Micreview: Mendocino Imperial IPA (Winter Seasonal)

Since I've got quite a long backlog of stuff (especially beer from my visit to Asheville) to get through, I thought I'd see how it felt to do a shorter, more "traditional" review every once in awhile. This beer seems ideal to try out something like this, since it's not all that special tastewise (there's something else that's interesting about it, though...).

So - it's the Mendocino folks again. I pointed out why I loved these guys in my review of their stout: if you buy Mendocino, you get value and you get bottle conditioning. The first is the main thing, and you can think of the extra yeastiness as a bonus they throw in. The Binnys folks have unfortunately bumped the price on Mendocino sixers up to, um, $6.99, which just means you're getting a really good deal for the money rather than an astonishing one. Today I'll be dealing with Mendocino's Imperial India Pale Ale, which I found looking very solitary in in a dark lonely corner of Binnys behind a bunch of Christmas ales. It's a good beer. But that's not the really interesting thing. The interesting thing is that right now you can buy it for $5.99.

I repeat, it costs $5.99. For a six pack. Even Binnys themselves admit that this is the best friggin' deal in their store. It's astonishingly cheap - stupidly cheap. I repeat: A SIX PACK COSTS SIX BUCKS. Fuck, a sixer of Miller Lites will cost you fifty cents more, and this is a 7.5% alcohol slobberknocker of an IPA (rather than a shitty lager). Why hasn't everyone in Chicago migrated to this stuff yet? Who the fuck is still buying Budweiser? Do they even know what their seven dollars will buy them nowadays? (Mind you, I'm not being an elitist here, I'm just saying: why would you spend even more money on something worse?)

Ah, well, I suppose I'd better get to the review.

The brew pours a very pretty carrot orange, with a half-finger of fizzy, bubbly white head. The nose is - well, hell, I don't even need to stick my head in to check it, I can smell the citrus assault from halfway across my desk. Coming in for a closer whiff, the strongest elements are (surprise!) the hops, like a grapefruit that's gone mad and dressed itself in pine needles. Way, way in the back there's Mendocino's trademark yeast aroma, but it's more or less an afterthought here. It's not the most complex aroma in the world, but it's surely got me salivating

Hrm, well, it's a good IPA. It's not great, and I'm not sure I would call it an "imperial" - at any rate it's nowhere near the kick in the dick that Dogfish Head's 90-minuter is - but it's quite solid, just a nice, hoppy, somewhat-bolder-than-average India Pale. Up front I immediately get a sharp piney bitterness. The sweetness of the malt and a bit of yeast come in from there to take over for a moment, but it's all for naught once the spicy citrus bite clamps down on the party at the end. This all closes out into a very dry aftertaste, which is - typical of the style - nice and puckery. Mainly I get hops, although you can still sense the sweet malt - or what remains of it at least, after having been run down by a pine tree in a pickup. The beer's even relatively smooth, with the body kept fairly light and the alcohol as well-masked as it can be for this style (but don't kid yourself, you're not going to be drinking this one quickly).

Like seemingly everything Mendocino makes, this beer ain't one of the greats, but it can hold its own against the standards of the style and come out looking pretty good. As an IPA, I'd rate it as slightly above the Sierra Nevada and Goose Island IPAs, slightly below the Stone IPA and DFH 60-minuter (and well below the 90-minuter), and about on a par with Great Lakes' Commodore Perry. And that's pretty damn good company for a beer you can buy for a buck a bottle. So, for those of you who live anywhere near Chicago, what the fuck are you waiting for? When even the friggin' store is wondering why they've priced something so low, there's absolutely no excuse for not trying some.

Grade: B+
Summary: When the next-cheapest IPA is more expensive by two bucks - i.e., more expensive by a third - you don't really need to make it good. Mendocino did anyways.

Review: Bluegrass Jefferson's Reserve Bourbon Barrel Stout and Kona Pipeline Porter

I'd like to talk about a distinction between enhancement and gussying-up. Both of these things broadly amount to a sort of addition - you have one thing, and then you do something to it or put something else in it - but beyond that there remains a gap that makes all the difference.

Put it this way. A few weeks ago ago I took it upon myself to make my own oven-baked breaded chicken fingers. It was a complete disaster: they were greasy, overcooked, tough, and even smelled kind of funky. Not content to simply throw the things away, I took it upon myself to try eating them with whatever condiments were available. I gussied them up, in other words. Nothing worked: adding barbecue sauce, for example, simply made them taste like really awful chicken fingers with barbecue sauce on them. Spicy mustard, honey, even an unbelievably delicious cranberry sauce I had invented around thanksgiving - all of this simply sat on top of the fingers without changing their whatness, their terrible essence, in any way.

Now compare this situation to another, one which you might have heard of. Take some gin, i.e. some grain alcohol with a ton of juniper in it, and slosh it around with some herbally-infused wine and a lot of ice. Now strain out the ice and add an olive. It shouldn't be any good, should it? Gin, on its own, is fairly unenjoyable (it was made popular as a dirt-cheap alternative to beer for the British peasant, after all). Even vodka has a long, proud tradition of drinking on rocks or simply neat - not gin, though, not unless you're an alcoholic from the isles. So, in any case, we're not starting off with something particularly promising here. Nevertheless, add that herby wine in just the right proportions and drop in an olive and you've got something that isn't nearly as horrible as it should be. Indeed, you've got something spectacular: the dry martini. The gin, which on its own tastes like an evergreen tree mopping a floor, is mellowed and transformed by the vermouth. As a result you get something crisp and cold and sour and spicy. You get what is still one of the best aperitif cocktails in existence - just don't drink one right after eating, for god's sake, and not at all in amounts larger than two ounces or so (unless you feel like having dinner while nursing a sizable drunk). The dry martini, then, is an enhancement. The gin is transformed by what is done to it and added to it - not that it ceases to be gin, but it is gin in a certain sense sublated to a nobler status.

I have here two beers: the Jefferson's Reserve Bourbon Barrel Stout made by the Bluegrass Brewing Company, and the Pipeline Porter made by Kona out in Hawaii. Both of these are examples of brews that have had something done to them. Both are examples of addition in the broad sense. The thing is, one of these additions works, and the other doesn't. One of these beers is very good, and the other isn't. So which is which?

The BBS is, as the name might imply, an imperial stout that's been aged in a bourbon barrel. I've had two examples of this style before: the Walter Payton attempt (which I liked) and the Goose Island version (which is probably the best beer I've had all year). I'm expecting good things from this, in other words. According to the website, this stuff has been in the wood for 60 days - not very long at all compared to the others, but presumably still enough to suck up some bourbon character. More weirdly, it's only rated at 8% ABV. That's slightly low even by imperial stout standards, and really low for a barrel stout. Oh, well, at least it comes with an atttractive barrel-themed label (wood grains and all).

Off goes the cap. It pours very black, but surprisingly it's not particularly thick - by appearance it just sort of looks like a middle-of-the-range stout, really, not the monster I've been expecting. Even more oddly, it's got a head. And a big one at that: I get three fingers' worth of tan bubbles from this stuff. I got nothing of the sort from the other two barrel stouts, and that probably says more about the BBC take's alcohol content than anything. The aroma is, well, subdued. Initially it's very much like the Payton and the Goose Island, except at about a tenth of the power. Underneath the sweet bourbon, oak, and vanilla smells, though, I detect more conventional stout flavors. It's kind of a dull coffee and cacao mixture, really. Hrmm.

If the aroma is disappointing, though, that's nothing compared to the taste. First imagine a day-old pile of bonfire ashes; now imagine pouring a shot of Beam over it. There, you've now got a pretty good idea of what this beer tastes like. There's a little bit of bourbon in this, to be sure, but you only really get it at the end. The rest is just a kind of dull charred maltiness. Up front I get a slight bitter tingle, which then expands into that not-very-pleasant burned flavor. This mostly holds steady until the aftertaste, when the vanilla-y bourbon sweetness finally (finally) pierces its way through. Even then, though, the ash still dominates. The aftertaste is pretty much the most pleasant aspect of the beer, really, and it doesn't even last that long. I'll grant them this: it's probably an easier beer to drink than the Payton or the Goose Island. It's not as heavy nor as strong, but the price you pay is that it's quite boring and not very good to drink.

What Bluegrass has here, then, is a questionable stout that's not very good to drink - I half suspect they took a flamethrower to the malt before they brewed it, although I can't confirm this - which they tried to fix by hosing it into a bourbon barrel for a couple of months. It hasn't really worked. Rather than turning a mediocre beer into a good one, they've just added a few new all-too-thin bourbony flavors to their mediocre beer. They've gussied it up, in other words. I suppose it's better than it might have been otherwise, but there's no getting around how ultimately disappointing this stuff is. C+, and that might be too generous.

Now for the Kona porter, and I'll get to the most important thing right away: this is a coffee beer. I don't much care for this style - in fact, I think many of the more prominent examples (e.g., the Founders) are overdone disasters in which all the flavors are drowned out by the weed from Ethiopia. So I'm biased against the Pipeline Porter from the beginning. And yet rather than a gigantic hideous baby, it's got a friendly baby blue surfing-themed design on its label. It looks friendly, it looks irreferent, it looks like something that one might actually want to drink...

In fairly standard fashion, it pours a moderately viscous auburn - a little bit of light gets through this stuff, but not a whole lot. It has a lovely one and a half finger tan head, too, and that's nice. But what's nicer is the aroma, which is - not too put the point too carefully - the greatest smell I've ever had from a coffee beer. For once, the joe doesn't take over completely! Instead there's a melding and a partnership between it and a rich roasted malt aroma. I get chocolate milk, brown sugar, and fresh oatmeal at first, and only when I scent deeper does the coffee cut in - enhancing the aroma rather than taking it over. Like the BBS, there's no trace of hops (but who cares?).

Honestly, the taste is a slight letdown after the smell. This time the coffee takes the lead - take a sip and its bitter edge hits the tongue right away. The notes of joe retain their dominance, on an increasingly shaky basis, all through the middle and the finish, where molasses notes start trying to pull it away (there's also a brief poke from the hops to remind you that you're drinking a porter, but they've clearly only got a bit part). Only a few moments after you swallow does the roasted malty sweetness really overcome its coffee rival, leaving a long and very pleasant aftertaste. Not as good as the aroma, then, but still very nice. Even the texture is about right for a porter - not too thick, not too watery.

This, then, is how you make a coffee beer. I have no illusions about this being the end-all, be-all of the style, mind. I think it can be done better. But at the moment, the Pipeline Porter is the one to beat; this beer is the yardstick. What the Kona folks had was a very solid porter to begin with that they then enhanced with, of all things, a touch of joe. And, through some impossible warlockery, they didn't screw it up. That minor miracle is enough to make this beer special; the fact that it's probably one of the best winter beers around makes it even moreso.

Bluegrass Jefferson's Reserve Bourbon Barrel Stout
Grade: C+
Summary: Take a used bourbon barrel and light it on fire. Put some of the remaining ashes in a widemouth. Bingo.

Kona Pipeline Porter
Grade: A-
Summary: It's the glaznost of coffee beers. Joe and malt flavors working together towards mutual interests, leading to global peace.

The Bell-a-thon: Bell's Rye Stout, Special Double Cream Stout, Expedition Stout, and Best Brown Ale

This might be my last update for awhile, given that A) I'm going out of town for winter break tomorrow and B) I doubt my folks are going to give me much time to write about alcohol until I get back. But it should be a good one.

So here's the deal. After much singles-buying and several people dropping off beer for Thanksgiving, I've now inexplicably got my hands on collection of four (4) different beers from Bell's Brewery. I didn't plan for this and I don't really know how this happened, (given that I don't typically buy Bell's), but here I am anyways. Funny enough, three of them are stouts as well (probably because Bell's has some crazy obsession with stouts - last I checked they sold about a dozen of the things during various parts of the year). All told, I've got me an Expedition Stout, a Special Double Cream Stout, a Rye Stout, and a Best Brown Ale. I'm hoping amazing things will happen, and dreading that they won't.

You see, I like to think of Bell's as something like the Toyota of the microbrewing world. I do this for several reasons. First: they're fairly ubiquitous. Toyota is the largest car company in the world, and while Bell's isn't quite up to that level, the upper midwest is still nevertheless utterly saturated with them. If any store around here sells any microbeer at all, they're going to sell Bell's. Second: they're reliable. I've never had a Bell's that's actually been bad, which is to their credit. Third: most of what they make is pretty boring. As examples of this I'll cite their Porter, Lager, and Pale Ale, all of which I've had sometime in the past year. All three of these beers are quite competent, practically flawless, and deeply unexciting examples of their styles. I wasn't exactly let down, I just felt like I was drinking... a porter, a lager, and a pale ale. With nothing much remotely interesting about them. If I ever have any of those beers again, I might review them - but it'd be hard. I think I'd come up with something along the lines of: "Yeah. Pretty good."

Those, then, are the three typical things. But there's one other thing about Toyota, and (indeed) about Bell's, that most people don't notice. And that's Point The Fourth: every once in awhile, when the mood is just right, they can and do go completely insane.

I could cite several moments from Toyota's occasional dives into madness. The original Scion xB, for example, or the 2000gt, or the upcoming Lexus LFA (which will cost three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars). But there's a much better example to be found. Way, way back in the glorious cocaine-and-Wham!-fuelled days of 1985, Toyota created something very special. Up until that year the company had mostly been making its name off of stuff like the Tercel and the Cressida - cars that never broke down, at the cost of being deeply dreary. And then it dropped this thing - the MR2. It was an instant masterpiece: a light, stripped-down, fingertippy, revvy, quite fast sporty coupe. Even better than that, it was (and still is) stunningly good-looking. In terms of its looks, the MR2 was like a Japanese Ferrari. No, not was like, but was a Japanese Ferrari, beating Honda's NSX to the trick by half a decade. Better still, just like the hardest of the hardcore roaring Italian monsters of its day it even had a rear mid-engine layout - i.e., the engine was mounted literally right behind the driver to achieve a perfect weight balance. The engine itself was quite small - only a 1.6 liter four-banger - but it revved like a mofo, could be supercharged for good measure, and - as one of the legendary Toyota A-engines - it lasted pretty much until Richard Pryor came along and shot it with a .357. And most importantly, the MR2 was cheap. All of this meant that any moderately successful 20-something could suddenly own himself a very reliable hardcore exotic sports car for about the same price as a four-door family cruiser. The MR2 was a stupendous achievement, and it was also voice-hearing, straightjacket-wearing, bug-eating nuts. I absolutely love it; it's my favorite Toyota ever, by miles.

(For the purposes of being thorough: GM also built a mid-engined car at about the same time, the Fiero. Unfortunately it had a habit of catching on fire)

Like Toyota's mad cars, Bell's has brewed some mad beers. I'll cite just one, which is (so far as I can tell) universally beloved: the Hopslam Ale. Unfortunately I can't speak from firsthand experience here; I tried to get my hands on one of these monsters to review, but by the time I realized it existed (uh, sometime this past summer) it had disappeared from the shelves altogether. The Hopslam, in essence, is a massive 10% ABV India Pale Ale. The very idea of such a thing is slightly insane, the fantasy of a dangerous and antisocial cascade addict, and it's certainly not the kind of brew you'd throw together in a weekend. Nevertheless, the folks at Bell's got together one day, seemingly lost their minds for awhile, and then went and made it. And that's wonderful.

So, here's the deal with my four beers. I'm expecting at least half of these to be boring, frankly. The math demands it. But what I'm really hoping for is that at least one will demonstrate the madness that I know Bell's is capable of, and earn my undying love.

So, let's get this going. First: the Bell's Special Double Cream Stout.

Well, what exactly is so "special" about it, I wonder? It comes in a fairly unimpressive, winter-themed bottle with some buck-naked tree branches (call me a philistine, but I miss the cow a little). In terms of style, this is apparently a milk stout - roughly comparable, then, to the Left Hand Milk Stout I reviewed (and loved) last month. I'm expecting good things, and the initial impressions don't let me down. This stuff pours a beautiful dark russet color, with a one-finger off-white head. The aroma, unsurprisingly, reminds me a lot of the Left Hand - it's basically good, lactose-rich chocolate milk. It's not quite as strong a nose as the LHMS, especially when agitated, but in return there's a little more going on. I detect hints of caramel and butterscotch buried a ways behind the chocolate milk. There's a little tinge of hops as well.

So I take my first sip, expecting the milky smoothness of the Left Hand, and... I don't get it. Astonishingly, this is actually thin. Very thin. It certainly doesn't have anything like the rich mouth-coating texture I was expecting, anyways. In terms of body this is essentially comparable to a porter, - and that's not necessarily bad if you're selling yourself as a porter, and not as a "Special Double Cream Stout." I've discovered, then, what the "special" means: they took the cream out.

It's not all that great as far as taste goes, either; I get lots and lots of roasted malts, with little else. It's just a muddy cacao bitterness that occasionally (but not often) lets rays of sweetness shine though. The aftertaste starts out with a dry, bitter twang, but if you let it linger for a bit you'll get (funny enough) a kind of earthy fruitiness as well. Think of musty, chalky raisins and you'll be close. It's not particularly pleasant, sadly. On a side note, this also tastes hotter than the Left Hand - a fact confirmed by the 6.1% alcohol content (as compared to 5.2).

I'm disappointed by this one in a big way; it's much drier than the Left Hand, which (again) would be fine if it were anything other than a "Special Double Cream Stout." I suppose the dryness and unrelenting cacao bitterness could suit some, but I find it to be nowhere near as much of a pleasure to sip. This, too, would be fine if the Bell's were cheaper than the LHMS (which, at $11 a sixer, is a bit dear) - but astonishingly, it actually costs more. And a lot more than Bell's regular beer. Bottom line, the Milk Stout is a supremely great sit-back-and-murder-two-hours beer. This, on the other hand, is more of a drink-while-chowing-on-gouda-and-a-barbeque-sandwich kind of beer. I don't mind such beers, of course, but I've got a ton of the latter to choose from and not a lot of the former. It's decent, where I was looking for great.

So, onto the Bell's Best Brown, then. It's a brown ale that comes with an owl on the bottle's label. Hmm, well, I'm honestly not expecting much from this one.

It's clearly not as thick as the stout as it pours (although it's not exactly a pilsner either). And it's not really "brown" per se - it's more like a darkish rusty color, with a foamy beige two finger head. The aroma's on the weak side for a brown; maltiness is the chief note, plus some grassiness, a touch of apple, and a slightly lemony hop tinge. It's rather pleasant, actually, like a nap in your backyard hammock.

And now I sip the stuff, and I'm honestly shocked. This beer, spookily, comes off as creamy - like, really creamy. It's like the lactose that was supposed to go into the Double Cream stout went into this instead. Whatever's responsible, I like it. In the front I get a little bit of fruity sourness, but that's quickly dispatched with a big wave of creamy, caramelly, malty goodness mixed in with a nuttiness that's spot-on for the style. Once it reaches the back the hops cut through and (politely, reservedly, like nervous children asking questions at Sunday school) have their say. The aftertaste is mainly the aforementioned nuttiness, with a touch of the hoppy citrus suspended over it.

It's very good, in that understated English brown sort of way. If you can think of brown ales on a spectrum ranging roughly from South Shore's Nut Brown (the most subdued) to Dogfish Head's Indian Brown (the most fierce), this is about 80% of the way towards the South Shore. There's enough hops around to remind you that you're, you know, drinking beer, but beyond that it holds back and just lets the texture and the earthy caramel speak for itself. Aside from the creaminess, then, this is a fairly standard (albeit particularly well-done) brown ale. And that's by no means a bad thing: an Indian Brown may be great for when you'd like to be wowed, but this, this stuff is comfort food. It's a big old Labrador coming to meet you at the door after a long day at work. It'd make a fantastic session beer, and frankly I like it a heck of a lot more than the Cream Stout (which is a neat trick, because it's two or four bucks cheaper for six).

All right then, the Bell's Expedition Stout. This is a Russian imperial, folks, so it should go right for the jugular. And, importantly, I'm drinking this one very fresh - it's had no aging at all, and I've been told this is a brew that probably needs it. So I'm expecting things to be pretty lively.

As expected, it pours a nice thick black, the usual dirty motor oil look. It also has a relatively large head - I get almost two fingers, and I didn't even pour the whole bottle. The aroma, again, is somewhat more subdued than I expected (the Brooklyn beats the pants off this for sheer knockdown power). When I sniff deep, oddly enough the first thing I notice is a kind of rustiness from the hops. It's not great. Things open up a bit with some agitation, giving off some toffee scents and (perhaps) a little bit of coffee. I can't even detect much heat - surprising for something that's a whopping 10.5% alcohol. Even when agitated, though, this thing has a very subtle nose. Weird. Well, bottom's up.

Wow, there we go. That knockdown power I was expecting in the nose? In the taste, it's there. This here is high-caliber shit; it's very strong and very rough. Some aging would probably mellow this right down, I think, but at the moment it's a teenaged street tough with a knife and a disregard for the health of others. Up front is a roasted bitterness with a sharp alcohol edge. Moving on back, I get cacao - lots and lots of very bitter cacao, with a touch of coffee in there as well. It's really mouth-coating, hair-raising stuff, too - this is a beer with a bad fuckin' attitude. Charcoaly hops hit like a FAE bomb at the end (destroying everything in your mouth that was left), and they carry right on through to the aftertaste (which, as is typical in imperials, lasts close to forever). Somewhere, Barber's Adagio for Strings is playing.

I don't know quite how to grade this. It's an imperial stout - which means I'll love it however bad it is - but this one is very, very tough to drink. It's to Storm King what Mezcal is to Tequila; imagine someone handing some newly-brewed Old Rasputin a chainsaw and you'll be close. I'm rather charmed by its rough ways, to be honest, but don't expect to drink it quickly. Set aside some time for this one, folks.

Last up is the Bell's Rye Stout. This is the one I've been saving a lot of hope for; I've never had a rye stout before, but given how much I love a good old fashioned (with Wild Turkey Rye or occasionally Old Overholt, if I'm feeling cheap) I've got high hopes that this'll be the great discovery of the night. The pale white gentleman on the bottle's label appears to have been killed by his, after all.

A fairly typical stout pour, really - it's a fairly thick, dark auburn, with hints of a cream head. The smell, mainly, is a big wet sloppy kiss of roasted barley. I get mostly milk chocolate all the way through, with a subtle edge to it in the back - I can't tell if it's from the alcohol (6.7%) or something else. Hmm.

The taste is - well. Hrm.

The rye is definitely adding something, that's for sure, but it's not quite what I was expecting. It's rather difficult to describe. As a rough blueprint, think of a standard medium-bodied Irish stout. Got that in your head? The creamy texture, the dry finish? Okay, if you can, mentally remove the dry, gentle hoppiness and replace it with a kind of mouth-coating bready feel. Yes, bready, as if you're chewing a slice of pumpernickel or maybe eating a nice aged cheese. I was expecting spice and burn with this stout, Sazerac-style, but it's not like that at all - instead the general sense is just this nice, yeasty, wheaty, slightly bitter flavor. It's odd.

All right, I should probably be more precise about the taste. Up front I get the creamy texture and a little bit of a tingle, but nothing out of the ordinary. There's still not much to talk about as it moves back, save a bit of bitterness (this stuff is smooth to a fault). By the end you get a bit of the roasted, milk chocolate flavor promised in the smell. It's only after you've swallowed that the yeasty, earthy, grainy bread taste shows up, and it lingers for awhile in tandem with the roasted sweetness. The alcohol isn't that strong (6.7%), but if you're paying attention you can tell it's there.

I don't know what to think of this one. It's not a bad beer at all, it's just not what I was expecting. I was looking for a rye whiskey assault, and got a sandwich. Verdict: decent, not great.

So that's it then. Four beers, and no real masterpiece among them. The SDC Stout was the biggest disappointment, as it just comes across like a mediocre porter. The Rye wasn't that amazing either. The Expedition Stout, while by far the most exciting beer here, was unweildy and not that much fun to drink. So the "winner," astonishingly, is the sleeper of the bunch - the Best Brown Ale. It is, as near as you could want, a perfect workhorse of a brown ale; sure, they could have gussied it up a little more if they'd wanted, but that would have lost the point of a simple brown ale. This beer is here to pamper you, to hand you your slippers and lie at your feet, and it does that flawlessly.

And thus, I wade into the Bell's portfolio and pick out the most boring beer of the four as my favorite. Against my better judgment, against my own convictions. I feel slightly guilty about this, as if I'd just driven a bunch of Toyotas and the one I preferred was the Avalon. Nevertheless, the result stands. And really, as much as I love the MR2, maybe the Avalon's not such a bad option after all.

Bell's Special Double Cream Stout
Grade: B-
Summary: It's a cream stout without the cream. Yeah. Pretty good.

Bell's Best Brown Ale
Grade: B+
Summary: It's a fine example of a mild brown ale. Yeah. Very good.

Bell's Expedition Stout
Grade: B
Summary: Charcoal ninjas declare war on your mouth.

Bell's Rye Stout
Grade: B
Summary: It's a really bready stout. Yeah. Pretty good.

Review: Flossmoor Station Pullman Brown Ale

I was in a class with Bruce Lincoln once, when the topic of the World Series came up. A few people in the class admitted to pulling for the Yankees over the Phillies. He wasn't so much outraged by this as confused; "Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for capitalism," he said.

I understand the sentiment, especially when I think about Goose Island. They make some fantastic - no, phenomenal beers, although most of my friends seem to completely ignore the good ones in favor of the fucking 312 Urban Wheat Ale. The thing is, Goose Island is huge and Goose Island is everywhere. In Chicago at least, every booze shop and every supermarket that sells beer carries some Goose Island or other. In a word, they're the Yankees of the Chicago brewery scene.

And that's fine, right? I mean, they do make some good beers and all. Indeed, but as a lover of this stuff I really want to get as much great beer as possible to the shelves of my local store as possible, and the giant in the playground isn't always going to be the best guy to do this. The trouble is, what about the other breweries around chicao? Where the heck are they? Do they even exist? And if they do, do the stores carry them?

If you look around you'll find a few here and there, but you can be forgiven for not noticing them. Half Acre, up in Lakeview, sell a bitter (pretty good as I recall) and a lager (which I haven't tried) and a bunch of other stuff I haven't been able to locate. Metropolitan, who reside up near Evanston, sell a couple of lagers that I also haven't gotten around to yet. If you want to go farther out, you've got Two Brothers out near Naperville (who make, among other things, a nice comfy reclining chair of an imperial stout that I'll have to review at some point) and America's Brewing Company a few more miles down in Aurora (who make that stupid but fun bourbon barrel stout I tried last month). And aside from a couple of brewpubs, err, I think that's about it...

...Except, of course, for the company I'll be talking about here. Flossmoor Station is a restaurant slash brewpub in Flossmoor (as you might expect), located right next to the Metra stop. I'd heard of them, but I've still never been down there. One day, however, I happened to spot this guy in the fridge of my local Binny's - the Flossmoor Station Pullman Brown Ale, a deuce-deuce with a beautiful bottle (which I'd like to describe in a moment). It looked interesting and it was local. Well, why not?

So, one thing to note right away is that this is a premium brown ale sold in a 22 oz bottle at around the $5-6 price range. And that immediately poses a problem. You see, that fact means it's competing directly with Naughty Goose, another brown brewed this time by - you guessed it - Goose Island. (Note that this is different from the GI Nut Brown Ale, which is more common, cheaper, and not nearly as good.) And Naughty Goose is probably my favorite brown ale ever. Compared to the Sam Smith's or the Dogfish Head it's not all that exciting, but there's such a purity and a faithfulness to the style and a skill to the approach that it just doesn't need all the extra nuance you get in those beers. Now, as you might expect, I'm not all that happy about the fact that GI makes - so far as I've had - the best brown ale. Loving something from Goose Island is, indeed, like loving capitalism. Thus, I do hope that the Flossmoor Pullman is better - beyond even my usual hopes that each beer I have be a little bit better than the one before. But the Naughty Goose is really good, so the Flossmoor folks have quite a battle in front of them.

So: the bottle. Briefly described, it's fantastic. Just take a look at the thing - those aren't labels you see, all that stuff has actually been painted onto the glass like an old-timey Coke bottle. The retro train-lookin' brewery logo, the exquisite design for the beer name, the various little "stamps" all around describing the beer - it just looks absolutely wonderful. I love the shit out of this bottle. If I gave out awards for best design, this would win this year's prize by a huge margin.

Nevertheless, this isn't a blog about bottle design. It's a blog about booze. And that means we have to actually open the thing up and try it. And I'm honestly not sure what to expect from this beer. It's a brown ale, which are usually pretty boring, right? But then on the side it reads: "This rich, robust, chestnut-colored ale uses eight malts plus oats and a dollop of blackstrap molasses for a smooth, creamy taste and texture." Molasses? oats? In a brown ale? What the hell am I getting into here?

So, the pour. Wow, this looks a heck of a lot darker than a normal brown - it's kind of a very dark auburn, rather than the usual coppery shade. Mind you, there's still a wee bit of light getting through, but not a whole lot. Newcastle on a drizzly day, then. There's not much of a head, either, which is really odd for the style - I only get about a half-finger of off-white foam, if that. If I were judging merely by its appearance, then, I'd suspect this of being a porter or even a stout long before I called it as a brown. The aroma, too, is very nice indeed, but it still doesn't make me think of a brown ale. There's tons of sweet roasted malts in there and some macademia nuts; the molasses comes through very strongly as well. I also detect a touch of hoppiness, although I suspect this beer's going to be very mild.

Now to taste...

...Okay, this is a stout. Or at least, very very close. That's not intended as a criticism - it's just a fact. It absolutely tastes like a stout. Apologies to my revolutionary comrades at Flossmoor, then, but that's what you've brewed here. The mouthfeel, for one thing, is incredibly smooth, creamy, and rich, with a medium body. I think it's the oats that're doing the most work in telling me this is a stout, really - this is very much like an oatmealer, although with quite a bit more character. The taste begins with a bit of coffee bitterness up front, and then expands into a thick mix of woody and sweet flavors. Towards the end I get a bit of an edge from the hops I smelled on the nose - not much, just a love nibble to let you know they're there. The aftertaste, to finish up, is very subdued, but mainly consists in the woodiness from before and a little twang left over from the hops.

In fact, if there's any case at all to be made for this being a brown ale, I'd say it's in the character of the hops. They are far and away the most traditional brown ale elements here - everything else is sweet and creamy and stouty, but these hops could've come right out of Avery's Brown or Turbodog. And happily, they do exactly what what the hops in a brown ale should: they counterbalance the maltiness and the sweetness with some bitter earthy citrus. In this case I think they're overmatched, but the good old fashioned brown ale hops are definitely here. (And now that I notice it, this extra bite actually makes Pullman easier to drink than most oatmeal stouts. Funny, that.)

So I'm torn by this stuff, really. As a beer, without any further determinations, this is excellent; just as good as Naughty Goose, and much more creative. But if I went to the shop looking for a really good brown ale, I wouldn't buy it. It's so far from that style that, were it not for my specifically looking for brown ale traits, I wouldn't have noticed them at all. So, give Pullman a B as a brown but an A+ for trailblazing (I'll split the difference and call it an A-). For Flossmoor has really created its own style here: it's a brown ale with stouty creaminess, an oatmeal stout pulled back to the earth by a good dose of rustic hops. Whatever you want to call it (an oatmeal brown, say), it's great beer. And when downing a bottle means striking a blow against the Yankees of the beer world, you've got all the reason you need to go out and find one.

Grade: A-
Summary: An English Brown and an Oatmeal Stout met at a bar and had a one-night stand. This is the mad, wonderful result.

Review: Maker's Mark Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whisky

As a self-identified student of philosophy, it's kind of my job to argue with people. And, around the campus, there's no shortage of folks to argue with. Hard sciences folks who can't really see why physicalism is a problem? Check. Aspiring "theory" types from literature departments? Check. Dedicated world-saving humanists critical of philosophy's frequent political neutrality? Check. Constructivist social scientists? Check. Theologians? Check. Hippies? Check. I like all of these people, and I like debating with them. Almost everyone I've met, when the topic of philosophy comes up (and it inevitably does when I mention what I work on), are willing to keep the open mind and attentiveness to die Sache selbst required of any real discussion. Honestly, I'm probably more of a stubborn stick in the mud in these debates than any of them.

There's another kind of person, though, that I tend not to like. I don't much interact with them and I probably shouldn't condemn the whole lot with a broad stereotype, but (for the purposes of this review) I will anyways.

On the far east side of the campus is my least favorite building in the entire neighborhood. It's the School of Business, and inside and out it looks like a bizarro Macy's (and obviously I have a problem with the Macy's part, not the bizarroness). When I'm forced to go inside, usually because someone I know would like to have lunch at the School's cafeteria, I can never quite shake the sense that I'm trespassing into a professional services ad. Polished, well-dressed people are everywhere, smiling, laughing, and shaking hands like a guy from Robert Half International is about to take their picture. It's a nightmare world of young professionals in collars, golf shirts, and dress skirts, tired and grizzly market researcher-looking types, and balding male betied professors reviewing drafts for their PowerPoint slides. I do not belong among these people. If the doctoral student working on philosophy has any natural enemies, then, at least one of them has to be the MBA.

First of all, for an MBA graduate school isn't something taken up for the love of knowledge or anything of that sort. It's a capital expenditure. They may actually learn something there, but that isn't the point: they are there entirely on the promise of future benefits. These folks are on their way up the economic ladder; they'd like nothing better than to get to the top faster. But how?

The MBA, if s/he is worth consideration as such, has mastered the art of appearing competent. Their entire mode of being is geared towards impressing others. So far as I can tell, this is not even something they're necessarily even aware of: they really believe that they know what they're talking about, that they're not just passing around terms like "paradigm" or "value-added" as so many old coins. In classes and over lunches they inherit a cache of methods, concepts, and most importantly cliches (as an MBA you should be able to rattle off many dozen sayings about how "what doesn't kill you catches the worm" or whatever); they probably have little idea of where any of it comes from or whether any of it is true, but this isn't particularly important. It looks impressive, it sounds convincing, and that's what matters. Business not going well? Clearly what's needed is team-based organization!!

Sure, MBAs can also throw together a cost-benefit analysis and present it in PowerPoint if you want them to, but that isn't really what they're all about. The essence of the MBA is what the Greeks called δεινὸς λόγος, skillful discourse. You might see this on full display if you can catch them in a mistake - say, if they call a market move the wrong way. Watch them dance, watch them finesse the facts (or hint at how they did, in fact, have some strong suspicions that things might have gone the other way), watch them quickly and subtly move on to what they did get right. I don't think they see this as fibbing so much as just how conversation normally proceeds - as if any discussion whatsoever were a job interview. If they're able to convince you (and themselves) that P is the case, then P is the case. Everything comes down to this moment of convincement.

Now, if MBAs ever drink Bourbon - and perhaps they shall do so more and more, given that vodka is becoming démodé - the bourbon they're likely to drink is Maker's Mark. I mean this not just as a kind of conceptual connection, but also as an empirical fact.

Of course, we've all seen Maker's Mark on store shelves - the ubiquitous hammer-shaped bottle with the tan paper label and the red wax seal. Heck, more than likely you've got yourself a bottle stashed away somewhere. But if you pay attention to MM for awhile, certain facts about it may strike you as rather strange. The side of the label claims that it's "America's only handmade bourbon whisky - never mass produced"; the blurb continues in this style, making repeated claims as to the smallness and the traditional nature of the distillery as well as to the care put into the product. That sounds great and all, but, well... put it this way. I said before that we'd all seen this bottle on the store shelves, right? But how? How can that be possible? I have never, EVER been to a liquor store that didn't have a couple of bottles of MM on sale; I've seen it in grocery stores, in gas stations, and just about everywhere that one can buy alcohol. We're talking thousands of stores. How can it be said that this bourbon, which is more common than Danielle Steel novels, isn't mass produced? Exactly what definition of "mass-produced" are they using here?

Ah, well. Let's look at the bottle itself, which - let's be honest - looks amazing. It's simple, rustic, and appealingly fashionable at the same time, like Hugh Jackman. To find a bourbon that looks cooler, I think you could step up to Blanton's (which comes in a grenade with a horse on top) - but this is surely the niftiest bottle in its price range. It is, of course, rather strange that a (supposedly ) small mom and pop operation like the Maker's Mark Distillery actually has its own bottles (with logos and everything), but we'll let that slide. Get some of the wax off the top, and... oh boy. You get a screw top with a plastic cap, rather than a cork. What's that doing here?

Never mind that, though, let's get some of this into a snifter. Mark, of course, pours a pretty standard bourbon color - a beautiful deep bronze. Even in a glass it looks fantastic. The smell, though, is even better, so stick your head in and breathe deep. I get oak, sweet corn, caramel, honey and maybe just a tiny touch of pomegranate. There's a little bit of heat, but nowhere near as much as the 45% ABV would suggest. This is, with no doubt, an epic smell, one of my favorites on the planet. It might be the best smell in the bourbon biz altogether - or at least, if there's a bourbon that smells better than this, I can't recall trying it.

So up until this point, things are going well - but now I have to actually drink the stuff. I take a sip. At first I get a typical sweet bourbon tingle. This quickly evolves into a pleasant honeyed oak flavor. And then... nothing much else happens. At all.

I wish I were kidding, exaggerating for dramatic effect, but I'm not. There's not a damn thing beyond that one flavor, which carries the whole way through. Even the aftertaste is quite brief. Sure, there's also a little bit of a burn as it goes down - one of the few things that's interesting - but even the burn is quite mild, especially for something that's 90 proof. Praying that there's more here, I've now added a few drops of water - which just makes it taste like watered down honeyed oak. Astonishingly, even this brings out no more tastes, because there's just nothing else to bring out. This is all Maker's Mark will ever be.

As a result, I find Maker's Mark infuriating. How could something that looks this cool and smells this impressive be so unbelievably bland when you actually sit down and drink it? Honestly, if I just wanted something to sip I'd take Beam or Evan Williams over this in a second; neither is my favorite bourbon, but at least they've got some character. However, I'm not the target audience here. The MBAs have no soul, and as a result of this they love Maker's Mark! Having made it through college getting sorority girls drunk with Ten High and coke, they're now ready to move up in the world. What an awesome bottle! What a great smell! And it's so smooth!! Yup, it's got everything an aspiring young professional could want (and that's if they drink it neat at all, which is unlikely so long as there's a bottle of 7-Up handy).

So in the end they share an affinity, Maker's Mark and the MBA. Both of them are all about the initial impression, not any real substance. Mark looks like it should be a great whiskey; it even smells like it. But it isn't; not by a long shot.

Grade: C+
Summary: Superficially captivating, profoundly lame. Think of it as a mediocre bourbon with whitened teeth and fake tits.