Wednesday, December 30, 2009

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.

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.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

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.

Monday, December 7, 2009

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.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

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.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Stout Month Review: Founders Breakfast Stout

Generally when one uses terms like "coffee" and "chocolate" in booze reviews, one says them in a kind of analogous way. I certainly don't mean that I think there's actually chocolate in the brew, nor even that it even tastes like it does - I simply go searching for some adequate word, some useful description to get at what scents and flavors I encounter in the beer, and happen upon the closest other scents and flavors that I can think of. Hence, "I smell a bit of coffee in this...", "I taste chocolate and some cherries...", and so on. Things begin to get complicated, of course, once brewers (being the crazy people that they are) begin putting actual coffee and chocolate into their beers.

Initially this seems like it would be a good idea. I'm no purist, after all, and I doubt many beer fans are. I say, the more ridiculous shit that brewers can do to their beer, the better - so long as it works. And chocolate and coffee seem like they would work pretty darn well. Again, how many reviews (like mine - guilty as charged) positively describe, e.g., the chocolatey taste of a beer? Imagine how much the love would increase if one actually put chocolate in!! And so it becomes the most logical thing in the world to dump real chocolate and real coffee into the vats. And the results so far have been... well, let's be kind and say "mixed."

I like chocolate a lot, and so I thought I'd be pleased by the various beers I've had that use actual chocolate to brew. But the truth of the matter is, chocolate mostly gets lost when it enters a beer. It sinks into the background and mostly disappears, leaving only a vague bittersweetness. I thought, when I first bought it, that the Young's Double Chocolate Stout would be brilliant, but it wasn't: instead it was simply a (rather thin and one-dimensional) stout, slightly more bittersweet than others. Nothing bad, of course, just uninspired. Coffee beers, in contrast, go way back in the other direction. Put coffee in anything, it seems, and the coffee simply takes it over - for the three or four of these porters and stouts that I've tried, I might as well have been drinking a big pot of iced-down joe. The only one I'd previously found to be reasonably successful is Kona's Pipeline Porter, and that's only because they obviously did everything in their power to keep the thing as light and as balanced as humanly possible (even so, I could never drink more than one a day).

And so we come to the Founders Breakfast Stout, which the bottle describes as a "Double Chocolate Coffee Oatmeal Stout." That sounds, in theory, like it should be great. Even the all-knowing internet says it's great: RateBeer claims it's the 39th best beer in existence, BeerAdvocate disagrees and says it's the 21st. The rather grotesque baby on the bottle's label seems to agree as well. Then you actually try it, and things start to go wrong.

It pours pitch black, with a moderate viscosity and a tiny bronze half-finger head. That sounds pretty good, right? But then you take a scent, and - oh boy. It's coffee. It's all coffee, all the way down. Go ahead, stick your nose as deep in there as you can tolerate, you're not going to find anything in there beyond coffee. It's the unmistakable smell of a kitchen that's had its joe maker set on Warm for three hours. And that's good if you like coffee, but I like my beers to have other elements.

Take a sip, and what you get is entirely dominated by - you guessed it - coffee. In the front there's a tingly jolt of java bitterness. It quickly coats your mouth in espresso as it travels back, and leaves a bitter coffee aftertaste behind (with maybe a tinge of sweetness for relief). This beer is coffee, coffee, coffee. There could be oatmeal or chocolate or scrambled eggs or even Cinnamon Toast Frikkin' Crunch brewed into this stuff, and I wouldn't taste it at all. If there are any other elements whatsoever to this beer, the one-dimensional coffee taste just beats them back well beyond the margins and keeps them there for the duration of the sipping. The label says this beer is 8.3% alcohol. Do I believe it? Well, sure, but I would have also believed four or sixteen. I honestly couldn't imagine it making much difference: the coffee completely trumps the booziness here, just as it trumps everything else. If you honestly think this is the 21st best beer in the world, well, you're certainly entitled to that opinion. Maybe I'm even missing something in this stout that a more skilled or mature taster would pick up on. In the meantime, however, I tend to think you're simply bonkers.

I'll give it a B, since there's nothing actually wrong with the stuff - it just doesn't have breadth, it doesn't do anything beyond its one trick. And I may complain about the coffee dominating everything, yes, but it's actually a pretty pleasant coffee taste as far as these things go. If you're the type of person who makes your own espresso and drinks it straight, you'll appreciate this stuff far more than I can. As for me, if I wanted a big heavy blast of joe I don't think I'd be drinking a beer for it.

[RETROSPECTIVE EDIT, Feb. '10: you know what? I had this again and found it even more unpleasant. This gets a B- at best.]

Grade: B
Summary: Coffee. Coffee coffee coffee. Coffee coffee, coffee coffee coffee. Coffee? Coffee.

Stout Month Review: Goose Island Bourbon County Stout (2008 vintage)

Recently I got into a discussion with some friends on a sticky point in anthropology and international rights that, it seems to me, can be broadened into a philosophical issue. It started with the famous Trekkian question of the prime directive. Let's say you encounter a small, entirely isolated culture on an island out in in the Pacific somewhere. How far, and under what conditions, do you interfere with or enculturate them?

The general agreement seemed to be that if the group needed some kind of medical assistance (they suffer from some kind of illness, say) then one should offer it or trade it to them; beyond that things got more iffy. It's quite questionable whether a "modern" culture, lifestyle, way of thinking etc. is any better (or, indeed, any worse) than that of the islanders. The itch to keep other cultures as they are, as unchanging objects - this is questionable. But then, the full-on enculturation of the islanders (e.g. taking them back to port) - this too is questionable. But what if they ask to be taken in? They could very well do so - and yet, could they make such a request based on any secure information?

During the course of the discussion it seemed to me that we were missing one possible avenue of approach, which I then tried to describe by analogy. I said something like the following:

"In my life, I'll probably never own a Lamborghini. But let us say that one day I gain an opportunity to have one, and all I need to do is to make the choice affirmatively. The difficulty is this: I have no idea what it would be like to drive a Lamborghini. It's very unlike anything I have previously dealt with. I shall never truly know what I'm in for in owning one until I sit in the seat and push the pedal - in other words, I shall never know what it's like to own a Lambo until I've already made the decision to own one. So it looks as if I have to choose somewhat blindly. Nevertheless, in the meantime there's still something I can do - I can ask people who already own Lamborghinis to describe the experience, as best they can, in my terms, and I can listen carefully to their descriptions of the joys and the costs (I can also read reviews, etc.). I shall still be missing something, no doubt, but this allows me much more of an informed decision.

"Now, the islanders are in a similar situation to me and my Lamborghini. They can choose to be enculturated or not. But the condition for adequately knowing what that would be like and evaluating it appropriately, is that they already be enculturated. All the same, though, can't they talk to us and ask us what it's like? Can't we describe to them, in more or less imperfect ways, what it means to live in a so-called 'modern' world? A full education is out of the question here, but I think one might be able to communicate some sense of this life."

My roommate Claudia pointed out to me - quite rightly - that I assume that communication would be possible in the first place, when it may not be the case. Indeed I do, and I have no easy answer (philosopically) to what it would mean to establish such communication (e.g., whether that would already be a kind of interference). So, Claudia wins this round. Nevertheless, the Lamborghini buying example and the situation of the islanders seems to me to hint at a special kind of philosophical phenomenon. In both cases the matter chosen or denied is a black hole of sorts - if I stay away then I shall never see (understand) it, and if I move in for a closer study then I shall be pulled in without hope of reversing the decision. I will either be stuck with it or forever kept in ignorance.

Every choice - I put this forward as a hypothesis - presupposes some knowledge of the directions that may be taken. Call this knowledge the epistemic condition for the choice. What is distinctive about these two cases is that although the epistemic condition is given in some sense - I will know what I have chosen when I have chosen it - it is also, to some degree or another, unavailable, away, absent. Let us dub these situations abconditional choices, for lack of a better term. These are not simply choices made without adequate knowledge, but choices where the only way to know for sure is to choose a certain way.

The cliche'd example of such an abconditional choice, of course, is the game show host presenting three numbered doors. Most of these choices seem to me much more quotidian, however, and much closer to home. When we buy a gift (or really, any consumer product), or go on a date with someone, we choose abconditionally; just so, when we drive the back roads rather than the interstate, or learn the guitar rather than the piano. Many of the decisions we make in life are one-way streets that we cannot escape if we enter, and cannot know what lies on the other end; we can perhaps only rely on the word of those who have already gone in.

Such is the situation I find myself in trying to review the Bourbon County Stout. How the fuck do I describe this thing? Nothing I've ever had comes close, not even the Payton Bourbon Barrel Stout, and I'm willing to bet the same goes for you, dear reader. I'll do the best that I can, but in the end the only way you'll know for sure what this sucker is is to try it for your own self.

Everything about this beer says it's going to be huge. The story helpfully written on the bottle (which is rather nicely designed, by the way, as is standard for Goose Island) indicates they made this by jamming malt into their tuns to the point of overflowing and then aging the results in an oak bourbon barrel for 100 days. How heavy is the result? Well, it's 13% alcohol. Thirteen percent. I've had distilled liquors weaker than that. So basically I'm expecting this thing to knock my damn fool head off (and, just to give you a preview, it doesn't disappoint).

I expect something special when I popped the top - a Michael Bay-style explosion, maybe. But there's nothing, just a very quiet hiss (there's not much carbonation in something like this, as you can imagine). I expect the smell to start pervading the room immediately, the way the Payton Stout did. But it doesn't - sure, it's got a striking odor when I take a whiff from the bottle, but it doesn't stink up the whole area. I give it a pour - it's absolutely pitch black and quite thick, albeit not as much as the Payton. Head? Ha, you must be joking. This is thirteen percent, vato, nothing's escaping from this shit. There's a little bit of copper foam haplessly floating around, but that's all: looking for a glorious stouty head is a lost cause here. The smell, again, is very similar to the Payton, but a lot more subdued - it's mainly sweet vanilla, with a few bourbon notes. It's hot, though. No hiding the alcohol when the brew's this big.

At this point I'm - well, not exactly disappointed, but certainly not bowled over. I paid six bucks for this bottle, versus (on average) two-fitty for the Payton - which spent three times as much time in the barrel. Honestly I'm feeling a little bit gypped. And then I take my first sip.

Holy fucking shit wow. Wow. What in the. I can't even. This is. I. Guh.

This beer is absolutely, completely overwhelming. Goose Island put a blurb on the side of the bottle, claiming it has "more flavor than your average case of beer." Astonishingly, they aren't lying. Do you remember the lack of dimensionality I complained about in the Payton review? That dimensionality is here, in spades. Drinking that was like sitting inside a giant subwoofer. Drinking this is like sitting inside a giant orchestra. Fucking hell, you know what? That's putting it way too elegantly. Drinking this is like being socked in the head by The Thing - it's just an unbelievably strong, potent, mouth-coating taste.

Okay, backing up a little, let's see if I can be more precise about this. Up front, there's slickness and a little bit of bitterness. Then, moving back, it e-x-p-l-o-d-e-s. The main taste is oak, bourbon, and roasted malts, but there's so much else here I don't even know where to begin. Licorice. Espresso. Rye. Prunes. Cacao? (Look, I got nothing folks, they should've sent a poet.) After it hits the back, the oaky notes begin to assert themselves more forcefully and take over, leaving an aftertaste so heavy it feels like you're breathing alcohol for seconds afterwards.

The mouthfeel is, of course, extremely thick and almost clammy. But in a good way. Like the Payton, this shit will coat your mouth like nothing else - don't even think of pairing it with anything, the BCS'll just run right over it and then take another pass to make sure it's dead. Oddly, though, I find this monster easier to drink than the Payton as well. I'd never call it a sessioner, but the sheer mass of flavors beg to be examined and inspected with another sip. Really, this isn't a beer, it's a fucking Bruckner symphony.

One final note for the description: this shit is STRONG. I know I said 13%, but it's definitely the harder side of 13%. I am now barely halfway down the bottle (a feat which took more than a half-hour), and I am well beyond Buzzed and entering the land of Shitfaced. Based on the sheer alcoholic force of this brew, thirteen sounds like a woeful underestimation. I don't mind, of course, but don't plan on doing much after you down one of these.

The grade? A+. Easily. I'm completely sold - there's simply nothing else to be done here. When I wasn't paying attention, Goose Island - they of the ubiquitous shitty wheat ale - went and crafted a masterpiece. Actually, this is something more than a masterpiece: it's a Concorde, it's a milestone in brewing history. I am left with nothing to compare it to.

My local Binny's has had four packs of the 2008 vintage on hand since last year, and they're selling them for about $21. That's well over five bucks for a bottle. Is it worth it? My opinion lies somewhere between "Yes" and "That's a Fucking Bargain," but I know that's probably not going to help you much - you who is reading this, you who is trying to decide whether to drink this stuff. I wish there was something I could say that would help, but I hit a wall a few paragraphs ago. In the end, you'll either try it or you won't, and you'll make that decision having no idea what you're getting into.

Grade: A+
Summary: It's a beer in the same way that Heracles was a man. It is, and yet... it just isn't.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Stout Month Review: Great Lakes Blackout Stout

I love pop songs.

Mind you, this is kind of a crazy thing for me to admit. In college I was a music student for a good three years, and pop music never crossed my mind. Even earlier on, as a kid, I never really knew the stuff; I'd heard the crap my sister and friends would listen to, of course, but it never made any connection with me. My musical interests in high school, for the most part, tended towards Steve Reich, Schoenberg, Autechre, and the like. Kid A struck me as unremarkable, if that gives you some idea.

It wasn't until much, much later - we're talking like a year after my undergraduate degree - that I began to understand the essence of the pop song. The turning point, predictably, was Prince, as Prince got the medicine of pop music understanding into me by way of a spoonful of sweet, sweet weirdness. I mean, take a listen to this thing. I honestly think this is one of the best songs ever written: the verses are great, the chorus is spectacular, and it's got a riff so good no ass in hearing range shall remain unshaken. And yet in this version, it's got that freaky freeform intro and a bridge that lasts forever going pretty much nowhere. In every way it conforms to pop music forms, and yet it's almost eight minutes long and pretty much indisputably bizarre. (This taught me a lesson about pop music that I still recognize today: good pop music is, by definition, somewhat strange pop music. The weirder and more incomprehensible (within the form's limits), the better. Go listen to Thriller if you don't believe me: at every moment the album radiates weirdness, and yet it never fails to hit the standard cues. This marriage of formula and contained insanity just is good pop music).

After Prince it was only a matter of time before I found Marvin Gaye, Sinatra, Madonna, Bobby Darin, the Beatles, and of course Jacko. At about this time, of course, Rickrolling had hit the net with full force, and so I also found out about Stock Aitken Waterman - a cynical pop song factory that, by the end, had perfected the art of hitting the lowest common denomenator.

Good lord, the SAW back catalogues. What a fucking mess of horrible shit and fantastically inspired genius. Never Gonna Give You Up is only the beginning, folks, these people had been plowing the world with impossibly catchy tunes for years before they even hit on the goofy redhead in the suit. Remember Dead or Alive? That was SAW. Remember Bananarama? Yup. Hell, even Judas Priest worked with these fuckers for awhile. SAW was the scourge of the '80s pop charts, especially in the U.K., and they were even famous enough to even attract parodies (Rickroll fans should watch for an Astley trio about 45 seconds in). Obviously I personally skipped the portions of my childhood where I would have cared about any of this, but this strikes me as the sort of stuff that kids would have bought like musical crack right up until the point where it became cool to scoff at it. Such is the order of things. And it is terrible, right? It's not subtle, it's not something you can use to impress potential girlfriends if they have any degree of "taste," it's not something you can play seriously at parties. And yet.

You know all those free jazz albums you claim to love so much? Those breakcore producers, those psychobilly bands, those math rockers? When's the last time you ended up humming one of their tracks for days?

And that seems to me to be the fact of the matter. We can judge this stuff poorly all we like, but for some reason it sticks to us. It holds our interest, our care, when the things that should don't. And so you can pose and preen like you're above this stuff, you can hide behind your Mountain Goats and Death Cab albums all you want, but the fact of the matter is: these cynical fucks could write better music than half the folks in your collection.

The reason I bring up SAW, then, is because the Blackout Stout reminds me of them - and, I believe, for good reason.

Great Lakes is probably my favorite American brewery at the moment. I've already reviewed their Glockenspiel, but there's just so much more: the Dortmunder Gold and Eliot Ness, which are among the best lagers I've ever had; the Oktoberfest, which is a near-flawless exemplar of the style; and, above all, the Edmund Fitzgerald Porter, which I think is the best porter brewed in the States (excepting the Baltics, which are very different beers, and the much stronger "imperials" - e.g., Flying Dog's Gonzo porter). I've never had anything from them that was short of excellent; I'm not even sure if they're capable of it.

Today, though, I'm reviewing the Blackout Stout. They only brew these suckers in Winter, and I've been storing this one since March. The bottle, incidentally, declares a freshness date of August 9, 2009. I think that may be Great Lakes' poor idea of a joke.

Anyways, this stout has a rather unusual history. According to its website, it's named for "the infamous 'Blackout of 2003' that left the northeastern United States in complete darkness, but resulted in old-fashioned neighborhood porch parties and down-home fun." The picture on the bottle depicts this happy darkness, with candle-bearing folks getting together (apparently) to suck down a box full of fine Great Lakes beers. The trouble is, although this beer is named after this blackout, it clearly wasn't brewed for it: it got its first award in 1996, as "Emmett's Imperial Stout." I don't know who the hell Emmett is, but clearly the guy knew a thing or two about beers. Anyways, let's get this thing in a glass.

Well now, this isn't what I expected. It pours a ruby-tinged black - nothing out of the ordinary - but what surprises me is that it's really not all that thick. I mean, it's not exactly watery (this is an imperial stout, after all), but compared to others of the style this is definitely lacking in viscosity (think 5w20 rather than 20w50). I also get a one-finger tan head, with a little bit of lacing - that, like the color, is also pretty standard. It initially smells of cacao and a little bit of raisin; when agitated, I get some molasses as well. There's no trace of booziness at all, either. All in all, it's a very subtle smell after the heavy ice-creamy Brooklyn last week.

I've now taken my first sip, and the overall impression is ash - deliciously so. This tastes like a smoky fourth of July barbeque smells. Up front is a tingly, almost sandpapery texture, which - moving back - evolves into a wonderful roasted malt bittersweetness. There's a little bit of other stuff in there too - maybe some brown sugar - but not much. The charcoal taste hits at the end and takes up most of the aftertaste, along with some lingering brown sugar flavors. How can I describe this better? Do you remember how, way back when you roasted marshmallows as a kid, you used to prefer - rather than just searing them - actually catching the marshmallows on fire, and then blowing them out ? There was a good reason for this: burned almost to a crisp, they were actually way fucking better to eat. This stout is a lot like those crispy, burned, but delicious marshmallows. God it's good.

What's really striking is just how easy it is to drink. The mouthfeel is extremely light for this style - it's got none of the heavy bombast you get, e.g., in Old Rasputin. Despite the 9% abv, It would be dangerously easy to quaff this stuff all night. I said some nice things about the drinkability of the Brooklyn last week, but this is really in a different league altogether. I could work through a four-pack of these like a bag of candy - something I couldn't do with most stouts, let alone imperials. I of all people wouldn't want to draw sharp distinctions between styles, but the more I drink the more I think this may be mislabeled as a "stout." If anything this reminds me of their own Edmund Fitzgerald, a porter, with the roasted malts and the ashy hops all given a good extra jolt.

So, obviously the Blackout is not the most complex of the imperials. Nor the cheapest, I should add. However, it's incredibly delicious and almost pathologically drinkable. What this is, then, is the SAW take on the style. If you're trying to show off your manliness as a beer drinker, you can not and should not admit to liking it - it's just too damn smooth and simple. No, you'll want to find an imperial stout at 30 proof with enough hops to kill a hippo to declare as your favorite. Really though, if there's any of these things that one could drink every night, it's this - because it's just so goddamned fun. Appearances be damned, I couldn't stop loving it if I tried.

Grade: A-
Summary: The most drinkable imperial stout I've had yet.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Stout Month Review: Stockyard Oatmeal Stout

I love pseudonyms, particularly due to the problems they present. Someone pens a text, and then adds a signature to it which is not their proper name: are they the author of this text?

I want to say: yes and no. Surely the text would not exist, were it not for the skill and the organization of the one behind the pen. But the concept of "author" is usually stronger than that: we want the text of an author to say what the author intends themselves to say. This need not be the case at all with a pseudonym. Kierkegaard, of course, is the textbook example. It is usually quite wrong to say, as we casually do, that "Kierkegaard suggested that...", "Kierkegaard held that...", etc.: precisely speaking we should say that he was the author of very little, but that he penned quite a lot. What he penned appeared under the names de Silentio, Climacus, Anti-Climacus, and so on, and we should not assume without further ado that these books say what Søren Kierkegaard intended.

But then again, one does not need a full-blown pseudonym to pen what one does not intend. Think, for example, of A Modest Proposal, which appeared under Jonathan Swift's own name. And think too of the contrary case of a pseudonym that allows an author to write exactly what they intend, but something which for one reason or another cannot appear under their own name (George Eliot, Lewis Carroll). There is, in any case, a sort of disconnect between authorship, the name which a text appears under, and the one penning the manuscript. This is by no means to say, as some of the more hasty among us might want, that there is no such thing as an author. This is nonsense: there are and have been plenty of examples of authorship in the simple and quite boring sense. A more serious question might be whether "authorship" should maintain its status as a kind of standard for any act of writing.

Here we have the Stockyard Oatmeal Stout, which is a pseudonymous beer. It claims to have been made by the "Stockyard Brewing Co." in Chicago. This company does not exist: there is no website, no address, no nothing. Instead, Stockyard is brewed under contract especially for Trader Joe's (where I bought it), and - if the internet is to be believed - it is in fact the work of our friends at Goose Island.

Now, this should seem a bit strange. First of all, Goose Island also sells an Oatmeal Stout under its own label; I've had it, and I like it. Second, that stout costs more money ($8 for a sixer), and you can buy it in many more places. So what's going on here? Has Goose Island simply repackaged their stout in a nice new red bottle to make some extra bucks? There's one way to find out.

First of all, the bottle. It's not the classy affair that the Goatmoose Stout's was. It's red and slightly garish; front and center is an old guy in a cap smirking at you, apparently just as happy as you are that you've saved two bucks. I'm not sure who the hell he's supposed to be, but he's certainly old and looks kind of vaguely blue-collary. There's also some cows and trains and other people in caps and... look, I don't know. I honestly don't think the Macbook guys put much work into this one, folks. Anyways, despite the rather stupid bottle, let's open this thing up and see if it actually is our old friend the Goatmoose.

Well, it pours dark brown with (yes) a half-finger off-white head - just like the Goatmoose stout. The smell is mainly of oats and just a little bit of fruitiness - just like the Goatmoose stout. The taste -

Actually, the taste is pretty different. It's more smooth and creamy than the Goatmoose for a start, and much more dry as well. Up front, I get a little tingle and some baker's chocolate. There's not much to say about the middle or the back end, to be honest - it's all a fairly successful mix of dry stout creamy and oatmeal stout smooth, with just a hint of bitterness after a moment. The aftertaste is a dry tang - some roasted hickory melded with mildly sour hops, and just a touch of malty sweetness. Not bad, and not at all the same beer as its brother. It does taste "cheap" in a way that's difficult to describe, though. Parts of the middle and the end almost remind me of a lager, it's actually quite thin (despite the creaminess), and the alcohol (although this is only a 5%er) comes out more strikingly than I would have thought.

I started this one expecting to get a fairly straightforward oatmeal stout like the Goatmoose, and what I got instead was an odd medium between the Goatmoose and an Irish stout. It's nowhere near as sweet as the Goatmoose - nor is it as refined - but it trades it out for more bitterness, a little more creaminess, and an extra touch of hops.

So which one is best? Well, if the two were priced the same, I'd say to buy the Goatmoose for drinking just one beer and to buy the Stockyard to make a night of it. Despite the odd lager character, the Stockyard is less sweet and lacks that sliminess I detected in the Goatmoose - and that makes it easier to drink in the long haul. But then, the Goatmoose is quite a lot more refined and interesting. You might actually be able to impress someone with the Goose Island stuff, while the Stockyard is fairly forgettable. The thing is, though, these aren't priced the same. At Trader Joe's, a six pack of Stockyards is six dollars. That's even less than the Black Hawk Stout I reviewed a few weeks ago. It tastes cheap, then, because it is cheap. That price, combined with its easy drinkability, makes it a hell of a good candidate for a party beer (even if, overall, I think I slightly prefer the Mendocino).

So I'm torn. I think the Goatmoose stout is the better beer in the end, but in a lot of ways this is the one I'd prefer to drink. It's not all that great, there's not all that much nuance to it, it's even kind of watery and grungy, but I think I like that unpretentious character. As far as pseudonyms go, Stockyard - with its worker's looks - couldn't be a better disguise for the rather too petit bourgeois Goose Island. This is a working man's beer, a stout for that anonymous blue collar joe on the label. It's the goddamned backbone of America, this stout is. So park that F-150, loosen the belt on those jeans, crank the Springsteen, and pop the cap on a manly American bottle of Stockyard. And hope to God no one finds out you were shopping at Trader Joe's.

Grade: C+
Summary: If Tom Hanks were a stout.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Stout Month Review: Left Hand Milk Stout

U can see thru race car drivers
Let me show U what I'm made of
Tonight is the night 4 making
Slow love

--Prince


There are a lot of activities in the world that can, and should be, sped up. The trip from Chicago to Boston, for example - or graphics processing in game consoles, or getting a passport, or nuking a microwave dinner. On the other hand, some things in life will only work if you do them slowly. Roasting a duck, walking in the woods, buying a house. When it comes to such things, if you try to cut a few corners in order to save some time you will either miss the point completely or inevitably screw them up.

Philosophy, as it turns out, happens to be one of those things. There are born geniuses when it comes to mathematics or to counterpoint, but - with the arguable exception of Schelling (I considered Kripke too, but I don't think the early work counts) - there are no born philosophers. No one starts pontificating about the nature of perception at the moment they can speak. Philosophers are, on the contrary, normal folks - perhaps with a greater curiosity than others, although I'm not sure even that is necessary - who are, at one time or another, struck with the drive to think. And, even more odd, they stick with it. (I have a suspicion, albeit unconfirmable, that everyone "philosophizes" at one time or another - the difference being that everyone else has the good taste to stop at the moment when common sense first provides an answer).

At any rate, philosophy takes time. It requires some maturity, some amount of aging, to be philosophical - not a lot, but some. More than that, the act itself requires time to work itself though. A philosophy must ferment. Kant was famously silent for a decade before the publication of the first Critique. Descartes required half-again more than that between the initial moves of the Regulae and the publication of the Meditationes. Quine was nearly 20 years into his career before he published Two Dogmas. Husserl required nine fallow years for the Investigations, Heidegger 12 for Being and Time. Spinoza and Wittgenstein never even lived to see the publication of their (incomplete) masterworks, which they'd been hammering at for decades. And I could, of course, go on.

All of this is good evidence of the sheer wrongheadedness of taking these texts casually, as "positions" that can be easily understood, reckoned with, and taken up or critiqued by anyone interested. It is also good evidence of the sheer silliness of first-year philosophy majors who take it upon themselves to "refute" Descartes or Wittgenstein in a ten page paper written over the course of a weekend. And I say this not to make a case for "elitism," if by that one means that only certain special people should be able to talk about philosophy. There is - I stress again - nothing exceptional and inborn about philosophers, and education at the best of institutions does not guarantee any special status either. All I consider necessary is to give philosophy its time - to live within a problem, a text, or a way of thinking for awhile.

A philosophical affair takes awhile. One must sit with it, in summers and winters, in happy times and sad ones; one must debate the affair, attack it, defend it. Only after a long time, and (at minimum) many weeks of frusteration, might it begin to clarify itself. One can either grant it its time (with no guarantee of success) or sidle on past with things half-understood - and one can get quite far by sidling.

Anyways, all this talk about taking time brings me to the Left Hand Milk Stout. (And I've got a lot more stouts to write about before November comes to a close, so let's get right to it.)

Now what, you may ask, is a milk stout? Well, according to Wikipedia (which is always right, especially when it comes to philosophy), a milk stout "is a stout containing lactose, a sugar derived from milk. Because lactose is unfermentable by beer yeast, it adds sweetness, body, and calories to the finished beer." These days it's a rather obscure style - Sam Adams has the Cream Stout (which is one of their best beers), Young's has their Double Chocolate (which isn't as great as it sounds), and Bell's - which now seems to have about a hundred stouts to their name - has the Double Cream (which I haven't tried). Aside from those and the Left Hand here, I haven't seen any others around Chicago. Which is a shame, really - this is exactly the style you want when it's necessary to nurse a single beer for hours on end and piss off the bartender.

I'm a big fan of the Left Hand bottle design. This one, with its friendly white and blue color scheme and goofy handprinted cow, looks like the sort of thing Doug the Hopeless Dork brought to lunch every day in sixth grade (his mother being worried about his calcium, and making sure he had a big stupid bottle of milk every day). No indication of the alcohol content on here, but my friends at BeerAdvocate inform me that it's a welterweight at 5.2%. So, let's get her in a glass then.

The milk stout pours a surprisingly light-looking semi-transparent mahogany color. There's also a tiny, pitiful excuse for a head, if you can call it that - even with a very aggressive pour, you'd have to get into absurdly tiny finger-fractions to measure this thing. There's basically no lacing, which is fine by me. And then there's the smell - dear god, it's chocolate milk. No, really. This isn't one of those stupid poetic phrases that reviewers like to use because they can't think of anything more apt: this stout actually does smell like (really good) chocolate milk. At first the scent is not particularly strong, just very sweet and very... milky (sorry). After giving it a good bit of agitation, though, it opens up considerably. The roasted malts come right through, along with - strangely - sassafras. Yeah, odd as it may sound, this actually smells a little bit like root beer if you shake it like a motherfucker and stick your nose in deep enough. And now to taste it.

Well! The first thing you'll notice, probably, is the lactose's effect on the mouthfeel. God it's smooth. Almost supernaturally so. Actually, you couldn't get any more smooth if you put Billy D. Williams in a tuxedo and played So What over the stereo. This is so goddamned smooth, in fact, that one could easily pound down a bottle in a few minutes.

That would be a crime, however. In fact, it would be a crime (confession time) that I myself once made after coming off a massive, months-long investigation of malt liquors. Don't criticize me too much for this: a month's worth of forties will prime anyone to drink almost anything very, very fast. Now, imbibed in such a fashion, the milk stout is still a good beer. It's oddly comforting, like petting a cat for a moment or two before it scampers off. But slow down a little, though, and this good beer becomes a great one. You want to make this sucker last a half-hour at the very minimum, folks. Get comfortable, ignore the dirty looks of the gentleman behind the bar, and enjoy this stout the way Prince would have intended.

All right, we've noted the impossible smoothness - what about the taste? Well, although it's certainly not a kick-you-in-the-teeth kind of beer, the Milk Stout's got more complexity to it than it really deserves (or than one might initially expect). Up front it doesn't have much taste per se, but it's got a bit of a tingle - like an old can of root beer that's still got a bit of carbonation left. The creamy, malty sweetness comes next - it's milk chocolate all the way, with hints of vanilla and sassafras. Which leaves you completely open for the slight shock of bitterness that closes out the taste and coats one's throat all the way down. The flavor may be mainly milk chocolate, but by the end it's still got a good cacao bite to it. The aftertaste, of course, lasts forever, and further encourages you to be as slow with this stuff as you can.

I really like this beer. The slower you drink it, the better it gets. It could stand a little more complexity to it, to be sure, but not much. This beer, fundamentally, is an old easy chair, a big fat St. Bernard to lay your head on. It provides a comfortable way to pass the time, and it does that job with astonishing skill.

Grade: A-
Summary: A brilliant stout. Drinking slowly is preferred here.

Friday, November 20, 2009

Stout Month Review: Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout (winter 08-09 bottling)

You know what bugs me? Albums that have exactly one good song on them.

(I may be dating myself here; do people even buy albums anymore?)

There are many examples one could mention, but at the moment I cite Sabbath's Sabotage and Eric B. and Rakim's Let The Rhythm Hit 'Em. (These both are also probably the last interesting work produced by their respective groups, but I'm sure that's coincidence) Symptom of the Universe is, I think, one of the best Sabbath songs ever; I don't believe it's ever gonna break into my top five anytime soon, but it's heavy, it's fast, it features possibly the best vocals Ozzy ever put down, and it's got a riff so stimulating it could substitute for sexual intercourse. And the title track from Rhythm is the best MC of all time spitting ice-cold verses at the very height of his powers; it's an funky amen break enema, with syncopated rhymes practically tripping over themselves with complexity and sheer speed of delivery. These are both stupendously good tracks, and the problem is that there's nothing else on the albums that even come close. They tower over their company like Yao Ming at a Chuck E Cheese; the two elements just don't belong together.

With that in mind, I'd like to talk about the Brooklyn Brewery.

I've had several beers from Brooklyn, and almost all of them have been either middling or downright bad. Their Monster barleywine is just too damned alcoholic and hoppy, and this is coming from someone who confesses to love highly assertive beers. Their IPA, again, is too hoppy - a strange criticism against an IPA, but trust me, the back end is just balanced all wrong. And then there's their brown ale, which still strikes me as an offense against the style (call me old fashioned but browns should be a good balance between dry, sweet, and slightly nutty, not between burned out and bitterly harsh; they should a walk in the woods in autumn, not a wander through London circa 1940). Your friend Paul, the guy from the Lion Stout review, loves these guys, and that's because he has neither undamaged taste buds nor a soul. It's hard to determine any sort of coherent strategy for the flavor of these beers, except for a general "lots." For all of them they seem to have thrown everything they could possibly think of into the pot, and then declared it done once it was sufficiently pungent. And so, almost all of them kind of suck.

But then there's the Black Chocolate Stout. This beer's different: it's an imperial stout, and with an imperial stout you want to throw in everything you've got. So, for at least this one beer, the strategy works. And very happily so.

The bottle I'll be reviewing is from a year ago. Oddly enough, my local Binnys has been trying to get rid of these old six packs for months; they literally just took down the display a week or two ago. I can't fathom why this might have been. Did they just order too much? Were people not buying it? Whatever the reason, it offered me a primo opportunity to get a bunch of fantastically strong beers, mellowed for a full year, on the cheap. The first point of appeal for this stuff is the price: a six-pack of these go (or went) for ten or eleven dollars, which is pretty darn cheap for the style (you could drink this stuff every day and not break the bank, although I'm sure the sheer heaviness would preclude this). Anyways, maybe it's all the mellowing or maybe it's the fact that I haven't had an IS for awhile. Maybe I was hit in the head earlier. Whatever the reason, I like this stuff a lot, and would definitely recommend it especially as an introduction to the style. Well done, Brooklyn! You've made one decent beer!

So, the description. The bottle design, with its gold on black layout, reminds me (oddly) of magazine ads from the seventies; all it needs is a guy with bellbottoms and an afro off to the side, trying to sell me a brand of floor polish. After that, I'm afraid I must move on to describing the beer itself, a process which I fear shall be deeply predictable and boring. You may be surprised to know that, unlike all other imperial stouts, the Brooklyn pours a thick, deep black. I didn't mean that, actually, I should have said "just like every other frigging brew in this style." On top of that, with a good pour you even get the standard imperial stout one finger copper head. Thrilling stuff so far.

But then you take a whiff, and suddenly it is thrilling. I was expecting it to smell like, well, chocolate, and it doesn't. It smells, and I'm not joking, like some kind of fruit ice cream. No really, it's something like a raisin, blackberry, and molassas ice cream - as if you'd opened up one of those top-shelf pints that cost well into the double digits. Even more interesting (for me), a little bit of alcohol actually comes through in the scent. Now, the Black Chocolate Stout is 10% after all, so this honestly shouldn't be a surprise - but it's still the first stout I've reviewed on this site where it's relatively easy to tell what a beast it is. In any case, the fruitiness and the booze make this odor a rather special experience. In all honesty, if you threw me this nose blindly I'd almost be tempted to peg it as a red wine of some kind - if it weren't for the carbonation, anyways. It's just that fruity and floral.

The boozy smell is the first hint that you need to take this stuff seriously. The second is the mouthfeel, which is thicker than Blue Cheer locked in an amplifier warehouse. This is one heavy sunnovabitch - you pound this stuff at your peril.

Taste, then. Up front, it's mainly semisweet chocolate - bitter but with a good bit of sugar - and some tingle from the alcohol (or maybe the hops). Moving back, the roasted malts come into play big time. If I were to take a big lick from the stuff the coffee shop people knock out of those little espresso canister things, I suspect it would taste a little like this. Mixed in, though, is some of the fruitiness from the smell - raisins, prunes, berries, banana, and a lot of stuff I can't readily identify. (Nor do I have much time, since I'm way too busy enjoying this fantastic beer.) Finally the booziness starts to set in at the back, along with unsweetened cacao and a good kick from what tastes like hickory smoked hops. The cacao and hops linger on big time, and form most of the aftertaste (along with a little bit of blackberry).

It's a fine beast, this stout. In a contest with Old Rasputin for the title of best bargain imperial stout, I'd call it a draw: the OR is more complex, but this is oddly (considering its higher ABV) easier to take. Neither is a session beer - try to make a night of these things and you'll be in for a world of pain the next morning. Then again, that's not the point. An imperial stout is not a good time waster, it's not a good social lubricant; it's an explosion of flavors, sheer spectacle at its best, and somehow the otherwise wayward Brooklyn Brewery does it quite well. This, then, is their Symptom of the Universe: it's wonderful, almost awe-inspiring, and one only wishes the rest of the "album" were so good.

In absolute terms, I want to give this beer an A: the imperial stout is one of my favorite styles, and this is a good example of it. On the other hand, as an imperial stout this is indeed merely a good example, and not a great one. In order to leave some headroom for others, then, I grade it a B+. Keep it up, Brooklyn, and try to make another good beer one of these days!

Grade: B+
Summary: The Everyman's imperial stout.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Stout Month Reviews: Goose Island Oatmeal Stout and Ceylon Lion Stout

I have two beers here. One of them is the Lion Stout, an export stout from the Ceylon Brewery in Sri Lanka. The other is an old Chicago standby, the Goose Island Oatmealer. These are two very different beers, brewed by very different companies in very different styles. And for this post I'm going to do something rather unusual. I'm going to compare these two stouts that really have nothing to do with one another, and draw a conclusion.

So let's talk about the Goose Island Oatmeal Stout first (hereafter abbreviated to Goatmoose Stout). Now, all told, Goose Island is a pretty large brewery: aside from being utterly ubiquitous in Chicago, they also sell in "15 states and the U.K.." That's not much compared to Miller, but I've known brewers that have a hard time selling to anyone beyond their front door.

Even taking that into account, though, they're bigger than you think. A few years ago they were bought (or very nearly bought) by the Craft Brewer's Alliance, which is even larger. This incorporation includes Goose Island, and also Widmer (in Portland), Redhook (New York), and even Kona (Hawaii). And, to cap it all off, a sizable portion of the CBA is owned by the massive beer giant known as Anheuser-Busch. Altogether, that puts Goose Island a stone's throw from being a sub-brand of the largest brewer in the United States. That means it's got a lot of money to throw around, and that means they've got plenty of people to make sure things are done well, done businesslike, and done efficiently.

The Goatmoose Stout is a fine example of this Willen zur Effizienz. One gets the sense that everything about it is made to exacting standards, everything precise within a razor's edge. Take the bottle design, for example. It's a masterpiece of understated professionalism - all white and grey on a black background, with a tasteful cursive font running all around the front-and-center goose logo and a beautifully laid-out set of serving instructions on the back. Even the bottletop looks good, seamlessly integrated into the total look. This is a fantastic bottle design, and someone with a soulpatch and a plaid shirt and (probably) a Macbook put a lot of time and effort into getting it right. I've had a lot of beers in recent years, and this is the only one of the lot that wears a tux. Congratulations on your fine work, Macbook man, and enjoy your iced soy chai latte - you've earned it.

Pour this stuff into a glass and it continues to impress. What you get is a nice deep mahogany color (not black - there's still plenty of light still passing through) and a small half-finger tan head, with moderate lacing. This is exactly the sort of thing that beer review sites love. Take a whiff, and the scent (surprise!) turns out to be very well-controlled as well. Mainly you get oats, honey, and raisin. The closest comparison I can come up with, actually, is freshly-baked cookies. Somewhere back there is roasted malt and a little yeast, but you really have to go searching for it; the general impression is just a nice, clean oaty smell.

Taking a sip, I get butter and just a little bit of bitter coffee upfront. The texture is less creamy than I expected - to what shouldn't have been my surprise, the Goose Island folks have carefully held it in check. More towards the back there's a very measured milk chocolate flavor, along with some slightly citrusy notes from the hops. The coffee comes back for the aftertaste: think of a medium-roast Columbian with cream and sugar. So it turns out to be, as one may have expected, quite delicious and wonderful. This, too, is the sort of stuff that pleases beer review sites.

The only problem comes after I've been drinking for awhile. About halfway through the bottle, I begin to notice an odd sliminess. It's difficult to describe - a sort of grimy feeling coating my mouth. It's not pleasant, but that's not enough to keep me from finishing the thing.

As an oatmeal stout, then, this is quite good: it's smooth, it's fairly light, it smells fantastic, and I could probably drink it all night if it weren't for that slimy buildup. It's not in the same league as the really good stouts of this sort (the Samuel Smith's, the Young's, even the Wolaver's (which is a personal favorite)), mind, but then that doesn't seem to be what GI was going for. One gets the impression that guys in lab coats and goggles spent a lot of time wandering around the brewery, checking all the gauges, doing very convoluted maths, and arguing about hop varieties and IBUs and local barley prices. One gets an image of precise operation and control. No, the Goatmoose Stout is no halo brew: it is, rather, calculated very precisely to be good beer on the cheap. It earns itself a solid B - a good beer. And a few of them wouldn't be a bad way of spending a night.

The Lion Stout, in contrast, was certainly not designed and marketed by the guys with plaid shirts and soulpatches. Rather than a professional six-pack carton, this stuff comes in an huge black cardboard box with a big goddamned lion on it. You get the sense they were trying for majesty here, but the label and box design just come off as rather goofy and halfassed. The lion on the box and the bottle looks less imposing and more like a pre-framed picture your aunt might have grabbed from a half-off kiosk at Wal-Mart. As a bonus, the bottle also includes a really shitty 'shopping job of Michael Jackson's portrait on the back, along with his endorsement. I blame the importers for this (looking at you, Elite Brands of Kalamazoo): rather than Macbook man, we get the fine work of the importer's 16-year-old son who's been playing with Photoshop regularly after downloading it off Piratebay two months ago. It's slightly painful to look at, honestly.

Then there's the beer itself, which was certainly not brewed by the guys with lab coats. I mean, it's from Sri Friggin' Lanka. Now, it's not like there were running battles with the Liberation Tigers around the fermentation tanks or anything but still, beer isn't really the first thing that comes to mind when I think of that particular island. And it gets worse, since the beer itself gives signs of having been made in a somewhat inexact fashion. It doesn't seem to have been filtered properly, for one thing, so by the time you've finished the stuff you'll have a small heap of black and light brown sediment in your glass.

So: it's poorly packaged, it hasn't been brewed with much care, and it's made in a tropical country ravaged by civil war for the better part of three decades. That's three strikes on the Lion Stout already. And that means it's completely hopeless.

Oh no it isn't. Instead it turns out to be, measure for measure, the best stout I've ever had. Yeah, that good.

I've been sitting here for ten minutes trying to think of some way that they might improve it. More hops? Maybe, but that would also throw off the oaky-chocolate flavors which are the star of the show. Stronger? It's already 8%, and hidden so well you'd almost never know. Thicker mouthfeel? But that would no doubt make it harder to drink. Trying to criticize this is like trying to criticize the SR-71: short of turning it into something else entirely, there just isn't anything you could do to make the thing better.

But I'm getting ahead of myself; I should actually describe what it's like to quaff this stuff before I stack any more breathless compliments atop of its stupid cardboard carton.

You'll get yourself a nice satisfying hiss upon popping the top. And that's a good starting indication, as the first thing you'll probably notice about the Lion stout is that it's very carbonated indeed. Well, not carbonated at all by Belgian standards - because you'll actually be able to get some of it into a glass before it spills all over the counter - but it's still enough to produce a huge two-finger bronze head that lingers for a couple of minutes, and that's not bad for a stout.

Lion pours a thick near-black - no light gets through at all. The smell? Mostly unsweetened chocolate and a lot of birch wood. More subtly, there's some espresso and something vaguely fruity. Cranberry, maybe. If you caught someone making brownies out in the middle of the redwood forests, I suspect the site would smell something like this. But as nice as the scents are, the smell isn't the real star of this production - so let's move on to what is.

The taste. Good lord, the taste. It's not extraordinarily complex, but there's a kind of crescendo to how it develops that makes the comparative simplicity irrelevant. Take a sip: it's surprisingly strong up front, especially for a stout, with a quick hit of a bitter tang. Making its way back, it quickly expands and strengthens - you get loads of bitter cocoa, tree bark (oddly), and just a touch of maple syrup. But don't let that fool you into thinking this is sweet. Compared to an IPA it is, I suppose, but the overwhelming impression is the deep, dark bitterness. It's bitter, very bitter. Maybe you could argue "bittersweet" to a point, but I'd stick to just bitter. As it reaches its peak, though, that bitterness starts to fall away in order to make room for a tart, fruity, and sometimes almost strawberry-like aura. It's terrific. And then there's the aftertaste, which is nutty and earthy - but in a good way, like on that camping trip where you ate a ton of overcooked marshmallows and lost your virginity to Jen from the class above yours.

Wait, that's a simile too far I think.

Anyways, how good is it? Your friend Paul, who only really likes beer if there are actual clumps of hop flowers still floating around in it, is going to find the Lion Stout boring. Your friend Samantha, who irrationally prefers milk chocolate over dark chocolate (in disregard of all human and divine law), is going to find it too woody and bitter. Both of these people are wrong, because this is a fantastic beer - maybe the best stout in the world, so far as I know. It is mindblowingly, elucidatingly, paradigm-shiftingly magnificent and delicious. And although it's somewhat carbonated, it's not particularly creamy or cloying, and neither is the 8% alcohol very present. So you could easily put away a couple of these in a night, and at a very reasonable $11 a sixer you could theoretically do this and not even hate yourself for it later. Just unbelievable.

I suppose it's possible that someone could make a better export stout than this. I see no logical contradiction in that, and nothing about the state of the world that prevents some other brewer from stepping up and outdoing the Ceylon folks. But I can't imagine how they might do it - and I certainly wouldn't bet on it ever happening, no matter how good the returns. So the Lion Stout gets an A+, because I can't in good conscience give it anything lower. Well done, Sri Lanka, you've given the world a masterpiece. I don't know much about this Michael Jackson guy, but clearly he had fine taste in his endorsements.

And so, in comparing our completely dissimilar stouts, what have we noticed? Well, we saw a quite large and well-financed brewing company make itself a very solid stout at a good price. Conversely, we saw a brewer in a former British colony produce, effectively, the new yardstick for all stouts of its type. And this goes to show that to make a truly monumental beer, you don't need a long and illustrious history of brewing or the newest technologies or guys with art degrees or the backing of Anheuser-Busch - or even a peacefully unified country, for that matter. So the lesson to be learned is, great beer can come from anywhere, without good cause and without warning. It is an event of sorts. It comes upon us like a tornado; it has no sufficient reason. And, in this case, it happens to arrive in a goofy black cardboard box.

Goose Island Oatmeal Stout
Grade: B
Summary: A smooth, tasty, and well-controlled (if somewhat dull) oatmealer.

Ceylon Lion Stout
Grade: A+
Summary: Stupid good export stout. One of the best beers in the world (rather inexplicably so).