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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike with the Dead Horse IPA

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

Setting them up from the everlasting keg

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

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

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

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

The bride and groom, having fun

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

Dancing with the bride

No, the main problem revolved around the night before–what to wear to a cocktail party at Oscar de la Renta’s house? If ever there was a chance for a disastrous fashion faux pas, this was it. The famous designer is a major investor in Corales even though he doesn’t play golf, as is singer Julio Iglesias, who does. Both live in the developing Corales neighborhood (along with that other famous golfer, Mikhail Baryshnikov) which gives access to the course, although guests at the de la Renta-designed Tortuga Bay villas and the PUNTACANA hotel can also corral some tee times.

In the end I settled on a print shirt, while Oscar went with a collarless white guayabera number. He didn’t seem too put out by my choice.

Hanging out with Oscar de la Renta

Various of de la Renta’s fashionable friends had shown up for the event (the Givenchys I was told, though I never stumbled across them), as had course designer Tom Fazio and his entourage (meaning his family), and the prime mover and shaker behind PUNTACANA, the president and CEO Frank Rainieri.

(In an editor’s nightmare, it’s always PUNTACANA, all caps, when referring to the resort, but Punta Cana when referring to the area.)

After the warm-up at Oscar’s, we all went off to the resort’s La Yola restaurant, perched right on the Caribbean Sea, where we tucked into a little snack. Those are actually giant prawns on the plate, not lobster.

But note at the top of the photo a glimpse of a bottle of Presidente beer, and the stem of a proper pilsner glass. The Cervecería Nacional Dominicana calls its flagship beer a Cerveza Tipo Pilsener, and indeed it is a type of pilsner as all pale lagers are a type of pilsner, no matter how far removed from the appealing attributes of an actual pilsner.

Presidente is made with corn grits and sugar, and so it has much in common with any other common mass market lager, some of which are also made and marketed by the sole brewery in the country. Nonetheless, Presidente is pretty much the only beer game in town.

I had done some homework before coming down, though, and so I knew that the company had introduced a new amber beer named–in a flash of inspiration, no doubt–Ambar. My job, other than to attend and report on the Corales inauguration, was to find it. This would prove difficult.

[Now it's impossible--see an update of sorts here on a 2011 trip to the DR.]

Less difficult perhaps, then it once was to even get to the area. The resort is celebrating its 40^th anniversary, but in the beginning, said Rainieri, “This land was all bush, cactus, sea grapes, accessible only by helicopter.” Or a four-hour drive from the Santo Domingo airport to an area sparsely populated, with no infrastructure.

Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernández (left) and PUNTACANA CEO Frank Rainieri. The guy in the middle wouldn't identify himself.

It was New York labor mediator Ted Kheel and a group of investors who initially acquired about 30 square miles for $200,000, the land for what would ultimately become the 15,000-acre resort. This includes the real engine of the local economy, the Punta Cana airport, the world’s first privately-owned international airport, which extracts a fee from every visitor, and there are plenty of us.

Rainieri and local investors came on board later, and he, Kheel, de la Renta and Iglesias are now the main owners of GRUPO PUNTACANA. They look like wizards of investment as Corales debuts, a third runway is under construction at the airport, and a third golf course is also under construction, Hacienda.

P.B. Dye’s La Cana Golf Course debuted here in 2001, and P.B. (Pete Dye’s son) and his wife were so enraptured with the area that they now live here. Both attended the Corales ribbon-cutting and revealed no trace of jealously over Fazio’s work, and why should they? P.B. is designing the Hacienda course, scheduled to open late next year, although he cautioned that time was an abstract concept in the DR.

Tom Fazio at the Corales opening

The President gave evidence of this, as he showed up about an hour late for the ceremonies. This gave me a chance to chat with Tom Fazio, who had his own perspective on time: “I don’t like to think how many courses I’ve done because it makes me feel old. I just like saying I’ve been doing this for 44 to 45 years. I still like bending over a blueprint, but I’m not as keen on the day to day stuff.”

Such details he leaves to his son, Logan, now the president of the family firm, and also in attendance with his mother, Sue. “And this will be a go-to place for my family,” said the paterfamilias during the ceremonial speeches, although he admitted to a mixed strain of feelings: “What makes a golf course great? It’s the people who are involved…the team that makes things happen…. So this is a little sad for us in a way, in that the work is over.”

The work will live on for quite awhile, as the Fazio team has created a design as fashionable as a de la Renta ensemble, with six holes skirting the Caribbean Sea, a variety of dramatic forced carries required, particularly at the home hole–which calls for the right shot over the rocky limestone coral of the Bay of Corales.

Logan, Sue and Tom Fazio at Corales opening

Otherwise there are broad and shapely fairways, and two holes (the third and the fifteenth) with double greens. Not shared greens, but two greens per hole. What was the thinking there?

Golf on the rocks--the ninth hole at Corales

Corales director of golf Jay Overton, who came out of what he thought was retirement after five years at Pinehurst and 32 at Innisbrook Resort, said, “What’s the number one course in the world? Pine Valley, where the eighth hole has two greens. So Frank Rainieri said to Tom, ‘If we’re going to be the number one course in the world we’d better have two holes with two greens.’ And so we do.”

There was no Ambar beer to be found at the course, however, nor at the La Cana Clubhouse where we had dinner that night, or at the Playa Blanca restaurant on my last night. Hand-rolled cigars, yes, plenty of pork, yes, but no Ambar.

Not that that last evening was over. The Dominicans like to party, and as it was the birthday of one of Rainieri’s daughters, the feast moved on, and in a bar adjacent to where the party was being held, I made the score at last: an Ambar Cerveza Oscura, which hardly anyone among the local crowd had even heard of.

So there was a lot of show and tell about what was, all in all, more a curiosity than a brewing triumph. It’s a mildly caramel sweet beer, amber to be sure, with slightly more kick but certainly more character than Presidente.

I figured I might not pass this way again, in a number of ways, so I kept the Ambars coming. The details of the evening became a little obscura after a time, but not the pleasure of another successful beer quest.

Name: Ambar Cerveza Oscura
Brewer: Cervecería Nacional Dominicana
Style: Amber lager
ABV: 5.5%
Availability: Tough to find even in the Dominican Republic
For More Information: www.cnd.com.do

[Corales was included in a piece I did for Celebrated Living magazine, available here.]

I responded to a comment on last week’s post that Belgian Scotch Ales may be more of an interpretation of a style than a style in itself, but there are enough of them (Gordon Scotch Ale or McChouffe–“the Scotch of the Ardennes” from La Chouffe) to make one wonder.

Historically, ales from Scotland have tended to have higher malt and lower hop profiles than English ales, one argument being that it’s colder in Scotland, so a more warming beer fits the bill. Another argument is agricultural–that as styles emerged there were ample hops in England and plenty of malt in Scotland, so there you have it. (It’s surely more complicated than that, but we’ll let beer historians wrangle over it.)

The varied strengths of Scottish beers were priced accordingly–60/, 70/ 80/ ales, an ale going for 90 shillings likely to be a whopper called a Wee Heavy, coming in somewhere between 7% to 10% ABV.

There has long been trade between Scotland and Flanders, but Hainaut is in western Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium, although but a few miles south of the Flemish border.

But according to the Van der Haegen family, which has been brewing in Silly since 1850, the Scotch ale was decidedly Scots-inspired. A Scottish regiment was based in the town after World War I, and requested a beer be brewed that would be to the soldiers’ liking. After many back and forth tasting sessions, a recipe using Kent hops was born in 1919.

That’s the same basic recipe being used today, with some sugars added to prompt a secondary fermentation in bottle or keg, meaning the beer could stand up well to some aging.

Certainly, Scotch Silly (sometimes called Scotch de Silly), is a worthy representative of a Belgian Scotch Ale or any Scotch ale–although perhaps we should call it Belgian Wee Heavy de Silly, even if it has marginally less body than last week’s Reunion ’10 beer, which also seemed a tad sweeter.

Mahogany in color, with a mild tan head, Scotch Silly has an estery toffee nose amidst the alcoholic vapors, a coating mouth feel, a bracing malt sweetness but a drying bite and what seems to me to the slightest touch of peaty smokiness. But that might have been some of my cigar residue.

This is a good beer to pair with a cigar–sturdy and warming, one that might well be best suited for days cooler than mid-July. Still, that I had but one 11.2-oz. bottle seemed like the only silly thing surrounding the entire enterprise.

Name: Scotch Silly
Brewer: Brasserie de Silly, Belgium
Style: Belgian Scotch Ale
ABV: 8%
Availability: Year-round, about 23 states
For More Information: silly-beer.com

“I signed up the first two dozen states,” said Shapiro, and Pete’s Wicked was off on a heady ascent (if not one ultimately sustained).

Shapiro’s colleague, Virginia MacLean, worked in marketing for Pete’s, and the two remained fast friends, even though Shapiro went on to work for Merchant du Vin, and now heads his own company, SBS Imports in Seattle, distributing De Proef Brouwerij beers from Belgium, and Batemans Brewery ales and Aspall Suffolk Cyders from England. Pete Slosberg sold his brands to the Gambrinus Company in 1998.

Dr. James Berenson

Though under the cloud of Virginia’s diagnosis with myeloma, a cancer of plasma cells that attacks and destroys bone, the three old colleagues reunited in 2007. While fighting her own ailment, Virginia wanted to help raise funds for the Institute for Myeloma & Bone Cancer Research, headed by Dr. James Berenson, the very doctor who treated her.

And so Reunion beer was born, named by Slosberg, and the first, 2007 installment was an organic Imperial version of the original Pete’s Wicked recipe, a brown ale. “Virginia was with us at the first release party for the beer,” said Shapiro. “But she passed away in June of 2007, four months after the beer came out.”

Slosberg and Shapiro have continued the annual release since, giving over 100% of its gross margin to the Institute and raising over $130,000 to date.

The Bison Brewing Company in Berkeley has been aboard for all four batches. The 2008 beer was an organic version of Pete’s Wicked Red, with the addition of rye and caraway. In 2009 a quartet of brewers turned out spiced double wheat ales–the Terrapin Beer Co. of Georgia, Pizza Port Brewing of San Diego and Elysian Brewing of Seattle joining Bison.

Terrapin and Bison are back for this year’s effort, a Belgian-style Scotch Ale in honor of Virginia’s heritage. Both brewers use the same basic recipe, said Shapiro, and “The bottles taste pretty similar. But there may be some difference in ABV because Spike [Buckowski of Terrapin] used a Rochefort yeast that ate a lot of sugar, while Dan [Del Grande of Bison] used more of a Westmalle yeast. But the beers are pretty close. Between the two of them they made about 180 barrels–a couple thousand cases.”

I had the Terrapin version, which pours out a deep brown with a light tan head. The Belgian yeast is beguilingly evident in the nose, as is an ample raisin and malt note. The flavor is malty rich as a Scotch ale should be, with a faint peaty/soapy quality, some spiciness, a mild hop bite and marked alcoholic heat. No one element overpowers another; it’s a smooth, velvety drinking experience.

One hopes Virginia MacLean would have liked it. It’s really quite delicious and, all things considered, a lovely beer.

Name: Reunion ’10–A Beer for Hope
Brewer: Terrapin Beer Co., Athens, Georgia; Bison Brewing Co., Berkeley, California
Style: Belgian-Style Scotch Ale
ABV: 8.5% or 7.0%
Availability: Terrapin in nine eastern states; Bison in five western states, for a few months until supplies run out.
For More Information: reunionbeer.com

It was not an American beer, but Belgian. My habit of drinking imports on the most iconic American holiday stretches back to my younger drinking days, when there weren’t that many American beers around of any great interest. To try anything somewhat different, something with a little more impact than the typical watery lagers of the day, imports were the way to go.

I was taking beer hunting fairly seriously early on–the drinking age was still 18 then (I’m talking late ‘60s-early ‘70s in suburban New York). But there weren’t a lot of big finds to be found, beyond obscure German lagers. To unearth a dark beer was a coup; a Belgian oddity would have seemed like something from another planet. Still, before the Fourth I’d head to the local beer distributor and stock up on whatever was new and unfamiliar.

I was a lucky kid growing up. My family belonged to a pool club–five families split the expenses originally, though the number grew over the years. The luckiest part was that the pool was in our backyard. I learned to swim there, and spent many a Fourth right there: playing baseball or volleyball as the day went on, downing countless hamburgers, hot dogs, ears of corn, slices of watermelon, while swimming for hours, sunning, contracting skin cancer….

The wonder is I never lost an eye or went deaf or blew off a bodily appendage from all the fireworks we set off as evening fell on the Fourth. We put on major illegal fireworks displays in those days, all fueled by our day-long ingestion of fairly potent beery imports.

True, the odd bottle rocket would sometime go screeching into the assembled crowd, sending a few of the timid diving off their lawn chairs for cover. A patch of lawn might catch afire from time to time, but that only suggested another fine use for all that imported beer.

All was well as long as we followed the four-word mantra of the fireworks-obsessed: Light fuse, get away. Those were the concise instructions right on the pack of firecrackers, cherry bombs, ashcans, Roman candles, fountains, or whatever ordinance we were torching. Sometimes the translator of the Chinese (all the fireworks seemed to be Chinese) aimed at a slight literary note: Light fuse, retire quickly. Or the always helpful: Do not hold in hand after lighting.

Those Fourths were among the most thrilling and satisfying days of my life, and I think I say that without undue nostalgic haze.

This Fourth was a bit muted after my wife pulled a muscle (or something) in her back. Lynn and I were supposed to march in Brattleboro’s Fourth of July parade in support of Vermont gubernatorial candidate Peter Shumlin, but that as well as an evening party had to go by the boards.

But there was still the beer! If Belgian, the Kasteel Rouge is just about as American as cherry pie, since that’s pretty much what it tastes like. Well, a spiked cherry pie, anyway.

The brewery site in West Flanders was a monastery in 640, succeeded by an eleventh-century castle, and the present building, dating back to 1736 but maintaining the Middle Ages cellars. The Van Honsebrouck family bought the castle in 1986, and maintain an outdoor café and indoor beer cellar for those looking to try the various brewery lines–Kasteel, St. Louis, Brigand and Bacchus.

The Van Honsebroucks have brewed in Ingelmunster since 1900, giving them clear entry into the non-profit Belgian Family Brewers association, a group which requires that members have been brewing beer in Belgium non-stop for at least 50 years. Wetten Importers of Virginia distribute the Van Honsebrouck beers in the U.S.

The brewery suggests that the Rouge would pair well with barbecue, so that worked for the Fourth of July. It pours out garnet with a red-tinged head and is thankfully not overly sweet, but would surely serve as an aperitif or dessert beer, too. There’s a sophisticated swirl of flavor, spice and depth to the Rouge, but there’s no question that tart cherry dominates the experience.

Cherry Bomb Vortex, by E.V. Day

The base of the beer is Kasteel Donker, a brown ale of 11% ABV left to mature for six months on sour cherries, and then cherry juice is added as well, which probably accounts for lowering the ABV to 8%.

But at 8% ABV, this is no half-inch firecracker. Nonetheless, it was a hot day, it was the Fourth of July, so after I popped the cork and lit its proverbial fuse, I took great satisfaction in retiring the Rouge rather quickly.

Name: Kasteel Rouge
Brewer: Castle Brewery Van Honsebrouck, Ingelmunster, Belgium
Style: Fruit beer
ABV: 8%
Availability: Year-round, about 33 states nationwide
For More Information: vanhonsebrouck.be

Thanks to E.V. Day for use of Cherry Bomb Vortex, 2002, Red Sequin dress with monofilament and turnbuckles (192 x 240 x 240) in the Exploding Couture series.

Still, it’s not likely to overtake Bud Light in sales anytime soon. Any Bud Light fans who innocently uncap (and then uncork) this beer for their first taste of a lambic should be prepared–their heads will soon be spinning like tops.

The singularity of the flavor is shocking to the uninitiated, and eye-opening enough even for those well-versed in the eccentricities of Belgian brewing. For the former, the briefest of primers:

Faro is a subset of lambic beer, an appellation reserved for spontaneously fermented beers from the Lambic region around and in Brussels. (Such beers brewed elsewhere are usually just called wild beers, which certainly works.) Lambics are made with a generous portion of unmalted wheat (often 30% of the total grain bill), lightly malted barley and aged hops (for their preservative rather than bittering character).

The koelschip at Brouwerij Lindemans

After a long boil (four to five hours) called a turbid mash, the wort is poured into a shallow open fermenting vessel called a koelschip (coolship). Then the fun begins. Brewers basically just leave the windows open, usually for one cool October to May night, and let the wild yeasts–Brettanomyces bruxellensis and lambicus–take over. No yeast is pitched; it’s all, well, spontaneous, the pure magic of nature diving right into the brewing process and producing results that are only roughly predictable.

Detail from "Peasant Wedding Feast" by Pieter Brughel the Elder, c. 1567

The day after the night of consummation the wort is put into oak casks or tanks with oak chips for fermentation and up to one or two years for maturation. Lambics are sometimes served straight from the barrel in earthenware jugs, just as they are in those old Breughel paintings, particularly in Brussels cafes, but more often different years are blended in a form called geuze (in various spellings), or in fruit versions. Lindemans offers a geuze called Cuvée René, and the typical kriek and framboise lambics (cherries and raspberries). But it extends the line to pomme, cassis, peche (apple, black currant and peach), all imported by Merchant du Vin.

Lindemans Faro typically adds dark Belgian candi sugar to the mix of young and old lambic. The dark green bottle offers no suggestion that the beer will pour out amber, with a mild head, but an aroma that breathes Belgium: fruity–apricots and apples, reminiscent of a cider–with a touch of vinegar.

The palate is simultaneously tart and sweet (in truth, a bit too sweet for me), and does a real dance in the mouth. There’s a moment of velvety coating on the front of the tongue, but the overall effect quickly becomes puckering and finishes sour–in a good way.

Yes, it’s an acquired taste, but it’s no hardship to acquire it. For all its impact of flavor, Faro is actually a fairly mild beer, one that works well as an aperitif, but equally well as a dessert beer, especially with a fruit dish, and certainly a refresher in any season.

Name: Faro
Brewer: Lindemans, Vlezenbeek, Belgium
Style: Faro
ABV: 4.0%
Availability: Nationwide
For More Information: www.lindemans.be

Clearly, I need to get to Maine more often, since I’ve never been to any one of the three Gritty McDuff’s brewpubs in the state (in Portland, Freeport, and Auburn), although I’ve long been a fan of the company’s Black Fly Stout and its label art, depicting that nefarious gnat is all its swarming glory.

Gritty’s has been around since 1988, when partners Richard Pfeffer and Ed Stebbins opened the Portland brewpub, making it the first in Maine since Prohibition, and the third in New England.

Portland is a swinging beer scene these days, quite in contrast to its earlier history as the site of one of the first temperance societies, founded in 1815. And in 1851, Portland’s mayor, Neal S. Dow, talked Maine’s governor into signing a statewide prohibition act. It became known as The Maine Law, and it outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcohol except for medicinal and mechanical purposes. I’m not sure what the latter refers to. Seems to me downing a brew after mowing the lawn would qualify as a mechanical purpose.

Neal Dow, the Napoleon of Temperance

In any case, by 1855, suspicions arose that Dow himself, the Napoleon of Temperance, had a cache of medical and mechanical goods stashed away. It all came to a head, so to speak, in the Portland Rum Riot on June 2, when Dow had the militia fire in a crowd of a few thousand thirsty rock-throwers, killing one and wounding seven.

The Maine Law was repealed the next year, and Dow’s reputation firmly on the downward path.

But times have changed for the better, and no one in Portland need be thirsty for long anymore.

For some reason, I confess, I had no great expectations for this beer, since summer beers (if usually lagers) are often timid ones, brewers hoping to capture those imbibers stuck in the mass market beer rut. And knowing that Gritty’s bottled beers are contract-brewed at Shipyard in Portland also put some unwarranted doubt in my mind. (There’s absolutely no reason this should matter.)

Net result was that I was pleasantly surprised to find this a quite tasty beer, well-positioned indeed for the season. But it will be best fresh. When I had a few bottles direct from the brewery there was an appealingly toasted grain nose (perhaps aided by a touch of wheat malt), a hint of the Cascade hops, a nice touch of malt sweetness and a decent bite in the finish (the Saaz hops?). A fine summer refresher.

Saving my last bottle for today, more than a couple of months, wasn’t a great idea, as the aroma and finish were holding on sturdily, but the palate had thinned out considerably. Which suggests a Vacationland idea to me–get behind the wheel, head for Maine, and pop open a bottle to sample side by side with a pint on draft at a Gritty pub.

Name: Vacationland Summer Ale
Brewer: Gritty McDuff’s, Portland, Maine
Style: Blonde ale
ABV: 4.9%
Availability: April through August; seven northeast states and Florida.
For More Information: gritty.com

(Neal Dow photo courtesy of Maine Memory Network)

Not light as in Light or Lite beers, of course, which you’ll never find me recommending, unless it’s to douse an out-of-control barbecue blaze. But light in terms of a beer’s overall body, mid-level range of ABV, and an ability to pair well with the foods of summer. And not necessarily light in color, either, as our one international choice for the week shows:

1) Prima Pils (Victory Brewing, Downingtown, PA; 5.3% ABV): George Motz, auteur of book and film Hamburger America, says, “I like to balance a thick, greasy burger with a crisp, cold pilsner or lager. It’s honestly the best way to go with a burger.” I’ll make no big argument there, so let’s go with this classically-inspired pils from Pennsylvania, made with whole German and Czech hop flowers. (victorybeer.com)

2) Zatec Dark Lager (Czech Republic; 5.7%): Amaze your friends with this proof that a dark beer can be perfectly, lightly, refreshing. Made in the Zatec region west of Prague, this dark beauty certainly has a caramel note from the dark malts, but it retains the crispness of a lager and a spicy hop tang. Relatively new to the U.S., the Zatec Dark should pair well with the kielbasa. (merchantduvin.com)

3) Gumballhead (Three Floyds Brewing, Munster, IN: 5.5%): Though actually named after Rob Syers’ underground comic book cat, this zesty wheat beer has enough fruity esters to actually suggest some bubblegum flavors. Once seasonal, it’s now brewed year-round. I’d heard more about Three Floyds than tasted anything by the brewery (started by brothers Nick and Simon with their father, Mike Floyd), since the beers are still regional to the Midwest. But they’re worth hunting down, as I was able to at the Kohler Festival of Beer in May. (3floyds.com)

4) Brooklyn Pennant Ale ‘55 (Brooklyn Brewery, NY; 5.0%): For the baseball lovers in the crowd, this pale ale of fame beer commemorates that championship season of 1955 when the Brooklyn Dodgers took it all for the only time. (For more on the Dodgers, and beer, click here.) A well-balanced English-style ale that should pair nicely with barbecue, burgers, peanuts and Crackerjacks. (brooklynbrewery.com)

5) Rye Pale Ale (Terrapin Beer Co., Athens, GA; 5.5%): This Georgia brew makes its way into a few northern states and should serve well with spicy selections, as adding the infrequently used malted rye to the grain bill produces a tang of its own, along with pleasing citrus hop aromas and bite. (terrapinbeer.com)

6) JuJu Ginger (Left Hand Brewing Company, Longmont, CO; 4.2%) Another feature at the Kohler Festival of Beer was pairing brews with foods. The Chef de Cuisine at Bon Appetit magazine, Jonathan Lindenauer, paired this herbal, ginger-infused beer with a fiery lemongrass-chile sambal over grilled shrimp. So we know that works. (lefthandbrewing.com)

This piece originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in the July-August issue of Fairways & Greens magazine.

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

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

Harpoon Riverbend Taps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oysters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

King Baasha of Israel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of DK Publishing

Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione will not likely be at the Brattleboro Brewers Festival on May 22, although you never know; he’s originally from Greenfield, Massachusetts, just down the road a piece, and returned to these parts to pick up some maple syrup for the collaborative brew with Sierra Nevada, Life and Limb, which was our TAP Beer of the Week 2.

I then referred to Dogfish Head as the east coast star of innovative brewing, and it wouldn’t be far wrong to call Calagione the rock star of craft brewing, such has been his impact and influence on the industry. It all begins with the willingness to throw just about anything into a brewpot–the company motto, after all, is “Off-Centered Ales for Off-Centered People”–and to ultimately pull it off.

But Calagione has more than a touch of the showman about him, and he also has the good looks, humor and intelligence to come off well under the klieg lights. He has modeled Levi jeans, written three books, given countless talks, been profiled by The New Yorker, and most recently gamely played a robot in a short film by actor/musician Will Oldham that played at the Dogfish Off-Centered Film Festival in April.

Last June the paperback version of He Said Beer, She Said Wine (DK Publishing, $16.95) appeared, the result of a battle that began in 2003 at the Dogfish Brewing & Eats brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. In one corner, wearing the beer trunks, was Calagione. In the opposite corner, robed in the wine togs, was Marnie Old, the founding education chair of the American Sommelier Association and head of her own wine consulting firm, Old Wines.

The two experts had long battled privately if good-naturedly at trade shows about which beverage was better, and which paired better with food. They finally decided they had to take it public, in a competitive tasting that matched a wine and a beer with each of five courses and letting the audience vote on which went better with the dish on hand. The evening was called, “Beer is from Mars, Wine is from Venus,” and both combatants came out swinging, no verbal holds barred.

The debate, now between covers, is every bit as entertaining, and informative, as Sam and Marnie are in person at the various tastings they’ve continued to do through the years.

At the first beer versus wine event, as in all subsequent events, there were surprises in store. Beer campers discovered that wine wasn’t so bad after all. Wine aficionados admitted that beer was sometimes the better pairing with a dish. And after scores of such tastings, the authors report that the results of many votes taken are a virtual dead heat. Some nights beer might win, barely. Other nights wine gets the nod, barely.

Uncorking the Past by Patrick E. McGovern (University of California Press)

Maybe this shouldn’t be so surprising after all. Both beverages share the glory of antiquity, wine dating from about 5000 BC and beer reaching back further to 7000 BC. Both are blessed miracles of agriculture and the happy confluence of grape or grain with yeast. The end products are almost primal foods. So even playing field there.

The real debate is getting past one’s personal prejudices, and seeing behind images. As Old relates in the book, “[B]oth wine and beer can be mass-produced, sacrificing quality in favor of quantity. What I hadn’t realized before was that because cheap beer is so much popular than cheap wine, I had dismissed beer based on that alone.”

From my vantage point, there’s always been a blind spot for beer in this country for that very reason–people see no further past the image of beer than as a cheap glass of yellow suds too often drunk in quantities leading to largely questionable behavior. Such a stereotype overlooks beer’s history and breadth–the wide variety, flavors and complexity that beer easily encompasses.

On the flip side, Calagione said he learned that one needn’t spend $20 or more for a good bottle of wine. He’ll still maintain that some of the finest beers in the world are less expensive than most good wines, although that virtue of beer is also sometimes viewed condescendingly by those too heavily invested in the cultural mythology (or collectibility) of wine.

The best part of this debate is that it’s ongoing, one is free to dive in anytime, and taste a lot of fine beer, wine and food in the process.

As for antiquity, Calagione has attempted to recreate a variety of ancient beer recipes in collaboration with Patrick McGovern, an archaeological researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who has literally written the book on the subject. Their efforts have led to Midas Touch, Chateau Jiahu, Theobroma and Chicha.

In the kaleidoscope of Dogfish brews, the Indian Brown Ale is almost a sleeper, relatively straightforward. But only relative to the rest of Calagione’s restless catalog.

He calls the beer a hybrid of ale styles– Scotch, IPA, American Brown–and certainly the beer has the malty character of a Scotch Ale, the hoppiness of an IPA, and the strength of an American Brown. It pours out an appealing mahogany with a rocky tan head. The organic caramelized brown sugar used in the brewing give off the beer’s dark toffee aroma. This follows through in the flavor, along with a mild roasted character and a hint of chocolate.

It’s a mouthful. I’m not getting much of the Goldings or Liberty hops in the nose, but there’s plenty in the finish, perhaps because the beer is dry-hopped like Dogfish’s 60 Minute and 90 Minute IPAs.

The Indian Brown Ale seems to fly a bit under the radar of Dogfish Head’s normally busy air traffic. It’s probably the least talked about of any of the company’s beers. But I have a sneaking suspicion it may be one of its best.

Name: Indian Brown Ale
Brewer: Dogfish Head, Milton, Delaware
Style: Brown ale, of sorts
ABV: 7.2%
Availability: Year-round, in about 25 states
For More Information: dogfish.com

Smuttynose has a bit livelier aura, reportedly where Blackbeard honeymooned, and certainly where two women were killed in 1873 in a notorious case that has spawned a number of books. One, a novel by Anita Shreve titled The Weight of Water, was made into a Sean Penn movie in 2000, directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Bigelow won the Academy Award as Best Director this year for “The Hurt Locker.”

Poster for "The Weight of Water"

Okay, now that we’re up to speed on the cultural bases, let’s get to work on Smuttynose the brewery, which will be pouring both these beers at the May 22 Brattleboro Brewers Festival, along with the Dirty Blonde Ale from its sister company, the Portsmouth Brewery.

Actually, to trace the Smuttynose family tree, one should start with the Northampton Brewery in Massachusetts, opened by brother and sister Peter and Janet Egelston in 1987, making it New England’s oldest operating brewpub. The Portsmouth Brewery was New Hampshire’s first brewpub, opening in 1991. And after buying the assets of the defunct Frank Jones Brewing Co., the Egelstons launched Smuttynose early in 1994. (The pair have since split the assets, Janet running Northampton, Peter the New Hampshire properties with his partner Joanne Francis.)

Portsmouth has made big news the last few years (well, in the World According to Beer, anyway), when it releases its Russian Imperial Stout, Kate the Great. With only 900 or so bottles available on one day of the year, beer fans begin lining up outside the brewery in the middle of the night, like golfers camping out to snag a tee time at Bethpage Black. Once the brewery doors swing open, the available beer is quickly claimed.

Head Brewer Tod Mott of the Portsmouth Brewery in the air, with general manager Brennen Rumble and owner Peter Egelston, center

It was only last year that Smuttynose surpassed the brewpub in gross sales for the first time, and growth has been such that a new brewing facility and restaurant is being build in Newmarket, about 20 minutes from Portsmouth. (The Portsmouth Brewery isn’t going anywhere.)

As for the beers, the best part of the Star Island Single, especially considering the reverent aspects of the island, is its label, showing a mermaid with a pile of crimson hair contemplating a shell-encrusted mug of, presumably, Star Island Single. The mermaid is a woman Egelston and Francis ran into in a consignment shop in San Diego, where they were attending a brewers conference. Francis asked her if she would model for the label. Miss Dixie von Trixie was happy to do it, since when not working in the consignment shop she struts her stuff as a model and burlesque performer.

The aroma of the beer is quite fruity, with little detectable hop scent. It’s probably just the beer’s name that suggests the flavor of star fruit, or carambola, but that’s the best I’ve got.

The Single in the title, not to mention some Belgian yeast, suggests the abbey-style leanings of the beer, while the bottle description of a “Session ale brewed with spice,” suggests a beer you can settle in with and have a few of.

I don’t think that will happening any too soon on my part. It’s a bit too sweet for me, and otherwise strikes me as thin, though the finish is mildly puckering, which may be where the coriander spice comes in. I’m not detecting anything particularly Belgian about it, which would help. Love the label, though.

Happily, my reaction to the Smuttynose IPA is almost exactly the reverse. I could see downing a few of these at regular intervals. But then I’m a hophead, and this is a hop festival in a bottle. The aroma is citrusy, although a bit less grapefruity than Cascade hops. (The mix here is Simcoe and the fairly obscure Santiams.)

There’s a nice woody bite to the beer, a pleasing malt sweetness and a bracing hop finish. It’s not a complicated beer, but it’s solid.

Good label here, too, showing two geezers sitting on lawn chairs in front of what looks like a trailer park home. They’re both holding beer bottles and having a good laugh. I’m not sure what this represents, exactly, since it seems far more likely a pair like this would be drinking something like Old Milwaukee Light than Smuttynose IPA.

Maybe someone put some of the IPA in their hands and they’re laughing at how great it tastes? If so, wouldn’t that soon trigger crying in one’s beer, thinking about all those years carrying the weight of bellywash?

Name: Smuttynose IPA, Star Island Single
Brewer: Smuttynose Brewing Co., Portsmouth, New Hampshire
Style: IPA, Belgian abbey-style spiced single
ABV: 6.9%, 5.3%
Availability: Both year-round on the east coast, west to Ohio
For More Information: smuttynose.com

True, it’s an ale made in the Belgian style by a brewery now owned by Belgians, but it blends well in the small town that houses the greatest sports hall of fame of them all, of America’s greatest sport.

Yes, Brooklyn Brewery’s Pennant Ale might have done pretty well, too–the large B of the Brooklyn Brewery logo was designed by Milton Glasser with the old Brooklyn Dodger B in mind. But we spotlighted Brooklyn two weeks ago, as we continue our series pondering the breweries that will be pouring May 22 at the Brattleboro Brewers Festival. The Ommegang Abbey Ale is our sixth of an eventual dozen.

For that matter, something like Coors Light might have been apt, too, if one is nostalgic for genuine old ballpark swill. Back in the good old days, when the Dodgers, Giants and Yankees were all in New York, each had their own beer sponsor. I remember them as Schaefer for the Bums, Knickerbocker for the Giants, and Ballantine for the Yanks. In the Mets early days, it was Rheingold. The Dodgers and Giants are long gone from New York, of course, and so are the beers, at least in their original incarnations.

They all had one thing in common–they were pale, bland, gassy lagers, served in big wax cups and probably warm by the time they were conveyed back to one’s seat. They always seemed vaguely sour to me, and there was usually something floating in them–stray peanut shells and skins, flakes of drifting cigar ash. On a hot summer day, enough of them could induce a real stupor by the late innings, probably the inspiration for the seventh-inning stretch.

I actually tried just such an experiment on opening day back in 1997. My nephew Jim had brought some Coors Light here for Thanksgiving or some such holiday, and it continued conditioning, untouched, in the garage, passing through close to ten different calendar seasons in that time. Since the Silver Bullet is not meant for such conditioning, it was in perfect swill shape. I poured it in a plastic cup and opened a few peanuts over it before settling down to watch the game.

Coors Light is the lightest of light beers. It’s been around since 1978, and is bewilderingly one of the most popular beers in American. The light certainly refers to the taste profile–there really isn’t any as far as I can tell, unless it’s two years old and funky. But for those watching waistlines there’s really nothing particular light about the Silver Bullet at roughly 105 calories per can at a 4.2% ABV.

So the excitement from the evening came not from my ersatz ballpark atmosphere, but because it was the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s first regular season major league game, being celebrated at Shea Stadium during a Dodgers-Mets game.

I could go on at extended length about my connections to Jackie Robinson, but let this suffice: He’s always been a part of my life, from my early days as a pip-squeak Brooklyn Dodger fan, watching him play at Ebbets Field, to more recent years, when I did some editing work on Stealing Home, Sharon Robinson’s memoir about growing up in the wake of her father’s career and fame. The Robinson story has always struck me as a profile in courage and pathos, and it doesn’t take much more than looking at his Hall of Fame plaque, along with that of his teammate and champion Pee Wee Reese in Cooperstown, to choke me up.

The entire 1997 season was dedicated to Robinson, and all the players that night were wearing uniforms with Jackie’s old number 42. Following remarks from then-President Bill Clinton and Robinson’s widow, Rachel, baseball commissioner Bud Selig did something right for a change; he announced that Jackie Robinson’s number 42 would be henceforth retired from all of baseball–the only player so honored in the long history of the game, and fittingly so. It was a stunning move, beautiful in its simplicity, guaranteeing that forever after there would be a question from a young fan–”Who was number 42?”–requiring an answer that would keep the legacy alive of the man who, in my book, was about as heroic as they come.

I suppose I digress, but then it’s a digression I’ve been on all my life, from ballpark swill to a devout appreciation for Belgian brewing. So it all seems perfectly apt and congruent to me. I guess it must be to the folks at Ommegang, too, since on June 17 of this year they’ll be hosting what they’re calling a Vintage Base ball Game–two words for baseball as per pre-1900 spelling. Under 1861 rules–no strikes, only the catcher wears a glove–the Cleveland Blues will meet the Fitchburg Rollstones in a contest likely to determine nothing at all. But one anachronism will be the beer on tap, Ommegang.

That’s always good news. The brewery opened in 1997, a partnership between the Belgian brewery Duvel Moortgat and Don Feinberg and Wendy Littlefield, the couple who ran the American beer importing firm Vanberg and DeWulf. Much credit is due the partners for broadening the appreciation for Belgian ales in the U.S., not to mention building a beautiful Belgian farmhouse brewery in what were once important hop fields in Cooperstown.

Brewery Ommegang

Moortgat bought the sole rights in 2003. (Feinberg and Littlefield continue to fruitfully operate Vanberg & DeWulf,though they moved from Cooperstown to Chicago last year.)

Brewery Ommegang has five splendid year-round beers (Rare Vos, Hennepin, Three Philosophers, Witte, and the eponymous Ommegang Abbey Ale). It’s seasonal specialties are always worth looking for (Ommegeddon, Chocolate Indulgence, Adoration, Bière de Mars), such as the BPA, a dry-hopped Belgian-stye Pale Ale that will be poured at the festival.

Then there’s the occasional one-off like the Inauguration Ale 2009. The beer was originally going to be called Obamagang, but the label ran afoul of the feds. A worthy salute nonetheless, and one wonders why the beer wasn’t served at the infamous White House Beer Summit.

Every now and again the brewery carts a few hundred cases of its beers about 45 minutes away, storing the bottle-conditioned brews in the constant 52°F temperature of Howe Caverns for further maturation.

I wouldn’t mind storing a few cases of the Abbey Ale in my garage. This is one delicious beer, ruby in color, with a complex fruity nose and an equally complex palate–toffee sweet but bracingly dry with all sorts of flavors coursing through–raisins, apples, plum, a hint of licorice and spice, with plenty of body and an earthy finish.  Score it a home run all the way, by current or 1861 rules.

Name: Ommegang Abbey Ale
Brewer: Brewery Ommegang, Cooperstown, New York
Style: Belgian-style Dubbel
ABV: 8.5%
Availability: Year-round, 40-plus states
For More Information: ommegang.com

Ray McNeill and cello

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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