Watson will return July 26-29 for the Senior Open Championship. He’ll be able to stay in one of suites named for the winners of the Open Championships played here–himself, Greg Norman in 1986, Nick Price in 1994 and Cink. Watson could also have a pint in the Duel in the Sun Lounge, named after the 1977 Open Championship epic, when he prevailed over Jack Nicklaus.

(Watson also won the Senior Open Championship here in 2003, Loren Roberts in 2006. Previous winners at Turnberry: Neil Coles in 1987, Gary Player in 1988 and 1990, and Bob Charles in 1989.)

Our group of five golf writers warmed up yesterday on the resort’s Kintyre Course, a treat in its own right. We tackled the Ailsa course this morning, a lovely spring day, though with a fairly brisk wind playing about.

I have more on the history and layout of the courses in a series of posts beginning here. This is a quick trip, essentially a day and a half, two rounds of golf and two killer dinners, as we’re off tomorrow on a long travel day to Greece to check out Costa Navarino. But there have been some big changes since last I visited. For one thing, the Ailsa Craig is for sale.

Ailsa Craig

This may be of particular interest to curlers, since about 70% of the world’s curling stones are fashioned from Ailsa granite.

Gannet (Photo courtesy RSPB, Andy Hay)

It may also be of interest to twitchers, as birdwatchers are called here. The island is home to Scotland’s third largest gannet colony. (Yes, I checked–the second is on the St. Kilda Islands, and the first is also within sight of a golf course–the Bass Rock off North Berwick.) Ailsa Craig–a volcanic mound uninhabited except by the gannets and friends–is leased by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds until 2050. But the RSPB is not in negotiations for the island, falling a bit short of the £2.5 million asking price.

I was sorry to see fencing around the grounds of Souter Johnnie’s Inn, a pub and restaurant on the site where the great Robbie Burns went to school. A troop of us had a grand evening here four years ago after an equally grand competition between U.S. and U.K. writers at Turnberry (click here). A recent fire which spread from the building’s thatched roof gutted the place. But there are plans to rebuild.

The resort didn’t rebuild itself, but it did undergo a multi-million pound renovation a few years past its centenary, evolving into a Luxury Collection Resort and re-opening just in time for the 2009 Open Championship.

Luxurious it is, and many of the 198 guest rooms reappointed in contemporary fashion. But many touches have restored the elegance of the original structure, such as the Grand Tea Lounge just off the main entrance.

The hotel has won a boatload of awards, not in the least because of the cuisine. Head Chef Justin Galea bends Escoffier traditions into modern twists in the signature 1906 restaurant, but can really dazzle guests at the Chef’s Table, a private dining room inside the kitchen.

The Chef's Table menu, including the crucial Pre Dessert dessert

Chef Martin Flanagan preparing a Chef's Table course

We wound up here our second night. Galea was away, but chef Martin Flanagan led us through the eight-course meal that had us surrendering like Durán by the end: “No más!”

Turnberry is big on local sourcing, and since 2009 that includes the beer offerings. A Glasgow brewery called West that opened in 2006 produces German-style lagers, and its pilsner, St Mungo Lager, was on hand. Both Boo Weekley and Mark Calcavecchia were big fans.

After a one-under opening round of 69 Calcavecchia suggested part of his success was due to the four pints of St Mungo he was allowing himself each night. It’s a pleasing 4.9% ABV beer, making it hard to fathom why anyone would order a mass market lager with such evident local brewing artistry on hand.

Turnberry Ailsa Amber Ale, with bagpiper, and the Aisla eighteenth hole in background

I was delighted to find the Ailsa Amber Ale on hand and cooling in an ice bucket in my room after the Ailsa Course round. Serendipity. The beer is a light amber ale, I’d call it a bitter stylistically, with English and American hops producing a lightly floral nose. Mildly sweet with a touch of nuttiness, a reasonable hop bit, and she’s done. At 4% ABV, easier to drink four of these than the St Mungo, methinks.

And as luck would have it, it was near seven, the hour each evening when the piper plays at Turnberry. I tried to get a shot of this happy confluence, foiled only by the window reflections.

Most of Turnberry’s beers are now local. The Ailsa Ale is brewed for the resort by the nearby Strathaven Ales company, which has a full portfolio of tasty session strength beers. During the Chef’s Table debauch–when we were probably supposed to be drinking more champagne, I stuck with Strathaven’s Clydesdale IPA (3.8%) and its Craigmill Mild, an absolutely delicious black ale that comes in at a mere 3.5%.

Both beers, as well as the Ailsa Ale, put the lie to the belief that beers must be stronger to be tastier. Would that we could find them in the U.S.!

Although if the Clydesdale IPA were shipped to the U.S. I wouldn’t be surprised if A-B InBev tried to slap some kind of trademark injunction on them. Budweiser usually comes in at about 5% ABV, Bud Light at 4.2%. In either case, the Clydesdale IPA is the better mount.

Name: Ailsa Amber Ale
Brewer: Strathaven Ales, Strathaven, Scotland for Turnberry
Style: Bitter
ABV: 4%
Availability: At the Turnberry resort, Scotland, year-round
For More Information: www.strathavenales.co.uk

Here’s a wee taste of the nightly bagpiping ritual, showing the facade of the hotel, then overlooking the clubhouse, eighteenth green and first tee of the Ailsa Course:

Related posts:
Return to Turnberry
TAP Beer of the Week: Cup O’ Kyndnes

Not to say I wasn’t mildly excited to find the Newcastle Founders’ Ale in the local Newfane Market recently. I’d managed to not hear a thing about the beer, and so running across something new from a company that has sent us only Newcastle Brown for years was titillating.

Newcastle Brown used to be titillating itself years ago, when there wasn’t much else on the horizon. Hell, even Heineken used to be titillating back in the desperate 1970’s and early ‘80s. (Corona was never titillating, however. Negra Modelo, Bohemia, yes. Corona, never.)

Actually, if I have my beer mergers and acquisitions up to date (no sure thing), Heineken UK now owns Scottish & Newcastle, which took over Caledonian Brewing. Which means Newcastle is actually a Heineken product.

It’s hardly been a go-to beer for me in recent years in any case, not that there’s anything wrong with it. Still way better than a sharp stick in the eye, it just seems a little bland in the current beer landscape. But I say this not having had one in awhile, and maybe I should, whilst paying attention to it.

Newcastle’s Limited Edition Ales were introduced last year about this time, and has run through three other seasonals which eluded me completely: Summer Ale, Werewolf and Winter IPA.

The Founder’s Ale had a nationwide release in February and will be wrapping up its allotted time by the end of April. Presumably the Summer Ale will then reappear.

The front label has a blue five-pointed star said to represent the founding brewers, that presumably of the original Newcastle Breweries in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and not the originator of Newcastle Brown in 1928, one James Herbert Porter. The brewery shown inside the star is that of Newcastle upon Tyne, but according to the back label this batch was brewed by Thomas Hardy Burtonwood Ltd in Burtonwood.

There’s a neck label which calls it, “A Blighty Good Brew.” No idea what this could actually mean, though the beer is certainly drinkable. There’s a faint caramel nose which follows through with a mild caramel flavor. There’s a vegetal touch, but the beer is thin on the palate with little mouthfeel. The Styrian Goldings hops do give it a drying finish. But overall, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there’s not much there there.

Compare the color of the Founders’ Ale, on the left in this photo, with the Samuel Smith’s Old Brewery Pale Ale on the right, and at least one of the differences in the two beers is apparent.

By further contrast, aroma is pouring out of the glass of the Smith’s beer–a whiff of butterscotch, a bit of plum. There’s a fuller mouthfeel, a toffeeish flavor–a malt-accented beer to be sure, but with a finish that feels better balanced as well.

I just happened to notice that the beer is now in a brown bottle, too, whereas it was once dangerously in clear bottles. When did that happen?

The Old Brewery Pale Ale is hardly a new or seasonal beer. More like an old friend that you haven’t seen in awhile, but always agreeable to run into again.

April appears to be the month for the second annual Samuel Smith Salute, an acknowledgement of this and the influence the brewery and its beers had on the U.S. craft brew movement. I did something of the same in a post about the company’s Yorkshire Stingo, and suggest clicking here for some of that history and information about the Yorkshire stone square fermenters still in use.

Name: Newcastle Founders’ Ale
Brewer: Heineken UK at Thomas Hardy Burtonwood Ltd, England
Style: Pale Ale
ABV: 4.8%
Availability: Nationwide through April
For More Information: www.newcastlebrown.com

Name: Old Brewery Pale Ale
Brewer: Samuel Smith, Tadcaster, England
Style: Pale Ale
ABV: 5%
Availability: Nationwide, year-round
For More Information: www.merchantduvin.com

Beer tasting by the Kohler Design Center's Great Wall of China

We decided to give up and declare a tie here, between two of the best golf resorts anywhere, with solid beer selections. Kohler gets the edge with the beer, Bandon with the golf, but both are bucket list worthy.

The small heartland town of Kohler is an hour north of Milwaukee. It’s a company town, but the company is now a lot more than plumbing fixtures: The American Club is the luxury hotel here, and it only stands to reason the Kohler Waters Spa is top-notch. There are four sterling Pete Dye-designed courses, one of which, Whistling Straits, has already hosted two PGA Championships. (Remember Dustin Johnson’s troubles in the bunker last year, which helped Martin Kaymer secure the title?)

The casual eatery at the resort is the Horse and Plow, which has an extensive list of bottled micros and Belgians and a nice rotating tap selection as well, emphasizing (but not limited to) Midwest brews. It would be easy to spend a lot of time here; there’s also a regular series of beer dinners. The Third Annual Kohler Festival of Beer will roll into town May 27-29 this year, and it includes the hotly-contested Beer Cup Golf Tournament.*

[*The Fourth Annual is June 1-3, 2012.]

The clubhouse at Whistling Straits

The old joke about the difference between Scotland and Bandon Dunes is that it’s easier to get to Scotland. But after they built it, people came, and people have been coming ever since to this pure golf location on the Oregon coast. It’s a self-contained universe that could be enjoyed by non-golfers, although the question might be why, since there are now four courses here, all of them ranked at or near the top in every best-of list going.

Indeed, in the most recent GOLF Magazine “Top 100 Courses You Can Play” list, Tom Doak’s Pacific Dunes design overtook Pebble Beach as the No. 1 course in the land.

Pacific Dunes

Doak and his associate, Jim Urbina, collaborated on the Old Macdonald Golf Links which opened last June to more huzzahs from the golf writing press. It wasn’t named after the farmer, but Charles Blair Macdonald, founder of the U.S. Golf Association and the country’s first great golf course architect.

There are a few different drinking and dining options at the resort, and what the beer list lacks in depth it makes up for in regional quality–a Mirror Pond Ale from Deschutes, a Mocha Porter from Rogue, a SOB Porter (Southern Oregon Brewing).

All the courses at Bandon Dunes are walking-only. It’s pretty safe to guarantee that after a 36-hole day of battling winds and one’s swing, settling down in McKee’s Pub with a plate of Grandma’s Meatloaf and a pint of Deschutes Black Butte Porter alongside, there will be absolutely no room, or need, for complaint.

# # #

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

< Previous: Birdies and Brews Part 4: Orlando

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>

Next: Birdies and Brews Part 3: Vermont>

Melody Pierce fills a pint at Toronado San Diego

There’s so much great brewing going on in San Diego that the city has been required to bend time: November’s annual San Diego Beer Week lasts for ten days; a mid-June Beer Week-end preview lasts four days, all taking place in multiple venues and still only beginning to sample all the glories of the local beer and dining scene.

In the U.S. earthquake of experimental (some might just say mental) brewing, San Diego has been the epicenter. A sour lambic blended with the bourbon barrel-aged Imperial IPA anyone? Think extra hoppy ales, extra-strong oaked curiosities, bars and restaurants devoted to extensive Belgian beer lists. Think Stone Brewing, think Ballast Point, think Port Brewing/Lost Abbey, think AleSmith, and then stop thinking and start drinking, because there’s lots to be done.

Indeed, a visit to San Diego will inevitably seem insufficient to the pleasant task; living here for a few months might do it. And that would leave some time for golf in between the epicurean quest.

There’s a lot on that plate, too. Start with the two Torrey Pines municipal courses, host of the annual PGA Tour Farmers Insurance Open in late January, plus the occasional U.S. Open–as in 2008, when Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate had their epic battle on the South Course.

Don't go long--the par-3 third hole at Torrey Pines South

Designer Rees Jones undertook a complete renovation of the course before that Open, rebuilding all the greens, tees and fairway features, many of the greens relocated to the edge of the bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It doesn’t get much better, unless one is also staying at the Lodge at Torrey Pines, and manages to score a meal at its tony AR Valentien restaurant.

The Barona Creek Golf Course in nearby Lakeside is another gem, one that Golfweek magazine actually ranks ahead of Torrey South, as the fourth best public course in California, as well as the fourth best casino course in the entire country. Golf, beer and a casino? What kind of dream is this? The relatively unknown Todd Eckenrode was the lead architect for the course while with the Gary Roger Baird Design team, and it’s an impressive enough calling card that he soon hung out his own shingle.

There’s more–a Tom Fazio track at the Grand Del Mar, an Arnold Palmer layout at the Park Hyatt Aviara Resort, and a renovated William Bell design (he also did Torrey Pines) at the Rancho Bernardo Inn. Show up at Rancho Bernardo on Tuesdays at 4 pm and you can play with hickory sticks–plus fours optional.

Lining 'em up at the Stone Brewing tasting room

# # #

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

< Previous: Birdies and Brews Part 1: St. Andrews, Scotland

Next: Birdies and Brews Part 3: Vermont>

Next: Birdies and Brews Part 2: San Diego, California>

Another night at Dunvegan's

Having dissed Ireland, we’ll salve the Celtic soul at the venerable home of golf, St. Andrews. As for the beer, consider four words: college town, real ales. Scotland’s first university was founded here in 1413. With classes in session this compact seaside town’s population effectively doubles to 14,000, invigorating the many charming shops, excellent restaurants, captivating historic sites, lively arts scene and boisterous pub culture.

For a traveling golfer, heading to St. Andrews is a pilgrimage. The healing scent of golf hangs in the very air. To behold for the first time the iconic eighteenth hole of the Old Course, the clubhouse of the R&A, the Swilcan Bridge, the breadth of the golfing landscape, is akin to being struck by a vision. And to finally tee it up on the Old Course is an answer to a prayer.

St. Andrews, The Old Course

The Old Course remains the plum, but there are ten other courses in the immediate area, seven of them under the auspices of the charitable Links Trust (the Old, New, Jubilee, Eden, Strathtyrum, the nine-hole Balgove, and slightly southeast of town, the Castle Course, which opened in 2008).

The famous Road Hole on the Old Course (the seventeenth) plays partially over the balconies of the luxurious Old Course Hotel, one of the few in the area with some secured tee times on the Old Course, and home to the Jigger Inn, a virtually required pub stop. The hotel also runs The Dukes Course, five minutes away and one of the finer heathland courses going, particularly after an extensive redesign by Tim Liddy in 2006.

Just past the Castle Course is Fairmont St Andrews, another luxury resort and spa gleaming under a recent multi-million dollar (or pound) refurbishment. And the reconditioning extended to architect Gary Stephenson’s reworking of the resort’s Devlin and Torrance courses, the former now called the Kittocks.

Kingsbarns is a slight ride out of town, seemingly in isolated splendor by the North Sea. Since opening in 2000, Kingsbarns has been cited by many as their favorite links of the Auld Grey Toon, and the Kyle Phillips design is unquestionably a modern classic.

Other than the ocean, water hazards are rarities on links courses. But there’s no lack of watering holes. The seeker for real ales–and certainly brands from Scottish brewers like Belhaven and Caledonian should be on the list–will do well to begin at Dunvegan’s, where all the caddies and not a few of the pros go after tournament rounds, and where the collection of golf memorabilia rivals the nearby British Golf Museum.

Further into the town center, spaced at proper pub crawl distances, one can put together memorable nights at the Whey Pat Tavern, the Central Bar, the Criterion and Drouthy Neebors.

Allan Webster pulling off a pint of real ale at the Whey Pat Tavern in St. Andrews

# # #

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

<Previous: Birdies and Brews: Introduction

Next: Birdies and Brews Part 2: San Diego, California>

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related Posts:
Obama Likes the Black Stuff
Postcards From Doonbeg
The End of the Beer World As We Know It, Part II: Fried Beer

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

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

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

Sasha Baron Cohen as The Dictator

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

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

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

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

Despite outing my anti-football stance in this rant, careful readers will have noted I’m pretty much okay with gambling. And since nothing brings out that instinct (it does seem like an instinct, doesn’t it?) more vigorously than the Super Bowl, here we are again.

Last year we wandered from Pittsburgh to Green Bay by way of the White House (and the homebrewing activities going on there, all mentioned here).

But for Super Bowl XLVI we’re sticking to the east coast, and hitching our star to a wager already in the works, between Brooklyn Brewery and Harpoon Brewery. Seems that the old pros at the helm of each brewery are chums and couldn’t pass up the chance to tweak the other should their home team win.

The deal is that should the Patriots win, Steve Hindy will dispense a keg of Harpoon IPA at the Brooklyn brewery. Likewise, should the Giants win, Harpoon’s Rich Doyle and Dan Kenary will dispense a keg of Brooklyn Lager in the Boston tasting room.

Gauging by the amount of coverage the wager has already received, the publicity will presumably help salve the wounds of the defeated, and I’m willing enough to lard on some more.

For the two breweries, this is actually Super Bowl Wager II, since the same terms were put forth for Super Bowl XLII in 2008, and even non-fans like me know the Giants dusted off the previously undefeated Patriots 17-14, a stunning upset. As this video shows, the bet was paid off, and Hindy made a prescient comment about the two teams meeting again in the playoffs:

Hindy, who obviously has a gambling problem, threw down a similar wager with Anchor Brewing in San Francisco before the Giants-49ers tilt for the NFC title. Anchor president John Dannerbeck not only agreed to pour Brooklyn’s Sorachi Ace beer from this Monday to tomorrow, but outfit tour guides in Giants jerseys:

At the Anchor Brewing tasting room, pouring Brooklyn's Sorachi Ale while wearing a Giants' jersey

I’m going to throw in my two cents here. I’ll select one of the specialty beers of whichever brewery wins on Sunday–so to speak–and make it my next TAP Beer of the Week. To the victor goes the laurel. To me goes the beer.

[We all now know how the Super Bowl turned out, so click here for the promised TAP Beer of the Week post.]

As far as this week’s two beers go, as a lager and an ale they aren’t really competitive; it’s apples and oranges. But there are some similarities in that both beers are the best-selling flagship brew in each company’s portfolio. Both are now being canned as well as bottled (both canned at the F.X. Matt Brewery in Utica, New York).

And both companies have now been around for a long time, by craft brewery standards. (See “Related Posts” below for a little more on each brewery’s history and beers.) Harpoon released its first beer, Harpoon Ale, in 1987. Brooklyn Lager was that brewery’s first offering in 1988. From small and none-too-certain beginnings, both companies have come a very long way: Harpoon was ranked ninth in U.S. craft brewery sales in 2010 (16^th in overall brewery sales), while Brooklyn was 16^th (25^th overall).

The two beers in question were mildly radical for the time and place of their introduction. As they enter adulthood they’ve more or less settled down into mainstream respectability, considering the wild experimentation going on around them. Neither will knock your socks off; nor will they let you down.

Brooklyn Lager harkens back to pre-Prohibition brewing days in the borough, when almost 50 breweries plied their trade, with a Vienna Lager-style recipe formulated by William Moeller, a fourth-generation brewer who went back into the notebooks. The Milton Glaser-designed logo harkens back to the Brooklyn Dodgers. (Talk about festering wounds!)

It’s a lightly amber beer with a nice sudsy head, an appealingly grainy nose with a touch of lemon zest probably from the (somewhat unusual) dry-hopping during lagering. (Hallertauer Mittelfrueh, Vanguard and Cascade in the hop mix.) The bottles I had from a recent variety pack were just past their freshness date with no apparent harm done. The palate is lightly malty, suitably crisp, with a bittersweet finish.

I hadn’t had a Brooklyn Lager for awhile. When I cracked one open a few days ago I had a bit of a flashback, on first sip, of the old New Amsterdam Amber, which both Brooklyn Lager and Sam Adams Boston Lager are the immediate descendants of from back in the mid-80’s. But that’s a bit of history for another time.

Interestingly, though, Brooklyn Lager is brewed at the Matt Brewing Company, as was New Amsterdam, Sam Adams and Harpoon for a time. However, the expansion of the company’s Williamsburg brewery is expected to double capacity in 2012 and again in 2013, so that may change.

The Harpoon IPA was introduced in 1993 as a summer seasonal beer, but sales went off the charts and the company quickly made it a year-round offering. Now it’s the number one house brand.

I suspect its very ubiquity makes beer geeks take it for granted. But I know I’m happy to call on it as a go-to beer when choices are otherwise suspect or limited. It’s not a west coast in-your-face IPA, but a solid Cascade hop-accented IPA with a fruity nose, a toasty malt character and a good bit of hop zing in the finish. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am, I’ll have another.

There, now wasn’t that more fun than talking about football?

Name: Brooklyn Lager
Brewer: Brooklyn Brewery, New York
Style: American Amber
ABV: 5.2%
Availability: Year-round, 25 states and D.C.
For More Information: www.brooklynbrewery.com

Name: Harpoon IPA
Brewer: Harpoon Brewery, Boston, Massachusetts and Windsor, Vermont
Style: IPA
ABV: 5.9%
Availability: Year-round, 26 states
For More Information: www.harpoonbrewery.com

Related Posts:
TAP Beer(s) of the Week: Harpoon 100-Barrel Island Creek Oyster Stout and Single Hop ESB
TAP Beer of the Week: Brooklyn Local 2
TAP Beer(s) of the Week: Summertime Brews
Super Bowl XLV

My wife gave me the t-shirt for Christmas (and took the picture). I think she might be on to me. But Happy New Year all, and here’s to a fun road ahead for 2012.

So it’s no great surprise that a compact Marc Sleen Museum stands alone in Brussels across the street from the more expansive museum holdings of the Belgian Comic Strip Center, one of the major tourist stops in the city.

Belgians love their comics, and their Art Nouveau, which makes the Center a perfect fit, housed in a 1906 Art Nouveau masterpiece designed by Victor Horta.

The animating spirit of Belgian comic art, Tintin, is now animated (well, in 3-D motion-capture animation at any rate) in the Peter Jackson-produced and Steven Spielberg-directed “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.” Spielberg was on hand for the premiere in Brussels on October 22, preceding the widespread U.S. debut now on hand:

Tintin and his creator, the late Hergé, are Belgian icons. Hergé was born Georges Remi in 1907 in Brussels, but signed his drawings Hergé for his initials in reverse (RG). Tintin came along in 1929, Hergé did 23 books of his adventures up to his death in 1983, and then there were no more–as he had directed in his will.

About the time of Hergé’s death the Horta building was looking for a stay of execution. The former textile warehouse, empty for twenty years except for squatters was in ruins, on the verge of destruction, about to become a parking lot.

Some 200,000 visitors now stream through the site annually to see the happier ending that ensued.

Nero striding at entrance to the Marc Sleen Museum

Sleen, meanwhile, is still very much alive as he approaches his 90^th birthday on December 30. He’s reportedly delighted with the museum in his name, and with the beer named after his best-loved character.

In the very first Nero strip Sleen drew in 1947, a criminal is uncovered using beer to brainwash Belgians into doing his bidding; in a subsequent adventure Nero discovers a beer tree in Rwanda which makes him rich.

There’s no beer tree at the Marc Sleen Museum, but there is the beer, available only there or in the café at the Comic Strip Center. It was brewed as a one-off by the De Proef Brouwerij in Locristi, but proved popular enough that larger production is being considered. I was lucky enough to sample some there in early May and bring a bottle safely home as well.

Willem De Graeve, director of the Belgian Comic Strip Center, pours a glass of Nero Bier

It’s a cloudy amber ale that is quite hoppy by Belgian standards, verging on an IPA, with a deep hop nose. It’s floral and fruity, the Nelson Sauvin hop throwing off notes of pineapple and mango. There’s a hearty malt character, but not overly sweet, with a brisk finish.

I just finished off the bottle fairly briskly as well in the spirit of it all–not only movie premieres, but the fact that the country finally has a new government.

We talk about gridlock in this country, but we have nothing on Belgium which, like Sleen, also set a record–the longest period in peacetime without an official government. Since the last general elections in June, 2010, the regions of the country–Flemish-speaking Flanders to the north, French-speaking Wallonia to the south (with a sliver of Germanic influence to the east)–were unable to agree on a ruling coalition.

Think René Magritte, and Belgium’s surrealistic side may suggest the political imbroglio, only just settled after 541 days. Having historically been invaded by everyone from the Vikings and Romans to the Spanish, Dutch, French and Germans, the Belgians can perhaps be forgiven a slightly oblique world view.

When the record was broken last February many Belgians, typically enough, partied. In Ghent in the north citizens stripped in public. In Louvain-la-Neuve in the south, free beer was given away. Not Nero, though it surely would have worked as well.

Name: Nero Bier
Brewer: De Proef Brouwerij, Lochristi, Belgium
Style: Belgian ale
ABV: 6.5%
Availability: Only in Brussels at the Marc Sleen Museum and the Belgian Comic Strip Center
For More Information: About Marc Sleen: www.marc-sleen.be
About De Proef: www.sbs-imports.com/deproef.php

But I behaved myself this trip, since I was really out Christmas shopping, and had actually stopped in hope of finding some gift beers.

The Wassail was a gift to myself. I hadn’t had any Full Sail beers since I got on the bus in Portland, Oregon, as part of the 2011 Beer Bloggers Conference in mid-August. We were heading for the Goschie Farms hop fields right in the middle of harvest season. The trip from Portland to Silverton in the Willamette Valley should have taken about an hour, but late on a Friday afternoon in good weather, we wound up trapped on the bus for well over two hours.

Trapped, in this case, wasn’t so terrible, since representatives from the Full Sail, Widmers, Rogue and Ninkasi breweries were on hand to introduce and pour their beers. A picnic and the smell of fresh hops was awaiting us at the end of the journey and there was a working bathroom on board, so all was well.

Full Sail will soon hit its quarter-century mark, a ripe old age for a microbrewery. It began in an old fruit-pressing factory overlooking the Columbia River Gorge and in 1989 became the first craft brewery in Oregon to bottle its beer, the Full Sail Amber. What’s lost now is that an amber beer was rather startling at the time, and so was the name. The Amber is still the company’s flagship beer, but it puts out a full range of year-round, seasonal and specialty brews.

At its twelve-year mark in 1999 the brewery became employee-owned, and it still bandies the number of the owner/employee workforce on each bottle (47 currently).

Executive brewmaster James Emmerson of Full Sail Brewing, on the bus

Full Sail's brewing supervisor Barney Brennan

Two of them were on the bus, brewing supervisor Barney Brennan and executive brewmaster James Emmerson. They poured three beers for us, marching upwards in ABV.

The first came from the throwback session lager series–Session–meant as a tribute to the way beers used to be pre-Prohibition, including the squat 11-ounce bottles. We had the Session Black, indeed as black as night, but a 5.4% ABV lager that was crisp and appealing, with a bare hint of roast.

We followed that up with one of the lagers in the rotating LTD series, meaning limited edition, although Emmerson said it also meant “Living the Dream,” which apparently all of the Full Sail employee owners are doing.

The LTD 03 lager, also on the bus

We had the LTD 03, a Pilsner-style lager at 5.6% ABV, that had a spot of wheat in the grain bill, and all Sterling hops. It was also a crisp, bright beer with a nice hop bite at the finish.

From the year-round beers we had the IPA, which for a northwest beer was not overwhelmingly hoppy, brewed more to the English-style, but still with a sturdy 6% ABV.

Like the Celebration Ale from Sierra Nevada I drank last week, and despite its name, there are no spices or additives other than malt, water, hops and yeast in the Wassail; its inveigling character derives solely from the four ingredients.

And not that the Celebration needs any kind of corrective, but non-hop heads might find it with the Wassail, and the two beers make for an interesting contrast.

Freshly harvested hops at the Goschie Farms in Silverton, Oregon

Brewed since 1988, the Wassail is a deep mahogany brew that, though it still has a considerable hop character, is skewed toward malt. The nose is sweet, fruity, with a touch of dark cherry. The palate is spicy, woody and toffee sweet, and the finish is subtly bracing rather than aggressive. It’s a mouthful, all in all.

Full Sail actually puts out three holiday or winter beers. The Wassail is the most potent, followed by Wreck the Halls from the Brewmaster Reserve Series (6.5%). A newer entry is the Fest Lager in the Session series (6.2%).

It would have been nice to try all three, but maybe that’s something for next year’s Christmas list.

Name: Full Sail Wassail
Brewer: Full Sail Brewing, Hood River, Oregon
Style: Winter Warmer
ABV: 7%
Availability: September-December, 29 states
For More Information: www.fullsailbrewing.com

Rarely has a beer been so aptly named as this holiday offering from Sierra Nevada. Mental fireworks blossom each November when I run across it on market shelves.

Although following the lead of Anchor Brewing, which first produced its annual holiday ale in 1975, Sierra Nevada was pioneering as well in annually producing a special winter beer since 1981, long before it became a brewing commonplace–and virtually a requirement for a brewery these days.

Unlike the product shot on the right, each bottle of the Celebration ale is dated with its vintage year. But this doesn’t mean that each year is different and that collectors should be laying down bottles for vertical tastings.

I once labored under just that impression, with the further thought that Celebration was a platform for trying out new hop varieties from year to year.

Apparently I was misinformed. Last year Dan Becker of The Full Pint website approached the always approachable Bill Manley of Sierra Nevada to ask him about certain myths that have grown up around Celebration Ale. The post is still up here but the gist of Bill’s remarks was that the recipe for Celebration has been unchanged since 1983. The only difference between batches would be due to the usual vagaries in hop crops.

The ale is bittered with Chinook, finished and dry-hopped with Cascade and Centennial hops, and despite any tasting impressions, has no added spices or flavorings.

But there are plenty of impressions to be found in a bottle. One is just how moreish Celebration is; it’s so delicious that the temptation is to drink it by the gallon. This would not be a great idea, since at 6.8% ABV it’s no shrinking violet of a beer.

Ken Grossman ponders the bottling machine in Sierra Nevada's early days

A bright amber in the glass, it is wildly floral, however, as well as fruity in the nose–citrus to be sure, some spiciness, a hop lover’s dream bouquet.

For those whose memories aren’t quite as long as mine, I have to report what a revelation this beer was when it first starting showing up on the east coast back in the day. There was simply nothing else like it around, or nothing that could be easily found in any case. Well, Sierra Nevada itself wasn’t that easily found back in the early ‘80s.

“Balance” is a term bandied about as a desirable goal in brewing, meaning the malt sweetness and hop bitterness have reached some grail of equilibrium. I’ll buy it in this case (and by the case). Celebration Ale is the epitome of poise, with its rousing malt opening followed by a quenching hop bitterness.

It’s a beer to be reckoned with, and I reckon I’ll have another one.

Name: Celebration Ale
Brewer: Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, Chico, California
Style: American IPA
ABV: 6.8%
Availability: Nationwide, winter seasonal
More Information: www.sierranevada.com

Related Posts:

TAP Beer(s) of the Week 49: Oh, Bring Us Some Clootie Dumpling…

TAP Beer of the Week 46: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

TAP Beer(s) of the Week 37: Fall Classics

TAP Beer of the Week 7: Sierra Nevada Glissade

TAP Beer of the Week 2: Life and Limb

Invoke Cave Creek in these parts and people seem to roll their eyes a bit, as if you’ve mentioned an eccentric uncle who is a lot of fun, even if he asks you to pull his finger from time to time.

Cave Creek’s bent rears toward a wild west heritage, with a heavy streak of pigskin fanaticism woven in. Though Buffalo Chip began life in 1951 as a feed and bait shop, it has evolved into an ample western dance hall and saloon, complete with bull-riding.

Not mechanical bull-riding, the real thing. And on Wednesday nights, which this was, it’s amateur night. Anyone with sufficient balls and lack of sense enough to sign a waiver can mount up and try to hang on to a 1,800-pound manically lurching bull for eight seconds. The evidence (and amateurs) on the ground suggested this was nearly impossible, and no one in our group was about to chance it.

I felt at sufficient risk asking the bartender if she had any good craft beer available. Her disdain was like a pointed cowgirl boot to my crotch. But actually they did have Widmer Hefeweizen on tap, which went pretty well with the pulled pork, grilled sausage, biscuit, beans and coleslaw I larded onto my plate.

The Buffalo Chip is also known as a Green Bay Packers bar. Walk a little ways across a large parking lot, which a few of us did, and you come to Harold’s Corral, which I was told is the largest Pittsburgh Steelers bar in the U.S. (And therefore, presumably, in the world.)

I neglected to ask how that was measured, precisely, or where Cardinal fans go. But in 2009 over 4,200 fans jammed into huge tents set up on the property to watch the Steelers beat Arizona in Super Bowl XLIII, 27 to 23, and then doubtless went crazy on beer.

I wasn’t crazy about the selection at Harold’s, but across the street we struck paydirt. The Cave Creek Tap Haus is a new kid on the block, opened only a few weeks, but for good beer fans it’s the mother lode, offering over 50 craft beers on tap, and claiming to have the largest local selection in the state.

By this time our entourage had been whittled down to me and Jerry Rose of Communication Links. As this post suggests, Jerry and I have been spending most of our time together of late atop barstools. We can deal with it.

We took our time deciding on our pints because bartender Pam Porter (perfect name for a beer bar), kept giving us samples so we could make up our minds.

Fifty taps at the Cave Creek Tap Haus can make selection a little tricky

I wanted to keep it local, and so settled happily on an Old World Brewery Eclipse Black IPA, a not overly hoppy but fairly rich and slightly roasty dark ale that seemed more like a porter than anything. Fine by me.

I can’t say I know much about the Phoenix-based brewery beyond what’s on its website and Facebook page, noting that the lineup of regularly distributed beers include an Old World Wit, a Nitro Blonde, a 4Leaf Irish Red Ale, a Dark Knight Porter and seasonals like the Eclipse, which is probably eclipsed by now. The brewery and a taproom is located at the old Capital Station Post Office at 334 North 25^th Avenue in Phoenix.

I sort of lost track of the beer because we were soon chatting and taking pictures with Pam and assistant bar manager Carrol Douglass, before one of them pointed out that Robbie Knievel was sitting at the bar right alongside us.

Knievel, who turns 50 in May, was eight when he first performed on a motorcycle with his legendary dad, Evel Knievel. Robbie carries on the family stuntman daredevil ways as Kaptain Robbie Knievel, having made over 250 jumps himself, sometimes replicating the feats of his late father, often surpassing them.

Robbie has jumped over a 228-foot span of the Grand Canyon, broken all sorts of records for leaping over cars and buses, and hopes someday to cap his career with a jump of the Snake River Canyon in Idaho–the feat he father attempted in vain in 1974.

Golf Road Warrior Tom Bedell and Road Warrior Robbie Knievel (right)

Robbie has had his own share of wipeouts, surely enough to sympathize with the amateur bull riders over at Buffalo Chip. But this night, he had the old man on his mind. Evel Knievel was 69 when he died on the way to a hospital on November 30, 2007.

“I haven’t had a drop of hard liquor in quite some time,” said Robbie. “But it’s exactly four years ago today that my dad passed away. So I’ve been thinking about him. I thought I’d have a drink in his memory.”

That sounded like a good idea to us. So we clinked glasses, and joined in on the memories.

Name: Eclipse Black IPA
Brewer: Old World Brewing Company, Phoenix, Arizona
Style: Black IPA
ABV: 7.3%
Availability: Seasonally, Arizona
For More Information: www.oldworldbrewery.com

The beer list at Talavera and the resort’s Onyx Bar Lounge is limited, but it does have some of the stars of the craft brewing show–Anchor Steam, Fat Tire, Dogfish 60 Minute IPA, and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

Even better, they have a local list that includes Four Peaks 8^th Street Pale Ale and Kilt Lifter, Oak Creek Amber and Nut Brown, a canned Lumberyard Red Ale, and Nimbus A-1 Pilsner and Pale Ale.

I made it a Nimbus night, trying both beers from the Tucson brewery (there’s also a bistro outlet in East Tucson). I don’t know a lot about the brewery other than that it began in 1996 and was originally owned by Nimbus Cousin. Cousin–for some reason unknown to the Nimbus bartender I spoke to on the phone–opted for a simian theme for the brewery.

When James Counts took over the brewery in 2000, he decided to keep the monkey around–now part of the brewery logo, with the key phrase, “It’s a natural selection.” A monkey is also on most of the labels, often placed in quasi-religious artwork context.

An exception is the one lager made by the company, the Nimbus A-1. It is a re-creation of an old Phoenix beer from the Arizona Brewing Company, with an attendant old timey label. I liked the label more than the beer.

But the Nimbus Pale Ale turned out to be a keeper. It’s amber, a bit cloudy, with a decent but hardly overpowering hop aroma, more evident as the beer warms a bit. (Unfortunately, they seem to be big on frozen glassware in Arizona.) The flavor is tilted toward sweet rather than hoppy, with not a lot of middle to the profile. But with four additions of Cascade, Chinook and Columbus hops, the finish is bracingly bitter.

Name: Nimbus Pale Ale
Brewer: Nimbus Brewing Company, Tucson, Arizona
Style: Pale Ale
ABV: 5.5%
Availability: Arizona
For More Information: www.nimbusbeer.com

Jerry Rose, a vice president at the Communication Links public relations firm, picked us up. The last time I saw Jerry was atop a barstool at a Yard House near Miami, so this wasn’t hard service for him.

He took us to the Four Peaks Brewery in Tempe, which I had heard was a favorite hangout for Arizona State University students, but the immediate world actually seemed to be here; it was a Monday night, and the place was packed inside and out. (And since Four Peaks can serve roughly 350 at capacity, my guess is that about 349 people were there.)

The brewery has been in existence since 1996, housed in a brick building dating from 1892, home of the Pacific Creamery, the first functioning dairy on the west coast, according to manager Matt McCormack. There’s a second location in North Scottsdale. McCormack also quickly delivered the bad news: the brewpub had plowed through 51 kegs of its popular Pumpkin Porter seasonal by Thanksgiving, and there was no more to be had, nowhere, no how.

Well, revise, adapt and improvise. We made do with a sampler tray, and we pretty much went through this entire list:

Matt McCormack

The Kilt Lifter is the flagship beer, a Scottish-style ale, though thanks to reverse osmosis tanks and clever water chemistry, Four Peaks mimics foreign styles pretty well. They also cultivate their own yeast cultures, and the big news, according to McCormack, was that a lease had been recently signed for a 16,000 square foot new production facility in Tempe.

Doing three brews daily six days a week in its 40-barrel brewhouse (all boldly on display in the brewpub), isn’t quite enough for Four Peaks to expand distribution beyond its 300 accounts in Arizona. But the new 60-barrel brewhouse will enable it to brew, bottle and can even more fine suds (over the current 10,000 barrels annually).

Kilt Lifter was suitably malty, with a bare hint of smokiness, and perhaps even less hop character as befits the style, coming in at 6.0% ABV. It’s a solid beer, and the wink and a nod name undoubtedly adds to its popularity. “My marketing guy tells me it’s the number one selling craft beer in Arizona,” said McCormack.

When we finally arrived at the Four Seasons Resorts Scottsdale I had another bottle to wrap up the night. But I can’t say it was my favorite beer of the evening. I was taken by the bold attempt to brew two different IPAs, the Raj and the Hop Knot.

The Raj is an attempt at an English-style IPA, though at a hefty 6.9% ABV, with Magnum, Fuggles and Golding hops, while the Hop Knot is the New World version, an American-style IPA at 6.7% with Cascade, Glacier, Magnum, Liberty and Simcoe hops. The latter is a hop bomb, and it suited me quite well.

Name: Kilt Lifter
Brewer: Four Peaks Grill and Tap, Tempe, Arizona
Style: Scottish Ale
ABV: 6.0%
Availability: Year round in Arizona
For More Information: www.fourpeaks.com

Kolbee Feese at the taps at Four Peaks

I’m hoping to pull off a TAP Beer of the Day throughout the week, because there will be beer. But no promises, because the days will be long and hard and loaded with (mostly golf) activity. I foresee much nodding off at night, while looming over the laptop.

After landing tomorrow I’m heading straight to the Four Peaks Brewing Company in Tempe (there’s a second location in North Scottsdale). Whether they’ll have any of their touted Pumpkin Porter left on tap will be promptly answered, preferably in the affirmative.

I’ll take what comes the rest of the way; a mini-pub crawl is in the works for Wednesday night in Cave Creek and who knows what by Saturday night. Stay tuned.

Now virtually every brewery in the land, and worldwide for that matter, puts out some kind of holiday ale or winter warmer, usually a strong or spiced or in some way out of the ordinary brew. I went on about this in a piece last year, noting a few others as well as Anchor’s.

But back in 1975 when Anchor brewed its first Our Special Ale, there was virtually nothing similar on the landscape. Fritz Maytag and his crew look positively visionary in retrospect.

Anchor continued the custom annually, supposedly varying the recipe each year, though keeping the brewing details close to the vest. One early version became part of the regular portfolio, however, as Liberty Ale (day-to-day one of my favorite beers).

The company definitely varied the label from year to year with some kind of tree–either stylized or actual. For the arborists in the audience, this year’s specimen is the Bristlecone Pine, and that’s Pinus longaeva for the sophomores in the crowd.

The company produced a nice little video about the whole magilla this year, so why not trot it right out?:

The beer is in its 37th iteration, and I can’t say that I’ve had them all. I barely knew Anchor existed in 1975. But I’ve had most at least since 1988, the first Our Special Ale bottle in my collection.

The beer is always a welcome sight when it appears in stores each November, and not buying at least a six-pack is virtually unthinkable.

Though the brewers won’t say what’s in it, I’ve suspected some kind of spruce adjunct for quite awhile now, or maybe even spruce tips. In any case, the ale is a spicy concoction with clove and nutmeg notes, and its piney aroma in a complex weave of hops, spice and malt all streaming out of the glass.

The beer is nearly opaque, with mahogany hues when held to the light. The flavor delivers all that the bouquet promises–sweet, tangy, full, well-bittered.

The spruce character seems somewhat less aggressive to me than in years’ past, which I think is a good thing. The beer has tended to taste as though it’s straight from the forest, maybe a stand of Bristlecone Pine. It still tends to summon the image of a Christmas tree. And, since ‘tis the season, all is well.

Name: Our Special Ale 2011
Brewer: Anchor Brewing Co., San Francisco
Style: Spice/Herb/Specialty Beer
ABV: 5.5%
Availability: Nov-Feb, nationwide
For More Information: www.anchorbrewing.com

Related posts:
Anchor Porter
Anchor Steam Beer

Nice of Stone to release their Veterans’ Day Vertical Epic Ale 11.11.11 a few days earlier than the label date. That meant I actually found a few bottles on the Brattleboro Food Co-op shelves today. And since I’m a vet, my path seemed clear.

It also seemed apt that the chilies in the beer–yes, chiles–came from the Hatch Valley in New Mexico, since I was mainly stationed in New Mexico back in my army days. (I was an MP, but you’ll have to get me pretty liquored up before I start dishing army stories.)

Dr. Fabian Garcia

Let’s talk about Dr. Fabian Garcia instead. A member of the first graduating class in 1894 of the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts (later to become NMSU), Garcia eventually returned to serve as a professor of horticulture for more than 40 years.

And it was his work in breeding cultivars that led to the New Mexico No. 9 chile in 1913–also known as the Anaheim or long green–and the main deal in Hatch, where the annual Hatch Valley Chile Festival is held in early September.

As I said in my review of the 09.09.09 beer on 10.10.10, the brewery’s Vertical Epic series began on 02.02.02, continuing on 03.03.03, 04.04.04 and so on, the next brew always appearing a year, a month and a day after its predecessor. Though all are strong beers made with Belgian ale yeasts, each recipe is different (in more ways than one), and so the notion of an actual vertical tasting of the eleven ultimate releases is a bit of a misnomer.

No matter–should be a lot of fun on 12.12.12 anyway, when those who have managed to annually horde bottles begin sharing their stashes.

For the record, I have a bottle each of the 09-11 releases. So far. I was quite fond of the 09.09.09 Imperial Belgian Porter, less enamored of the 10.10.10, which added wine grapes and chamomile to the mix.

I’d say Stone has nailed it again. The 11.11.11 is a reddish amber ale with all sorts of intriguing and appealing aromatics swirling together–banana esters from the Flanders Golden ale yeast, touches of clove, cedar, cinnamon, and a suggestion of chile peeking through.

This is all apparent in the flavor as well, though the chile rises immediately to the foreground. Not in flamethrower fashion–the chiles used are mild green Anaheim chilies, and they add more zest than real heat, although it’s there, and lingers through the finish. The light addition of cinnamon is at play as well.

At a hefty 9.4% ABV, the beer has plenty of sweet malt character at work as well, and the interplay of all the varied elements add up to a complex, compelling, and quite delicious beer.

I’m thinking I may have to go buy a few more, so I was happy to see the bomber bottle coming in at well under $10. (All the $15 to $25 bottles of beer I’ve been running across lately are becoming vexing.)

Bring me the chiles of Fabian Garcia!

Name: 11.11.11 Vertical Epic Ale
Brewer: Stone Brewing Co., San Diego, California
Style: Belgian spiced ale
ABV: 9.4%
Availability: Nationwide, but usually doesn’t last long.
For More Information: stonebrew.com

All this because ‘tis the season for pumpkin ales, which I suspect are now outselling Oktoberfest beers as far as fall seasonals go. I was going to bypass them this year but as I was just on a whirlwind trip to Cape Breton, where the fall colors were still vibrant, it’s only a week from Halloween and a Propeller Pumpkin Ale came to hand–so be it.

This isn’t my first acquaintance with the Propeller Brewing Company, as my book group buddy, Mary Lou Treat, brought me a six-pack of the Propeller IPA after her last visit to her Nova Scotia summer home.

And it was a treat. The less assertive hop character might have put this more in line with an English IPA than a west coast U.S. IPA, but it does come on strong at 6.5% ABV. And in any case, there are plenty of hops to keep all but the most rabid satisfied.

Our ride to Cape Breton

So I thought I was lucky then. But then the offer came to visit Nova Scotia, specifically Cape Breton, and visit it in style, aboard a privately chartered eight-seater Citation Sovereign jet. The point of the trip wasn’t to drink Propeller Pumpkin Ale–except as a further incidental exhibit of Nova Scotian talents. The point was to visit and play at the new Cabot Links golf course in Inverness, as well as a classic Cape Breton course, Highland Links.

And this we did–we being a group of eight golf travel writers, editors and publishers–taking off from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey and landing in Port Hawkesbury, where we boarded a comfortable bus well-equipped with beers from Nova Scotian micros (Propeller and Garrison) as well home-baked cookies and scones courtesy of Katherine MacDonald’s mom. (Katherine is the director of marketing for Golf Cape Breton.)

The golf I’ll go into in greater detail in another venue. But briefly, there’s going to be plenty to celebrate in terms of golf up this way, both in the full scale opening of Cabot Links in early July, and in the continuing work at Highland Links, not to mention the other four courses that make up the Golf Cape Breton association.

Highland Links

Highland Links was our first stop, a more than 70-year-old Stanley Thompson design that makes full use of the bold contours and backdrops of its locale within the Cape Breton Highlands National Park. The course has been tinkered with over the years but is in the throes of a restoration.

David Baum, publisher of Golf Odyssey and Golf Vacation Insider, in the throes of the lobster feed

Playing partner Vic Williams and I tried an Alexander Keith’s IPA out on the course. It had no bold contours; it was like any pale lagerish Canadian ale, with no hop character to speak of at all.

We had better luck that evening at the Castle Rock Inn in Ingonish Ferry where we stayed, and where we had a traditional Cape Breton lobster feed, which involves tossing lobsters onto a table covered in newspapers, the heck with the plates, and then digging in atavistically.

We had a choice to wash down the lobster (and a killer chowder) with Keith’s Red Amber Ale, a Clancy’s Amber Ale (from Moosehead), and a Rickard’s Dark (made by Molson). As a passable porter the Rickard’s was actually the most interesting of the bunch, save for the Propeller.

Okay, so, John Patch did not invent the Archimedes Screw. (Nor did Mrs. Archimedes.) The term is a colloquialism for a marine screw propeller, as Archimedes used a rotating screw as a mention of lifting water for irrigation. The principle was turned toward shipping in the early 1800’s, and one of the first demonstrations came in 1833 with an invention by Patch, a Yarmouth sea captain.

John Patch

But the SS Archimedes launched as the first steam-driven screw propeller vessel (with a design by Francis Pettit Smith) in England in 1835, and any credit Patch was due was already evaporating. He was never able to patent his design, and he eventually died in poverty in Yarmouth.

John Allen ran across the Patch history when seeking a name for the microbrewery he was starting. Since Allen was a props man himself in the TV and film industry, it all seemed to fit, and the Propeller Brewing Company took off in Halifax in 1997.

PBC has a few seasonals and seven year-round beers. “We’re big on keeping it classic and represent the beers to style the best way we can,” said sales and marketing director Andrew Cooper.

The Pumpkin Ale first appeared 2004. “It was a logical fall seasonal,” said Cooper. “It’s become legendary in Halifax. We do send some across Canada, but it flies off the shelves as fast as it can be stocked. It’s a good representation of the style, but quite accessible, not too over the top.”

It’s an apt assessment–though there are the usual pumpkin pie spices at play, the beer is skewed more toward ale than dessert, with a nice hop finish.

Maybe the pumpkins have something to do with it. The brewery uses the world’s largest pumpkin variety, Dill’s Atlantic Giant.

Seems the late Howard Dill, a farmer from Windsor, Nova Scotia, was obsessed with growing giant pumpkins, to the point of endless experimentation with genetic crossbreeding. He was successful beyond words, and was able to trademark his seed varieties–which have spawned giant pumpkin competitions worldwide ever since.

For the record, the current record is a 1818.5 pound behemoth grown by Jim and Kelsey Bryson of Ormstown, Quebec. Or rather, was, since the pumpkin was then shipped off to the New York Botanical Gardens where master pumpkin carver Ray Villafane turned it into a aptly gruesome part of this year’s Haunted Pumpkin Garden. Here’s a video of Ray at work on the Bryson’s great pumpkin:

The Dill farm and Howard Dill Enterprises, now run by his son and daughter, is a major tourist stop in Nova Scotia. The Propeller Brewing Company is good for tours, too, and heading there is not a bad idea, since the beers are not available in the U.S. unless a friend transports some south.

Once in Halifax, it’s only about a three and a half hour drive to Cape Breton. And now that Cabot Links is built and set to officially open July 1, people will come.

They’re coming already, of course–Cape Breton was named the Best Island Destination in the continental U.S. and Canada in a 2011 Travel & Leisure poll, and it wasn’t hard to see why as we roamed over the Cabot Trail on our way to the golf course. The 298 kilometer (185 mile) roadway loops over the northern tip of the island, and the consistently scenic splendor backs up the current marketing slogans, “There’s no wrong turn,” or “Where the mountains meet the sea.”

Cabot Links is in Inverness, and the course wends from the town to the sea in classic links golf style. Ten holes opened for play this July, and we were privileged to be the first journalists to sample the full 18, if with still fairly shaggy greens on the newer holes. So tireless tweeter Stephanie Wei was fully justified in claiming the women’s course record when she shot a 79 on our second day of play on this coastal joy.

The course is designed by Ron Whitman, surely his masterwork to date. Whitman was involved pretty much from the beginning with managing partner Ben Cowan-Dewar–who eventually enticed Mike Keiser into becoming involved. When Keiser brought his Bandon Dunes playbook along, success was virtually assured, although it’s been a long road since Cowan-Dewer and Whitman first walked the land in 2005 and began acquiring 13 separate land parcels.

Cabot Links ninth hole

Like the courses at Bandon, Cabot Links will be walking only, but a mesmerizing stroll it is. It broke my heart to drop out of the second round due a back condition which has been bedeviling me for a few months, but it was pleasure enough just to be on the grounds, so attractive is the pull of sea and links land here. And heading back to the airport for our flight home a reprise of the Propeller Pumpkin Ale was succor at least.

Meat darts? About what it sounds like, according to Katherine. For a $5 or $10 entry fee at the legion hall or local bar on meat dart nights, players can compete for prizes that range from lowly bologna to more desirable moose steaks or loin of veal.

You can’t do everything in 48 hours, so no one took home any meaty prizes. But having seen Cabot Links once, there’s little choice in wanting to return as soon as possible. Next time, meat darts and more Propeller beer for sure.

Name: Propeller Pumpkin Ale
Brewer: Propeller Brewing Co. (John Allen Brewing Company Ltd.)
Style: Pumpkin Ale
ABV: 5%
Availability: You might find some through October, mainly in Nova Scotia.
For More Information: www.drinkpropeller.ca

Cabot Links

What’s this heresy? I could go on and on why I think football is less of a healthy pastime in this country and more of a disease, but why bother? I know I’m in the minority, so I’ll just try to keep my head when all about me are losing theirs, painting them two colors, or stuffing them in over-sized foam hats.

But basically, I can’t see what all the excitement is about, unless it’s the betting. (That I can understand.) The games themselves are dreadful time-sucking bores on television. They speak to American excess however, in that the games are overly wrapped in wasteful packaging, with precious little meat on the bone.

To speak of the games being boring may sound strange from someone who would far rather watch baseball or golf. Football adrenaline junkies no doubt find these sports somnambulistic.

But baseball and golf are more individualized thinking man’s (or woman’s) games. Yes, baseball is a team sport, but when a batter is at the plate it’s one against nine. To win a golf tournament a player has to overcome a virtual horde.

Football, despite all the playbooks and specialists and endless X and O diagrams, is still basically about getting clobbered. It’s a militaristic advance and retreat that can’t help but appeal to the aggressive natures in players and spectators.  Good old George Carlin always had it right, when he said football was about “advancing deep into enemy territory,” while baseball is about, “going home.”

But then I said I wasn’t going to say anything. So I should move onto the beer. But even that bothers me in a football context, since many viewing party-goers or tailgaters drink too much beer, and too much lousy beer, and none of it works out well in the end.

If it weren’t for the boorish behavior, I could get behind tailgating, though, since it has potential for good communal fun, with grilled meats.

The San Diego-based TailGate Beer company launched its Blacktop Blonde in January, and followed up with its Hefeweizen about the time the football season kicked off. The name bespeaks the market the company has in mind, with a goal to bridge the gap between canned craft beers and canned mainstream beers.

Other than the obvious difference that both TailGate beers are ales, and not mass market bellywash lagers, neither is pushing any brewing envelope. That may be astute marketing, since pounding mainstream drinkers with a heavily hopped beer might not work out well. (The tide does seem to be turning in the direction of more flavorful beers even among the masses, but it’s still a big ocean.)

The Blacktop Blonde, said to be named with the help of Jay DiEugenio (otherwise known as Jay the Tailgate Guy), does have some Magnum and Cascade hops in the mix to lend a lightly spicy character. But this is an easy-drinking light ale. It’s a bit hazy in the glass–and yes, drinkers are encouraged to pour canned as well as bottled beers into a glass. There’s a distinct aroma of pineapple and a bit of pineapple tang in the flavor as well.

The Hefeweizen, too, has a bit of a canned pineapple juice aroma, along with a touch of sulphur, perhaps the barest hint of a clove character. But this slightly hazy golden brew seems to be in a limbo unlikely to appeal to too many tailgaters or craft brew fans. It reminds me of the old Rodney Dangerfield (not Carlin) joke: “I said to my wife, ‘Honey, was that good for you?’ and she said, ‘I don’t think that was good for anyone.’”

The TailGate beers, like the canned beers from San Francisco’s 21st Amendment Brewery, are contract-brewed in Minnesota at the Cold Spring Brewery. As mentioned in this post, Cold Spring is perhaps best known for having produced the infamous Billy Beer, back in the day.

If he were still alive and drinking it might be interesting to know what Billy Carter would favor these days. He might venture a spin on the blacktop, or even be downing some Georgia micros. The odds are he’d still be out in the mainstream mid-ocean, but at least unlikely to paint his face blue and gold.

Name: Blacktop Blonde and Hefeweizen
Brewer: TailGate Beer, San Diego, California
Style: Blonde ale and Hefeweizen
ABV: 5.0% and 4.9%
Availability: Year-round, four states: CA, MN, ND, PA.
For More Information: www. tailgatebeer.com

My last visit, chronicled here, turned into a quest to find Ambar Cerveza Oscura, the darker-hued sibling to the ubiquitous Presidente, the flagship beer of the sole brewery in the DR, the Cervecería Nacional Dominicana. With no more nights to spare on that trip, I was finally successful.

So this time I thought I’d get my order in early, so to speak, shortly after arriving at the Casa de Campo resort. At a cocktail party for our arriving group of golf writers, I already had a Presidente in hand when I met the resort’s general manager, Daniel Hernández Quiñones, and expressed the hope that he might be able to track down an Ambar for me.

As it turned out, he was not able, but he didn’t let me down, either.

Nor did anything else about the resort. I’ve been writing about Pete Dye’s Teeth of the Dog course for years–without ever seeing it–because one can’t write about golf in the Caribbean without mentioning it.

The Dye Fore Chavón nine

Ever since it opened in 1971, preceding the opening of Casa de Campo in 1975, Dye’s course has routinely been considered one of the best in the world. (Number 47 in GOLF Magazine’s current Top 100 Courses in the World list.) Its seven holes right on the water (four on the front side, three incoming) have become something of a Caribbean template.

The first seaside hole, number five, is an iconic eye-opening par-3 that starts putting the teeth into the course, which is showing no signs of wear. Dye has returned twice to polish the Teeth, which he still calls one of his favorites.

Others enjoy the Links course (undergoing work during our visit), and some have gone so far as to call the Dye Fore course their favorite. It was mainly to see nine new Dye holes that our group was invited, a nine that will become part of a 27-hole Dye Fore layout.

With the former front nine of Dye Fore (the Marina nine) also undergoing work, we began on the former back nine, now called the Chavón nine since it plays high above the Chavón River in spectacular fashion. In hopes of doing something completely different for the new nine, Dye went to small and sometimes tabletop greens in a links-style nine.

Eric Lillibridge, director of instruction at the resort’s Jim McLean Golf School gives a brief intro here:

Just as we were finishing up our round at Dye Fore some nasty looking clouds rolled impressively in, and the ensuing storm was a dozy.

Mostly the weather was drippingly hot, and under the circumstances Presidente sure began to seem like the beer of choice.There are others–Cervecería Nacional Dominicana also makes a Presidente Light and another cerveza tipo Pilsner, Bohemia and Bohemia Light. But the call of “beer” in these parts provokes the smiling response of “Presidente” to any local I spoke to, almost a point of national pride.

Presidente is a totally unremarkable pale lager, made with sugar and corn grits adjuncts, the kind of beer I pretty much stopped drinking years ago. So I was a little surprised by how much I was looking forward to one, or several, after coming off the golf course.

Golf writer Art Stricklin lines up a shot

Or after a round of shooting clays, one of the many non-golf activities available at the 7,000-acre resort. The shooting center is spread out on 245 acres, with 300 different stations available. Our group headed over, put on a protective vest, were handed a box of 25 shells and earplugs, and were soon merrily blasting away.

I expected to hit absolutely nothing. True, I was a sharpshooter with an M-16 back in my army days, but I think I’ve fired a rifle exactly once since the early 70’s. More surprise, when I had 17 hits, tops in our crew. But it was hot and sweaty work–time for another Presidente.

The weather wasn’t all that was hot. The Zimmerman Agency had arranged the trip and the two capable reps they had on the Casa case, Kerry Anne Watson and Jennifer Gillespie, also happen to be stunners. And one of the invitees, Renee Knorr, is the fashion and beauty director for The 19th Hole Magazine.

Left to right, Jennifer Gillespie, Renee Knorr, Kerry Anne Watson

Golf press trips rarely have a pulchritude level this high. Renee has, unsurprisingly, modeled and done film work, and she wore one killer outfit after another on and off the golf course, though if that dress above looks good from the front, its absence in the back was also tough to beat (eyes right).

The emphasis on fashion is something of a tradition here, if one recalls that the 1971 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue used Teeth of the Dog as a backdrop.

The resort was owned in the early days by Gulf+Western, which owned Paramount Pictures, and a few movies were filmed on location here as well. (Dip back into “Apocalypse Now” and check out the river scenes, filmed on the Chavón River, pre-Dye Fore days.)

A Paramount set designer created Altos de Chavón, an artist gallery and shopping area near the Dye Fore course, made to look like a Mediterranean village. I took a stroll through one morning and it seemed like a fashion shoot was going on around every bend.

The cameras were firing the last night of our visit as well, as we’d all been asked to dress in white for a dinner at the Beach Club by Le Cirque.

White Night at the Beach Club by Le Cirque--Canadian golf writer Brian Kendall didn't get the memo.

Daniel Hernández Quiñones was at the dinner and he turned a little white himself when I mentioned that the Ambar beer had never shown up. As I soon discovered, he then set the wheels to turning, turning to executive chef Luca Banfi, something of a beer nut himself after over a decade of work in craft beer-crazy San Diego.

I’d spoken to Luca earlier in the trip and found out he’d been at beer-food pairing at a San Diego Beer Weekend event in June, 2010 that I had attended. Sure enough, when I returned home I spotted him in a photo I’d taken then–small world, getting smaller all the time.

Before long a Erdinger Dunkelweiss was sitting on the table and a Köstritzer Schwarzbier in the ice chest. I was a happy man, but still, I wondered aloud, no Ambar? Daniel pulled out his phone, and an acquaintance told him he didn’t believe it was being made anymore.

This I later confirmed–Cervecería Nacional Dominicana ceased production of Ambar in February. Descansa en paz.

I was a happy man as well when I asked Jennifer Gillespie to strike a pose and my misbehaving camera caught her at just the right moment. I think we have a chance to turn Jennifer into the Farrah Fawcett poster girl of the 21st century–if anyone reading is old enough to know what I mean by that.

Name: Presidente
Brewer: Cervecería Nacional Dominicana
Style: Pale lager
ABV: 5%
Availability: Ubiquitous in the Dominican Republic; 15 states east of the Mississippi and Washington, D.C.
For More Information: www.cnd.com.do

G. A. Smith

You never know, but this isn’t my old man, who enjoyed a glass of beer now and again, but was more of a vodka man. This is Tom Green, a comedian in Brighton, England, who appeared in several silent films by G.A. Smith, this one dating from 1897–the earliest days of British cinema.

Indeed, according to an article by Frank Gray on the Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema website, George Albert Smith was lauded late in his life (1864-1959) as “the father of the British Film Industry,” and was made a Fellow of the British Film Academy in 1955.

Such early films were usually limited to about 75 feet of film running through the camera, and hence were rarely titled. This one was alternately called “Comic Face” or “Man Drinking.”  It may be YouTube that also decided Tom Green looked old and slapped that title on it.  Certainly, Tom is no poster child for Drinking Responsibly, getting pretty silly in the space of four sips and forty seconds.

The clip comes from the British Film Institute archives, which can be  accessed at its own YouTube channel.

The big question remains–what beer is Tom Green drinking? I can’t make out the label, but it’s a pretty dark beer that would have been available in a bottle in Brighton in 1897. Let the nominations begin.

I included the Pike XXXXX stout, so I had every intention of downing one (at least) at the brewery. But with a late arrival from the east I remained in the outlier district near Sea-Tac airport my first night in town, venturing no further than Sharp’s RoastHouse, a busy BBQ joint within walking distance.

Sharp’s sported a respectable 26 taps of mostly northwest brews, 23 more than I could handle in one sensible night.

While passing the time with other transients bellied up to the bar I soon acquainted myself agreeably with Fremont Interurban IPA (6.2% ABV, and belonging to that slim genre of beers named after outdoor sculptures), Maritime Pacific’s Nightwatch Dark Ale (listed as 7% ABV on the Sharp’s menu, but 5.5% on the brewery website) and a Flyers Pacemaker Porter (5.5%).

Fremont's Waiting for the Interurban

The latter brewery hews to an aviation theme in naming its beers, which seemed apt as I was talking to two commercial pilots at the time. Phil Spencer of Delta, who lives in Honolulu, was in town for an annual golf jaunt with friends, this year to the Sunriver Resort in Oregon.

I didn’t even bring my sticks on this trip, even though SIP’s editorial director, George Fuller, and I go way back more in terms of golf than spirits. But we restricted our exercise on this trip to elbow-bending, meeting up yesterday to grab lunch at Pike.

We had hoped to run into Charles and/or Rose Ann Finkel, but as they were busily getting ready for an imminent trip to Africa, we had to content ourselves with Naughty Nellie, a 4.7% blonde ale that seemed well-enough behaved to us.

George and I took a lengthy break to tour the Pike Place Market and along with the rest of the tourists watch a fish or two go flying. But in a few hours we were back in the same booth at Pike’s Brewing with SIP writer Jacqueline Pruner and designer Randi Karabin, swapping mostly Pike beers from different samplers. This included the XXXXX Extra Stout, a regular in the portfolio after an on-again off-again history, not unlike that of the Finkels.

Step one, grab fish. Step two, toss.

It’s tough to overestimate the impact of the couple on the contemporary beer scene; they had a major hand in getting it all rolling in the first place, that place being the late 1970’s, through their seminal beer importing company Merchant du Vin, begun in 1978.

I have a bit of that history here. Not only were the Finkels helping to revive nearly lost styles, they were doing much to educate U.S. palates. Eventually, they decided to do it themselves–enter the brewing company in 1989.

Broadly curious and eager to try their hands at new endeavors, the couple sold both companies in 1997. But after wandering in the wilderness for a few years, the old yearning returned, and they reacquired Pike Brewing in 2006. It looks like they’re now here for the duration, as is the XXXXX Extra Stout, which floats above the brewery/restaurant action in a giant inflatable bottle.

The XXXXX is a no-frills stout’s stout, black as night, suffused with roasted malt aromas, chocolate, licorice and coffee flavors. It’s all balanced well with Chinook, Willamette and Goldings hops, for a smooth, chewy and filling pint. Well, it was after I drained the insufficient sample glass and ordered a pint to dive into, as the beer deserves.

Lining 'em up at the SIP Northwest launch (Photo by Nityia Design)

The launch party was held at the Wine World Warehouse, and the emphasis was indeed on wine, varietals served up from Barnard Griffin, Cooper Wine, Swiftwater Cellars, Terra Blanca, Gordon Brothers, sparkling wine from Treveri, cocktails from two different Maker’s Mark blends, chocolate from Forté and other goodies.

Daniel Lee of the Odin Brewing Company

But Daniel Lee of Seattle’s Odin Brewing Company was there as well, saving the day for beer nuts with a Kölsch-style Freya’s Gold (4.5%) and the juniper berry laced Odin’s Gift, a 5.4% ruby ale.

It was a grand event, but we weren’t finished yet, as most of the SIP folks present went off for a late bite to eat at Murphy’s, said to be the first Irish pub in Seattle. Naturally, there was Murphy’s and Guinness on tap. But I went with the cask-conditioned Diamond Knot IPA (6.2%), since I’d already had my stout for the day.

Name: XXXXX Stout
Brewer: Pike Brewing Company, Seattle, Washington
Style: Stout
ABV: 7%
Availability: Year-round in WA, OR, ID and MT, sometimes AK, and in select Total Wines stores on the East Coast.
For More Information: www.pikebrewing.com

The chalk board at Murphy's

That was the tasting of the 2009 bottling, with a little history on Samuel Smith and its stone Yorkshire squares, beer writer Michael Jackson and his influence on the early days of beer’s rebirth in the U.S., all thrown into the brewkettle.

This is only the third release of the beer in the U.S., as usual on August 1, Yorkshire Day in England. Well, here too, if one so celebrates. And taking note of the celebration with a Yorkshire Stingo would only be appropriate, not to mention satisfying.

This year’s version, brewed in 2010, comes in at 8% ABV, a tad lower than last year. It has prune-like aromas swimming in a sea of oak. The taste is sweet, smooth, rich, oaky, almost like a port, slightly less tannic than last year. Though news releases from the U.S. importer Merchant du Vin suggest a soft oak note, it seems pronounced to me, but blending nicely in the overall complexity of the brew.

I’m not going to make last year’s mistake, when a mere bottle crossed my lips, and leaving me with nothing to vividly compare to this year’s vintage. I’ll pick up a few more this year to cellar, and a few more just to savor now. That is, if I can find it. Fewer than 24,000 bottles were produced, so don’t dawdle should you find one on the shelves.

The White Rose, symbol of Yorkshire

As last year, Stingo remains a beer you can linger with over an hour or two, if one has such patience. It was easily done this year as I had opened the bottle before sudden dinner plans materialized, so I enjoyed as a pre- and post-prandial treat, right up to the time I began dozing on the couch. Naturally, praising Yorkshire all the while.

Name: Yorkshire Stingo
Brewer: Samuel Smith, Tadcaster, England
Style: English Strong Ale
ABV: 8%
Availability: Nationwide as long as the supply lasts
For More Information: merchantduvin.com

So it goes in Belgium, where beer and food trump golf. I never did see a course on a recent trip to Flanders, but toured five breweries and ate numerous meals cooked with beer or paired with beers.

Belgium is an inspirational mecca for brewers and beer lovers and there’s nothing like a visit there to try specialty house beers in restaurants and bars. (www.visitflanders.us) But many of the best are readily available at better beer outlets in the U.S.:

Poperings Hommel Ale (Brewery Van Eecke, Watou, 7.5% ABV) www.brouwerijvaneecke.be

Unlike the U.S., in Belgium highly hopped beers are the exception rather than the rule. This is a distinctive exception, brewed near the hop fields of Poperinge, where a festival in praise of hops is held every three years. (And this is the year.) The beer is a golden ale with a suitably sharp finish.

Kwak (Brewery Bosteels, Buggenhout, 8.1% ABV) www.bestbelgianspecialbeers.be

All Belgian beers have their own special glass, but the round-bottomed Kwak glass requires a wooden holder to keep it upright. If you want to remain upright, drink this amber ale carefully, since its fruity, spicy, malty mix goes down easy.

Westmalle Tripel (Westmalle Trappist Brewery, 9.5% ABV) www.trappistwestmalle.be

There are six monastic breweries in Belgium (and one in the Netherlands) under the direct control of Trappist monks. Westmalle more or less invented the Tripel style of strong golden ales, and the beer remains a complex wonder, a reverent pour.

Duvel (Brewery Moortgat, Puurs, 8.5% ABV) www.duvel.be

On the other shoulder, the devil (duvel) is in the details of this most beguiling golden ale, which looks as innocuous as a light lager, but which packs a punch in strength and in its fruity, pear-like flavors.

Rodenbach (Rodenbach Brewery, Roeselare, 6% ABV) www.palm.be/en/rodenbach.php

The late beer writer Michael Jackson once called Rodenbach, “The most refreshing beer in the world,” and it’s tart, cherry-like character is certainly a palate cleanser. There’s no fruit in the brown ale; it’s character comes solely from the special yeast, fermentation techniques, aging in oak casks (for up to two years) and blending of different vintages. An acquired taste, but worth acquiring.

In somewhat different form, this piece was originally featured in the July-August 2011 Fairways + Greens Magazine, courtesy Madavor Media. To read the latest digital edition, click here.

This, I thought, is the death knell of Megasuds Bellywash. With superior choices now available in non-breakable cans, golfers need to assert themselves and demand that the cart girl pack in better brews! Slake a thirst and strike a blow for quality!

So we’ve gone all cool aluminum with these suggestions for the warmer months–and mostly wheat beers at that, just because they’re so darn refreshing.

Mama’s Little Yellow Pils (Oskar Blues Brewery, Longmont, Colorado, 5.3% ABV; www.oskarblues.com): But let’s first give a nod to Oskar Blues, the brewery that put its Dale’s Pale Ale in a can in 2002, revving up the craft brew in a can movement. This one is an all-malt Czech-style pilsner, mildly hopped, and if it works for Mama it sure works for us.  (Click here for an entry on Gubna from Oskar Blues.)

Sunshine Wheat (New Belgium Brewing, Fort Collins, Colorado, 4.8% ABV; www.newbelgium.com): Another Colorado offering by way of a Belgium wit beer style–malty, spicy and fruity, with orange peel and coriander leading to a citric tartness that will scour away any thirst.

Royal Weisse (Sly Fox Brewing Co., Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, 5.6% ABV; www.slyfoxbeer.com): East of the Mississippi, this regional favorite is an unfiltered Bavarian-style wheat beer, the special yeast strain lending a bready malt and clove character. The aptly named Scott Summers, general manager of the brewery brewpub, said, “It’s a good morning beer.” We’ll consider that.

Nude Beach Summer Wheat (Stevens Point Brewery, Wisconsin, 5.17% ABV; www.pointbeer.com): Forget a collared golf shirt, this is a clothing-optional unfiltered brew with what the brewery claims are all “au natural” ingredients, including raw and red wheat. Light, crisp, nothing hidden. Remember the sun block.

Hell or High Watermelon Wheat (21^st Amendment Brewery, San Francisco, California, 4.9% ABV; www.21st-amendment.com): I would have picked this just for the name, but make no mistake, it tastes like watermelon. Melonheads will want to try it at least once, or have some on hand to whip out at a barbecue for the novelty value, which includes the instructions on the can to agitate before opening. Another plus–it’s seedless. (Click here for more on the 21^st Amendment Brewery.)

Sorta fits the theme, right?

Paulaner Hefe-Weizen (Paulaner Brauerei, Germany, 5.5% ABV; www.paulaner.de): A classic Bavarian style unfiltered wheat beer (“hefe” means yeast) with banana esters and a strong clove character. The canned version of the Munich brewery’s best-selling beer will debut in the U.S. at the end of May. Prosit!

In somewhat different form, this piece was originally featured in the May-June 2011 Fairways + Greens Magazine, courtesy Madavor Media. To read the latest digital edition, click here.

My greatest wish, I thought, was that someday I might get a chance to play golf with President Barack Obama, the golf nut. Now I realize that what I’d really like to do is have a beer with President Barack Obama, the beer geek.

Okay, technically, I suppose what I’d really like to do is play golf with the President and then have a beer with the guy. But if only one of these dreams could come true, I’d happily settle for lifting a pint with the man who has to be one of our greatest beer-drinking Presidents.

I’m not talking quantity here. I’m talking panache, a man who likes a good beer and isn’t ashamed to show it. I’ve written about this before (most recently here), but the President reaffirmed the fact today with a triumphal visit to Ireland. He included a stop at Moneygall, home of his great great great grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, and where he lifted a pint of Guinness with (among many others) Henry Healy, his eighth cousin.

Now, I recommended that the President do this as long ago as February 2010 (see My Breakfast With the President), and it pleases me to see that he’s taking close note of my counsel.

I guess he couldn’t work out a golf game in Ireland, or even spend a night there; he had scheduled a stay in Dublin, but Iceland’s spewing volcano scuttled that plan. Barack did run into Padraig Harrington however, waiting backstage after the President’s speech to a crowd of about 25,000 in Dublin.

During the speech, the President said, “I’m Barack Obama, from the Moneygall Obamas, and I’ve come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way.”

President O’Bama met with Irish President Mary McAleese in Dublin, and like President John F. Kennedy before him, planted a tree in a garden at the rear of the presidential home.

More impressively, back in the Ollie Hayes pub in Moneygall, Obama had downed his pint of Guinness in four gulps. (Take that, Tim Pawlenty!) An AP report quoted government clerical worker Christy O’Sullivan as marveling at the feat: “”The president actually killed his pint! He gets my vote. He’s the first president I’ve actually seen drink the black stuff like he’s not ashamed of something.”

Indeed, the President waited for the pour to settle, as did the First Lady, who downed a half-pint, and later moved behind the bar to try her hand at pulling a few pints. No word on whether she added the shamrock flourish or not. (If it came to it, I’d happily settle for having a beer with Michelle. Just for the record.)

There are only about 300 souls populating Moneygall, but there’s a good chance Obama shook hands or hugged every one of them. Only about 35 to 40 made it into the pub, but spirits were clearly high as the lifting of the pint moment arrived.

According to the always entertaining Obama Foodorama, the Beer Drinker-in-Chief also laid some money on the bar and said, “I just want you to know the President pays his bar tab.”

Another good reason for drinking with him!

While maybe not quite as gruesome as the company’s 55% ABV The End of History, surely the first confluence of beer and taxidermy, Royal Virility Performance is surely the first professional blending of beer and Viagra. (Amateurs have been doing it ad hoc for quite some time now.)

The news began gushing forth yesterday from the BrewDog blog, announcing a limited edition of 1,000 bottles of the beer to be made available only on the company website, going for £10 per bottle, on April 28, the day before the much-ballyhooed wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

One complimentary bottle was sent off to Prince William; according to BrewDog partner James Watt, “We put a bottle in a jiffy bag marked ‘Prince Willy, Buckingham Palace.’ We sent it by Royal Mail as we presume they are most likely to know where he lives. As the bottle says, this is about consummation, not commemoration, so we hope he gets it.”

Whether Watt really meant the bottle or the joke is, well, hard to say. The label says the 7.5% ABV India Pale Ale is brewed with such well-known aphrodisiacs as Viagra, chocolate, Horny Goat Weed and ‘a healthy dose of sarcasm.’ The suspicion is that the dose of sarcasm has been substituted for the Viagra (which is not, strictly speaking, an aphrodisiac), and that the blogsite photo of the little blue pill being added to a brewing vessel is more artifice than evidence. No confirmation along these lines has yet been, uh, nailed.

Maybe it’s really in there, a tankard of tumescence. We can think of about 1,000 lawsuits that would come raining down on the brewery from every direction if such a brewing attempt were made in the U.S.A. Squadrons of lawyers streaming forth from the Feds and Pfizer would be just the beginning. Once consumers got their fists around a few of these 330ml bottles one can only imagine the creative clamor for damages that would, um, arise.

The brewers may have covered their tracks somewhat by offering 20% of all profits to Centrepoint, a U.K. charity for homeless youth that the late Diana, Princess of Wales served as patron; her son, Prince William, became the patron in 2005.

The dose of sarcasm also extends to the many commemorative brews that are being produced in the onrush of the wedding, brews variously named I Will, Windsor Knot, Something Blue, Kiss Me Kate, Better Half. So why not Arise Prince Willy, as the RVP is nicknamed?

In go the little blue pills....

According to the blogsite: “With this beer we want to take the wheels off the royal wedding bandwagon being jumped on by dozens of breweries; The Royal Virility Performance is the perfect antidote to all the hype. A beer should be brewed with a purpose, not just because some toffs are getting married, so we created something at our brewery that will undermine those special edition beers and other assorted seaside tat, whilst at the same time actually give the happy couple something extra on their big day.”

Beer has itself sometimes been called an aphrodisiac, although Shakespeare wisely noted in “Macbeth” that drink “provokes the desire but it takes away the performance.” These cheeky brewers may have put a spike in the old saying, while provoking a different kind of Scottish play altogether.

It helps to have a sense of humor on April Fools’ Day, especially for those at the receiving end of pranks–a place golfers often feel they visit year-round. To help put it all in light-hearted perspective, we’ve corralled a few brews that don’t take themselves too seriously–except when it comes to flavor. These taste splendid, not funny, but they pair well with jokes. Did you hear the one about the blonde who asked the bartender for a double entendre? He gave it to her.

Clown Shoes Hoppy Feet (Mercury Brewing Co., Ipswich, MA, 7% ABV): Speaking of clowns, this one puts its big feet down in black IPA territory, a relatively new beer world category people can’t quite agree on (others call the style Cascadian Black Ales, and which the Brewers Association recently termed an American-Style Black Ale). As you’d expect with an India Pale Ale, this is loaded with hops; as you wouldn’t expect, it’s black. What we’d like to see–like those old clown cars–is an endless stream of bottles pouring out of the refrigerator. (clownshoesbeer.com)

Wilco Tango Foxtrot (Lagunitas Brewing Co., Petaluma, CA, 7.8% ABV): If it weren’t a brewery Lagunitas might be a stand-up comic with expert timing. Being the first under the wire with a WTF beer in a WTF zeitgeist is no mean feat. The seasonal was first brewed in 2010 (as a “Malty, Robust, Jobless Recovery Ale”) as a riposte to the 2009 Correction Ale, when no economic correction seemed to be happening. Luckily, this brown ale happens big time. (lagunitas.com)

Delirium Tremens (Huyghe Brewery, Belgium, 8.5% ABV): Make a strong beer, name it after the severe effects of acute alcohol withdrawal, and then festoon the label with dancing pink elephants. That takes some ballsy whimsy, and this heady golden ale has been such a hit since its introduction in 1989 that it has spawned two sequels, a dark Delirium Nocturnum (9% ABV) and a Christmas beer, Delirium Noel (10% ABV). (delirium.be)

Old Leghumper (Thirsty Dog Brewing Co., Akron, OH, 5.8% ABV): As the label puts it, “So many legs…so little time,” a notion that has made this robust porter the flagship beer of the Ohio brewery, which names all its beers doggy style. With spring here, officially anyway, a bock wouldn’t be stylistically out of order, so there’s always the Maibark alternative. (thirstydog.com)

Monty Python Holy Grail Ale (Black Sheep Brewery, Masham, England, 4.7% ABV): This is the beer for those familiar with the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow, and those who eat ham and jam and Spam a lot. It’s actually a fairly straightforward but study pale ale, and despite what the label says, no witches were burned during production. (blacksheepbrewery.com)

And here’s one for the road: A skeleton walks into a bar and says to the bartender, “I’d like a beer–and a mop.”

In somewhat different form, this piece was originally featured in the March-April 2011 Fairways + Greens Magazine, courtesy Madavor Media. To read the latest digital edition, click here.

Church Brew Works, Pittsburgh

The Steelers may have lost Super Bowl XLV, but Pittsburgh wins my favor in the beer contest, for the simple reason that I was able to get some decent beer from the Steel City.

To give Green Bay its due, the Hinterland Brewery was probably a little busy to worry about a peon like me–it had just received an order for three cases of beer to be served at the White House Super Bowl party–one each of its Pale Ale, Amber Ale and Luna Stout.

And a Pittsburgh beer? None on order, though owner Scott Smith of the East End Brewing Company mounted a spirited social media campaign to try and get some of his beers onto the White House playing field.

In the end, Pennsylvania was represented by Yuengling Lager and Light from–Pottsville. To use an oft-uttered Washingtonian phrase: no comment.

Photo by Pete Souza/White House

Truth be told, the bottle I would have been have knocking people over to get my hands on was the White House Honey Ale, homebrewed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue by a team of the staff chefs, using honey from the White House bee hive.

Talk about a collectible! But rumor has it that of about 100 bottles on hand at the party, not a one was left by evening’s end. Must have been a raucous evening.

The President is turning out to be one of our greatest Chief Executive hopheads, a matter that may bear a further post. Yes, history notes that the founding fathers enjoyed their homebrew. (Actually, I also noted it, here.)

The President and First Lady mug for the camera (Photo by Samantha Appleton/White House)

But the Obamas are the first to have presided over homebrewing in the White House. However, as the lively White House food site Obama Foodorama notes, it was widely misreported that the President did the brewing himself, which he did not. Give him time.

I’m no big football fan. Actually, I actively dislike the sport and wish the Super Bowl would dry up and blow away. I just can’t take the hype. But if it gives me an excuse to try a new beer, then bring on #XLVI!

It’s not likely I would have run into the goods from the Church Brew Works on my own, as the beer is distributed only in western Pennsylvania, radiating out of the Pittsburgh brewery and restaurant in the Lawrenceville area.

Radiate is the word. Housed in the former Diocese of Pittsburgh church, St. John’s The Baptist, the Church Brew Works may be one of the loveliest breweries this side of Rochefort. Built in 1902 as a church, school and convent, St. John’s ministered to the local community until 1993, when the Diocese deconsecrated it.

Sean Casey, president of the company, purchased the building directly from the Diocese in 1996, and the reconstruction project was soon underway. From the start, the goal was to keep the sanctuary space intact, use the original pews for seating, maintain the stained glass windows, and install the brewhouse on the former alter.

The Church Brew Works opened in August of 1996, and it has been wowing people ever since. A lively menu and good beer help, of course, but the ambiance is clearly unique, achieving a Historic Landmark status from the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation in 2001. The effect looks pretty breath-taking in photos. Next time I make it to Pittsburgh, there’s at least one must-do on the list.

There’s a nice range of regular beers and specialties at the Church, a few bottled for wider distribution, but perhaps in a nod to Lawrenceville’s historically heavy German population, its best-seller is its Pious Monk Dunkel, a Munich-style dark lager–not the most common style at U.S. breweries. I would have liked a touch more malt sweetness in this one, which rolls in at about 4.3% ABV, putting it on the light side for the style. But a fine and drinkable brew nonetheless.

I leaned more toward the Celestial Gold, a north German-style pilsner (at 4.1% ABV) that I thought had an appealingly grainy aroma and flavor, delivered cleanly and crisply, with a spicy hoppy bite.

The Millennium Trippel is also called the 2000 Trippel, and was first brewed then, though there are only four bottles left from that vintage. It’s conditioned in a 750-ml bottle, which the brewery suggests can be safely aged, although it’s the first beer label I’ve seen that recommends long-term storage of the bottle on its side.

The beer is hazy orange, with a short-lived head and little Belgian lace. At first there was a somewhat tinny aroma, a sense of slight oxidation, but that blew off and the Belgian yeastiness came forward with a wave of fruity esters–peach and pear.

The quite-pleasant flavor had a touch of green apples, a distant funk, and a dangerously absent sense of alcoholic power. The peppery finish is a strong hint, however, and should help keep matters on a reverent level.

So, the Super Bowl. Pittsburgh wins, right?

Name: 2000 Trippel
Brewer: Church Brew Works Lawrenceville Brewery, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Style: Belgian Trippel
ABV: 9%
Availability: Eleven counties in western Pennsylvania; heading to eastern Ohio this summer
For More Information: churchbrew.com

Try as I might, I haven’t yet had a beer in every town the world over. So I’ve called on an extensive network of beer mavens to help pick one prominent brew in the tournament locales, and a likely place to drink it. Those lucky enough to attend the tournament can also attend the bar. Those of us watching on TV can hope the beer finds its way to a nearby distributor. Play away:

1. The Masters (April 7-10, Augusta National, Georgia): Recent Augusta State University grad and beer writer Lonnie Best says no place in town treats beer with more respect and the care it deserves than Rooster’s Beak Bar & Kitchen (feedyourbeak.com). And as the azaleas bloom over at Amen Corner, the flowery aromas of Terrapin Brewing’s Hopsecutioner IPA should sharpen the drama. (terrapinbeer.com)

For more great stories on Augusta and the Masters by TheAPosition.com writers, click here.

2. U.S. Open (June 16-19, Congressional Country Club, Bethesda, Maryland): Former brewer, now wine and beer salesman Tom Cizauskas gives the nod to the Scottish-tinged Royal Mile Pub (royalmilepub.com) in Wheaton, seven miles from Congressional. There are ample Scottish ales available, but don’t miss the Heavy Seas Loose Cannon on tap, also called Hop³ for its exponential hop aroma. (hsbeer.com)

3. U.S. Women’s Open (July 7-10, The Broadmoor, Colorado Springs): Writer Eli Shayotovich, the local “Mad Man of Beer,” is partial to the Phantom Canyon Brewing Company, owned by the state’s new Governor, John Hickenlooper. But he also suggests keeping the Scottish theme going at The Blue Star (thebluestar.net); among the many offerings is the Bristol Brewing Company’s Laughing Lab Scottish Ale. (bristolbrewing.com)

Approach to the fifth hole, Royal St. George's

4. British Open Championship (July 14-17, Royal St. George’s, Sandwich, England): Bit of a quandary here, old chap. Jim Green, CAMRA Branch Secretary for the Sandwich area, recommends The Red Cow (no website) for a good pint of real ale, but the pub isn’t pumping any Wantsum Brewery’s beers. Considering the name, who wouldn’t want some? (Try the Bell Hotel, where the golfers may well be staying.) But Gadds’ No. 5, a traditional Kentish Best Bitter from the Ramsgate Brewery, should be worth a Cow tipple. (ramsgatebrewery.co.uk)

5. PGA Championship (August 11-14, Atlanta Athletic Club, Johns Creek, Georgia): It’s back to Georgia to round out the men’s majors, so Matt Simpson, a/k/a The Beer Sommelier, recommends pulling up a stool at Taco Mac (tacomac.com) in nearby Alpharetta, where there are 90 draft and 200 bottled beers. A nutty, malty Sweetwater Georgia Brown should pair nicely with Glory’s Last Shot. (sweetwaterbrew.com)

In somewhat different form, this piece was originally featured in the January-February 2011 Fairways + Greens Magazine, courtesy Madavor Media. To read the latest digital edition, click here.

See more stories by The A Position on the PGA Championship at: http://theaposition.com/Partner/pga-championship

The point being, what does this have to do with Banana Bread Beer?

Charles Wells

It’s a closer connection than might be expected. The man banging the iconic gong is Billy Wells, better known as Bombardier Billy Wells, famed as a British heavyweight boxing champion, but also a descendant of Charles Wells, who founded the Charles Wells Family Brewery in Bedford, England in 1876, all for love.

Wells was a merchant seaman, but he fell in love with a local lass, Josephine Grimbley, whose father forbade the pair to marry if Wells was going to be constantly away at sea.

So Wells bought a property on the banks of the River Ouse that included a coal depot, a brew house, and 35 local pubs, and set about creating a brewery and a family. Five generations later, both are still going strong, and still using the water from a well the founder sunk in 1902.  The brewery has moved from the original site, but is still in Bedford.

Three Wells family members are still involved in the enterprise, which is now called Wells and Young’s, after the 2006 merger with Young’s and Co. And the following year the company also took over the Courage line.

Wells Bombardier Bitter is the flagship brand, and according to head brewer Jim Robertson, “The beer is a tribute to the British Royal Artillery, which the Wells family has a history of service in. But it was really named after Bombardier Billy Wells, and as film buffs know, Billy was the man who banged the gong at the beginning of the Rank Organization films.”

I’m not too sure that many film buffs really do know this. Especially since there were actually four men who greased up for the Rank films logo sequence. Wells was the second who swung the hammer, but a further bit of history suggests the gong was never actually struck, since it was made of papier-mâché. The sound was dubbed in by a percussionist named James Blades. No known beers named after him.

The brewery introduced its Banana Bread Beer in 2002, but I only recently heard about it. Now that I have, there seems to be a growing amount of buzz about it of late, and it’s certainly an attention-getter, beginning with the label that shows a glowing glass emerging from peeled banana skins.

There’s an inviting–one is tempted to say cake-like–amber color to the beer. A mild but sturdy head gives rise to the unmistakable and inescapable aroma of banana bread.  I’m a banana bread fan, so no worries for me there.  Those less keen on banana bread, or bananas at all, should stand clear.

My wife picked up some licorice aromas and as the beer warmed I began to think of (and crave) those old circus peanut candies–which had nothing to do with either circuses or peanuts, other than that the marshmallows were molded to look like large orange peanuts, and then artificially flavored with banana.

Indeed, while this particular beer is brewed with bananas (and Fair Trade Bananas at that), banana flavor is also added, and that’s probably where a majority of the aroma comes from.

The pleasant surprise is that the beer is really quite tasty, certainly sweet, but not overly so, and mainly from malt, not fruit.  The beer doesn’t try to be any more wacky than what it is, an English ale brewed with bananas and some banana flavoring. There’s some mild hop bite at the finish (Challenger and Goldings hops), and it’s all in all quite agreeable–if you like bananas. Or circus peanuts.

One of my Twitter friends–and I’m not sure she knew that the brewery produced both the Wells and Young’s portfolios–has suggested that it might be interesting to blend the Wells Banana Bread Beer with the Young’s Double Chocolate Stout.  Well, now, it might, mightn’t it?

Name: Well’s Banana Bread Beer
Brewer: Wells and Young’s Brewing Co., Bedford, England
Style: Specialty Ale
ABV: 5.2%
Availability: Nationwide
For More Information: wellsandyoungs.co.uk or belukus.net

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

Maybe he didn’t say that. I might be mixing it all up with Groucho Marx never taking his cigar out of his mouth.

Anyway, with a new year about to unfold, it would be a near miracle not to hear at least one rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.” But who would want to miss it? It’s hard to imagine a more apt and achingly bittersweet song for a time when we simultaneously say farewell and welcome. Cynics are free to disagree, others can enjoy the version we’ve cued up here, which also makes evident that the song shouldn’t be limited to a New Year’s Eve anthem.

Beethoven actually made a lively arrangement of the tune, and I was tempted, but this excerpt is from the October, 2004 dedication of the new Scottish Parliament building. The Queen spoke, Sean Connery attended, as did the novelist Alexander McCall Smith, all briefly glimpsed in the video.

We’ll eschew a scholarly treatise of the song here. Most think it wholly the creation of Robbie Burns, but he actually breathed further life into even older fragments of Scottish verse. He put a different tune to the song, which singer-songwriter Eddi Reader begins with here, before coercing the assemblage into joining her with the more familiar melody.

Robbie Burns

Through the centuries of iterations, the lyrics may now be a linguistic puzzle, but it doesn’t seem to matter in lachrymose terms. It’s a little like golf. The origins may be a bit obscure, but the current manifestation seems perfect in its affectiveness.

Here are the two most well-known verses:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and days of auld lang syne?

CHORUS:

For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere !
and gie’s a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll tak a right gude-willy waught,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

Brewery Ommegang

This is the third Ommegang beer we’ve recommended this year, from the seasonal Zuur to the year-round Abbey Ale, where we went into the Belgian connections of the Cooperstown, New York brewery. And in the post on the Belgian Scotch Silly we pondered how the Scots influenced Belgian brewing after World War I. But it’s on the Cup O Kyndnes label, too.

So now we have a seasonal Belgian-American Scotch Ale brewed with some heather tips and a touch of smoked malt and roasted barley. The result is a deep amber beer with pear-like aromas in a well of malt. But it’s a bit spicy rather than overly sweet on the palate.

As the beer warms a faint peaty, soapy touch reveals itself, and it all finishes in a lightly hopped wisp.

However this year finishes for you, friends, thanks for joining in. Let’s take a cup of this right gude-willy waught for auld lang syne, and look ahead to the journey into 2011. Cheers!

Name: Cup O Kyndnes
Brewer: Brewery Ommegang, Cooperstown, New York
Style: Belgian Scotch Ale
ABV: 6.6%
Availability: Seasonal, 40-plus states
For More Information: ommegang.com

However, in news I first read in Stephen Beaumont’s essential Blogging at World of Beer site back in late October, an Austrian Trappist abbey is attempting to join the fold. The Stift Engelszell abbey hopes a brewery will help raise money for some capital improvements and that would make eight, if Stift Engelszell brews according to the criteria for an “Authentic Trappist Product.” The rules are laid out by the International Trappist Association, which understandably protects the appellation religiously:

1. Products which carry this label are produced within the walls of the monastery or in the vicinity of the monastery.

2. The monastic community determines the policies and provides the means of production. The whole process of production must clearly evidence the indisputable bond of subsidiarity, with the monastery benefiting from the production, and must be in accordance with the business practices proper to a monastic way of life.

3. The profits are primarily intended to provide for the needs of the community or for social services.

In other words, Trappist beers are pretty much a nonprofit product, with all earnings beyond production costs going to the monastery or its missions.

Will there be nine, come March, when the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company releases Ovila, a beer made in partnership with the Trappist-Cistercian Abbey of New Clairvaux in Vina, California?

The answer, according to Bill Manley, Sierra Nevada’s communications coordinator, is no. “What we’re doing is an homage to those great Trappist beers, and using an authentic Trappist yeast, but not strictly speaking a Trappist beer. However, they will be the only authentic Trappist-style Abbey ales in America.”

Manley used the plural because Sierra Nevada will release three of these Abbey beers next year, a Dubbel in March, a Saison in July, and a Quadrupel in time for next year’s holidays, suggesting that the brewery’s encore to its spectacular 30th Anniversary releases is very promising. But more of all this next year.

I visited all seven of the brewing Trappist monasteries a number of years ago, perhaps the best journey I’ve ever been on in my life, and will resurrect the piece I did about it before too long (I hope). At 130 years old next year, the Koningshoeven abbey is one of the younger communities among the flock.

But then as now, it seemed to be one of the most open to visitors and tastings. I well recall Brother Samuel, who was fond of donning a helmet and riding around in the abbey’s fire truck. Then about 84, Brother Samuel gave my wife and me and a few other visitors a tour, and I was intrigued to find that the monks had access to a television. It seemed a bit incongruous with their life of study, prayer and near silence. “It’s there so that we can keep up on the news,” said Brother Samuel. “But we do sneak a few peeks at the Tour de France when it’s running.”

Not long after our visit La Trappe lost its “Authentic Trappist Product” status for awhile when the commercial Bavaria group became involved with the brewery. But some kind of agreement was reached about five years ago, the label is back on the La Trappe bottles, and some interesting new products have hit the market, including a Trappist Witte, a Bockbier, and some oak-aged Quadrupel. These days a part of the profits of La Trappe go to monasteries Koningshoeven set up in Indonesia and Uganda.

Three years after the abbey was established in the Netherlands, the head abbot, Nivardus Schweykart, thought a brewery might support the monastery better than farming–perhaps because his father was a brewer. So he dispatched Brother Isidorus Laaber off to Munich, there to learn the brewing process.

Last year marked the 125th anniversary of the friar’s initial efforts. When a commemorative beer was created to recognize the milestone, it seemed clear that it should be named for the first brewmaster. Hence, Isid’or.

At 7.5% ABV it’s a heady tribute, but then most Trappist ales pack a punch. Less potent versions are often brewed for the monks themselves, although Brother Samuel admitted that some nights (during heated Tour de France moments?) the younger monks were sent over to the brewery to pick up some stronger bottles. Trappist beer run!

If a Trappist beer can be called typical, Isid’or has the heady, fruity, yeasty aromas associated with strong Belgian ales, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It pours out a hazy orange. The flavor is a bit cidery, with a medium malt body, some spicy fruitiness, with a gradually puckering finish. It didn’t blow me away as many Trappist beers do. But then I’m not sure one bottle is going to suffice to fully assess this one. An additional donation to the Ugandan monastery may well be in order.

Name: La Trappe Isid’or
Brewer: Trappist Brewery Koningshoeven, Tilburg, The Netherlands
Style: Belgian Specialty Ale
ABV: 7.5%
Availability: About 38 states
For More Information: ArtisanalImports.com or latrappe.nl

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

I thought wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong.

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

Mozart

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

Venanzio Rauzzini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Yorkshire flag

August 1 is Yorkshire Day in England, a day to celebrate all things Yorkshire. The Samuel Smith Old Brewery in Tadcaster both qualifies for and certifies the day, by releasing its Yorkshire Stingo on August 1, after the beer has been brewed and matured for a year in the company’s century-old (if occasionally repaired) oak casks.

(Click here for a newer post on the 2010 bottling of Stingo.)

Fewer than 2,000 cases of the 2009 vintage made it across the pond, landing in shops by late August or early September, but bottles sometimes linger through to spring, and certainly the beer is worth looking for.

Michael Jackson at work

Another thing Yorkshire was beer bard Michael Jackson, who had something of a special relationship with the brewery. One of his first regular tipples was Samuel Smith, back when Jackson began his newspaper career as a 16-year-old reporter in the ‘50s.

It was Jackson’s ground-breaking World Guide to Beer in 1977 that gave Charles Finkel, founder of Merchant du Vin in 1978 (the U.S. importer of the Samuel Smith portfolio) the idea to have the brewery revive some fading beer styles, beginning with an oatmeal stout in 1980.

According to beer writer Stan Hieronymus, Finkel had come across an old label for such a beer and asked Jackson what it would have tasted like. Finkel told Hieronymus, “He didn’t know. He’d never tasted one.” But Jackson puzzled out some educated guesses and then Finkel went back to the brewery to see what they could come up with.

Hieronymus, a sort of amanuensis to Jackson later in his career, unearthed a 1990 quote from Jackson about Samuel Smith’s reaction to Finkel: “They said, ‘Well don’t be ridiculous–nobody has made oatmeal stout for years, nobody remembers how to make it, nobody in America would even consider drinking it. They all drink Schlitz out there anyway.’”

Nonetheless, they made an oatmeal stout, and for many curious but naïve beer drinkers back then, like me, this was a first time encounter, as was the Smith Taddy Porter, or the Smith Imperial Stout. It’s hard to believe now, so common are these styles, but so it was. And I have to admit that I’m pretty sure I was still drinking Schlitz in 1980!

Styles often crop up as a topic in beer blogs like Stan’s Appellation Beer, Martyn Cornell’s Zythophile or others. Indeed, Cornell recently took up the whole notion of beer styles being largely the late Jackson’s doing.

Jackson also alerted the world to brewing styles–such as the Yorkshire stone squares still used by Samuel Smith and, it would appear, now only by Samuel Smith. The system is basically open fermentation in square slate vessels, in which slow-acting yeast is frequently skimmed off and stirred back into the fermenting wort.

Yorkshire stone square fermenter

This year’s offering was bottled at 9% ABV, but it’s a bottle-conditioned beer that should ferment out a bit more over time, which won’t hurt it. The ideal approach would be to store a few (or more) bottles to taste over the next few years.

I found the aroma and flavors of the beer shifting around in emphasis in just one night, but then I managed to stretch the drinking of this Victorian pint bottle (550 ml; 18.7 ounces) to three hours–before, right through dinner, and as a post-prandial treat. The Merchant du Vin website recommends pairing Stingo “with beef, wild game, or demanding deeply-flavored foods like pickled fish or strong aromatic cheeses,” but it went pretty well with a meatless wheat pasta with broccoli, walnuts and ricotta cheese.

It has a fruity, spicy nose–apples topped with raisins and brown sugar and a whiff of cinnamon, though there are no spices in it. The entrance is toffee thick and sweet in a pleasing way, but gives way quickly to a tannic teeth-coating, oaky and puckering finish.

All in all it was a nice three hours, and certainly the first good reason I’ve had to look forward to next August.

Name: Yorkshire Stingo
Brewer: Samuel Smith, Tadcaster, England
Style: English Strong Ale
ABV: 9%
Availability: Nationwide as long as the supply lasts
For More Information: merchantduvin.com

Whatever one’s political leanings, there is no joy among Texas Rangers fans today, as the Giants polished off the American League champs 3-1 last night to win the 106^th World Series four games to one.

The news isn’t great in the beer world, either. I was hoping to spotlight a Texas beer this week–preferably something from Rahr & Sons of Fort Worth–but nothing rolled up to the door and I just couldn’t find any other Texas beers in time. So I’m going with another brew from the World Series champs’ town, made by the 21^st Amendment Brewery, which is within walking distance of the Giants’ home field.

Actually, Rahr is going to have to perform further obeisance than merely giving way at the TAP Beer of the Week stand. Two days before the Series began Shaun O’Sullivan, co-owner of the San Francisco brewpub, was contacted by Fritz Rahr, owner of the Texas brewery, and the two made a suitably professional wager on the games.

Sullivan, on the company’s blogsite, said that in the unlikely event that Texas won the Series, he would wear a Texas Ranger’s shirt while drinking a Rahr & Sons beer outside of San Francisco’s AT&T Park. But should the Giants win, “Fritz will be wearing a Giants shirt and drinking a 21st Amendment canned craft beer outside of Arlington Field.”

Other than the attendant shame and humiliation, it doesn’t sound like there’s a real loser in this proposition. No word yet when the bet will be paid off, but maybe the principals will get back to us.

Meanwhile, I do happen to have a few cans of 21^st Amendment on hand. Along with the Brew Free or Die IPA (which resonates well in New England, where the official state motto of New Hampshire, “Live Free or Die,” is reinforced daily on every license plate), I have the Back in Black and–with one of the great beer names of recent note–Hell or High Watermelon Wheat Beer.

More and more craft breweries are putting their beers in cans these days, as the old stigma that any beer in a can is, ipso facto, no good, steadily fades away. That strong, good-tasting beers can actually come out of a can may not be great news for the megabrewers of bellywash. Craft brews were once nowhere to be found at golf courses except (sometimes) in the clubhouse, since bottles weren’t permitted out on the course or in most beverage carts. The only thing holding them back now are the continuing bad tastes of some golfers.

The Brew Free or Die tastes pretty good. It’s a loaded can, that’s for sure, at 7% ABV, and heavily hopped–Warrior for bittering, Columbus and Cascade in the finish, and then dry-hopped with Amarillo, Simcoe and Ahtanum. I’m not that familiar with the latter, but it appears to have citrus and floral aromas, both quite evident here. The flavor is heavy on the hoppy grapefruit, but with a pleasing malt profile to round it heartily out. A solid beer, the best-seller at the brewpub, and no surprise there.

I have to admit that it felt a little weird pouring a beer out of a can into a glass, but I could get used to it. This one pours a bit hazy with an orange hue, which certainly seems appropriate under the current baseball situation.

Truth be told, the 21^st Amendment’s canned beers are made out in Minnesota, at the new-old Cold Spring Brewery, which has seen its ups and downs. Cold Spring Export beer was a hard-to-find but touted brew for awhile, since it had been formulated in the late ’70s to meet Rheinheitsgebot standards by Charles Finkel, to be distributed by his Merchant du Vin company.  (Quite possibly the nation’s first contract brew.)  Sought after for a time, but the time and the beer have passed on.

[Update: TailGate beers canned at Cold Spring are aimed more at football fans. Click here for story.]

So has the most notorious beer ever canned at Cold Spring–Billy Beer, named for President Jimmy Carter’s late brother Billy. (Billy wasn’t devoid of beer sense, if this quote attributed to him is to be believed: “Marijuana is like Coors beer. If you could buy the damn stuff at a Georgia filling station, you’d decide you wouldn’t want it.”)

One thing to be said for Cold Spring–it survived Prohibition. Hence the name of our brewery in question, which pays tribute to the constitutional amendment which ended The Great Experiment. That’s always worth a drink, and so is a tribute tipple to the Giants, winning their first World Series since 1954, when they were still in New York. They fell short in the Series of 1962, 1989 and 2002. But that page is turned, and San Francisco has its first World Series flag.

Name: Brew Free or Die IPA
Brewer: 21^st Amendment Brewery, San Francisco, California
Style: IPA
ABV: 7%
Availability: 14 states and D.C.
For More Information: 21st-amendment.com

Beers from Saint Arnold and Rahr & Sons are being served at Rangers Ballpark. Saint Arnold turned down my request for some samples, so screw ‘em; stay tuned till Monday (Game 5, if necessary) to see if Rahr comes through.

“You don’t care about either team,” my wife points out, “so why do you want to watch the World Series?”

To me the answer is inherent in the question: because it’s the World Series. It’s baseball. The Fall Classic, the end of the road, for all the marbles. Enough said. Although as I began discoursing on Josh Hamilton’s travails and accomplishments, Lynn said, “Don’t even try to get me interested.”

As an old Brooklyn Dodger fan, long a reconstituted Mets fan, I have an inbred hatred of the New York Yankees and, by extension, the American League, where they don’t play real baseball anyway. So I’m pulling for the Giants, although that’s no easy task for a former Dodger fan either.

I managed to crack open the Anchor just before the first pitch, and as just as the television viewing audience found out the game was being brought to us by Budweiser. Appropriate ballpark swill, of course, but as I noted in TAP Beer of the Week 14, we won’t be going there.

It wasn’t too hard to find some beer from Anchor and I opted for the Porter for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s been a little chilly here in Vermont and I’d already started turning toward some darker beers when I picked up a six-pack of Sierra Nevada Porter last week. (That the thermometer hit a steamy 70 degrees today is an anomaly that won’t last.)

The other reason was that I was just a little weary of constantly looking for something new to try, and decided to revisit an old favorite that I hadn’t had for awhile, and I wasn’t sorry. So I decided to keep the theme going with the Anchor. Maybe a little World Series-provoked nostalgia played a part, too.

Both porters, like the breweries themselves, were among the first to revive the style in the U.S. in the late 1970’s, and were a revelation to me back then. (Yuengling was still brewing its porter back then, too, though as bottom-fermented beer it was something of a stylistic oddity.) Porters became and remain one of my favorite beer styles.

Both of the California beers were new world interpretations of the British style, with little more of everything–malt, hops, alcohol, and both are now considered by those who consider beer styles, Robust Porters. Which they certainly are.

Truth be told, I slightly favor the Sierra Nevada over Anchor; it’s a little smoother where Anchor is a little huskier. But they’re both marvelous beers, and this is San Francisco’s night, not Chico’s.

The Anchor pours deep garnet, virtually opaque, with a rocky dark head and a resinous, piney nose (not unlike some of the recent Christmas ales), with the first hints of the black and chocolate malts that are readily apparent in the flavor, as is the touch of roasted barley. The Northern Brewer and Cascade hops balance the beer nicely, but aren’t readily apparent. There’s an almost sour puckering to the finish, which merely seems to suggest another sip is in order. Or, if the game is getting intense (the Giants just went ahead in the fifth), a gulp.

Name: Anchor Porter
Brewer: Anchor Brewing Co., San Francisco
Style: Robust Porter
ABV: 5.6
Availability: Year-round, nationwide
For More Information: anchorbrewing.com

Related posts:
Anchor’s Our Special Ale
Anchor Steam Beer

The Pumpkinhead is pretty popular in these parts, not in the least because of its label art, with a jack-o’-lantern grinning Headless Horseman, fresh from Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” story–at least as Disney re-imagined the old tale about Ichabod Crane’s misadventures.

Pumpkinhead is no slouch of a beer at 5.1% ABV. I like having a bottle, but one might do it; for my taste the nutmeg and cinnamon are too forward, too much of a pumpkin pie spice assault. I feel like I should be adding a squirt of whipped cream or vanilla ice cream to it. Might as well just have a slice of pie.

The Smashed Pumpkin is a different story, as well as a clever name. As many irritated homeowners know around this season, it is indeed pumpkin smashing time, and short of lawn motion detector alarms there doesn’t seem much to do about it–the pumpkin smashers ye shall always have with you. Might as well just have a beer.

My wife and I live in a remote enough area that in 18 Halloweens we have had exactly one trick-or-treater. For years Lynn went through the motions of buying candy just in case, which I found agreeable since I always wound up eating it. Now she doesn’t bother. Still, there are better than even odds that if we put out a pumpkin, it will eventually be smashed.

Alan Pugsley

The Smashed Pumpkin beer is certainly a more peaceful option. It’s part of the brewery’s Pugsley Signature Series, meaning it gives brewmaster Alan Pugsley a chance to flex his muscles and come up with some bigger beers than the brewery’s typical offerings, including an Imperial Porter (at 7.1% ABV), a Barley Wine Style Ale (8.5%), and a XXXX IPA (9.25%). This entire quartet is available in a 22-ounce bottle four-pack, for any creatures of the night looking to bring something special to this year’s Halloween party.

Actually, for those able to stop by the Shipyard gift shop in Portland, there are still some bottles left of a year-old cellar-aged limited edition of Smashed Pumpkin.

The beer has an appropriate orange tint. The spice aromas come through faintly in the nose, but it’s really more of a boozy, malty aroma. The spices really come through in the flavor, but not to the blunt degree of the Pumpkinhead. Smashed Pumpkin is a more sophisticated and heady beer in various ways, not only in its increased strength, although that’s a major factor, making it a sipping beer that would be welcome at the dinner table.

The bottle label suggests, “Smashed Pumpkin pairs well with sharp cheeses, nuts, lamb, hearty stews and desserts like flan or pumpkin pie.” It also suggests cooking with the beer in a dish like braised short ribs, or mixing it with the brewery’s Blue Fin Stout for a “fall warmer.”

Just don’t devour it like candy corn, or even a man who is pure at heart and says his prayers at night may become like the unfortunates shown here.

Name: Smashed Pumpkin
Brewer: Shipyard Brewing Company, Portland, Maine
Style: Strong spiced ale
ABV: 9.0%
Availability: 38 states
For More Information: shipyard.com

(Pumpkin photos courtesy of ExtremePumpkins.com)

So I missed by a day.

And what’s in a name, anyway? The beers are brewed well in advance of the release date. And the notion that on 12.12.12 there could be a bang-up vertical tasting of each release in the series is a little shaky, since vertical tastings (as the term comes to us from the wine world) technically implies sampling different vintages of the same beer. (A horizontal tasting implies the same vintage year of a beverage type, but from different producers.) But every beer in the Stone Vertical Epic series has been different, with different ingredients.

Stone seemingly recognizes the anomaly, since the typically chatty label prose, in suggesting a tasting of all eleven chapters in the series in 2012, puts the “vertical” in quotes.

But what the heck, it’s still fun to imagine working through eleven bottles of distinct, high-octane beers towards the end of 2012, and beginning 2013 with an epic hangover, if more likely to be horizontal than vertical at the time.

I could hope to catch up by then, anyway, but it’s a faint hope. Only 300 cases of the 02.02.02 were brewed, and one is now more likely to bring a Chilean miner to the surface than one of these vintages.

The limited release bottles tend to vanish almost as soon as they appear on store shelves, so availability is haphazard. I gather I was lucky to find the 09, fairly recently, which is also the first of the VE series I’ve actually tried.

Maybe I can put my nephew Doug, on the case. He knows Stone chairman and CEO Greg Koch somewhat, having run into him most recently at a 10.4.10 epic event at the ChurchKey beer mecca in Washington, D.C.–Stone’s Total Tap Tower Takeover Two Thousand and Ten. Stone beers were flowing from 40 taps, which could have made for a long night’s work.

Greg Koch (left) with Doug Honker

The open-mouth snarl is Koch’s attempt (I’m guessing) to replicate the gargoyle in Stone’s logo. The signage is a continuation of beer photo tag, last indulged in when I ran into Koch out at the Stone brewery in San Diego in June:

The 02.02.02 is the lightest of the VE beers in terms of ABV, at 7.5%, not light at all, but all the rest are at 8.4% or upwards. Some vintages have used only barley, water, hops and yeast, while others have used a smorgasbord of ingredients–grapes and chamomile in the 10.10.10. All are aiming at some variation of a Belgian beer, be they wits, saisons, strong pale or dark ales, or the 09.09.09, characterized as an Imperial Belgian Porter.

This one is loaded with goodies, too–roasted malts, dark candi sugar, vanilla, and tangerine peel, along with some aging on French oak chips. It pours an opaque brown with a tan head, with a predominantly chocolate nose, though my wife picked up the tangerine immediately.

The mouthfeel is chewy and thick, like chocolate velvet, the flavor tannic like bittersweet chocolate, with faint evidence of any of the Perle or Magnum hop character (appropriate enough for a Belgian style). It’s not unlike the Bashah collaboration with BrewDog, in that I’m not sensing much of the Belgian character suggested in the label description. The chocolate malt takes over, and leaves a similarly puckering and chalky finish.

Of course, I’m drinking the beer well before its time. But I have set one bottle aside, and with any luck both it and I will still be around for the next tasting, around 12-12-12.

Name: 09.09.09 Vertical Epic Ale
Brewer: Stone Brewing Co., San Diego, California
Style: Belgian Imperial Porter with spices
ABV: 8.9%
Availability: ? (Good luck)
For More Information: stonebrew.com

(Bottle and glass photos courtesy of Stone, by StudioSchulz.com)

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

So I’m glad I hung on to the last bottle spirited home from Wales, from the Kingstone Brewery in Tintern, in the Wye Valley and not much more than a sheep toss across the River Wye from England.

Besides toasting captains Corey Pavin and Colin Montgomerie and the boys–if one needs another excuse for a tipple–Tuesday is National Drink a Beer Day in the U.S. I’m not sure I’ll treat this day any differently than the other 364, although I did forget to take note of International Beer Day on August 5, so maybe I’ll make it a twofer Tuesday.

The golfers will be further south, not inspired by the magnificent wreckage of Tintern Abbey near the brewery, so I don’t imagine too many of them will be quoting William Wordsworth:
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
Bonus points for those who know the full title of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” is ““Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.”

J.M.W. Turner, "The Chancel and Crossing of Tintern Abbey, Looking towards the East Window," 1794

The long-abandoned abbey also inspired Tennyson, and the painter J.M.W. Turner, whose The Chancel and Crossing of Tintern Abbey, Looking towards the East Window was composed four years before WW’s ramble through the countryside.

Edward Biggs also takes his inspiration from the natural world, particularly the way yeast takes on sugars in the brewing process: “I’ve always loved ales, and drank them.  That’s why we had so many ales in the shop.”

That’s the Meadow Farm Shop, which Biggs and his wife, Tori, took on eight years ago, and which sells its own breads, preserves and other baked goods as well as local produce and now the Kingstone beers.

“A friend was running the brewery and basically said he’d had enough of it, so I took it on,” said Biggs.  “Now we sell only our own beers, all brewed on a four-barrel system.  They’re all bottle-conditioned or cask-conditioned, and I do about three to five brews a week.”

Biggs is a lucky man–he loves his work: “I love the entire process, from grinding the grain, going through the brewing process, bottling, and meeting the customers, which to me is just great.

Edward Biggs pours some of his Kingstone beers with help from daughter Alisia

“Not that I always understand them.  One said to me one time, about the 1503 Tudor Ale, ‘Oh, I couldn’t drink much of that.’ I said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I think it’s definitely one of our moreish beers.”

The name comes from his appreciation that 1503 was the year that Nostradamus was born, Leonardo da Vinci began work on the Mona Lisa, and Richard Arnold, in a work called Customs of London, made one of the first references concerning the use of hops in flavoring beer, in a recipe that included oats and wheat in addition to malted barley.

Biggs went from there to produce his Tudor Ale recipe, which he calls an old ale more from antique tradition than alcoholic strength. It includes chocolate malt and some smoked malt along with the barley, wheat, oats and hops.

I appreciated the full lineup of eight different beers that Biggs poured for me the day I visited, but the 1503 Tudor was my favorite, and it still tastes like it’s right from the brewery. There’s a bit of green apple in nose, but toasty and chocolately aromas, too, all of which carry through to the flavor. It’s a textbook example of how to make a mid-level strength beer with plenty of flavor.

The European Ryder Cuppers might like this one, but I have my doubts about the American lads, who are more likely to be swilling lite beers, assuming their religiosity permits drinking.

Richard Arnold would surely have approved.  Wordsworth and Turner would probably simply be irked that the brewery wasn’t around 216 years old.

Name: 1503 Tudor Ale
Brewer: Kingstone Brewery, Tintern, Wales
Style: Old ale
ABV: 4.8%
Availability: Southern Wales, London, Surrey, Bath, Bristol
For More Information: kingstonebrewery.co.uk

Tintern Abbey