Another week, another pair of beers I grabbed in Asheville. This time it's a couple of brews from the Thomas Creek Brewery in Greenville, SC; I haven't heard of them, but then again I'd never heard of the folks at Ceylon either. So, let's see what these southern boys've got for us.
First up from Greenville folks is the Stillwater Vanilla Cream Ale, apparently a summer seasonal. I bought it, among a number of other appealing choices, because I had no idea what any of the words in that name were doing together and it sounded interesting. The bottle, however, is not that interesting: it features two guys fishing and a funky logo, and could basically be mistaken for an organic root beer of some kind.
Anyhow it's a cream ale, a style with which I am not well-acquainted. With the exception of a Genesee I had a few years ago (which I don't remember liking) I don't think I've ever had a one. This could be a new experience, then. And the website confirms this in one sentence: this beer is "a light-bodied and golden American style cream ale with a highly refreshing palate and an undertone of pure vanilla essence." So they actually put vanilla into this stuff? Oh, man. I have enough misgivings about chocolate and coffee - vanilla has the potential to dominate a beer like an angry mistress with a snake whip. Here goes.
It pours a pale, lemony yellow with a fizzy one-finger white head. It looks a little like a macrobrewed lager, to be honest. Only when you stick your head in do you notice what's special, and - surprise! - it's the vanilla. It doesn't totally take over the smell, but nor does it integrate with the rest of it - which is mainly pale malts and some light hops, your standard pilsner stuff. The vanilla aroma just sort of floats on top of this, like oil on water, and it comes and goes. Let the glass sit for a moment and the sweet vanilla notes come wafting out; give it some agitation and the malts snatch the aroma right back. It's odd.
The taste is also odd. It's nice, so long as you don't drink too much or too fast. Take just a sip at a time and the unusual combination works beautifully: the vanilla arrives at the beginning and holds place like an ostinato, while the bitter but light beery flavors wax and wane over it. Drink it with patience and the sour and bitter qualities of the malts, rather than taking over the vanilla, give it a lovely flattering contrast. Try to drink too quickly, however, and things go wrong: the malts and (rather wimpy) hops take over right from the beginning, with the vanilla only coming out in the aftertaste (and not pleasantly so). Sucking it down is clearly not the right way to quaff this stuff - a fact that makes it a poor choice for everyday use, and about as far from the pilsner norm as you can get. It's a smooth beer too (it had better be, at 4.5% abv), light and carbonated - which makes it all the more strange that it sucks to drink fast.
It's an interesting thought, this beer, but does it work? Sipped for a half-hour it's extremely interesting, but other than that it's just too subtle, too delicately balanced, too easy to ruin. And this is a summer seasonal, exactly the sort of beer where you don't want subtlety. Weird flavor additives go in abbey ales and stouts, not in glorified pilsners there to provide refreshment in the heat. And despite this fact, despite all the reason in me screaming that this isn't a good beer, I'm liking it more and more with every sip. The vanilla tends to linger, and over the course of the bottle it very slowly begins to win its battle against the malts. The result is that this gets better as it goes along; it gains character and complexity, rather than just getting warm and nasty. I still don't think the idea quite works, but no matter the season I'd take a single failure like this over a dozen decent but identical wheatbeers and pale lagers.
Since this beer is basically sui generis, and is likely to remain so, I don't think I can grade it. It exists for the sake of the curious, and I think that's how it should be.
The second and last entry from the Greenvillians appears to be more pedestrian. It's a porter, and one with a less boring but somehow even more more unremarkable bottle than the last one. I prefer to link images large enough that you can actually see something, but here it doesn't really matter - this label really looks like it should be the cover of a now-forgotten alt rock album released circa 1995. But we're not here to be catty about designs, we're here to drink beer. Let's crack this open.
Well, it pours very dark indeed - not quite pitch black, but the light only barely passes through it. The head's almost nonexistent, something I don't expect from a brew this weak (a mere 5.75% abv), and what little there is quickly settles into a foam. It more than redeems itself in the aroma, though: this smells absolutely fantastic. It's not really a typical porter smell - think of an imperial stout dialed back a few notches and with the fuzz pedal turned off. There's a pure, rich cacao and cherries smell here, interlaced with nuts, caramel, and a little bit of cinnamon. I get a roasted malt aroma, too, although it's not the most prominent thing in the nose by far. I am absolutely in love. I may have to move to South Carolina in the near future if the beer itself is as good as its smell.
...It isn't. It's not bad, though. The front end, surprisingly, is the sweetest part of the taste profile, a kind of toffee taste with a bit of smoke to it. This gets taken over rather quickly by cacao and charcoal, although the roasted malts are never too intrusive. Everything else is more of the same: the bittersweet, smoky character hangs on through the aftertaste, which lasts forever (as it should). The finish is a bit dry, but not excessively so. In a lot of ways this reminds me of the Edmund Fitzgerald porter - there's that same sense of roasted malts barely kept under restraint. The Pump House isn't really in the same league as that monster, but it's still a fine beer. Its greatest flaw is that it's rather watery; if you can get past that and emphasize the smell of the stuff, it'll make a fine little session porter.
Overall? Well, if I graded entirely on aroma this would be well into the high A range. The taste and the texture aren't quite there yet, though. Give it a shot if you see it on a shelf somewhere - although if it's between this stuff and the Cream Ale, I'd grab the latter for novelty value alone.
Nice work all around, Thomas Creek. I look forward to trying more of your stuff whenever I'm in the neighborhood.
Thomas Creek Stillwater Vanilla Cream Ale
Grade: n/a
Summary: On the Island of Misfit Beers, this thing is in the aristocracy. Try it.
Thomas Creek Pump House Porter
Grade: B
Summary: Tastes like an ashy but pretty good porter. Smells like a spicy chocolate and cherry party in heaven.
Showing posts with label porter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label porter. Show all posts
Monday, March 22, 2010
Monday, January 11, 2010
Vacation Roundup: Asheville Ninja Porter, Olde Hickory Hickory Stick Stout, and Pisgah Porter
I watched Stalker (aka CTANKEP) for the first time a couple of months ago. I loved it. I could go into some specifics about what makes it so amazing, but suffice it to say it's just a brilliant, beautiful movie; it somehow manages to be thought-provoking without shoving things down one's throat. It's a great movie, and a thoroughly unique one.
Thing is, though, I wouldn't watch it every day. Hell, I wouldn't watch it every month.
This in itself seems to be enough to make questionable certain kinds of metaphysical assumptions; I am thinking in particular of Whitehead and process philosophy more generally. This position is generally not taken very seriously anymore, nor even particularly well understood, and I shall not try to describe it generally. One key feature to all metaphysical positions of this sort (broadly speaking), is that the work of "becoming" has to have an aim of some sort. Every entity, in the short moment of its being an entity, makes a 'decision' (in a very broad sense of the term) based on the various prevailing possibilities available to it. The thought goes that this 'decision' cannot be made at random, but must have some kind of telos. Whitehead says, for example, that "'becoming' is a creative advance into novelty" - by which he means, to grossly simplify, that the the cosmos as a whole, in all its diversity, must have an increase of novelty as its final aim. The 'decisions' of all entities, although never perfect, gravitate towards the novel. This must be as true of us as of anything else. Becoming, as such, is aesthetical. But why, then, should I prefer to watch something worse - Con Air, maybe - over Stalker? Surely I would say that Stalker is not only a finer film, but a more novel one. But I could watch Nicholas Cage sidekick dudes with a mullet all day, whereas Stalker is more of a once-a-year kind of thing. I spend hours watching dumb clips on Youtube, when a priori at least I should be watching City of God or something.
Now, in all fairness, I'm sure a sufficiently clever process thinker may find some way to explain away these particular examples as perfectly consistent with their position, but there's a more fundamental point that (it seems to me) still stands. Process philosophy attempts to understand every entity, every little scrap of being, as an instance of production, working, making, poiesis - in a cosmos where we ourselves are not always "at work." Hell, we aren't always even comfortable working. On the contrary, human beings have an orientation towards leisure which is at least as fundamental. I won't tease out any further what that means, at least not today, but it seems to me important to take note of. After all, as I never tire of pointing out, leisure is the first condition for philosophy.
With that in mind, then, I'd like to try out a trio of leisurely beers - two porters and a stout. These beers are all sold in deuce-deuce bottles, cost roughly the same, and are all made somewhere around Asheville. Seems like prime material for a roundup.
The first beer is the Ninja Porter from the Asheville Brewing Company. It's, well, a big bottle with a friggin' ninja on the label. It's dopey, but it's not like they were going for anything else. Maybe they were wise to do this. Really: if you passed a beer with a ninja on the label in your local shop, could you pass it up?
Out of the bottle it pours almost completely black, with just a trace of ruby at the sides if held up to a light. Not much of a head on this one either: I get a half-finger at first, which quickly dies down into a coppery froth. It does smell pretty damn good, though: milk chocolate right out front, flanked by some roasted malts and just enough fruitiness to keep things interesting. Further down in the back I also get raisins and a little bit of banana bread. No trace of hops, really, just a thick dollop of dark malty goodness.
I can report, verbatim, that my first words upon sipping this porter were "ooh, that's kind of nice." In a lot of ways this reminds me of the Bell's Special Double Cream Stout I had a few weeks ago (which was, I note again, neither creamy nor very special), except it's lighter, slightly more interesting, and a heck of a lot easier to drink. The cacao flavors from the roasted malt are dominant, but they're relieved by some honey, raisin nut bread, and sweet chocolate tastes. The word of the day here is "balanced." The taste up front features a mild coffee sting - no sweetness at all. Towards the middle the bitter coffee/cacao flavors remain in command, but at the same moment they're contested by a sugary-but-burntastic counterpart - almost a cola flavor, if you wish. By the end the cola develops into a molasses-and-chocolate kinda thing, which closes out on equal footing with the roasted malts (united in harmony to keep out the hops). The aftertaste is a bit cloying, really - imagine you've just had a not-so-great cup of sweetened black tea - but doesn't detract much from the rest of the beer. In terms of texture, it's about average for a porter. That is to say, those of us weaning ourselves off of Miller High Life are going to think they're drinking a loaf of sourdough, and those of us coming from a couple of imperial stouts are going to find it pleasantly light.
Me, I'm in the "pleasantly light" camp. I find this beer to be, as it were, not "exciting" or "interesting" (it isn't - if you've been around your English ales long enough, you know these flavors) so much as "refreshing." If I'd just crawled into the Asheville Brewing restaurant after a day climbing around the local mountains, this is the beer I'd want to have. It's not incredible - it's a bubble bath, if you like. It's just there to be kind of idly comforting. It's the When Harry Met Sally of beers, and it gets a B.
Next up on the plate is the Hickory Stick Stout from the Olde Hickory Brewery. Hickory is a city a ways east of Asheville, down in the foothills. You can think of it as Asheville's more workmanlike, less trendy, significantly less hippy big brother. I like to imagine that when they get together for holidays and such, Hickory tries to tell boring stories about the other guys working at the plant and Asheville has to spend ten minutes explaining why stuffing cooked in Hickory's turkey is no longer vegetarian.
Where was I? Oh, right. Anyways, the bottle has a reasonably pretty forest design on it.
Like the Ninja it pours real, real dark, albeit not "totally black" (as the side of the bottle would have you believe). Again, no real head to speak of - I get a little bit of tan fizz for a moment, which then settles back down again to leave a thin film. Hmm. The aroma, likewise, is pretty subdued - lots of milk chocolate in there, cut through with some coffee. None of the fruitiness from the ninja porter, but there's definitely some hops in there this time. It's a very vague aroma, really - I don't know what I'm getting with this one.
Well, now! This, too, produced an "Ooh, that's nice." The flavor development is very odd on this - it doesn't go at all how one would expect it to, but in a good way. It starts off with a tiny bit of a coffee tingle on the tongue, then develops a lovely hot cocoa kind of taste in the middle. Then, all of a sudden, WHAM. Roasted malts rush in like a flash flood, intermixed with a small measure of grapefruity west coast hops, all of it fusing with the already-established sweet malt flavors. It's rather as if your hot chocolate somehow got two shots of espresso and a lemon into it as you were drinking the stuff. The aftertaste is pretty dry, mainly carring over the roasted flavors. It's an unusual flavor line, then, but it grows on you quickly.
The Ninja Porter may be more refreshing, but this is the better beer. It's more creative, it's got more going on; it's the sort of thing you can show off to your friends (trust me, they haven't tried this one before). Hell, it would even work pretty well as a holiday beer. Actually, in some ways this is the most festive brew I've had since my buying spree - and that's with a couple of Christmas ales and winter warmers under my belt.
Unfortunately, however, it does not have a ninja on the label. No beer is perfect. But it gets a B+ anyways.
Finally there's the last of our trio of Asheville area bombers, which is another porter. This one, the Pisgah Porter, is from the Pisgah Brewing Company in Black Mountain, and it claims to be "Asheville's best selling beer." Hmm, I don't know about that, not as long as the big boys with their crap lager are still around. On the other hand, this claim is in fact the most interesting thing on the label. The rest of it is pretty nondescript. You get a kind of light brown color on most of the label, and then right in the center there's the "Pisgah" name and a shot of a river running downhill amidst a forest. It's the sort of picture one expects to find on a blue-coded Magic: The Gathering card, really. I kind of prefer the Ninja's label. Anyways, moving on...
Well, like the previous porter, this pours a nice dark ruby color (hold it up to a light and you can see hints of red at the sides). Also like the others, there's no real head here either - just a miserable half-finger that quickly disappears. The aroma is actually a bit stronger, although simpler as well: most of it, again, is chocolate milk, relieved by a little bit of earth and roastiness. No real hoppiness this time. That's really all there is to it in terms of character, but - again - it comes across as about twice as strong as the others. And now I taste it...
...Wha-a-at?
I don't want to think that I got a bad bottle somehow, but I can't imagine the beer is supposed to taste like this. If the Hickory stout takes a hard, powerslidy left turn halfway through the mouth, this one hits a tree. Hard. I mean, it starts off very nicely: there's coffee with cream and sugar on the front end, then a milky bittersweetness as it approaches the middle. And then it just kind of ends. The flavor falls off completely, leaving almost no aftertaste. It's not a dry finish or anything - there is no finish. You might be able to detect some slight sweetness and an odd, almost minty coolness, but that's it; it's like the beer just evaporates.
I simply have no idea what's going on with this beer. The flavor development is the closest any brew has ever come to coitus interruptus. I guess I can say the body is medium to thin and that it might pair well with some barbecue or something. Because it is, and it would. But saying that is just to cover how mystified I am by a beer that somehow steals itself out of my mouth the moment I swallow it. Does anyone understand this? What is happening here? What the fuck is going on?
I almost feel like I shouldn't grade this. I don't like it, but at the same time I can't get my brain around what they were doing here. If this is some kind of new self-cleaning beer, it's brilliant. If it's just an attempt at a decent porter, it's well short of the mark. I'll assume it's the latter.
Asheville Ninja Porter
Grade: B
Summary: It may have a ninja on the label, but inside it's a big teddy bear.
Olde Hickory Hickory Stick Stout
Grade: B+
Summary: A delicious and oddball surprise. Not quite world class, but different enough to chase down if you get a chance.
Pisgah Porter
Grade: D+
Summary: It's the Amazing Evaporating Porter!
Thing is, though, I wouldn't watch it every day. Hell, I wouldn't watch it every month.
This in itself seems to be enough to make questionable certain kinds of metaphysical assumptions; I am thinking in particular of Whitehead and process philosophy more generally. This position is generally not taken very seriously anymore, nor even particularly well understood, and I shall not try to describe it generally. One key feature to all metaphysical positions of this sort (broadly speaking), is that the work of "becoming" has to have an aim of some sort. Every entity, in the short moment of its being an entity, makes a 'decision' (in a very broad sense of the term) based on the various prevailing possibilities available to it. The thought goes that this 'decision' cannot be made at random, but must have some kind of telos. Whitehead says, for example, that "'becoming' is a creative advance into novelty" - by which he means, to grossly simplify, that the the cosmos as a whole, in all its diversity, must have an increase of novelty as its final aim. The 'decisions' of all entities, although never perfect, gravitate towards the novel. This must be as true of us as of anything else. Becoming, as such, is aesthetical. But why, then, should I prefer to watch something worse - Con Air, maybe - over Stalker? Surely I would say that Stalker is not only a finer film, but a more novel one. But I could watch Nicholas Cage sidekick dudes with a mullet all day, whereas Stalker is more of a once-a-year kind of thing. I spend hours watching dumb clips on Youtube, when a priori at least I should be watching City of God or something.
Now, in all fairness, I'm sure a sufficiently clever process thinker may find some way to explain away these particular examples as perfectly consistent with their position, but there's a more fundamental point that (it seems to me) still stands. Process philosophy attempts to understand every entity, every little scrap of being, as an instance of production, working, making, poiesis - in a cosmos where we ourselves are not always "at work." Hell, we aren't always even comfortable working. On the contrary, human beings have an orientation towards leisure which is at least as fundamental. I won't tease out any further what that means, at least not today, but it seems to me important to take note of. After all, as I never tire of pointing out, leisure is the first condition for philosophy.
With that in mind, then, I'd like to try out a trio of leisurely beers - two porters and a stout. These beers are all sold in deuce-deuce bottles, cost roughly the same, and are all made somewhere around Asheville. Seems like prime material for a roundup.
The first beer is the Ninja Porter from the Asheville Brewing Company. It's, well, a big bottle with a friggin' ninja on the label. It's dopey, but it's not like they were going for anything else. Maybe they were wise to do this. Really: if you passed a beer with a ninja on the label in your local shop, could you pass it up?
Out of the bottle it pours almost completely black, with just a trace of ruby at the sides if held up to a light. Not much of a head on this one either: I get a half-finger at first, which quickly dies down into a coppery froth. It does smell pretty damn good, though: milk chocolate right out front, flanked by some roasted malts and just enough fruitiness to keep things interesting. Further down in the back I also get raisins and a little bit of banana bread. No trace of hops, really, just a thick dollop of dark malty goodness.
I can report, verbatim, that my first words upon sipping this porter were "ooh, that's kind of nice." In a lot of ways this reminds me of the Bell's Special Double Cream Stout I had a few weeks ago (which was, I note again, neither creamy nor very special), except it's lighter, slightly more interesting, and a heck of a lot easier to drink. The cacao flavors from the roasted malt are dominant, but they're relieved by some honey, raisin nut bread, and sweet chocolate tastes. The word of the day here is "balanced." The taste up front features a mild coffee sting - no sweetness at all. Towards the middle the bitter coffee/cacao flavors remain in command, but at the same moment they're contested by a sugary-but-burntastic counterpart - almost a cola flavor, if you wish. By the end the cola develops into a molasses-and-chocolate kinda thing, which closes out on equal footing with the roasted malts (united in harmony to keep out the hops). The aftertaste is a bit cloying, really - imagine you've just had a not-so-great cup of sweetened black tea - but doesn't detract much from the rest of the beer. In terms of texture, it's about average for a porter. That is to say, those of us weaning ourselves off of Miller High Life are going to think they're drinking a loaf of sourdough, and those of us coming from a couple of imperial stouts are going to find it pleasantly light.
Me, I'm in the "pleasantly light" camp. I find this beer to be, as it were, not "exciting" or "interesting" (it isn't - if you've been around your English ales long enough, you know these flavors) so much as "refreshing." If I'd just crawled into the Asheville Brewing restaurant after a day climbing around the local mountains, this is the beer I'd want to have. It's not incredible - it's a bubble bath, if you like. It's just there to be kind of idly comforting. It's the When Harry Met Sally of beers, and it gets a B.
Next up on the plate is the Hickory Stick Stout from the Olde Hickory Brewery. Hickory is a city a ways east of Asheville, down in the foothills. You can think of it as Asheville's more workmanlike, less trendy, significantly less hippy big brother. I like to imagine that when they get together for holidays and such, Hickory tries to tell boring stories about the other guys working at the plant and Asheville has to spend ten minutes explaining why stuffing cooked in Hickory's turkey is no longer vegetarian.
Where was I? Oh, right. Anyways, the bottle has a reasonably pretty forest design on it.
Like the Ninja it pours real, real dark, albeit not "totally black" (as the side of the bottle would have you believe). Again, no real head to speak of - I get a little bit of tan fizz for a moment, which then settles back down again to leave a thin film. Hmm. The aroma, likewise, is pretty subdued - lots of milk chocolate in there, cut through with some coffee. None of the fruitiness from the ninja porter, but there's definitely some hops in there this time. It's a very vague aroma, really - I don't know what I'm getting with this one.
Well, now! This, too, produced an "Ooh, that's nice." The flavor development is very odd on this - it doesn't go at all how one would expect it to, but in a good way. It starts off with a tiny bit of a coffee tingle on the tongue, then develops a lovely hot cocoa kind of taste in the middle. Then, all of a sudden, WHAM. Roasted malts rush in like a flash flood, intermixed with a small measure of grapefruity west coast hops, all of it fusing with the already-established sweet malt flavors. It's rather as if your hot chocolate somehow got two shots of espresso and a lemon into it as you were drinking the stuff. The aftertaste is pretty dry, mainly carring over the roasted flavors. It's an unusual flavor line, then, but it grows on you quickly.
The Ninja Porter may be more refreshing, but this is the better beer. It's more creative, it's got more going on; it's the sort of thing you can show off to your friends (trust me, they haven't tried this one before). Hell, it would even work pretty well as a holiday beer. Actually, in some ways this is the most festive brew I've had since my buying spree - and that's with a couple of Christmas ales and winter warmers under my belt.
Unfortunately, however, it does not have a ninja on the label. No beer is perfect. But it gets a B+ anyways.
Finally there's the last of our trio of Asheville area bombers, which is another porter. This one, the Pisgah Porter, is from the Pisgah Brewing Company in Black Mountain, and it claims to be "Asheville's best selling beer." Hmm, I don't know about that, not as long as the big boys with their crap lager are still around. On the other hand, this claim is in fact the most interesting thing on the label. The rest of it is pretty nondescript. You get a kind of light brown color on most of the label, and then right in the center there's the "Pisgah" name and a shot of a river running downhill amidst a forest. It's the sort of picture one expects to find on a blue-coded Magic: The Gathering card, really. I kind of prefer the Ninja's label. Anyways, moving on...
Well, like the previous porter, this pours a nice dark ruby color (hold it up to a light and you can see hints of red at the sides). Also like the others, there's no real head here either - just a miserable half-finger that quickly disappears. The aroma is actually a bit stronger, although simpler as well: most of it, again, is chocolate milk, relieved by a little bit of earth and roastiness. No real hoppiness this time. That's really all there is to it in terms of character, but - again - it comes across as about twice as strong as the others. And now I taste it...
...Wha-a-at?
I don't want to think that I got a bad bottle somehow, but I can't imagine the beer is supposed to taste like this. If the Hickory stout takes a hard, powerslidy left turn halfway through the mouth, this one hits a tree. Hard. I mean, it starts off very nicely: there's coffee with cream and sugar on the front end, then a milky bittersweetness as it approaches the middle. And then it just kind of ends. The flavor falls off completely, leaving almost no aftertaste. It's not a dry finish or anything - there is no finish. You might be able to detect some slight sweetness and an odd, almost minty coolness, but that's it; it's like the beer just evaporates.
I simply have no idea what's going on with this beer. The flavor development is the closest any brew has ever come to coitus interruptus. I guess I can say the body is medium to thin and that it might pair well with some barbecue or something. Because it is, and it would. But saying that is just to cover how mystified I am by a beer that somehow steals itself out of my mouth the moment I swallow it. Does anyone understand this? What is happening here? What the fuck is going on?
I almost feel like I shouldn't grade this. I don't like it, but at the same time I can't get my brain around what they were doing here. If this is some kind of new self-cleaning beer, it's brilliant. If it's just an attempt at a decent porter, it's well short of the mark. I'll assume it's the latter.
Asheville Ninja Porter
Grade: B
Summary: It may have a ninja on the label, but inside it's a big teddy bear.
Olde Hickory Hickory Stick Stout
Grade: B+
Summary: A delicious and oddball surprise. Not quite world class, but different enough to chase down if you get a chance.
Pisgah Porter
Grade: D+
Summary: It's the Amazing Evaporating Porter!
Monday, December 21, 2009
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.
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.
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