We’ve been together for years and have been through all the plays at least twice and most thrice. But we were still all a little surprised at a recent meeting, when Shakespeare himself showed up.

It was unquestionably him—the rounded forehead and highly receding hairline, his locks long on the side, the pencil moustache and pointed goatee. He went into some kind of explanation about his words making him immortal, and something about the time/space continuum, but I had run to the kitchen to get an ale and missed the details.

Everyone else seemed to gladly accept his presence, so I didn’t want to be rude and press him. Besides, he had some keen insights into the plays, and dished up some juicy backstage-at-the-Globe gossip.

I was struck by his modern dress, however, and the logo on his polo shirt, which looked like three catamounts against a black slash on a yellow shield. The stitching underneath read: Stratford on Avon GC.

I had to ask: “Is that a golf course, by any chance?”

He more than confirmed it: “That is my home of love. If I have ranged, / Like him that travels, I return again.”¹

Willie was a player! I wasted little time in inviting him out for a few rounds, and he fit right in with the MOTO Research Team in no time. He knew when to applaud a fine tee shot (“A hit, a very palpable hit”²), and when to politely ignore a lousy one (“The rest is silence”³).

The Bard was decidedly not a poet on the course, save for the mordant view of his own play, entirely warranted. He’d step up to short putts without a great deal of confidence: “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.”⁴

Then he’s scuff his three-footer and still have two to go. He seemed grateful when we told him to pick it up: “I’ll queen it no inch further, but milk my ewes and weep.”⁵

Willie’s favorite pro was Nick Faldo (“Men of few words are the best men,”⁶) and he thought to model himself after the stoic Englishman (“I will be the pattern of all patience”⁷), but he failed in all respects. He wasn’t above some violent displays of temper: “I’ll break my staff, / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, / And, deeper than did ever plummet sound, I’ll drown my book.”⁸

Besides, he was a torrent of words out on the course, given to ceaseless analysis of how a golf swing could go bad:

“Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffer then
The nature of an insurrection.”⁹

Could David Leadbetter have phrased it more acutely? Willie had his own succinct swing thoughts. He’d step up to the tee box, mutter, “Speak, hands, for me!”¹⁰ and then stab away with his outside in swing, and the big banana ball would slice out of bounds: “This was the most unkindest cut of all.”¹¹

He was a go-for-broke player, though, his theory on course management not really matching his dubious skills: “Our doubts are traitors,/ And make us lose the good we oft might win, / By fearing to attempt.”¹²

Once his heroic attempts would go astray, he wasn’t above blaming his clubs for the result: “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us.”¹³

Above all else though, he was a traditionalist. He preferred to walk, carrying his own bag, and being English, would play in any weather: “Blow, wind! Come, wrack! At least we’ll die with harness on our back.”¹⁴

But he wasn’t big on lessons (“Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well”¹⁵), and he had nothing but disdain for yardage markers: “Let every eye negotiate for itself and trust no agent.”¹⁶

He became unraveled, however, when confronting water hazards. He’d look at the big pond on the seventh hole at the Brattleboro Country Club and moan: “O! That way madness lies; let me shun that.¹⁷ Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground. I would fain die a dry death.”¹⁸

His misgivings were well founded, since sure as sin, he’d be holding his pose after another dubious stroke muttering: “Glory is like a circle in the water, / Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, / Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.¹⁹ My ending is despair.”²⁰

After one recent round, Willie added up the scorecard and then began drinking heavily, saying, “I will make it a felony to drink small beer.”²¹

He began to get pretty lachrymose about his game: “Is there no pity sitting in the clouds, that sees into the bottom of my grief?”²² and suggested that there was no point in ever playing again: “Past hope, past cure, past help!”²³

Considering that he’d been playing the game for more than four hundred years, it wasn’t surprising that he was feeling discouraged. But, like all duffers, Shakespeare knew in his high handicapper heart that, “I am a man more sinned against than sinning.”²⁴

So when I suggested that it was still early in the day, and he said, “Tempt not a desperate man,”²⁵ I knew we were good for another nine. Quite a piece of work, that Willie. And when it came to golf, noble in reason.

Returning the favor and visiting Shakespeare's home town and birthplace

1. Sonnet 109, l. 5
2. Hamlet V, ii, 295
3. Hamlet V, ii, 372
4. Julius Caesar, III, ii, 174
5. The Winter’s Tale, IV, iii, 462
6. Henry V, III, ii, 40
7. King Lear III, ii, 37
8. The Tempest V, i, 54
9. Julius Caesar II, i, 63
10. Julius Caesar III, i, 76
11. Julius Caesar III, ii, 188
12. Measure for Measure, I, iv, 78
13. King Lear V, iii, 172
14. Macbeth V, v, 51
15. King Lear I, iv, 371
16. Much Ado About Nothing II, i, 184
17. King Lear III, iv, 21
18. The Tempest I, i, 73
19. Henry VI, I, ii, 133
20. The Tempest Epil., 15
21. Henry VI, IV, ii, 75
22. Romeo and Juliet III, v, 198
23. Romeo and Juliet IV, I, 45
24. King Lear III, ii, 59
25. Romeo and Juliet V, iii, 59

Next: Birdies and Brews Part 5: Kohler, WI and Bandon Dunes, OR>

This is a stretch, because while the golf in Orlando is wildly abundant, the good beer-drinking opportunities are harder to find. But we’ve found them. Keep three places in mind and all should be well:

The Cricketers Arms Pub is in the Festival Bay Mall along International Drive, where much of the action (that is to say, theme parks) is outside of the city proper these days. A thoroughly English pub and eatery, the Arms always has some hand-drawn Fullers ESB as well as a half-dozen others from the cask, and more micros on tap or in bottle. There’s likely to be a Manchester v. Arsenal match on the telly, but that’s no hardship.

The funky Redlight Redlight in the Azalea Park area is a bit of a dive, but there’s one terrific selection of micros and Belgian beers on 20 taps, two engines, and countless bottles. Just don’t wear a suit here.

Redlight Redlight

Lastly, it’s time to find a package store, and Knightly Spirits is the place. There are actually four locales, all with good selections, but the mother ship is on South Orange Blossom Trail. Manager and buyer Alan Robey said, “We have a ton of beer here–850 to 900 craft beers, and a good chunk of Belgians: 250 sounds about right.”

Hole 17 on the National golf course at Omni Orlando Resort at ChampionsGate

Arnold Palmer’s Bay Hill Club & Lodge is probably golf choice number one. As the winter home of the King, it’s not at all uncommon for guests to see him strolling about or putting in some range time. The Championship course was tweaked last year under his watchful eye, and Palmer pronounced himself pleased with the results: “The renovations really add some new dimensions of play for Tour players and for our guests.”

Palmer’s old rival, Jack Nicklaus, is responsible for the layouts at Grand Cypress, including 27 holes at the North, South and East courses, and 18 at The New Course, which is an overlooked but enjoyable tribute to the Old Course at St. Andrews.

Both Palmer and Nicklaus, along with Tom Watson, have top flight designs at the Reunion Resort, and the Annika Academy will help out golfers of any gender.

There are two challenging Greg Norman designs, the National and the International, at the lavish Omni Orlando Resort at ChampionsGate. And yes, toward the close of day, those are the sound of bagpipes you hear being played. (On the tenth hole of the International course for those who must know.)

The Mystic Dunes Resort and Golf Club in Celebration has a unique layout by former PGA Tour player and now TV analyst Gary Koch, with some elevation changes more common to Vermont than Florida. There are usually some good stay and play deals here as well.

And David Harman has done a solid design at the Shingle Creek Golf Club, part of the massive Rosen Shingle Creek Resort right off Universal Boulevard.

There’s plenty more, but we have to stop somewhere.

# # #

This piece first appeared, in somewhat different form, in the Spring, 2011 issue of The Beer Connoisseur.

< Previous: Birdies and Brews Part 3: Vermont

Next: Birdies and Brews Part 5: Kohler, WI and Bandon Dunes, OR>

Next: Birdies and Brews Part 4: Orlando, Florida>

Okay, but where in Vermont? No, all of Vermont. The latest Brewers Association stats put Vermont at the head of the list–the state with the most breweries per capita–and all of them are craft breweries.

Vermont is not a huge state–slightly more than 600,000 souls call it home, and there are more senators in the U.S. Congress than the lone congressman. A head to foot (or vice versa) traversal is doable in about two and a half hours, and one is never too far away from the next good beer or golf course.

It all began in Burlington when the late, great Greg Noonan (author of the iconic Brewing Lager Beer) and his wife, Nancy, fought to change the laws to allow brewpubs to operate in the state. The Vermont Pub & Brewery opened in 1988, and is still going strong in the state’s largest city–at under 40,000 people.

Vermont golf rarely gets its due because the season is pretty much over by November. (The less hardy say a month earlier.) But when the hills are green, there’s hardly a more beautiful place to play. Just a few pairings:

The Brattleboro Country Club is a lively curtain-raiser for visitors from the south, and a brisk introduction to the rolling elevation found throughout a state where an uneven stance is more rule than exception. In town the prize-winning McNeill’s Brewery can make the rough places plain, and always has a few hand pumps running.

Ray McNeill at the 2010 Brattleboro Brewers Festival

The Long Trail Brewing Co. in Bridgewater has surpassed the 20-year mark, making it a microbrewery venerable. It’s Double Bag is a 7.2% ABV double Alt doubly notable for its heifer-related label (a cartoon of two bovines viewed from the rear, displaying, well, their bags). And a few miles away the Woodstock Country Club is something of a microcosm of the state–packing large scale complexity into a compact plot:

“On paper the course looks easy,” says long-time pro Jim Gunnare. “It’s only 6,052 yards from the blue tees, it has six par-3s, and plays to par-70. But when you come to the fifth hole already seven-over, you begin to realize it’s a very hard golf course. It’s tough because it’s narrow. The greens are small. And if you play the course perfectly you’re only going to cross Kedron Brook twelve times.”

Tenth hole at the Stowe Mountain Golf Club

The Alchemist Pub & Brewery is a great stop in Waterbury*, and just up the road is the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory, a stop almost required by law in Vermont. Just a bit further on into Stowe one can try the fare at the new Brewery at Trapp Family Lodge or old favorite The Shed Restaurant & Brewery**. The tee time will be at the challenging Stowe Mountain Golf Club, a newish Bob Cupp design aptly named, with splendidly elevated views.

# # #

This piece first appeared, in somewhat different form, in the Spring, 2011 issue of The Beer Connoisseur.

*And, alas, since the story first appeared, the flooding from Hurricane Irene devastated parts of  Vermont, including the Alchemist Pub & Brewery. As an operating brewpub, it is no more. But as a production brewery, it still exists in a separate facility, now canning a double IPA called Heady Topper. Click here for a related story.

**The Shed lost its lease and sadly closed its doors last fall. But the brand is currently still being brewed by Otter Creek.

< Previous: Birdies and Brews Part 2: San Diego, California

Next: Birdies and Brews Part 4: Orlando, Florida>

A good pint is the trick. Lord knows tsunamis of Megabland Bellywash Light have streamed from golf clubhouses for years–particularly in the U.S.–or been retrieved from the icy cold depths of the cart girl’s cache mid-round for those who like to drink and drive (and indeed, can’t seem to get their game right without a little swing oil).

It was always a bit of a puzzle why golfers–restless nomads when it comes to playing new courses in new locales–would settle for the same old fizzy yellow water when a round was over. The quick answer, of course–because it was there.

Lord knows Trappist ales weren’t there, though a golf course would be an apt place for them, considering how often names of the deity are invoked during play. Another factor was that bottles were typically not allowed out on the course.

Times are changing, though. Golfers are demanding better choices in the clubhouse, and more and better beers are now being canned (a tip of the golf cap to Oskar Blues of Colorado, which first put Dale’s Pale Ale in cans in 2002).

But let’s think larger, pondering a few locales with the sublime nexus–terrific beer and great golf. It’s not quite as easy as it sounds. Superlative U.S. beer drinking towns like Portland (Oregon or Maine), or Philadelphia fall a bit short in the golf realm. There’s marvelous golf near Philly, for instance, but mainly at private clubs. Belgium is decidedly not known for golf. And while the golf and Guinness (okay, or Murphy’s) are nonpareil in Ireland, there’s not yet a lot of beer diversity in the Emerald Isle.

This is all open to debate, naturally, preferably over a brew after 18 holes. But here, with quiddities, are five locations where the better beer-loving golfer will not be disappointed, except for that four-putt on the twelfth hole.

Click on any heading to navigate through the piece:

Birdies and Brews Part 1: St. Andrews, Scotland
Birdies and Brews Part 2: San Diego, California
Birdies and Brews Part 3: Vermont
Birdies and Brews Part 4: Orlando
Birdies and Brews Part 5: Kohler, WI and Bandon Dunes, OR

# # #

This piece first appeared, in somewhat different form, in the Spring, 2011 issue of The Beer Connoisseur.

Perry Dye

Here at The A Position we’re given a topic to address (or not) each month for The A List feature, and the April challenge was to rhapsodize about our favorite golf island. We even cornered Perry Dye, one of Pete’s designing sons, and put the question to him. Since he worked for four years on Roatan, completing work on the Black Pearl course at the Pristine Bay resort in Honduras, it’s not hard to guess his pick. (Although he seems more taken with the bonefishing than the golf.)

My colleagues and I have about 20 islands of different sorts covered from Australia to Sardinia and around the world, including one mythical one if I read Casey Alexander’s contribution correctly! Click here to see where we’ve roamed.

I stayed a little closer to home, my old New York home that is. The round I refer to at the end was the subject of a longer piece now buried somewhere in the archives. I’ll excavate it here one of these days, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.

***

At 118 miles it’s the longest island in the contiguous U.S., and the biggest: by size Long Island is larger than Rhode Island; if it were a state its 7.5 million people would rank it 13th in population.

It also packs in two major airports and five U.S. Open sites. (No points for naming Bethpage Black and Shinnecock; a tip of the cap for coming up with Fresh Meadow, 1932; Inwood, 1923, and Garden City, 1902.)

To me, it was just home, a fence separating us from the third hole of the Hempstead Golf & Country Club, where my parents were members. This partial A.W. Tillinghast design was my young playground, and where I developed a love/hate relationship with the game.

By the time I’d moved from New York to Vermont, I discovered it was all love, and returning to the old course years later to play with another born again golfer–my brother–was one of the finer things I’ve ever done.

Author teeing off at par-3 eighth hole at Hempstead Golf and Country Club, Long Island, NY

The recovery effort and united community response has been quite extraordinary, but there is still work to be done, roads, homes, bridges, businesses and lives to repair. Precisely the reason for the two beers in our glass this evening, both of which will divert money to recovery efforts.

As the accompanying video shows (and explains), Waterbury, Vermont about had its heart ripped out, and for those who had visited the lively and popular Alchemist Pub and Brewery the news that it had been flooded was further dismal news.

Subsequently, owners John and Jen Kimmich decided to let the pub go, and amp up activity at the production brewery and canning facility they had started nearby. (We’ll eventually try the initial offering, Heady Topper.) (And see comment below.)

Stone Brewing’s Mitch Steele had heard about the Alchemist’s plight, and he invited John out to San Diego to collaborate on a beer with him and Jamie Floyd of the Ninkasi Brewing Co. from Eugene, Oregon, with the profits to go to the Waterbury Good Neighbor Fund.

Meanwhile, Deerfield, Massachusetts was hit hard as well, though the Berkshire Brewing Co. wasn’t damaged. But with many accounts in Vermont, BBC owners Chris Lalli and Gary Bogoff brewed up “Good Night Irene” as a one-off, with $15 from the sale of every case earmarked for local recovery efforts.

Both beers first appeared in the area in late December and may now be hard to find. But if there are any still on the shelves pick some up–good and interesting beers supporting a good cause.

But while both are 7% ABV IPAs, the similarity ends there. Though “Good Night Irene” is called a West Coast Style India Pale Ale, it seems a bit mischaracterized to me. When I think of a west coast IPA I’m expected a beer with a lot of immediate hop aroma and flavor, and a rousingly bitter finish. “Good Night Irene” may be amply hopped, but the character is skewed to the malt. Or, to the recovery side, if we take the brewer’s description that the beer has, “… the assertive bitterness of a hurricane and the subtle malty sweetness of recovery.” I’m open to poetic and brewing license in this case, so okay.

John Kimmich earned his brewing stripes at the Vermont Pub & Brewery in Burlington, under Greg Noonan, the late and great patriarch of Vermont craft brewing, credited by some (like John) as the originator of the Black IPA notion.

Nonetheless, More Brown Than Black is really a west coast IPA, brewed at Stone, and far more radical in terms of the hopping. As Mitch Steele notes in the video, the hops used were Super Galena, Nelson Sauvin, Delta, Galaxy and Citra. In short, a hop bomb. Non-hopheads need not apply.

There is such a concentration of hops in the beer that not all of it was filtered out by bottling time. Both bottles I had were rift with greenish floaters. This didn’t stop me, however; I loved the beer, and felt righteous drinking it, too.

Late afternoon sunlight shows off the floaters in More Brown Than Black. Won't kill you, though.

Name: More Brown Than Black IPA
Brewer: The Alchemist, Waterbury, Vermont; Ninkasi, Eugene, Oregon; Stone, San Diego, California
Style: Dark IPA
ABV: 7.4%
Availability: Better chances in New England, but time running out
For More Information: http://blog.stonebrew.com/?p=2885

Name: “Good Night Irene” West Coast Style IPA
Brewer: Berkshire Brewing
Style: IPA
ABV: 7%
Availability: Better chances in New England, but time running out
For More Information: www.berkshirebrewingcompany.com

Geoffrey Cornish with the woman he always referred to as his "bride," Carol.

Geoffrey Cornish rose, as usual, at about 3 a.m. He had gone to bed the night before, as usual, at about 7 p.m. He is not a font of information about the latest TV shows.

He dressed more or less as usual: brown loafers, brown socks, brown slacks, a muted teal shirt, a brown patterned tie, a grayish sweater and a brown tweedish jacket. It was mid-October. He would, after a few hours of work in his home office, slip into a red Chevrolet Cavalier convertible, but he would later aver that, “It belongs to my bride of sixty years; I’m not the sports car type.”

He did, however, wear a golf cap, this sporty note being the sole clue that its wearer might have a nodding acquaintance with the royal and ancient game.

His acquaintance is a bit more than nodding. Since he first hung out his golf architecture shingle in 1952, he has designed, expanded or remodeled upwards of 250 courses, largely in New England, conspicuously in Massachusetts. He has written several books on golf course architecture, including the seminal The Architects of Golf (with Ron Whitten).

Cornish in his ASGCA blazer

He joined the American Society of Golf Course Architects in 1967, served as president in 1975, and was honored with its Donald Ross Award in 1982. He was given an honorary membership in the British Association of Golf Course Architects, an honorary doctorate from the University of Massachusetts, named to the Royal Canadian Golf Hall of Fame and… and the list goes on and on. The man is a walking institution, with the emphasis on the walking.

This morning he was leaving his home in Amherst while it was still dark and driving about two hours north to tromp around the Manchester Country Club in Vermont, which he laid out in 1969. He had an early morning appointment with Steve Durkee, who has won acclaim for his work at Okemo Valley Golf Club and other Vermont layouts. Durkee, who had grown up playing on the Manchester course, had the job of re-doing Cornish’s back nine.

“It really is a kind of homecoming,” said Durkee, “and a great opportunity to work with Mr. Cornish and get to know him.”

Durkee’s deference was classy, if probably unnecessary. Cornish bears his reputation lightly indeed, and certainly appears little concerned with his age. He attributes his vigor largely to his incessant walking. When reworking some holes at a course in Minnesota, Cornish hooked up with doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. They talked him into a stress test, and the results were astonishing. “I may be 87,” he said, “but they told me I had the heart of a 37-year-old.”

He also says to his wife, Carol, that his memory is as sharp as ever, and indeed, he could recall aspects of the Manchester construction (“We brought up two feet of loam…”) 32 years after the fact. If he was a little rusty on names, he claimed that it was because he knew so many people. (And it is Carol’s department to remember the names anyway.)

The famous seventeenth hole maple tree at the Manchester Country Club, Vermont

Cornish’s visit was more than a courtesy call. Durkee was puzzled about what to do with the seventeenth hole, a dogleg left with a tee shot complicated by an enormous maple, then in full autumn blaze.

“I used to work for the great Stanley Thompson,” says Cornish, referring to the legendary Canadian course architect. “Stan told me, ‘I always build one controversial hole. It keeps the members arguing long enough to let me get the rest of the course in shape.’ Well, this is probably one of the more controversial holes in New England. We’ve been playing around with it for 32 years. Steve has to figure it out now.” But Cornish, as was his wont, was willing to help.

Six Weeks

Cornish was born in August, 1914 in Winnipeg. The family moved west to British Columbia, and he eventually wound up studying for a degree in agronomy at the University of British Columbia. Thompson was building Capilano in Vancouver, and he came to the University to find someone who knew something about soils. “Stanley emphasized, ‘I won’t be able to keep you for more than six weeks.’ That was still the Depression, and any job that came along you took. I was happy I took that one. It was 66 years ago, so that six weeks has been extended.

The Toronto Terror, Stanley Thompson

“Stanley taught me a tremendous amount. He was the exponent of the principles of art in golf course design, which is why Nicklaus, Cupp, Morrish and the like all went out and studied Banff. He also started Trent Jones out, which was a great thing–if you look at it objectively, I think that Trent has contributed to our art form more than anyone else. I stayed with Stan until I joined the Canadian Army and went overseas.”

Cornish landed at Normandy on D-Day. “But I landed that evening, and that was altogether different than the earlier landing–we walked ashore.” The war did have a profound impact upon him, however.

“When you’ve been in the army during war, you’re sure not interested in yourself too much after that. You lose your sense of competition. People have said to me, ‘You have no competitive spirit.’ And I have to say I really don’t.”

Though he plunged right back into work with Thompson, he’s never considered it such: “I claim I’ve never done a day’s work since I got out of the army in 1945. Designing golf courses and meeting a lot of nice people can hardly be called work–but I can see how it grips everybody.”

For a guy with no competitive spirit, Cornish’s listing of credits in his own The Architects of Golf runs to seven columns–barely shy of the ink spilled for Donald Ross or Trent Jones.

His attitude didn’t hurt: “I’m no noble guy, but I tried to help other people get into the business, too, and they all reciprocated over the years.” It also didn’t hurt, Cornish noted, to have taught over 100 students at the University of Massachusetts, a post he took up in 1949. But a pleasant demeanor and even a liberal grading policy will go only so far if you can’t deliver the goods.

Cornish started delivering in the recovery years after the war. “No one, particularly in New England, had enough money to build a golf course, and if they had there was no one who could pay enough green fees.” He and his new bride, who Cornish credits as the power behind the throne, figured out that having floodlit pitch and putt courses would keep people happy.

“I used to charge 75 cents a round. The idea spread and people began to hire me to lay courses out for $500. I must have done about 15 up and down the east coast. A few still exist, such as the one in Brewster. Literally hundreds of people came up to me in years to come and said, ‘We started golf at one of your pitch and putts.’”

Mrs. Cornish started at the one they owned, Little St. Andrews, 18 holes on four acres in Shrewsbury. “On the first hole, about 80 yards long, she topped the ball, and the darn thing rolled into the hole. Then she said, ‘What do I do next?’”

Cornish turned next to his first full-length course, amazingly enough, the fullest length there was, the International Golf Club in Bolton.

Bert Surprenant was one of the wealthiest men in Massachusetts, and perhaps one of the most eccentric, and he came to Cornish and said he wanted the world’s longest golf course. “So I gave it to him. I think it was 8,040 yards from back tees when it opened [in 1956, two years after Cornish became an American citizen]. They’ve continually added length to it to make sure it stays the world’s longest. It’s now 8,375. Number five is the big one. Bert wanted a hole that no one would reach on their second shot, a 640-yard par-5, but on opening day, Paul Harney cut the corner and hit the green on his second. Bert had a fit.”

Further on Down the Road

While Cornish will let a few names slip about Massachusetts tracks he believes exemplify his best work–the country clubs of Crestview, Foxborough, Spring Valley, the all par-3 Blue Rock in South Yarmouth, which set off a par-3 course boom across the nation in the early sixties–he’s reluctant to name some at the expense of others.

Cornish’s last full new 18 was the Center Valley Club in Allentown, Pennsylvania, which opened in 1994. He claims he designs these days, “When the young people let me,” the young people being his current partners Brian Silva, Mark Mungeam and Tim Gerrish. In truth he’s doing a surprising amount. “I’m asked to come in and have a look at a lot of the old classical courses they won’t let anybody else on. I can’t mention them because they’re practically bringing me in incognito. If they have a wonderful Robert Trent Jones layout, for example, they don’t particularly want his sons to know I’m in there. But I get around to telling the boys, eventually.”

Cornish doesn’t play golf any more. It used to be a custom that the architect would hit the first ball on opening day. But when he started to top balls on the first tee, without his wife’s success, he gave up the game. “If I’m driving along and see a driving range at night, I’ll go out and hit balls.”

What he is doing is a good deal of writing. He had a book in galley stages last fall, Eighteen Stakes on a Sunday Afternoon and Other Aspects of North American Golf Course Architecture. “The title dates back to when the Scots first came to this country. They’d get a job as a greenkeeper or professional and in their spare time–Sunday afternoons–they’d stake out a golf course. I think the going price was $25.”

Another book further down the road is Golf Holes Classic and Otherwise: Searching for the Roots of an Art Form, done with Robert Muir Graves, Cornish’s partner in ongoing seminars at the Harvard School of Design (from whence came the pair’s first title, the 1998 Golf Course Design).

“It is an art form, in many ways the purest form of landscape architecture–molding the earth and then vegetating it.”

Cornish gets most of his walking in these days with hours-long hikes around the giant freshwater swamp behind his house, taking the neighbors’ dogs with him–as many as 12, but more usually four. “Sometimes my neighbor the evolutionary biologist comes along with another set of dogs, and we talk about it. But he hasn’t quite gotten around to explaining the art of it yet–why, when we arrange something in a certain way, that we feel better just looking at it.

“We’ve really invented the most fascinating profession of our species, wouldn’t you say?”

That's Geoff Cornish on the right in coat and tie during pre-WWII construction of Highland Links in Cape Breton

(Photos of Cornish courtesy of the American Society of Golf Course Architects; Highland Links photo courtesy of Mark Mungeam.)

One need merely flip the cyber page to last week’s TAP Beer of the Week entry to see how this one developed. I promised to pick a specialty beer of whichever brewery won the Super Bowl XLVI wager, and we all know how that turned out.

The only wrinkle from what I reported last time out is that the beer on tap was Brooklyn BLAST! instead of the flagship Brooklyn Lager. This may have seemed like the only bit of luck for New England fans; the BLAST! is usually found only in the Brooklyn Brewery tasting room.

Though I’m from New York, living in Vermont for 20 years, I didn’t have a dog in the Super Bowl hunt because I’m indifferent to football (unless I’m irked with it).

It would have been no hardship to have to pick out a Harpoon specialty. I’ve enjoyed some of the Leviathan series beers and always pick up the latest 100-Barrel series offerings if I’m not too tardy to the counter. It may already be too late for the Vermont Spruce Tip Ale, now being overtaken by a Black IPA.

But I did find the Giants victory convenient, since I happened to have two bottles of the Brooklyn Brewery Black Ops on hand. My brother gave me one for my birthday toward the end of 2010, and I bought one (at about $20) last December.

Black Ops suggests clandestine doings, so secret that they’re secrets within secret organizations. Let’s not get all political here, though the temptation is great (think Dick Cheney and Blackwater and a secret CIA assassination program).

The world of Black Ops is probably better captured in video game terms, since it’s all in fun and no one gets killed for real. (Indeed, the seventh instalment of the “Call of Duty” video game series is also called Black Ops.)

With a nod to all this spy stuff, the Brooklyn Brewery disclaims all knowledge of the beer, and refers to it only in classic doublespeak:

Brooklyn Black Ops does not exist. However, if it did exist, it would be a strong 11.3% ABV stout concocted by the Brooklyn brewing team under cover of secrecy and hidden from everyone else at the brewery. The myth is that this supposed “Black Ops” was then aged for four months in bourbon barrels, bottled flat, and re-fermented with Champagne yeast. Presumably such a beer would raise a rich, fluffy dark brown head and it would combine chocolate and coffee flavors with a rich underpinning of vanilla-like bourbon notes.

A beer like that would be mighty nice, but it would be hard to make more than few cases – it could never be sold or released to the public. They say that the brewmaster revealed the beer to a few other people at the brewery only after it had been barreled. The rumor going around is that the brewery plans to drink the beer themselves over the holidays and give some to their family and friends. That’s what they say. But frankly, there’s no evidence for any of this. This beer is obviously a figment of people’s fervent imaginations. People tend to get loopy around the holidays. Everyone go home now –there’s nothing to see here.

Should reality intrude–as with a January tasting of the beer paired with an artisan cheese–the brewery’s blog entry about the event serves up a blurred out photo of a beer bottle, and refers to it as Brooklyn XXXXX XXX.

The cheese fares better; the Winnimere by Jasper Hill Farms is a seasonal runny cheese made from the winter milk of the farm’s Ayrshire heifers, wrapped in spruce bark and with a rind washed by a lambic-style beer from its Greensboro, Vermont neighbor, the Hill Farmstead Brewery.

Those of us with our own secretive methods can find a back door into the brewery’s website and download an image of the beer, but no information on where it might be available, since it doesn’t exist. A brewery spokesman, Dan D’Ippolito (a potential pseudonym), leaked this to me: “Rumors have it that the beer generally comes out in November, and will therefore be available during the Christmas season where quantities last. People claimed to have seen it last year in all 26 states, although of course if [Brooklyn Brewery] were to produce a beer like this, it would only be in very small batches.”

What more is there to say? The non-tasting notes above are pretty spot on. The beer is indeed as black as a night in Siberia, but luxurious enough to please a Russian countess. It has a velvety sweet palate mixed with the weight of the whiskey huskiness. It’s big in all aspects, including the one pint, 9.4-ounce bottle.

I had meant to drink the 2011 batch first, and the 2010 bottle the next night, but mistakenly did it the other way round. This was interesting, though: I would have thought the effects of the barrel-aging might have dissipated a bit in a year’s time.

Not so. Bourbon is aged in charred white oak barrels, and the smoky whiskey notes were far more pronounced in the 2010 batch. It was just this side of harsh, the 2011 seeming a bit more mellow, in a relative sense. After the fact I’ve noticed that one bottle is rated at 11.3% ABV while the other is 11.6%, but I don’t know which is which. There’s some bottling information numbers on the back, completely indecipherable. Obviously in code.

I’m not a whiskey drinker, but I preferred the 2010 to the 2011 bottling. Not because I drank the entire bottle by myself (I shared the 2011); I just liked the in-your-face flavors more.

Make no mistake, the 2011 is a ravishing Imperial Stout as well, just as ready to seduce you and then knock you over the head. Drink two bottles and you’ll wake up naked, behind enemy lines and without your passport.

Name: Black Ops
Brewer: Brooklyn Brewery, New York (purportedly)
Style: Imperial Stout, barrel-aged
ABV: 11.3%
Availability: Year-round, 25 states and D.C.
For More Information: www.brooklynbrewery.com (although they’re not talking)

Related Post:
TAP Beer(s) of the Week: Harpoon 100-Barrel Island Creek Oyster Stout and Single Hop ESB

Scott Willis demonstrating the power of yoga (courtesy of Timothy Thrasher, Thrasher Graphics)

In the year of his grieving, 2001, Scott Willis would hop in his car and just drive south from Brattleboro, Vermont, on Route 5, the back road through Guilford, into Bernardston, Massachusetts, Greenfield, Deerfield, as far as he needed to go until his equilibrium returned. Then he’d turn around and head home. His father, Ed, had died that June, and then the shock of 9/11 just compounded the dislocation.

Golf had been a big part of Scott’s childhood in Walpole and Keene, New Hampshire. He would caddy for his dad and mom, he and his dad would play together occasionally, and the pair would frequently watch golf on television together. For a time hardly a spring or summer day went by when Scott and his friends weren’t playing or caddying out at the nine-hole Hooper Golf Course in Walpole. But he essentially quit the game after ninth grade, to concentrate on baseball, music, girls.

By 2001, he had barely played a half dozen times in 35 years. Then one day, motoring between Bernardston and Greenfield, he decided to stop at Sammy K’s driving range and hit out a few balls. Another day he veered over to the Northfield Golf Club, went to the practice green in a medium to pouring rain and just stayed out there, putting. “It felt good,” he recalled recently. “I liked it.”

He played a few times at Northfield in 2002, then joined in August. The next year he signed up at the Brattleboro Country Club, where he is still a member. “Not long after I resumed playing I realized it wasn’t a big step from there to putting my two loves together.”

The other love is yoga. After a varied career path as a musician and academic counselor, Willis took his first yoga class in 1987, when he was 35, “And it all immediately felt so good, physically and emotionally.”

It still does. The way Willis puts it to his students–he has now taught yoga since moving to Brattleboro in 1992–is that, “Yoga is like a well I can always go to to get water. And for me, golf is yoga outside.”

Be the Ball

From the Sanskrit root, yuj–to bind, or unite–yoga is the ancient means to unite mind, body and spirit. How this is done can be interpreted in a bewildering number of ways, not a few of which Willis has studied. “Yoga is about postures, breath work, meditation and philosophy. I think of it as a practice of three things: gratitude, loving kindness and forgiveness, mindfulness in daily life. There is a spiritual component to it; I encourage people to connect to whatever that means to their deeper selves. “

Be the Ball

But his classes–particularly his Golf Yoga classes–are laid-back and easy-going, conducted with a sense of humor, urging students to go at their own paces, to the comfortable edge of a stretch or yoga pose.

“I tell students yoga is an oasis of time where they’re not responsible to or for anyone else, with no need to impress anyone in class or the instructor. Pretty much like a round of golf.” Willis finds golf such an opportunity to really focus that he has occasionally put together “Meditation in motion” foursomes that play for nine holes in relative silence.

He doesn’t teach golf technique. The Golf Yoga classes he conducted over the last four years consist of six dynamic stretches and nine static stretches–some classic yoga postures like Warrior, Dance, Willow with golf club in hand–all at a relaxed pace. In place of meditations that might begin and end typical yoga classes, Willis plays taped excerpts from the likes of golf psychologist Dr. Bob Rotella, and might wrap up a session with a Jim McLean video.

Scott holding the coveted Be the Ball Scramble trophy

Ten weekly sessions culminate just about the time the golf season opens in Vermont–and then it’s time for the Be the Ball Scramble for all current and former students.

Does it help? “Using myself as an example,” he said, “I was a 24 handicap when I started playing again. I’m a nine now.”

But he’s not stopping there. He suspended the class in 2010 in favor of giving private lessons, going a little deeper into the sports psychology angle, but he’s taking them up again early in 2012.

“The idea is to maximize the enjoyment of the game. It’s like Bagger Vance says (in Steven Pressfield’s novel)–through focusing one can experience levels of awareness deeper than usual.” If we play to the level that our subconscious lets us play, then we need to convince the subconscious to let us play better. And to that end Willis has created methods for players to become more factually aware of their games, and affirmations that help them visualize playing better.

In his own case, he’s created a precise scenario that has him shooting a 68 on October 15, 2013, thereby lowering his handicap to four. He won’t promise this will happen, but for now he’ll admit no doubt about it, either, merely commenting: “Check back with me then.”

———————–

More information on Scott Willis and his Golf Yoga classes can be found at www.Solarhillyoga.com; he can be reached at Scott-willis@comcast.net, or (802) 257-1926.

The Yoga Center at Solar Hill studio, Brattleboro, Vermont

How golf and yoga went down in the desert during the Golf Road Warriors Scottsdale trip, “The Golf Yoga Connection” here.

But considering the trepidation I had this morning about my back, I was all in for the post-round Golf Yoga session at the Movement Studio in the Spa at Four Seasons Resort Scottsdale at Troon North. Though five of us were signed up to attend, only Jeff Wallach and I summoned the courage to go to the mats.

Well, our videographer colleague Jamie McWilliams was there, but he was merely skulking about trying to take shots of Jeff and me in distress, as at right. (Guess I was taking a break, though, since I took the photo.)

But we were in good hands. Dodie Mazzuca is not only a certified yoga instructor, but a former LPGA Tour player. Clearly in great shape herself, she works out of the Four Seasons and her own GolfPROformance enterprise to take players through a threefold approach–body awareness, technical skills, and a mental state of peak performance.

This being the Four Seasons, yoga is but one item on a vast menu of fitness options for visitors–golfers, tennis players, joggers or otherwise, including mat Pilates, spinning or zumba classes.

In our abbreviated session we stuck with classic yoga poses as Dodie explained how they could apply to our games, while making sure I avoided those that might strain my back.

We weren’t unfamiliar–both Jeff and I have done yoga before, in my case in specific yoga for golfers classes that culminate in an annual Be the Ball tournament back at the Brattleboro Country Club in Vermont.

It eventually occurred to me–after a check of the records–that Dodie and I had probably crossed paths once before, clearly unknowingly, back in Vermont in 1999. Dodie was in her third year of the FUTURES tour then, and she played at the SmartSpikes FUTURES Classic at the Green Mountain National Golf Course in Killington.

I played in the pro-am event for the tournament. No time machine available, alas, to see if I spilled a beer on her at lunch, whether we spoke or even came within fifty yards of one another. But I do know she finished in a four-way tie for 15th that year, taking away a whopping $798 for the accomplishment.

She was back in 2000, her best on the FUTURES tour, winning the Capital Region FUTURES Classic in Guilderland, New York, making 18 out of 18 cuts, reaching third on the money list and gaining exempt status for the LPGA, where she played in 2001 and 2002.

She eventually headed west and did well on mini tours before turning more toward yoga and teaching.

After putting Jeff and I through our paces, we decided she would be the ideal player to fill in some of the empty tee slots we had for later in the week. Her dance card had some openings, so it’s probably a date.

More on the day’s round in the preceding post, “Meet and Beat” here.

More on yoga and golf as practiced in Vermont, “The Yoga Oasis” here.

The Pete Dye Course at the French Lick Resort

The plane was rerouted to Nashville, which meant I had about a four hour bus ride ahead of me to the Louisville airport, and then an hour’s-plus drive to the resort.

I missed a day of golf, but all was well in the end, and I think it’s now safe to step forward and take credit for Barack Obama’s 2008 victory. As the following piece shows (it originally appeared in the Brattleboro Reformer in Vermont before the election), my trip to Indiana clearly tipped the scales, and threw the formerly red state into the blue column for Obama. I don’t know whether Dave was the deciding vote or not, but I’d like to think our little chat had something to do with it. As for 2012, my strategy is still in the planning stages.

***

I packed the sticks and pinned on my “Vote Obama” button last month, traveling to the heartland to discover that Indiana is a swing state.

I was heading for the French Lick Resort, where the midwest meets the south, 70 miles northwest of Louisville, Kentucky, and where the Ryder Cup was set to unfold the following week.

I was set to preview the new Pete Dye course that will open in the spring, as well as play the restored Donald Ross course at this equally—actually, stunningly–restored casino resort town.

The hick from French Lick

Unfortunately, there is no lascivious origin for the town’s name. Its bubbling minerals springs left salty deposits on rocks that the wildlife would lick, the early settlers were French, and there you have it.

By the mid-19^th century a Dr. William Bowles was bottling the local specialty, selling it as Pluto Water and putting up guests who had come for the cure in the French Lick Springs Hotel, where chef Louis Perrin created tomato juice in 1917.

In 1850, a mile away in Mile Lick, the similarly conceived Mile Lick Inn went up and the area was truly launched as a resort destination. The Mile Lick owner, Dr. John Lane, later changed the name of his hotel and the town to West Baden Springs, where Mr. and Mrs. Joe Bird created their son, Larry, in 1956.

FDR in 1931

Bird also lived across the town border, hence the nickname “the hick from French Lick.” The boom years were over by time Larry started dribbling. Both hotels had flourished for decades, largely because illegal gambling thrived until 1949, which it managed to do because the West Baden hotel became a headquarters for the state Republican party, while the French Lick hotel became a Democratic fixture.

Indeed, it was at a conference at the hotel for Democratic governors in 1931 that Franklin Roosevelt solidified support for his presidential run.

With the current presidential run on my mind, it was instructive to find out that not everyone in the country is a rabid Obama fan, and that a mere campaign button could provoke stares and comments and turn me into a proselytizer. I was ready to flap my gums at any opportunity.

Not for naught: the day after I returned, Obama had gone up two percentage points in Indiana polls and the state is now officially considered a tossup, if still leaning McCain’s way. And my handicap went down two points, so all in all it was a successful trip.

And after a half-century of bust days, French Lick looks to be revving up for success as well. What began as a philanthropic gesture in 1996 by the Cook Group Inc. to save and partially restore the West Baden Hotel took on a life of its own, ultimately a half-billion dollar effort that has included an historic restoration of both hotels, a new (legal) casino, two spas and the various golf courses.

The expenditure, if startling, is understandable just by walking into the atrium of the West Baden Hotel. Prior to the construction of the Houston Astrodome, the hotel held the record for the world’s largest free-span dome, stretching 200 feet and once called the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” Shining once again with an old world elegance, the atrium is a visual and acoustic marvel.

With 45 holes of golf on hand, I never even made it to the casino, another marvel. There’s history in the golfing grounds, too. The nine-hole Valley Links adjacent to the French Lick hotel was built as an 18-hole layout in 1907 by Tom Bendelow. Lee Schmidt did the reworking in 2006.

Schmidt also took on the 2006 restoration to its original design of the Ross course, built in 1917 and the site of the 1924 PGA Championship won by Walter Hagen, and the 1959 and 1960 LPGA Championships (Betsy Rawls and Mickey Wright, respectively).

The Donald Ross Course

At a cost of $6 million, the restoration included reshaping and expanding many of the greens to their antique square or rectangular configurations. It’s a splendid job, at a course traditionalists should flock to.

One curiosity is that the 1957 Midwest Amateur Tournament was held at the course, won by Pete Dye. Dye knew Ross, and Lee Schmidt once worked for Dye; there are fewer than six degrees of separation in the golf design world.

Dye was on hand for the preview rounds at his course, and responded to a fawning introduction with refreshing self-deprecation: “I may not be the leading architect of the day, but I am the oldest.”

Pete Dye, his handiwork in the background

His newest creation is a study in grandeur perched on one of the highest hilltops in Indiana, with 30-mile vistas in all directions, but plenty of work on the ground for the golfer to attend to in a brawny design likely to be compared to Dye’s work at Whistling Straits.

It was a lot to take in in a two day campaign, but there’s no question that French Lick is a fresh golf destination to reckon with.

On my last morning in Indiana I was ushered into the dining room for breakfast, the hostess seated me, wandered away, and then returned to say, sotto voce, “It’s nice to see someone wearing an Obama button here.”

“Not too many in these parts?”

She laughed, and said, “Pretty much none.”

My driver back to the airport, let’s call him Dave, wasn’t wearing one. Dave agreed that the Dye layout was a beautiful site, though he didn’t really play golf much.

In truth, Dave was something of a walking stereotype—a former truck drivin’ kind of guy, a pot-bellied, hog ridin’, beer swillin’, gap-toothed grinnin’, deer huntin’, chaw chewin’ McCain supporter.

But Dave had a brain in good working order, and we were able to bounce things back and forth genially enough for awhile before he sensibly concluded that we could agree to disagree.

So then we spent the rest of the ride talking about marriage, wives, kids, grandkids—the important stuff. Plus a lot about beer swillin’.

Souhegan Woods, a Friel family course in New Hampshire

Here at The A Position we’re given a topic to address (or not) each month for The A List feature, in a neat 150 words or so. The June challenge was to summon up the best pithy golf advice we’ve ever received. We enlisted the help of guest writer Dave Pelz, who has dispensed more than his share of advice himself. For the complete roundup of what the team came up with, click here.

I excavated two one-liners that have resonated over the years, and that have made playing more enjoyable:

While once making an attempt to play all six Friel courses in New Hampshire I ran into Phil Friel–pro, designer and operator of close to a dozen New England courses in all.

I hadn’t been playing particularly well, and probably began a dreary explanation of why. Friel smilingly put it all into zen-like focus: “Don’t complicate it; it’s just a game, a game with a ball and a stick.”

*

Bill Tooley in the Brattleboro Country Club grill room, 2003

During a lesson for a series I did with former Brattleboro Country Club pro Bill Tooley, I was displaying more than usual frustration with my efforts.

When we were done and I was walking away Tooley called out to me: “You’re better than you think you are!”

I’ve been deconstructing the timing, meaning and need for that comment ever since, but always in a mood of delight.

***

Phil Fried has since passed away, the family sold off some of its golf courses, and I’m not sure the magazine I was writing the piece for, New Hampshire Golf, exists in any viable form anymore.

Bill Tooley moved away from Brattleboro to another professional position near Syracuse, but then began working for a golf GPS company. Haven’t heard from him in a couple of years.

Time marches on. But good advice remains good.

Twenty-six new governors are taking up the reins of power this year, and the excitement arrived here in Vermont this week. On Wednesday the Governor-elect, Peter Shumlin, came to Brattleboro for a home county celebration; he took the oath of office at the State House in Montpelier on Thursday and it was party time again on Friday at the inaugural ball.

Sam Brownback

No Vermont brewer had the wisdom to stir up a special batch for the 81^st Governor of the fourteenth state, like the Blind Tiger Brewery of Topeka did for incoming Kansas Governor Sam Brownback. Kansas is the wheat state, so brewmaster John Dean (hmm), created a brown Brownback Wheat Beer.

Out in Colorado, new Governor John Hickenlooper used to own the Wynkoop Brewing Company in Denver, and it seized the day by producing Inaugurale. The 6.8% ABV beer fell somewhere between a strong brown ale and a winter warmer. According to the brewery blog, it was “a reach-across-the-aisle creation.”

Another Colorado brewery, Oskar Blues, was the first to put craft beer in cans with its Dale’s Pale Ale in 2002, but more recently it produced Gubna Imperial IPA, which is a strong, highly hopped beer it bluntly calls a “hop grenade in a can.”

So without a beer to call his own, I decided my mission was to get a can of Gubna into Governor Shumlin’s hands. I would have two opportunities, as Lynn and I were going to both the Wednesday and Friday events.

We’ve been Shumlin supporters for quite some time, regularly returning him to the statehouse in the 90’s, where he eventually became President pro-tempore of the Senate.

Something strange happened in Vermont in 2002, when Republicans won the races for Governor and Lieutenant Governor. Shumlin’s loss to Lieutenant Governor Brian Dubie was, he thought, the end of his political career, and he was prepared to turn back to private life. That lasted until he returned to the Senate in 2006, when he was again selected to serve as the President pro-tempore.

Lynn, who served as the chair of the Windham County Democratic Committee in that period, kept pestering Shumlin to run for Governor. When he finally did, so did four other strong Democratic candidates. So first we sweated through a primary campaign (which ended in a Shumlin victory, but with the vote close enough to prompt a recount, which I took part in). Then Shumlin went up against Brian Dubie again, this time for the top spot.

The race was too close to call until the morning after election day, when Dubie conceded, and relief mixed with celebration.

Shumlin speaking at the Brattleboro Museum

It was all smiles and celebration Wednesday night at the Brattleboro Museum. Shumlin spoke briefly, mainly by way of saying thanks to his local supporters, and then he spent hours pressing the flesh and posing for pictures.

I finally had my chance, and held out the can of Gubna to him: “I’m going to present you with your first ethical dilemma, as to whether you can accept this gift or not.”

I also invoked Hickenlooper’s name–Shumlin had recently run into him at what he called “Baby Governors’ school,” a weekend seminar for Governor-elects led by their predecessors.

“Interesting guy,” said Shumlin. Then, having a laugh at the beer’s name, “Oh, I’ll absolutely take it.”

“It’s a strong one, so drink it carefully.”

I probably sounded more worried about how he would treat the beer than about how he would run the state government. Which I have no worries about at all.

It’s almost not fair to say that Gubna has a mammoth hop nose, since a prominent proboscis is one of Gov. Shumlin’s most quickly evident features–one he once actually employed as a silhouette on a campaign poster in 2002.

During the campaign last year Shumlin joked about a radio broadcaster who said he had won the primary by a nose: “If I’d won by my nose it would have been by a hell of a lot more than 197 votes.”

Nonetheless, the Gubna aroma is immense, citrusy, with a touch of sweet hay. Others might call this onion. The beer is made entirely with Summit hops; cruising the interwebs in search of information about the hop produces the usual mishmash of fact, fancy, misinformation and strongly held opinions, but it’s safe to say that many perceive an onion component when the hop is used too late in the boil. Others have suggested Gubna smells like garlic, marijuana, an unfinished pine dresser, nail polish, or a tropical fruit bowl.

A more berry like fruit aroma does come through as the beer warms a bit. If it never does warm up, you’re drinking it too fast for a 10% ABV brew. Pour this one into a snifter and take some time with it.

(Who’s working on the study that says 12 ounces of microbrewed beer in a can is polished off more quickly than the same beer poured from a bottle?)

One might expect the palate to be astringent, but it’s surprisingly caramel sweet, though a high-pitched hop bite lurks around the corner and lingers on with a wash of alcohol.

There was a new Governor but no Gubna at the Inaugural Ball Friday night, at the Sugarbush ski resort in Warren. It was all-Vermont night as it should have been, with Vermont beers, foods, and members from various groups around the state forged into the Vermont All-Star Band.

Gov. Shumlin dancing with his daughter, Olivia, at his Inaugural Ball

They earned the title–Dave Grippo, Brian McCarthy, Russ Lawton, Ray Paczowski, Bob Wagner, Lowell Thompson, D Davis and Jon Rogone were rocking and the dancing went on for hours. The covers were heavy on tunes by The Band and Bob Dylan, which suited us just fine.

The new Governor may be forced to do some budget cutting this year, which won’t be easy. But he demonstrated out on the dance floor that he sure can cut a rug. I may never find out if he liked the Gubna. Then again, this being Vermont, I just might.

But along with all the other celebrants at the ball, we knew the answer when the chorus of “Like a Rolling Stone” came around. How did it feel? It felt great.

Name: Gubna Imperial IPA
Brewer: Oskar Blues Brewery, Longmont, Colorado
Style: Double IPA
ABV: 10%
Availability: Year-round, 25 states
For More Information: oskarblues.com

In the middle of May, 1659, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony issued the following order:

For preventing disorders, arising in several places within this jurisdiction by reason of some still observing such festivals as were superstitiously kept in other communities, to the great dishonor of God and offense of others: it is therefore ordered by this court and the authority thereof that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, upon any such account as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shilling as a fine to the county.

The Puritans were concerned that the more bacchanalian aspects of medieval winter solstice celebrations were besmirching the Lord’s birthday, and it would be best to nip it all in the bud. The specter of the motherland, where Christmas revelers were wassailing–drinking spiced ales, mulled ciders and the like–wouldn’t do in the New World.

Luckily, it didn’t work, although the order amazingly stayed in effect until 1681. (If the law of the land today the sheer volume of five shilling fines would handily take care of our national debt problem.)

Whether the solstice, Christmas, Chanukah or New Year’s, we like to celebrate, and the beer world is ready to oblige. The proliferating number of holiday ales and winter warmers is up to the task of keeping everyone’s nose as red as a cherry.

Santa is not partial only to cookies and milk. In his tasty little volume, Christmas Beers (Universe Publishing, $19.95), author Don Russell unearths a 1959 letter to the big man found in the Rutland, Vermont Santa Claus mailbox: “Dear Santa: I’ll leave you a glass of ginger ale, and if you’re still thirsty, I could leave you two quarts of beer. Remember, my house is the one with the beer. Love, Cindy.”

Cindy may now be old enough to be collecting Social Security, but I hope Santa was good to her over the years. If she’s a beer fan, no worries. As Russell points out, what was once a trickle of holiday ales has become a virtual flood, all the more reason for merriment. And if ever a Christmas season gift seems to come pre-wrapped, brightly labeled big bottles of holiday beer are the ideal specimens. I’ve never known such an offering to be poorly received. I know (hint alert) I never tire of them.

Naturally, the joy of the season needn’t be confined to Christmas celebrants. The Shmaltz Brewing company’s annual Chanukah beer, Jewbulation, is from all accounts a powerhouse of an offering, but I haven’t been able to light one up yet.

Nor have I found the beer modeled after a Scottish suet fruit pudding from the Orkney Brewery, Clootie Dumpling. But there’s always next year.

We’ll consider a few festive brews over the next few weeks, with this six-pack for starters:

1. Our Special Ale (Anchor Brewing Co., San Francisco, CA, 5.5% ABV): In the U.S., Anchor revived the custom of brewing special holiday beers in 1975, annually varying the recipe and label. And now you can buy ‘em by the magnum. (anchorbrewing.com)

2. Santa’s Private Reserve (Rogue Brewing, Newport, OR, 6.3% ABV): One of the few beer bottles of use if the weather knocks the power out, thanks to glow-in-the-dark labels. There’s plenty of flavorful wattage inside, too, brewed with five different malts, three different hops, and a partridge in a pear tree. (rogue.com)

3. Fuller’s Vintage Ale 2010 (England; 8.5% ABV): The active yeasts in bottle-conditioned ales like the Fuller’s Vintage permits cellaring for five years or more, for those who can wait that long. Better plan, buy enough to chart the changes in the maturing beer from year to year. (fullers.co.uk)

4. Infinium (10.3% ABV): Fill the glass flutes with this collaboration between the Boston Beer Co. (of Samuel Adams fame) and Germany’s venerable Weihenstephan Brewery, which was ready for uncorking last month. It’s a beer, but the golden, fruity, spicy concoction is New Year’s Eve-worthy in its champagne-like character. (samadams.com)

5. Malheur Brut (Brouwerij De Landtsheer, Belgium; 11.0% ABV): The champagne of bottled beers is Miller Genuine Draft only in ad copy. This Belgian sparkler claims to have been the first real méthode champenoise beer in 2001. Put it on ice and power into the new year with its slightly stronger sibling, Malheur Dark Brut. (belukus.net)

6. Our Brewers Reserve Grand Cru (Sierra Nevada Brewing, Chico, CA; 9.2% ABV): This is the final offering in the year-long celebration of the brewery’s 30^th anniversary, and it is both a fond look back and a bold step forward. I’d say it is one beautiful beer, but it’s actually a blend of the flagship Pale Ale, the annual Celebration Ale, and some oak-aged Bigfoot Barleywine-Style Ale. Let the fireworks begin.

In shorter form, this piece was originally featured in the December 2010 Fairways + Greens Magazine, courtesy Madavor Media. To read the latest digital edition, click here.

Sure, I wish I’d been in Chico, California on Monday night, at the 30^th Anniversary Party Sierra Nevada Brewing was throwing in one of its warehouses–especially since the company had gone into the vaults for some of the 30 beers being offered, many never released to the public.*

But I’m at the Fairmount Turnberry Isle resort in Aventura, just north of Miami, the weather is perfect, I’ve already played two rounds of golf (albeit badly), on the Miller Course yesterday and the Soffit Course today, after the rigors of a Golf Performance Massage at the resort’s Willow Stream Spa.

So let’s be clear I’m not complaining.

The reason for the trip, besides beating myself up on the two courses, was to check out the resort’s new integrated fitness and instruction programs, aimed at making it a magnet for golfers looking to improve their bodies and their games. I’ll be writing this up for a magazine article a few months down the road so I can’t spill all the beans here, but I can say it looks like a pretty good bet.

Pete Bommarito analyzing a client

The resort has enlisted Pete Bommarito and Dr. Matthew Cooper and given them the playground of a gleaming 3,650-square-foot Willow Stream Spa fitness center. A huge list of professional athletes use Bommarito Performance Systems in their training, and Cooper’s USA Sports Therapy utilizes enzyme therapy to give visitors nutrition advice.

“We’re about performance,” said Bommarito, and as far as golf goes, “our goal is to help players reach their genetic maximum.”

Once one’s biomechanics are diagnosed and understood, the information can be trotted out to the new THEgolfacademy at Fairmont Turnberry Isle, where GOLF Magazine Top 100 Instructor Bill Forrest and his team have a full menu of game improvement offerings.

Christina Trammell

One team member is Christina Trammell. Someone tipped me off that Christina, once named a PGA of America Teacher of the Year, summers in Vermont. We quickly established that she’s then only about 40 minutes up the road from the center of my universe, at one of Vermont’s finest (if private) courses, the Ekwanok Country Club in Manchester. So naturally she also knows the Ekwanok assistant pro Zack Moore, who used to live right across the street from me.

Hiro Suzuki (left) and assistant golf pro Kevin Lamprich

Another serendipitous meeting was with resident golf professional Hiro Suzuki, who used to be the golf director for Robert Trent Jones, Sr. That meant he’s well acquainted with Roger Rulewich, long RTJ’s senior designer. In October I played in a tournament foursome with Roger at the Crumpin-Fox Club in Bernardston, Massachusetts, where the Rulewich & Fleury Golf Design firm is headquartered.

Rulewich was on hand when the two 18s were originally built here by the Jones firm back in the early ‘70s, when the property was known as the Turnberry Isle Yacht & Country Club. So the two tracks were pushing 35 when golfer/designer Raymond Floyd was given a $45 million budget to revamp them. The old South course was reopened as the Soffer Course in 2006 (named after the original developer of the property, Donald Soffer), and the North as the Miller course in 2007.

Aventura is thick with high-rise condominiums, yet Turnberry Isle somehow manages to create an air of splendid isolation within its 300 acres. Many of the holes of the two courses often play toward the distant edifices, but there’s a feeling of spaciousness and quiet broken only at regular daily intervals by crows fleeing or returning to the rookeries.

But I digress. To return to the subject in hand, I’d thought about making a local Florida brew the week’s spotlighted beer. The resort serves two, both made by the Florida Beer Company in Melbourne. Despite its name, the Hurricane Reef Caribbean Style Pilsner didn’t rock my boat. While it’s a decent all-malt lager with faint Hallautau hopping, a beer aspiring to taste like a Caribbean pilsner isn’t aiming real high.

At a nice sampler lunch at the Cascada Grille, which also serves as the 19^th hole for golfers, I had the Key West Sunset Ale, a mild amber lager that was a step up, but not a big one.

So I went back to the plan of choosing Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, the company’s flagship beer, the very first bottle of which made its way through the rudimentary brewhouse on November 15, 1980.

The story goes that the brewery founders, Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi, weren’t wildly satisfied with the first batch, however, and they tossed it out. Then the second.  Then the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth.  The beer finally went to market in 1981, and the company has since thrived, with Grossman still at the helm (Camusi bowed out in 1998) and as inventive as ever, as the special 30^th anniversary releases have shown.

My wife and I were married only two months before that first bottle came off the line. The wedding I remember well, but I can’t recall when I had my first Sierra Nevada Pale Ale–it was years before the beer made its way to the east coast. But there’s little doubt that I was blown away by its rich malt character and its intense Cascade hoppiness. When and if there’s ever a Beer Hall of Fame, the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is a shoo-in, first ballot, unanimous. Its importance in modern beer history, along with Anchor Steam Beer, cannot be overstated. The company may have started out shaky with no certain success in sight, but it gradually became a beacon other craft brewers followed, a foundation that others built upon.

But there’s nothing institutional about the beer. It’s still poetry in a pint glass, now the single highest-selling craft beer in the U.S., racking up $50,426,000 in sales in 2009.

So it was something of a shock to walk into the resort’s swanky Michael Mina Bourbon Steak restaurant last night and not find any Sierra Nevada on the beer menu! I was forced to quickly improvise with four Chimay Whites and a mouth-watering filet mignon.

Not to worry. Tonight a few of us wandered over to the nearby Village at Gulfstream Park, a trendy collection of shops, restaurants and nightclubs that opened in February, and grabbed a table at Yard House.

A chain that began in California in 1996, Yard House has now moved into ten states; there are two other Florida locations in Coral Gables and Palm Beach Gardens. They all have huge oval bars with over 120 beer taps (over 220 in some locations). And while they may not be offering barrel samples from the latest oak-aged sour hidden in the cellar, there’s pretty much something for every beer taste here, with a mild regional bias.

The bar at Yard House

Indeed, I had my eye on a Cigar City Maduro Oatmeal Brown from the Tampa brewery I’ve been hearing about. But first things first. I ordered up a pint of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and saluted accordingly, looking west, and across the years.

Name: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale
Brewer: Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, Chico, California
Style: American Pale Ale
ABV: 5.6%
Availability: Nationwide, year-round
For More Information: sierranevada.com

*According to the company website, this was the full list of beers being poured at the 30^th anniversary party:
2009 Bigfoot
2010 Bigfoot
20th Street Ale
Almond Marzen
Barrel Aged Life & Limb
Beer Camp #6 (Russian Imperial Stout)
Belgian Trippel
Best Bitter
Celebration Ale
Draft Pale Ale
Estate Homegrown Ale
Hell Raiser
Hopsichord
Hoptimum
Kellerweis
Knightro
Kolsch
Northern Hemisphere Harvest Ale
Old Chico Crystal Wheat
Pilsner
Porter
Pro-Am Audition
Saison Versa
Saison Vice
Sierra 30 – Charlie, Fred and Ken’s Bock
Sierra 30 – Fritz and Ken’s Ale
Sierra 30 – Jack and Ken’s Ale
Sierra 30 – Our Brewers Reserve
Stein Altbier
Stout
Torpedo
Tumbler
Westnatte Lupulus
Wood Aged Porter
Writer’s Block

When in Pennsylvania, drink Keystone State beers. My friend and MOTO Research Team member Prentiss Smith was afraid there wouldn’t be any suitable brews on hand for me when we arrived Friday night for the opening bash in the weekend festivities celebrating the marriage of his son, Prentiss Smith Jr., to Lauren Katz, so he went out and somehow managed to score a miscellaneous six-pack of local beers. This was no easy task, considering the state’s bizarre laws, which usually require buying beer a case at a time.

The rehearsal dinner was as sumptuous a gala as many weddings themselves, a Mexican-themed evening at the home of the bride-to-be’s parents, Connie and Sam Katz in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia.

Sam Katz made three unsuccessful runs for Mayor of Philadelphia, each time as a Republican, though he began his political life as a Democrat. He switched parties more to gain a place on the ballot than because his convictions had changed, and the rumor is afloat that he is now contemplating another shot at the post, this time as a registered Democrat. But he gamely refrained from discussing politics during the wedding weekend.

The only hitch in the program was that recent torrential rains had created massive traffic tie-ups, and a bus bringing most of the out-of-town guests from a downtown hotel–normally a short ride–took about an hour and a half, delaying the festivities and the arrival of the prized six-pack. But I dallied pleasantly enough with the Negra Modelo on hand.

Prentiss had chosen wisely, with beers from the Lancaster Brewing Company, Victory, Yards, and Stoudts. With a massive cold, I figured I’d be lucky to taste anything, so I made my choices based on whimsy and bottle art. Who could resist something called Amish Four Grain Pale Ale? The label suggested, perhaps redundantly, that this Lancaster Brewing Company beer was “Brewed Naturally–Without Preservatives.” It said nothing about the use of electricity or distribution of the beer via motor vehicles.

The beer does include oats, rye and malted wheat along with malted barley, comes in at 5.3% ABV, is a deep copper, and I was able to discern a toasty character, and some floral hop aroma thanks to dry-hopping with Saaz hops.

Lancaster was home to our fifteenth and, some say, worst President, James Buchanan. I’m halfway through his biography, as I continue on in my self-assigned Presidential reading project. This one, by Philip S. Klein, is not badly written, but I’m still yearning to get to the next President–it’s been a bit of dry run of late with Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce and Buchanan in numbing sequence.

Perhaps with that in mind, my next choice was one of Yards Brewing Company’s Ales of the Revolution, General Washington’s Tavern Porter. The others in the series are Poor Richard’s Tavern Spruce Ale and Thomas Jefferson’s Tavern Ale, all three said to be based on recipes our founding drinkers used themselves to concoct brews, though whether George, Ben and Tommy did any of the actual brewing themselves is open to historical debate.

The Tavern Porter label claims the General had the recipe brewed, “to satisfy his thirsty field officers,” but there’s no debating that it’s a sturdy dark pleasure, coming in at 7% ABV, with a strong hint of the molasses used in the brewing.

Prentiss Smith Jr. and Lauren Katz, the night before their wedding

We stayed with old friends Will Doak and Andrea Botts, who live appealingly close to Downingtown, home of the Victory Brewing Company. As mentioned in the entry for Victory’s Golden Monkey back at TAP Beer of the Week 10, Will and Andrea are accomplished beer nuts in their own right, so there was no question that we’d be visiting the brewery on Sunday.

It turned out that Victory was sponsoring a fall festival that day right in downtown Downingtown, packing the streets with food and craft booths, and the new Victory Brewpub On Wheels, basically a mammoth rolling beer dispenser. The B.P.O.W. is the subject of the company’s first-ever commercial, and a funny one at that, showing what might happen if the B.P.O.W. made the rounds of the neighborhood like an ice cream truck.

The cast of the commercial is made up of employees or friends of the brewery, including co-founder and owner Bill Covaleski, playing the crucial part of Man w/Suitcase.

Bill was trying to direct some of the human traffic in the streets the day of the festival, and I reintroduced myself as the guy he sat with in the Flat Street Pub one night during the Brattleboro Brewers Festival in May. No need–he even remembered I was drinking Victory Hop Devil that night, an impressive feat of suds recall.

The overflow street crowd had the same idea we did–go over to the brewery and brewpub. So we had to wait a bit for a bite and some beers, but that gave us time to choose our sampler beers from the bulging list available.

Once home, I decided it was time to tackle the V-12 my brother gave me back in January. If the Golden Monkey is a triple, the V-12 is a quadruple or maybe a quintuple. It’s big.

But considering the 12% ABV at bottling (it’s liable to keep climbing as a bottle-conditioned beer), it goes down like the Monkey–all too smoothly, with warmth but little alcoholic burn. There’s a vigorous malt backbone and an energetic play of flavors–spicy, fruity, yeasty. I’m sure I was lucky in that I had help drinking it, but it was disappointing nonetheless when I poured out the last of it.

The label noted I had a March 2, 2009 bottling, with the recommendation that I drink it before five years had elapsed. Done.

Name: V-12
Brewer: Victory Brewing Company, Downingtown, PA
Style: Belgian Quadruple
ABV: 12%
Availability: Year-round, 30 states
For More Information: victorybeer.com

But Oktoberfest is also a beer style, more accurately called Märzen, that is perfect for autumn days–a little on the fuller-bodied side, with a touch more malt and color than pale summer beers, just enough to complement what is going on outside–those color-turning leaves, that crisp snap in the air, the late harvest crops rolling in. Then there’s the Fall sports calendar, as stuffed as a Halloween trick-or-treat bag.  As we did with our Summertime Brews entry, here’s a lively seasonal six-pack:

1) Spaten Oktoberfest (Germany; 5.9% ABV–alcohol by volume): Though preferably served in liter mugs by busty fräuleins, this is the original Märzen beer (hence, Ur-Märzen), introduced by Spaten in 1872, brewed in March and then conditioned in ice-filled caves until Oktoberfest. Like many Munich beers it is malt-accented, amber, if now brewed more for foreign consumption than German, where Oktoberfest beers have gradually become lighter-bodied. We can deal with it. (spatenusa.com)

2) Goose Island Harvest Ale (Chicago, IL; 5.7%): President Obama recently touted Goose Island’s 312 Urban Wheat Ale, but for autumn he’d do better with this copper-colored beauty made with all-American Cascade hops and midwest malts, that brewmaster Greg Hall says, “Has enough body and richness to be a perfect match with richer foods–roast meats, game, turkey.” Game on. (gooseisland.com)

3) Pumpkin Imperial Spruce Stout (Rock Art Brewery, Morrisville, VT; 8%): Part of owner/brewer Matt Nadeau’s Extreme Beer series is this interpretation of a colonial-style beer in a full-bodied stout: “I haven’t used any pumpkin pie spices, but like the early settlers used pumpkin for added starch, as well as spruce tips harvested in the spring for flavor and bittering along with the hops.” (rockartbrewery.com)

4) Saison de Silly (Brasserie de Silly, Belgium; 5.5%): If temperatures spike during Indian Summer, there’s nothing silly about this tart refresher from French-speaking Belgium.
Saisons were traditionally made for Wallonian farmhands, and the brewer at Silly makes it the old-fashioned way, blending a year-old batch of the beer with a fresh brew and then storing it away another year for conditioning.

5) Indian Brown Ale (Dogfish Head, Milton, DE; 7.2%): In the kaleidoscope of innovative brews from Dogfish founder Sam Calagione, the Brown is another intriguing hybrid, with the malty character of a Scotch Ale, the hoppiness of an IPA, and the strength of an American Brown. We took an earlier and more extended look at this beer here. (dogfish.com)

6) Tumbler Autumn Brown Ale (Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., Chico, CA; 5.5%): Any new offering from this pioneering brewery is worth a try, so I’m recommending this one sight unseen or as yet tasted. Sue me. But not unless you try what is likely to become a seasonal regular.

It’s made with fresh malts straight from the roasting kilns, some of them smoked–summoning, perhaps, the days you were actually allowed to burn those piles of raked-up leaves. (sierranevada.com)

In slightly different form, this piece was originally featured in the October 2010 Fairways + Greens Magazine, courtesy Madavor Media. To read the latest digital edition, click here.

As the days shrink and afternoon tee times are moved up to get the round in before twilight, there’s no denying another summer has burned off and harvest time has come, with the leaf rule in full effect. Enjoy the brisk approach of fall; it’s no time for dark moods, but somewhat darker beers may well be in order. Rather than bobbing for apples at the Halloween party, fill that metal tub with ice and stock some richly malty lagers and ales for autumn.

There’s a solid 200-year-old precedent for this. Oktoberfest, the party, began in Munich in 1810 as a celebration of the marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig I and Princess Therese. It has been going strong ever since, always beginning in mid-September, a fortnight before the first Sunday in October. It always begins the same way, with the Lord Mayor of Munich tapping the first keg of beer at noon. But this year’s anniversary is being called a Jubilee Year, and so festivals-goers will have one extra day to cram in as much sausage and pigs’ knuckles as possible.

Oktoberfest, the beer, is actually a style called Märzen (or Vienna lager), that no self-respecting former apple-bobbing tub should be without. So here are some suggestions, in good company with other seasonal picks. Some are more regional than others, but most should be widely available in better beer shops:

Ayinger Oktober Fest-Märzen (Germany, 5.6% ABV (Alcohol by volume), merchantduvin.com) In pre-refrigeration days of the mid-19^th century Bavarian brewers began producing full-bodied, malty beers in March (Märzen) and then lagering them in cool caves until it was time to celebrate Oktoberfest. The style has existed ever since, and this interpretation from the town of Aying represents exporting at its best.

Rahr’s Oktoberfest Celebration Lager (Rahr & Sons Brewing Company, Texas, 5.5% ABV, rahrbrewing.com) A snow-induced roof collapse this past winter has slowed down but not stopped Fritz Rahr of Fort Worth, who decided to sponsor a September 25 Rahr Oktoberfest 5K Run to benefit the local Habitat for Humanity. Lederhosen race togs are optional, but the post-race beverage should be interesting.

Hoptober Golden Ale (New Belgium Brewing, Colorado, 6% ABV, newbelgium.com) A bit lighter in profile if not strength is this August through October seasonal from the makers of Fat Tire, packed with barley and wheat malts as well as oats and rye. Five different hops contribute a citrus note. Those closer to Colorado can look for the Fall Wild Ale from the Lips of Faith series, a malty dubbel at 8.5% ABV spiced with schisandra berries.

Harvest Ale (Long Trail Brewing Company, Vermont, 4.4% ABV, longtrail.com) It’s an apt year for the beers from Long Trail, since its namesake, the oldest long-distance hiking trail in the U.S. is now celebrating its centennial year, although work continued on the 273-mile Vermont Long Trail until 1930. Running from the Massachusetts line to the Canadian border, the Trail meets up with the Appalachian Trail for 100 miles, and just thinking about all that walking deserves a few bottles of this malty brown ale tribute.

Poperings Hommel Ale (Brouwerij Van Eecke, Belgium, 7.5% ABV, brouwerijvaneecke.tk) Don’t let the pale golden color of this ale fool you; it packs a wallop, and is loaded with about twice the bitterness of other Belgian beers, which are not big on hops. But the city of Poperinge was once the hop capital of the country, and still has a gala hop festival every three years. Tickets still available for the 2011 blowout.

Pumpkinhead Ale (Shipyard Brewing Co., Maine, 5.1% ABV, shipyard.com) What would the fall be without a pumpkin beer? Shipyard has two, the more widely available Pumpkinhead wheat beer replete with pumpkin pie spices, and the Smashed Pumpkin in the Pugsley Signature Series (named after brewmaster Alan Pugsley). The latter is a bigger, sipping beer at 9% ABV, with subtler spice flavors. Visitors to the Shipyard gift shop in Portland can get Smashed in a year-old cellar-aged limited edition.

Saison Dupont Vieille Provision (Brasserie Dupont, Belgium, 6.5% ABV, brasserie-dupont.com) Okay, this is a bit of a holdover from summer, but saisons are fine year-round refreshers, fruity and dry, and this corked beauty was dubbed a world classic by the late, great British beer writer Michael Jackson. Concocted in a Belgian farmhouse brewery and conditioned in the bottle, Saison Dupont will cellar well and grace any dinner table, matching nicely with fish or fowl.

Double Bastard Ale (Stone Brewing Co., California; 10.5% ABV; stonebrew.com) “Warning: Double Bastard Ale is not to be wasted on the tentative or weak.” It’s tough to compete with the copy on the Stone beer labels, but this hop monster takes the brewery’s popular Arrogant Bastard Ale one arrogant step beyond. It will appear November 1, just in time for San Diego Beer Week, which also goes a step beyond by lasting ten days, November 5-14.

Ommegang Zuur (Brewery Ommegang, New York, 6% ABV, ommegang.com) Baseball’s Fall Classic is threatening to linger into winter, and one can hope the same for this offering from Ommegang, a Belgian-owned brewery as American as cherry pie, since it’s in Cooperstown, home of the Hall of Fame. The Zuur is a collaboration, blending two beers from Liefman’s in Belgium including a kriek (beer with cherries), resulting in a Flemish Sour Brown ale with a cherry on top. Bring on the pies!

Well, it was hard not to be happy–the weather was beautiful and so was the bride, everything went off without a hitch (except for the conjoining couple), and the site was the Holyoke Merry-Go-Round at the Heritage State Park in Massachusetts. Shortly after the ceremony was over, the carousel rides began.

Having been given the portfolio for beer for the nuptials, I was as fearful of running out as my wife was of running out of food at the rehearsal party she was cooking for. Lynn is of Italian descent, so her irrational fears are ingrown. I had only my credentials as Minister of Beer on the line to prod me into grossly overestimating just how much drinking was going to be done.

How much beer? was actually the second question, following What kind of beer? Not everyone is a beer snob like me, or as much of a hophead. At a local distributor Lynn had run across a great deal for mixed cases of Belgian beers, including Leffe Blonde, Hoegaarden White and Stella Artois, a mix that could have pleased anybody. She cursed herself for not buying ten cases on the spot, because when I called a few days later the deal was off the table for the simple reason that all the beer was gone.

I was cursing myself because I had somehow frittered away the time to brew a beer for the wedding. I had been thinking: Let’s see, if I try a test batch two months before the wedding, I’ll still have time to make one for the day itself. Then it was: Okay, forget the test batch, I still have three weeks to produce a drinkable ale. Finally, I had to admit there was no way to put a Prothalamion Ale on the tables in a week’s time.

I brewed over 100 batches of beer in my day, but that day was quite awhile back. The last batch of beer I brewed was for the wedding of my son, Mike, to Carline, and they now have three children, the oldest (Nate the Great) now nine. The label, as almost all of my beer labels, was created by Jen. (For those wondering, a prothalamion is a nuptial song, or poem, as is an epithalamium.)

When I finally came to grips with that bungle, I set my mind on bringing five gallon logs or a half-barrel keg (15 gallons) to the wedding, and felt I didn’t have to look much further than McNeill’s in Brattleboro, just down the road a piece.

Ray makes a beer once called Big-Nosed Blonde, now called Blonde Bombshell. I’m not being uncharitable (especially since Jennifer herself mentioned it), to say that either name might have applied. Both Jen and her mother have proud Roman noses. And Jen was never more of a blond bombshell than on her wedding day.

The only problem was that Ray didn’t have any in the pipeline. His ESB would be too much of a hop attack for many; I had to go a little more middle of the road. He gave me a bottle of Ruby Ale to try to see if I might want to go with that, but I settled on a five gallon log of the Dead Horse IPA for the Friday night rehearsal dinner, and a keg of the Firehouse Amber for the post-wedding festivities.

Ray had told me, “In a perfect world, there will be 40 pints in a five-gallon log, and 128 in a keg.” His caveat–that it’s not a perfect world–led me to the error of bringing some more bottled beer to the rehearsal party and, having scored a case of Blonde Bombshell bombers at the eleventh hour, putting a bottle of that on each table at the wedding.

In short, for fewer than 80 people, there was no lack of beer. What there was, after the last merry-go-round ride, was an ongoing no lack of beer.

Mike with the Dead Horse IPA

Mike had taken the Dead Horse to his hotel room on Friday night, and I gather he and my nephew, Doug, had a good go at it. But there was still plenty left over.

Setting them up from the everlasting keg

The keg situation was even more ridiculous. Though I was personally pumping some out after the (lovely) ceremony, I still needed help lifting the thing into the car at the end of the night, and used a luggage trolley to get it up to Room 317 in the hotel.

“Come get a beer in Room 317,” was the mantra for the night, and after a rather lengthy session in the hotel bar a few hardy souls did, until Lynn kicked them out so we could go to sleep.

I had until the end of the week to return all the beer hardware to Ray, but what about all the software–the leftover beer? Our old friends Joan Rockwell and Eric Singer stayed with us for three days after the wedding, and Eric and I had our share, along with leftover sausage and peppers we happily ate for three days running. Nephew Chris Allen came over to fill a few pitchers. But it was the softball team that really helped, since I took the keg to both days of a state tournament we played in.

Particularly after we were eliminated, the Mocha Joes (and members of a few other stray teams), put a good dent in the gallonage. The only requirement for filling one’s glass was to toast Jen and Glenn, whose marriage should now be heartily well-blessed.

The bride and groom, having fun

Name: Firehouse Amber
Brewer: McNeill’s Brewery, Brattleboro, Vermont
Style: Amber ale
ABV: 5.5%
Availability: VT, NH, MA, NY
For More Information: mcneillsbrewery.com

Dancing with the bride

The brewery can be so prolific because it is really two breweries, the original Boston plant that opened in 1987, and the Windsor, Vermont plant it purchased in 2000 from the expired Catamount.

It was a sad day for Vermonters when Catamount went belly-up; it was one of the earliest and best of the New England craft breweries.  Many of us still pine for a Catamount Porter. Harpoon made what seemed like a half-hearted attempt to keep the Catamount name alive for awhile.  But it was a candle in the wind.

Harpoon Riverbend Taps

That said, Harpoon is now into its third decade, making it one of the venerable ancients of the craft brewing world.  With the Windsor plant, locals pretty much consider it a Vermont brewery now, particularly with the Harpoon Riverbend Taps and Beer Garden on hand, adding a brewpub-like menu and atmosphere onto a brewery visit.

Harpoon is our penultimate featured brewer leading up to the May 22 Brattleboro Brewers Festival.  It will certainly be pouring the flagship beer, Harpoon IPA, a real go-to selection that often saves the day (or night) whenever other beer choices are limited (a slot once likely to be reserved for Sam Adams Boston Lager).  It’s a solid Cascade hop-accented IPA, not too far over the top, easy to find and a pleasure to drink.

But why stop there with so much choice?  Harpoon’s other beers fall into a variety of categories–UFOs (Unfiltered Offerings), seasonals, and two limited edition series, the Leviathans and the 100-Barrel beers.

I’ve been dipping into each category, a little promiscuous myself.  The UFO Pale Ale has been available since September and is about to vanish, more’s the pity, but it shall return.

The Leviathan series is self-evidently about big beers, all upwards of 9% ABV, in 12-ounce bottle four packs.  The Imperial IPA comes in at 10% ABV and reaches 122 IBUs with its massive Amarillo, Chinook, Centennial and Simcoe hopping.  Wisely, the company has made this a year-round offering.

The Big Bohemian Pilsner is just out and will probably be poured at the Festival.  It’s a tasty beer, with a grassy nose, a pleasing hops and malt blend, a bit metallic and harsh on the palette, with a lingering sweetness giving way to alcoholic warmth.

It’s hard to know exactly what Harpoon was aiming at here–or, for that matter, any brewer putting out an Imperial Pilsner, something of an ersatz style.  The beer is strong enough for an Eisbock, and reminiscent of a strong golden Belgian ale.  But it’s a lager, of course, loaded as a Bohemian Pilsner should be with Czech Saaz hops.  But the hops are less evident than the viscous malt profile.  Tasty, as I say, but puzzling in the same sense as a remake of a classic movie–why go to all the trouble?

On the other hand, going to the trouble seems the key to the 100-Barrel Series, wherein every couple of months Harpoon gives its brewers a free hand to dream up, develop and brew a 100 barrels-worth creation.  The brewer’s signature is on the label, the beer lasts as long as it lasts, and then it’s on to the next one.

The program began in May 2003 with an Oatmeal Stout that lasted three months, and has since plowed through some mighty interesting beers on its way to the 31st iteration, not that I’ve had them all: I’ve learned, once I see one, not to wait until my next trip to the store to buy it; it may well no longer be there.  Mighty sorry I missed Session 29, a Ginger Wheat.

But I did enjoy Session 30, the Island Creek Oyster Stout.  Dry stouts are classic accompaniments to oysters, which is certainly the idea behind the Oyster Stout from Marston’s in England, the only one I believe I’d ever had up until now.  There are no oysters in Marston’s Oyster Stout; it’s less an ingredient and more a suggestion.  (There was no question in the oyster shooter I once had–which was a raw oyster floating in a glass of Guinness.)

But in Katie Tame’s Harpoon version, several hundred Duxbury Bay oysters from the Island Creek Oysters farm were shucked and added right to the brewpot. Katie’s theory was that oysters would add some protein to the beer and hence a bit more head retention. Other brewers on the bandwagon have been throwing in whole shells or just the shells, which would probably assist in fining. No one seems to be mentioning the potential aphrodisiacal qualities of the style.

Oysters

But the beers are now surfacing everywhere.  From New Jersey, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Oregon, respectively, come Flying Fish Exit 1 Bayshore Oyster Stout, Fisherman’s Oyster Stout, Moonestone Stout and Upright Oyster Stout.  (Well, maybe the latter is a stimulative comment.)

From further afield in Toronto, England, Ireland and New Zealand come Patrick’s Oyster Stout, Gadds’ Black Pearl Oyster Stout, Porterhouse Oyster Stout and Three Boys Oyster Stout.  Presumably these are only some of the oyster stouts in the brewing seas, and I’ve even heard of one mussel stout from Australia.

Mussels I like.  I’ll slide a raw oyster down now and again, but I’m no great fan.  Depends how much nerve is mustered at the moment for gulping down a grayish, wet, phlegmatic blob. The odds improve if I have a stout in hand.

The combined packaging of Harpoon’s offering requires no nerve whatsoever.  It’s a pleasing stout with a toasty brown head indeed, opaque in the glass, with a roasted malt, coffee and chocolate nose and flavor, though hardly overpowering in any way.  There’s an unmistakable mineral note that one is naturally tempted to call briny.  So I’ll call it briny.  But in truth, the oysters in most oyster stouts are virtually undetectable.

The 31st 100-Barrel entry is the Single Hop ESB brewed by Charlie Cummings, and in its own way as adventurous as an oyster stout, since the hop is Delta, never before used in a commercial beer according to Harpoon.  A new strain from Hopsteiner, Delta is said to be a cross between Fuggle and Cascade.

My guess is that the Fuggle qualities dominate, since the aroma is more woody and piney than citrusy.  The aroma hops are backed up by a firm malt character, but the initial flavor impression is of a sharp hop bite.

The beer tended to thin out when I first served it, too chilled.  Letting this one warm up a few degrees decidedly brings the beer to greater life, releasing more aromatics and malt character.   Still, it’s not a beer that will knock anyone over, and would probably serve well as a flavorful refresher on a warm day, not that we’ve had too many of those in Vermont of late.

Anyone reading this before May 12 can go to the Harpoon website at noon (EDT) to hear some live chat about the beer with the brewer and Michael Sutton of Hopsteiner.  Otherwise, just drink the beer, while there’s still time.

Name: Harpoon 100-Barrel Island Creek Oyster Stout, Single Hop ESB
Brewer: Harpoon Brewery; Boston, Massachusetts; Windsor, Vermont
Style: Oyster Stout, ESB
ABV: 5.5%, 5.8%
Availability: Stout since February, ESB since April, until they run out, in about 25 states
For More Information: harpoonbrewery.com

They’re largely content to stand on the cider’s virtue’s alone, and ciders will definitely have a presence at the May 22 Brattleboro Brewers Fest–Farnum Hill of New Hampshire and J.K. Scrumpy from Michigan are scheduled to appear, and as our tenth featured company leading up to the day, Woodchuck, the largest selling U.S. cider maker.

The Vermont cidery started out humbly enough in 1991 in Proctorville, with Greg Failing, creator of the original recipe, topping off bottles by hand with a turkey baster. The current Middlebury plant is now a major player in the beverage world, turkey basters long ago replaced. But not replaced has been Failing, who remains the cider maker to this day. He began his fermentable life as a winemaker in upstate New York but began making apple wines in Vermont in 1986.

Five years later, Failing’s recipe for Woodchuck Amber Cider hit the market. (For those not in the know, a Woodchuck is slang for a native Vermonter, versus carpetbaggers like myself, known as Flatlanders.) Another Failing blend, Dark & Dry, is now known as 802, for Vermont’s area code.

The 802 was shipped off to the Great American Beer Festival in 1994, and judges couldn’t figure out where to place it into any of the regular beer categories. But in those earlier days of GABF there was a popular vote People’s Choice Award, and the Dark & Dry brought that trophy home to Vermont, beating every beer at the festival.

Cider doesn’t beat beer for me; I’m not a big fan for two simple reasons–they’re generally too sweet for my palate, and as long as I’m drinking something I’d just as soon have a beer, thanks.

Sampling three Woodchuck products this week, I found the flagship brand, Woodchuck Amber, does little to sway me for just that reason–too sweet for me. But the Granny Smith offering is a dryer, and therefore more palatable blend that many a beer (or wine) drinker could probably cozy up to.

Of the three I most enjoyed the limited release Summer Cider, with a bit more tartness to balance the sweet, and that agreeable “hint of blueberry” promised on the packaging. My wife actually thought the flavor was closer to peaches and pears than blueberries, but it’s ripe and juicy fruit either way.

The aroma and flavor actually reminded me of hard candy bon-bons, the kind with a soft fruity center, which I happen to like. And I liked this, too.

Name: Woodchuck Draft Ciders
Brewer: Green Mountain Beverage, Middlebury, Vermont
Style: Hard Cider
ABV: 5%
Availability: Year-round plus seasonals, nationwide (Hawaii excepted)
For More Information: woodchuck.com

And if ever there were two breweries that seemed simpatico, these genre-busters are high on the list. Both seem intent on breaking down barriers, whether in terms of brewing, marketing or established beer styles.

BrewDog is notorious for brewing the world’s strongest beer, Tactical Nuclear Penguin, which came in at an astounding 32% ABV. This blew Samuel Adams Utopias out of the water. The Boston brewery had claimed the record at 27% with the 2009 vintage of Utopias, packaged in a bottle that looks like a mini-copper brewkettle and selling for (at least) $100.

But then in February of this year Schorschbräu in Gunsenhausen, Germany, had the gall to brew a Schorsch Bock, at 40%.

BrewDog partners James Watt and Martin Dickie considered this a shot across the bow, and soon responded with Sink the Bismark at 41%, coming soon to a gas station near you.

There’s also a pretty funny video about all this on the BrewDog website and the beer arms race may not be over soon, so stay tuned.

King Baasha of Israel

I’ll have more to say on Stone down the road, since I’m visiting the brewery in San Diego in June, but it’s fairly well-known nationwide these days, with the in-your-face Arrogant Bastard Ale, a beer so hoppy the label even says, “You probably won’t like this beer.” Actually, everyone seems to love it, even if they’re not worthy enough to drink it.

The limited release collaboration brew was made in Scotland, and there’s a video about this as well (both BrewDog and Stone are master marketers), chronicling some of the outsized fun the principals clearly had in the process. No one has particularly come clean on what Bashah actually stands for, although one blogsite speculated that it meant “King,” after the ancient King Baasha of Israel.

Stone co-founder Greg Koch (pronounced Cook) seemed to debunk this theory when he commented on another blog that the name wasn’t a word at all, but an acronym. This was as far as he took it, leading one reader to suggest it stood for “Black as Shit, Hoppy as Hell.”

It is all of that, with a quintet of exotic hops in the mix–Hercules, Magnum, Warrior, Centennial and Amarillo. Beyond that it’s hard to judge on any known stylistic spectrum–probably just the way these breweries like it–since I don’t really know of any other Black Belgian Style Double India Pale Ales. It could just as easily been called a WTF? Beer, except that that name was more or less covered in March by Lagunitas, with its seasonal “Malty, Robust, Jobless Recovery Ale” called Wilco Tango Foxtrot.

One thing Bashah does not seem to have much of is any Belgian character, although it was surely made with a Belgian yeast. It may be that it’s just overwhelmed by other characteristics, rare as it might be for yeast to take a back seat.

At 8.6% ABV Bashah is like a beer with training wheels for BrewDog and Stone, but it packs a punch nonetheless. The brew pours with a thick tan collar, is a deep mahogany, and gives off aromas of a booze-soaked fruitcake. Then the hops come rushing on, along with a touch of cedar in the nose.

The flavor–bitter chocolate, black malt, molasses, licorice, all totally involving. There’s an extremely bitter finish which turns puckering and somewhat unpleasantly chalky. But I bought two bottles of this high-priced number, and no matter what it’s called, I have to say I’m looking forward to Round Two.

Would that I could look forward to what will be an even more limited release of an already limited release, aged in whisky casks and spiked with blackberries, tayberries and black raspberries. This version should be released sometime in June, but I have doubts whether it will even make it across the pond.  If you see any bottles with this label (above), grab them.

Name: Bashah
Brewer: BrewDog, Fraserburgh, Scotland; Stone Brewing Co., San Diego, California
Style: Well, it’s called a Black Belgian-Style Double India Pale Ale.
ABV: 8.6%
Availability: Good luck; about 14 states
For More Information: brewdog.com; stonebrew.com

Ray McNeill and cello

Will Ray McNeill play the cello at the May 22 Brattleboro Brewers Festival? With Ray, you never quite know. He’s a classically-trained cellist, but given to wearing t-shirts emblazoned with his motto, “Beer is the reason I get up each afternoon.”

Ray, his pub, his beers, are all indispensable institutions in Brattleboro, Vermont, all trailing colorful histories. The pub is a no nonsense, funky and unpretentious hall usually replete with students and a noisy mixed crowd reveling at long tables or kibitzing by the dart boards. Ray has owned the bar for over 20 years now, from its first incarnation as Three Dollar Dewey’s on South Main Street, to its current location in the old Elliot Street firehouse, which he moved into in the summer of 1990. Brewing began the following year, after Ray did an internship at the late and lamented Vermont micro, Catamount.

In the early years, some of the beers were as wild as Ray’s tied-dyed fashions, since toned down. But the range of beer styles was and remains a hallmark. There are usually about a dozen McNeill recipes on tap, including a few cask-conditioned ales, many of which have won regional, national and international awards, not to mention sweetly scenting the air of the great metropolis of Brattleboro (actually a town of about 12,500), with malt aromas on brewing days.

When the town built a parking garage near the Elliot Street facility it literally cast a long shadow over the brewhouse, cutting off the passive heat and playing havoc with production for a time. Ray solved that by moving the bottled brewing operations into larger facilities out on Route 5, although he said starting that up was a nightmare: “Whatever could go wrong did go wrong.”

McNeill’s bomber bottles were missing from local shelves for a mournfully long time, but all is well once again, and production has increased; McNeill’s fancifully named and labeled beers (including Blonde Bombshell, Dead Horse IPA, Pullman’s Porter, Professor Brewhead’s Brown Ale and my go-to favorite, McNeill’s ESB) can now be found in six states. Sales have recently begun in New York City and according to Ray are going like wildfire, exceeding the combined sales for the beer in the other five states where it’s available.

Ray’s relatively new Warlord, the fifth in our imaginary 12-pack from brewers represented at the festival, will be poured that day, as will a special beer brewed especially for the occasion. “We haven’t started brewing that one yet, but it may well be a pale ale with Amarillo hops for bittering, finishing and dry-hopping.”

The Warlord uses equal parts of Chinook, Cascade and Centennial to balance a rich malt character. Indeed, the beer is sweet, not unlike a barleywine in character, although probably too bitter for that style, Ray said. Indeed, it’s so hoppy that it makes me sneeze every time I initially take a sip. But that assault past, I settle down for the ride, which turns out to be smooth and satisfying. It should pair nicely with a Bach unaccompanied suite for cello.

Name: Warlord
Brewer: McNeill’s Brewery, Brattleboro, Vermont
Style: Imperial IPA
ABV: 8.5%
Availability:  VT, NH, MA, RI, TN (east), NY
For More Information: mcneillsbrewery.com

There are more and more of them, because the world of brewing has become one of wild experimentation, and my tasting was one attempt to satisfy thirsty curiosity.  The Strangebrew part was to cover the angle of beers with stuff in ‘em, be the extra ingredients fruit, herbs, flavors from wood barrel aging, chocolate, maple syrup, whatever, as long as it was no-holds-barred brewing.

Brooklyn Brewery obliged with a new series of Belgian-inspired ales, Local 1 and Local 2, the former a strong pale ale, the latter a strong dark ale.

Though it might sound like the beers are inspired by “On the Waterfront” or the AFL-CIO, the labels make the subway line reference plain.  Whatever the allusion, the beer will get you where you need to go.  And while there’s no underground connecting Vermont and the great borough of Brooklyn, the brewery will be pouring at the Brattleboro Brewers Festival on May 22, filling the fourth slot in our figurative 12-pack.

I polished off a 25-ounce-plus bottle by myself Sunday night while watching the U.S. House thrash it out over health care, which gave me plenty of sipping time.  Still, when the bill finally passed I emptied my glass in a toast, and felt euphoric in all directions.

Though I haven’t seen him in years, I used to thrash it out with Garrett Oliver at homebrew competitions of the nascent New York City Homebrewers Guild.  I may even have bested him once or twice, though I’d have to go into the archives to check.  But whenever my beers did win a ribbon, they were always accompanied by certificates festooned with Garrett’s artful calligraphy.  Talented fellow in many directions, that Oliver, who built on his homebrewer days, going pro at New York’s first brewpub, the Manhattan Brewing Company, before the Brooklyn Brewery wisely took him on and made him brewmaster.

Garrett has since become one of the real celebrities of the craft brewing world, particularly as it pertains to matching beer with food.  His book, The Brewmaster’s Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer With Real Food (Ecco, 2003) is a tour de force of beer styles, history and flavors.

I did ask him recently if he had a model for Local 2, and not surprisingly he was aiming high, at some classics from the Trappist breweries at Achel (the Extra Brune) and Chimay (the Grand Reserve, but the Grand Reserve circa 1988).

Local 2 is a worthy tribute indeed, and it’s lucky that the beer is part of Brooklyn’s year-round portfolio.  It’s made with German Pilsner and English Chocolate malts, Perle, Aurora and East Kent Golding hops.  Some raw wildflower honey from a New York farm, sweet orange peel and Belgian dark candi sugar are the extra stuff, along with a Belgian yeast strain.

The effect is a rich and filling beer, deep garnet with a light tan head, a sweet and fruity nose with complex raisin or prune notes. The flavor is sweet but dry, with a touch of zesty spice, and a nice puckering finish.  Definitely a beer to bring to the table–where Garrett suggests it will pair well with duck, ham, mushrooms.

It goes pretty well with wacky politics, too, helping to make that gumbo a lot more palatable.

Name: Brooklyn Local 2
Brewer: Brooklyn Brewery, New York
Style: Belgian Strong Dark Ale
ABV: 9%
Availability: Year-round, 25 states
For More Information: brooklynbrewery.com

Ron (left) and Bill

The brewery has been operating since 1996, although the genesis goes way back to when co-founders and owners Ron Barchet and Bill Covaleski met on a school bus in fifth grade. They’ve had a good ride ever since.

That Golden Monkey did not crack the top ten in the recent New York Times tasting of Belgian-style golden ales (some actually from Belgium) suggests two things to me. One is that the category is awfully broad. The second is that there are a lot of tasty Belgian-style golden ales out there.

It seems obvious that the model for Golden Monkey is Duvel, a beer which the late Michael Jackson dubbed a world classic, although it, too, failed to crack the NYT panel’s top ten. (What’s wrong with them?)

Both beers are indeed golden, looking for all the world like unexcitingly tame pale lagers. Both are ales, both are anything but unexciting, redolent of spices and fruit, particularly pear notes. They’re peppery and effervescent on the tongue, refreshing and delicious, and both will cut a drinker off at the knees if not mindful of their hidden wallop. One 12-ounce bottle is enough to begin working some magic. If I had a Duvel on hand I would taste the two side by side for purposes of research. Then I would take a nap.

Soldiering on with just Golden Monkey is not a hardship. Victory calls Golden Monkey a tripel, perhaps because of the spices it adds, or perhaps, as Will Doak, my man on the ground in Pennsylvania puts it, to make a play on the monk in monkey:

“I think the flag for Golden Monkey, inside the pub, says something about enlightenment. But after a few Golden Monkeys, I’d be your man on the floor.”

Will, who lives ten minutes from it, reports that, “Business at Victory’s renovated brewpub is booming. It’s hard to find a parking place.” If lucky enough to find a space and get inside, “It’s hard to hear your wife, even in your good ear.”

His wife, Andrea Botts, is also a beer nut, making Will lucky in love. “Andrea went through a long phase of drinking Golden Monkey, but has moved on; she’s now quite a fan of Victory’s Fest.”

There’s certainly plenty to move on to. Victory probably cycles through 30 different beer styles in a year’s time, though some are available only at the brewpub in Downingtown. But along with typical year-round beers like HopDevil, Hop Wallop, Prima Pils, Storm King Stout, are seasonal and specials that take no prisoners.

Among those birthday bottles my brother picked out for me were Victory’s WildDevil and V-Twelve. The latter is a Belgian-style strong ale that tops 12% ABV, and which I haven’t had yet since I don’t dare drink it alone. The WildDevil is the company’s HopDevil fermented with a Brettanomyces yeast strain (one strain for the draft version, three strains for the bottled version). Here it seems obvious that the model is Orval, a Belgian Trappist classic. And again, the homage seems righteous.

Name:  Golden Monkey
Brewer: Victory Brewing Company, Downington, Pennsylvania
Style: Belgian-style Golden Ale or Triple
ABV: 9.5%
Availability: Year-round, 30 states
For More Information: victorybeer.com

Brattleboro is a vibrant southern Vermont town, well-known for lively weekends like the Strolling of the Heifers in early June and the Brattleboro Literary Festival in early October. So while this is the first beer festival in town, it will surely not be the last. (Actually, an all-organic beer festival may be in the works for later this year.)

Brattleboro is a great beer town, with one brewpub/microbrewery in town, another pub with scores of taps, and any number of restaurants, nightspots and retailers with good selections.

I’ll fill in more details as we go on each week up until May 22. Though the festival spotlight will obviously shine on Vermont and New England beers (some being brewed specifically for the event), selections are coming from all over the nation and abroad, and I’ll try to keep my picks geographically diverse.

That said, I’ve already covered some of the breweries that will be present, both in past TAP Beer of the Week entries (Sierra Nevada and the Huyghe Brewery) and in the piece on Rock Art’s lively Vermonster.

This week’s pick comes from the Allagash Brewing Company in Portland, Maine. Whether the company will pour the Black remains to be seen, but it hardly matters: Allagash is one of the most adventurous breweries on the east coast, and since its first release in 1995 has yet to market a beer that isn’t at least worth trying. Usually they’re worth hunting down, fighting over and hoarding if necessary.

At base is founder Rob Tod’s love for traditional Belgian beers–which are traditionally all over the stylistic map. So from cellared and barrel-aged beers, brews made with grapes, sweet potatoes, pepper and exotic spicing, bottles corked with the méthode champenoise, and beers fermented with multiple yeasts, including a proprietary Brettanomyces stain, Allagash continues exploring ways to head right over the boundaries.

The Black is a pretty good example of this, since a Belgian-style stout is an anomaly to begin with. It’s possible to find stouts in Belgium, but they’re usually not Belgian. Sure, there are a few–Ellezelloise Hercules Stout, Buffalo Stout, Troubadour Obscura–not that I’ve ever tracked these down.

But a stout is just an ale, after all, with roasted malts giving the beer its signature chocolate and coffee aromas. The Black, which pours out as opaque as advertised, fulfills expectations with a full-bodied aroma.

Then the Allagash fun begins, adding German barley to the pot, oats, torrified wheat, Belgian dark candi (a caramelized sugar), along with the house Belgian yeast strain.

The end result is a sturdy but highly quaffable beer, creamy and toasty sweet, but with a nice roast edge and all sorts of flavors swirling through the finish. It’s not only a tasty beer, but an intriguing one as well. It raises questions, as well as one’s spirits. The main question being: Where do I find the version of the Black aged in bourbon barrels?

Name: Allagash Black
Brewer: Allagash Brewing Company, Portland, Maine
Style: Stout
ABV: 7.5%
Availability: Year-round, 25 states
For More Information: allagash.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

Banner from Rock Art's original brewery

What is the sound of a paradigm shifting? To Matt Nadeau of Rock Art Brewery in Morrisville, Vermont, it sounds like a rising collective voice that gives Power to the People in the struggle against Corporate America.

And if that sounds a little like an editorial cartoon, it’s only because the situation Nadeau found himself in last September was cartoonish, in a noir sort of way.

That was the day he received a cease-and-desist letter from the Hansen Natural Corporation, makers of Monster energy drinks, telling him to stop brewing one of his beers, a whopper of a barleywine named Vermonster.

Nadeau’s first unsurprising reaction was, Huh?

His second was to contact trademark lawyers, who basically told him the same thing–Hansen probably didn’t have a legal leg to stand on, but since it will take in an estimated $1.1 billion in revenues in 2009, the Corona, California company could certainly win a protracted legal war of attrition over Rock Art, which will brew an estimated 3,000-3,500 barrels of beer this year, a microbrewery by any measure.

So Nadeau’s next reaction was, Hmm.

Nadeau, 43, is a Montpelier native. He and his wife, Renee, met at Johnson State College, where they graduated in 1989. (They were given Outstanding Alumni Awards in 2009.) Matt began homebrewing in 1994, shortly after the couple returned from years of living and working in Colorado.

“Matt was absolutely enthralled with brewing,” said Renee. “He read everything about it he could lay his hands on. He opened a brewing supply store mainly to save on his own brewing expenses.” (And so he wouldn’t have to drive an hour there and back to what was then the nearest supply shop.) “When he’d finally made more beer than we could hope to drink, we went professional.”

Matt and Renee Nadeau

Rock Art brewed about 40 barrels of beer in 1997, not a lot more in 1998, said Matt Nadeau, since the brewery was still in the basement of the couple’s house in Johnson, as it would be for the first four years of its existence.

Since 2001 it’s been housed in a warehouse at the back of a side street in Morrisville, with a small tasting room and store, gradually increasing the portfolio of beers (upwards of 25 different brew recipes) and with a small crew of employees, brewing twice a week.

In 2006, preparing to mark the company’s tenth year with a special brew, Nadeau came up with Vermonster, named after the mythical creature with one set of legs longer than the other, thereby enabling it to walk level in Vermont’s hills. Nadeau trademarked the name, which no doubt lit Hansen’s fuse.

Available in 22-ounce bottles, the Vermonster label has a photo of an autumnal farm scene, as well as the brewery logo, the dancing, flute-playing Kokopelli, common to southwestern petroglyphs.

Made with six different malts and five varieties of hops, the Vermonster earns its name as a big beer, thick, sweet and viscous, aggressively hopped (100 IBUs–international bittering units) and taking no prisoners at 10% abv (alcohol by volume). It’s a very tasty beer, but any energy derived from drinking it is likely to be illusory.

And any chance of mixing it up with a can of caffeinated Monster, with its creepy M indicated by three snakelike lines, is downright hallucinatory. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont put it well when he joined his voice to the collective and wrote a letter to the Chairman of the Hansen company’s board of directors, Rodney C. Sacks in October 20, noting that, “…any normal person would find your claim preposterous.”

Shortly after the Vermonter story began to hit traditional media outlets, it went viral on the social media, exponentially multiplying, first through e-mail from the brewery to its mailing list. That prompted some beverage distributors to pull Monster from its shelves.

A YouTube video made gratis by the Green River Pictures of Burlington showed Matt Nadeau laying out the David versus Goliath storyline, and saying he couldn’t give in, that there was a principle at stake.

The reactions were immediate–trending topics on Twitter (marked by hashtags like #IsupportRockArt, #monsterboycott or #boycottmonster), postings and repostings of the video on Facebook. Outrage was the general ambiance, the commonly succinct message to Hansen: “GFY!”

“It was a combination of factors that just snowballed,” said Nadeau. “Craft beer drinkers are an enthusiastic and passionate crowd, and our brothers and sisters in the craft beer drinking world really came through.”

Hansen, meanwhile, was having the opposite, no doubt stunned, reaction, looking for all the world like a real monster of avaricious corporate greed. Stonewalling didn’t help. I called the company for a comment and was told a statement would be e-mailed to me. It never came. I called again and requested the statement again. That one never came, either.

We reached the height of absurdity when I asked a company representative if Hansen’s was publically held.

She said, “We have no comment on that.”

Huh? “You can’t even tell me if it’s a publically held company, on the stock exchange?”

“It is publically held, yes,” she finally admitted, but it certainly showed that the company was jittery. The chances were good that someone, somewhere in a Hansen office, had received a monster dressing down, if not outright dismissal, for one of the most bonehead moves in recent marketing history–grossly miscalculating the effect of trying to squelch a little guy, one who proved not so little.

Though gratified by the overwhelming positive response and publicity, Nadeau still characterized the entire debacle as a hassle: “It’s kept me from attending to my business–creating, making and selling beers. Before all this began I had interest from distributors in southern New Jersey and from Florida, but I simply haven’t been able to focus on that.”

Matt and part of the crew, assistant brewers Andrea Muhlfelder and Zeb Maxfield

Maybe now he can. Hansen threw in the white towel in late October. Though the details were not made crystal clear, the gist was that Rock Art could keep brewing Vermonster, while agreeing never to go into the energy drink market, which it had never intended to do in the first place.

Then the social media went wild in declaring victory, and Nadeau proclaimed that power had been returned to the people.  (He elaborated in a second YouTube video.)

He said he hoped the momentum at hand might prove useful for other small businesses: “We need to even the playing field or create some kind of way to prevent this type of stuff; maybe when some of the larger issues now confronting them pass, legislators will have a moment in which to tackle this.

“My fear is for a small company that’s not making such a sexy product as ours–a dental supply company, say–wouldn’t have the same kind of groundswell.”

Maybe a catchy call to arms, “Remember Vermonster!”, will rally future troops, who clearly have new weapons at hand, and favorite beverages, to combat corporate injustices.

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