12-guest B&B, where they usually have two beers on tap and others in bottles.  Since most guests are from out of town, the couple rightly emphasizes Vermont beers, but they’re more concerned with serving up seven different styles for a one-hour crash course in beer diversity.

Amy and Tim Brady

The thirty-something young couple left their professional lives in New Jersey to take over the B&B at the end of 2007, and they’re energetic converts to and boosters of the charms of southern Vermont.  But they’re also beer nuts and evangelists for the best in the brewing arts.  They’ll travel just about anywhere to try an unfamiliar brew, and then they’ll post a video about it at their blogsite, Here for the Beer.  (I wound up in one, “Tim and Tom Talk Trappist,” a riveting essay on monastic ales.)

They’re also key players in the first Brattleboro Brewers Festival, which will roll into town in late May, with two evening pub crawls on Friday and Saturday nights, May 21 and 22, the festival itself playing out from 1 to 5 pm on Saturday.

There were ten of us for the tasting this past Saturday, four couples staying at the B&B–three from Massachusetts just visiting for a getaway, and one from New Jersey, newlyweds as of the previous evening.

We started off with a hefe-weizen  and rolled right through to an oatmeal stout, five Vermont beers, two German, a nice trip. I’d had all the beers before, but hadn’t sampled the Pinkus in a long time.  It was a pleasant reacquaintance.

There are a few novelties surrounding the beer.  The brewery, founded in 1816, is the only one of 150 breweries left in Munster, still family-run to the sixth generation.  It was the first to go all-organic, beginning in 1980, and is one of the few with a female brewmaster, Barbara Müller, at the helm.

And you don’t see an unfiltered pilsner every day, either, since cloudy beers still give some drinkers the willies.  But it may be the beer’s visual resemblance to a hefe-weizen that lends a zesty quality to the brew, not to mention the snap of the Tettnanger hops.  There’s a surprisingly fruity nose to the beer, redolent of apricots, and the overall impression is of a sturdy, filling and yet refreshing beer, suitable for any tankard.

Name: Pinkus Organic Ur Pils
Brewer: Pinkus-Müller Brewery, Munster, Germany
Style: Pilsner
ABV: 5.2%
Availability: Year-round, in all but five states (AL, MS, NH, SD, WY)
For More Information: merchantduvin.com

Tim talks beer at Forty Putney Road

But I was actually returning from the PGA Show in Orlando, where it was shorts weather for a few days; driving back from the airport, I stopped for gas in Northampton, Massachusetts, not far from the Table & Vine selections at the Big Y supermarket there, and the sirens called:

As Lagunitas isn’t distributed in Vermont, I picked up a few bottles from the Petaluma brewery.  (The company began its brewing days in Lagunitas in 1993, and the name has stuck.)

I’d heard a lot about the brewery, particularly its creative label writing and imaginative seasonal offerings and one-offs, such as the plan to release beers commemorating the 40^th anniversaries of each album release by Frank Zappa.  (There were five, from Freak Out Ale to Reuben and the Jets Imperial Stout, before the Zappa Family Trust zapped the plan.  Too bad: I’m curious what the brewery would have done with Burnt Weenie Sandwich.)

The Pils and the IPA are among the year-round brews pouring forth from Petaluma.  The former is called a Czech Style Pilsner, which naturally begs comparison with Pilsner Urquell.  It doesn’t suffer thereby, though it’s lighter in both color and flavor, if stronger in alcohol.  It’s straw-colored, appropriately floral, nicely bitter, if a bit thin overall.  I owe it another try in warmer weather.

The IPA was certainly a nice chaser.  The brewery claims this is the best-selling IPA in California, and enough inertia has set in that I’m not going to check.  It also claims that it is a “homicidally hoppy ale,” and here I respectfully disagree. I’m still walking.  There is plenty of citrus character from the Cascade and Centennial hops in the mix, but even non-hopheads might find this a good session beer.

The Pils is a lager, the IPA is an ale.  What’s the difference?  You have to love a brewery that explains it so clearly on the bottom of its six-pack carrier: “Where an ale might hit you over the head and take your wallet, lagers donate to charity and adopt stray cats.  While an ale might steal your car or try to date your daughter and keep her out all night doing who-knows-what, a well-bred lager would offer to clean your house while you’re on vacation and leave fresh scones and coffee for you when you return….”

Any questions?

Name: Lagunitas Pils, Lagunitas IPA
Brewer: The Lagunitas Brewing Company
Style: Bohemian Pilsner, India Pale Ale
ABV: 5.3%, 5.7%
Availability: Both year-round, primarily in the west, but now in about 30 states
For More Information: lagunitas.com

Singha’s rival, Chang, had flown completely under my radar since being introduced in the U.S. in late 2007. I didn’t know it existed, much less that it was available. Then I went to Thailand.

Back in the home country the two beers battle it out with each other. Singha usually scores on style and tradition points, but Chang outpaces it for value and alcoholic heft, clocking in at 6.4% ABV, pretty strong for a pale lager, especially if you’re pounding them in the ripping heat and ripe humidity of a Thai golf course.

I rarely drink during a round, unless I’ve already given up, but in Thailand gulping down the occasional Chang or Singha seemed just about essential for survival.

Singha has long been the best-known Thai beer

I played six rounds in Thailand, most of them at least partially in the mid-day sun, surely some sort of madness. Indeed, during one round at the Muang Kaew Golf Club in Bangkok I was feeling a little lightheaded. I was playing with Mark Siegel, managing director of Golfasian, which packages golf holidays in southeast Asia, and he suggested a bite of food at the next rest stop.

Rest stops are traditional about every three holes in Thailand. So applying a cool scented towel, while downing a few pork dim sum, a diet Coke and a Chang in quick succession, and I was soon ready to blast away again.

After a round in Thailand it’s difficult not to order the beer by the gallon, but Chang does have a kick. The Export version is a bit milder at 5% ABV, and that’s the version available in the U.S., though simply called Chang Beer. Chang means elephant, the country’s revered pachyderm. Which means this is the second week in a row we’ve featured a beer with an elephant on the label.

Double-barrel mid-round refreshment, a Coke and a Chang

As for character, it’s a brew that many beer geeks will disdain, but lovers of pale lagers could do worse–better a Chang than a Bud, Miller, Coors, etcetera and so on. There’s a mildly sweet nose and an almost citric tartness in the mouth and a crisp enough finish. I’d certainly be willing to order another in a Thai restaurant to fit the mood.

But ideally I’d opt for the 6.4% ABV version back in the Kingdom, out on the course when in need of a restorative and a good mouth-scrubbing, or at night, when sitting in bug-eyed amazement at one of the many fleshpots of Thailand.

Name: Chang
Brewer: Cosmos Brewery Co., Ayutthaya, Thailand
Style: Pale lager
ABV: 5%
Availability: Year-round, 23 states
For More Information: changbeer.com

And that’s the simple premise of this ongoing beer tasting and journal–notes on some of the brews that weave through my weekly routine, as I write about beer for this website and other outlets, as I simply get through life from my home in southern Vermont, or while I’m traveling on a writing assignment or vacation. Regular readers will get to know a little about me and the people in my life, a little about my tastes, and a lot, I hope, about different beers.

Since I actually drink more than one beer a week, other pieces in the Beer on TAP category will attend to the spillovers and other beery matters. So let’s have a beer:

In my personal Beer Hall of Fame, Anchor Steam Beer will always be the first inductee. It was well over twenty years ago now that my wife, Lynn, uttered the sentence she has ever since wished she could take back. We were in some obscure restaurant in New Hampshire, one of the more intriguing features being a shelf of beer bottles and cans running around all four walls, and a beer menu of brews I’d never heard of, including Anchor Steam Beer. It came in a squat little bottle with a colorful label, and prompted Lynn to say, “Why don’t you start a beer bottle collection?”

I did, and that was the ruin of me. Once into collecting bottles I discovered the world of microbreweries. So I wrote about microbreweries and discovered the world of homebrewing. So I brewed my own beer, and that’s where the real marital problems began: It’s remarkable what can happen to a kitchen floor when a siphon hose filled with sticky beer wort gets loose.

Well over twenty years later, I have over a hundred batches of beer behind me, have written almost as many beer articles, and the beer bottle collection has taken over the basement. That first Anchor bottle is still there, and I’m happy to say I’m still married.

Fritz Maytag

But Anchor Steam Beer is important for more than personal reasons. That colorful label on the bottle says, “Made in San Francisco since 1896,” but the truth is that the beer and the brewery were saved from extinction in 1965 by Fritz Maytag, scion of the appliance Maytags, then a graduate student at Stanford. Maytag was at the bar of the Old Spaghetti Factory in San Francisco having an Anchor Steam, when he was told that if he liked the beer, he ought to head over to the brewery, because it was only days away from closing its doors.

He did, and as far as the appliance business went, it was the ruin of him. Once he hoisted Anchor, Maytag refashioned the company into a small-scale all-malt brewery that served as the model for many of the small-scale all-malt breweries that have followed. It’s not so small anymore, but Anchor Brewing is still the quintessential craft brewery, and its entire roster of beers is world class, from Anchor Porter, Liberty Ale, Old Foghorn Barleywine, to the annual Christmas beer, Our Special Ale.

The flagship brew, Anchor Steam, is brewed in long, wide, and shallow fermenting tanks at temperatures higher than normal for a lager. This tends to give it a fruitier, ale-like character. Amber in color, with a sweet malt and flowery hop nose, the brew is full-bodied with a bracing hop bitterness. The Steam style is unique (and the name trademarked), and its ancestry as hazy as a San Francisco fog. But the story with the most currency is that the beer used to be fermented in barrels, and when they were tapped, a steam-like gush of carbonation would jet forth. Anchor certainly propelled me in a pleasing direction, and I’m pleased to have it start off yet another collection.

Name: Anchor Steam Beer
Brewer: Anchor Brewing Co., San Francisco
Style: Of its own
ABV: 4.9%
Availability: Year-round, nationwide
For More Information: anchorbrewing.com

Related Posts:
Anchor’s Our Special Ale
Anchor Porter