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.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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).
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).
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Review: Great Lakes Glockenspiel
In brief? It's a good beer. But if you'll excuse me for being a bore for several paragraphs, I'd like to talk about philosophy.
Professor Brian Leiter, most famous for the Philosophical Gourmet Report, has just penned a blog entry declaring that "the game is up" for what he calls "Party-Line Continentalists." (Note the term "continentalists" rather than "continental philosophers," which is an important rhetorical point: the "continentalists" are not philosophers.) This is an attempt, all at once, 1) to eliminate the so-called break between anglophone and continental philosophies, chiefly by showing that the "analytics" are now perfectly capable of doing good scholarship on European thinkers, and 2) to criticize those who, in reading these philosophers, still cling to an outmoded and broadly post-Heideggerian style of "continental" reading. Leiter presents himself as at war against a politicized (but, happily, increasingly marginalized) bunch of ideologues who are simply out of touch with the status of contemporary philosophy.
All of this is in response to a rather careless reply to a recent podcast interview that Leiter did on Nietzsche. The anonymous poster writes:
Leiter replies, "I am not an 'analytic.' I do not even know what that means." In good rhetorical fashion, he then goes on to demonstrate that he is not doing what analytic philosophy did. He has, in fact, wider interests, so he shall not be hemmed in by the very narrow and specific term which the anonymous poster attaches to him. Even more than that, he cannot be an analytic because analytic philosophy has long since ceased to be: "'Analytic' philosophy as a substantive research program has been moribund for forty years or more." I would certainly disagree about the time frame - Lewis or Kripke, for example, would be surprised to discover that all their work after 1969 was "moribund" - but the more general proposition that analytical philosophy proper has been effectively dead for quite a long time seems to me basically in the right. (This is also increasingly true, as Leiter also rightly notes, of the continental traditions)
All of this is fine: we know what analytic philosophy is, and we know when it was. But of course, if analytic philosophy has been dead for decades it is difficult to explain the state of affairs which I now quote from another of Leiter's websites, the Philosophical Gourmet Report:
Anyways, clearly we must say that "analytic" philosophy is not analytic philosophy. Leiter is not an analytic scholar, but he is "analytic" in the sense of style. He surely sees himself as a clear, rigorous researcher. And this, so far as I can tell, is supposed to be in contrast to another style, one which is obscure and slipshod. Let us give this style the name of "Continental" or "Postmodern" philosophy - being careful to keep the quotes in place. In this sense, many continental and postmodern (without quotes) philosophers - namely the ones Leiter wants to save - in fact turn out to be "analytic," or may at least be understood by that style. And the reverse is regrettably true also for obscurantist, "continental" analytics, as the same page of the PGR hints (I remove a set of quotes to fit my terminology):
With this distinction in place, then, let us read the anonymous poster again, but correct him with the appropriate quotation marks:
Leiter closes his post by writing:
We need to nail down more specifically what "analytic" philosophy is supposed to be. For an example of this "rigorous historical scholarship," and an example of "analytic" philosophy in general, I use Leiter's own comments on Nietzsche in this essay. At the very beginning of the post he repeats a point made in the earlier Philosophy Bites interview, declaring:
There are certain situations where we must ascribe different views to the same author. For example, the pre-critical and critical Kant both have considered, precisely argued, and re-presentable views that can be debated and scrutinized, and then accepted, denied, or modified. There is no difficulty here, and both views will be philosophically legitimate. But if Leiter means to say something similar about Nietzsche's views in the Nachlass versus his later, revised views, this (it seems to me) would simply concede some legitimacy to those readers whom he is at pains to show as "misunderstanding" Nietzsche. Misunderstanding means not that they have understood a view that Nietzsche once held, but one that he never held. So now it looks like Leiter means to say that Nietzsche
A) held certain views (those written in his famous notebooks) on truth and knowledge
B) rejected these views over time
C) did not hold those views
This looks like a straightforward contradiction. It cannot be that Nietzsche held that P at one time and also never held that P. Of course, this is a rather uncharitable reading. Well then, is there another possibility?
The most charitable reading seems to me to be this, namely that Leiter believes Nietzsche never held (in a considered way) the views "expressed" in the unpublished notebooks. Rather, what we find there is (for example) an imprecise working-through of ideas, a free play of thought. They are merely bi-products, remainders left behind in the making of Nietzsche's real philosophy, and thus we should not take them seriously. Nietzsche's view is Nietzsche's view. This view is (or can be made to be) rigorous and clear, and the notebooks are not representative of it.
The deluded party-liners and their ilk may simply reply that Nietzsche nevertheless wrote what he wrote. One finds, beyond the umbrellas, ideas that frequently exceed what is present in the published works. By what right does one deny that these, too, are not legitimate views? Leiter has a very good answer to this objection: he says that the illegitimacy of these texts is "the consensus view in the scholarly community."
Why must we not take seriously the unpublished notebooks, and by extension the commentaries written on the basis of those notebooks? Because the scholarly community has decided that this work is not serious. The scholarly community - that is to say, researchers in philosophy legitimized in their own way by various titles, institutional status, etc. - has chosen and delimited which texts and which positions can be officially considered under the name of "Nietzsche scholarship." Or, better put, they have established a hierarchy of such positions (ranging from the very plausible to the completely unacceptable) which any work must fall into and be scrutinized under. The unacceptable is pushed to the margins and ignored. These structures can of course be changed, and one can, for example, make good arguments that perhaps the Nachlass should be more carefully considered. But in the end, the decision as to the legitimacy of any such philosophical work must rely on a positive answer to the question: do the experts find it plausible?
Up until now I've mainly been limiting this exploration to historical research, but it can be easily broadened to any work in the academic field of philosophy. Trying to publish a paper on ethics? Then you'd better make sure you've read and carefully cited all the hot names, formatted your endnotes correctly, and written in the accepted style. Hoping to write a dissertation on Collingwood? Unfortunately, Collingwood was not a serious or important philosopher, so you probably can't. I might cite more examples, but this is probably enough. We are increasingly enmeshing ourselves in a situation where the deciding element of philosophical value is the opinions of professional philosophers. If it pleases the right sort of people - including, presumably, a certain UChicago law professor - then it is legitimate; if not, it falls into the damnable style that we have called "continental/postmodern." All of this strikes me as troubling.
Leiter has often praised the recent compartmentalization of philosophy into specialties. And he has a point: to name one example, we are finally beginning to get a sizable body of decent literature on Spinoza. This pleases me considerably. Even so, there's something questionable about this: is philosophy fundamentally about pleasing the tastes of scholars, each in their own tiny area? Is it about increasingly getting clear on "what Nietzsche/Spinoza/Kant/Frege really meant," or gaining agreement on the "plausible" approaches to metaphysics or ethics or the theory of science? Is it really all a matter of "the consensus view in the scholarly community"? Leiter would like the "party-liners" exiled to the literature departments, yet precisely what he is celebrating is philosophy itself having become a literature department. Serious "analytic" philosophy must be clear, precise, rigorous, scientific, etc., and it is a small cadre of professionals who decides whether a work has met or failed these criteria. "Analytic" philosophy is simply that which is approved by scholars of philosophy in the relevant area.
I may, of course, be accused of overreading Leiter, which is a fair enough point. I like to think he would say that there is of course more to academic philosophy than pleasing the prevailing orthodoxies, and that such orthodoxy is precisely what he is objecting to in the "party line continentalists" (which is a straw man if there ever was one - Leiter can't really believe, e.g., that anyone who takes Derrida seriously is simply a "careless reader and listener"). I like to think he would see a deep problem with any "philosophy" whose worth is gauged in such a way. But I am hard-pressed to find another criterion in his post by which we could say what work is philosophically interesting, aside from "the scholarly consensus says so."
Allow me to seem a bit naive. Perhaps it is not a particular "style" that makes some philosophy worth paying attention to (a personal letter, written in haste with many obscurities, may be more worthwhile than a referee'd journal article). Perhaps it is not the approval of today's scholarly tastes (need I list off the number of great philosophers who were "refuted" and even ridiculed in their own time and afterwards?). No, perhaps the whole question rides on just whether or not a philosophy is true, or at the very least, whether it helps us along the road to truth.
Philosophy is not the study of what is plausible to journal referees. And philosophy is not the study of philosophers and their "positions," but rather of what the philosophers themselves were interested in. Strictly speaking, I do not think we should care whether what is written in Nietzsche's manuscripts is his considered position or not, for we are (strictly speaking) not interested in Nietzsche himself. The rather banal fact is that these writings provoke us; they surprise and astound us; they force us to think anew the matters at hand. They can and do teach us something, whether rejected by Nietzsche or not, whether approved by the scholarly community or not. Even if I disagree with these writings, the fact that they instruct me, force me to respond, and (most importantly) prod me into looking again into the truth of the matter is of sufficient weight. I submit that this is all that is required for good philosophy.
The picture I'm proposing is, of course, considerably messier than a philosophy which is valued according to its approval by a consensus. Perhaps it is even a bit romantic. And yet: I think it is the only real standard. So the question that should fall upon us as philosophers should not be whether we are enlarging our field or satisfying our colleagues. The question that should matter most is "Is what we're saying true?" - and if we cannot fully affirm that, then we must at least be able to answer, "Are we teaching anyone anything?"
(What's rather odd is that if you read them closely, many of the hateful "continentals" and "postmoderns" - several of the ones I study, at least - are actually quite concerned with these questions. They are not unique in this, obviously, but most others of this sort are not much willing to doubt the concept of truth itself even as they chase it. So do these "continentals" subject truth itself to interrogation in spite of a concern with teaching the truth? Or - more paradoxically - do they do so because of it?)
I leave the question for others to consider. All of that out of the way, then, what is there to say about Great Lakes' Glockenspiel?
This thing is a weisenbock, which is not a style I've ever had before. So far as I can tell, a weisenbock is a wheatbeer that does benchpresses - whereas most of the wheats I've had have happily moved about around the 5%-6% alcohol range, this clocks in at a hardy 8%. That's well into high gravity lager territory, which is not the sort of place I expect wheatbeers to be happy at. And I should mention that I've never been a big fan of wheatbeers. That's not to say that I don't like them - when forced to put one down I usually enjoy it. However, when it's been a long day and I just want something to relax with I'm usually happier with a bock or a porter or somesuch - the sort of beer that's like a faithful old couch you just flop into. I need to be in a very special sort of mood to buy a sixer of wheatbeer: the complexity of the malts and the general fruitiness doesn't lend itself quite so well to taking it easy.
Nevertheless I was curious, especially since (as I've mentioned before) the Great Lakes Brewing Company seems constitutively incapable of making a bad beer. So, now lighter by $3.19, I'm ready to give it a try.
A very easy pour produces a slightly murky deep amber beer with a one-finger white head. The scent is very sharp, and actually quite boozy as well (you can definitely gauge the strength of this one by smell alone). Beyond the edge, the most dominant presence is banana nut bread and yeast. It's pleasant, but powerful.
The first sip. Hmm, the texture is lighter than I expected, it's actually pretty smooth. You can tell it's a strong bugger, though - no danger of this stuff sneaking up on you. It's oddly tart on the front end, like a slightly unripe cranberry - not unpleasant, just striking. Beyond that, the beer is very much a "middle-range" puncher (if I can be allowed that expression). There are no real extremes to the taste; think of a Handel oratorio or something. Actually, yes, that's exactly what this beer is, a Handel oratorio. The main flavors are of wheat, berries, banana, and some of the yeast I found in the smell. The aftertaste, as you might expect, is quite fruity (there's the banana nut bread again), but clean and easy to live with.
Once again, you can definitely sense the 8% alcohol in this. After all the stouts, I'd forgotten what it was like to drink a beer that was open about being a little hot. And I can even say that it's a very warming beer - perfect for a chilly autumn night, for instance.
Is it something I'd buy again? Probably not, unless my tastes change dramatically. But it's instructive, and that's what I enjoyed more than anything. This has a very different taste profile from all the stouts I've been quaffing lately - everything I've had in the past month, really. Where the stouts have been bittersweet, this has been fruity, and where they've been thick and creamy this has been boozy (pleasantly so). It's given me a lot to think about, this big cloudy wheatbeer, and that's more than I can say for most of the beer I've had recently. Or most of the approved, credentialed, well-praised articles and books I've recently read, for that matter.
Grade: A-
Summary: A hot but delicious (and surprisingly drinkable) wheatbeer. Pricey, though.
Professor Brian Leiter, most famous for the Philosophical Gourmet Report, has just penned a blog entry declaring that "the game is up" for what he calls "Party-Line Continentalists." (Note the term "continentalists" rather than "continental philosophers," which is an important rhetorical point: the "continentalists" are not philosophers.) This is an attempt, all at once, 1) to eliminate the so-called break between anglophone and continental philosophies, chiefly by showing that the "analytics" are now perfectly capable of doing good scholarship on European thinkers, and 2) to criticize those who, in reading these philosophers, still cling to an outmoded and broadly post-Heideggerian style of "continental" reading. Leiter presents himself as at war against a politicized (but, happily, increasingly marginalized) bunch of ideologues who are simply out of touch with the status of contemporary philosophy.
All of this is in response to a rather careless reply to a recent podcast interview that Leiter did on Nietzsche. The anonymous poster writes:
Like many Analytics, Leiter's attitude towards the Continentals (and especially towards the Postmodernists) is of barely concealed contempt. With few exceptions, Analytics tend to reduce the thought of their Continental/Postmodernist foes to easily dismissed, facile generalizations, instead of sincerely engaging in dialogue.(I myself would criticize a lot of this, but at the moment I'd rather focus on Leiter's response.)
Leiter replies, "I am not an 'analytic.' I do not even know what that means." In good rhetorical fashion, he then goes on to demonstrate that he is not doing what analytic philosophy did. He has, in fact, wider interests, so he shall not be hemmed in by the very narrow and specific term which the anonymous poster attaches to him. Even more than that, he cannot be an analytic because analytic philosophy has long since ceased to be: "'Analytic' philosophy as a substantive research program has been moribund for forty years or more." I would certainly disagree about the time frame - Lewis or Kripke, for example, would be surprised to discover that all their work after 1969 was "moribund" - but the more general proposition that analytical philosophy proper has been effectively dead for quite a long time seems to me basically in the right. (This is also increasingly true, as Leiter also rightly notes, of the continental traditions)
All of this is fine: we know what analytic philosophy is, and we know when it was. But of course, if analytic philosophy has been dead for decades it is difficult to explain the state of affairs which I now quote from another of Leiter's websites, the Philosophical Gourmet Report:
In the U.S., all the Ivy League universities, all the leading state research universities, all the University of California campuses, most of the top liberal arts colleges, most of the flagship campuses of the second-tier state research universities boast philosophy departments that overwhelmingly self-identify as "analytic."How is this possible? These departments are manifestly not occupied by the very same kinds of scholars that were around a half-century ago, and yet contemporary professors still use the term "analytic" as their own. How can this be explained? Leiter's site offers an answer to this earlier on in the same page:
"Analytic" philosophy today names a style of doing philosophy, not a philosophical program or a set of substantive views.What is "analytic" philosophy, in this sense? It is a tone, a stance, a method, a style. When a department self-identifies as "analytic," what it intends to say by this is simply that it is in the mainstream of philosophical research - and that means that it purports to be clear, rigorous, logically argued, and "scientific" in the broad sense. The Leiter of the Nietzsche Blog must surely object to this use of the term: how can these departments self-identify as analytic, when they clearly go well past the projects of Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, et al? How can this word be used, when there are pragmatists and metaphysicians and Rawlsians and Hegelians and, indeed, Nietzsche scholars running about? So, in effect, Leiter disagrees with himself. But he does make the hapless anonymous poster look like a fool in the process, and one suspects that was the whole point.
Anyways, clearly we must say that "analytic" philosophy is not analytic philosophy. Leiter is not an analytic scholar, but he is "analytic" in the sense of style. He surely sees himself as a clear, rigorous researcher. And this, so far as I can tell, is supposed to be in contrast to another style, one which is obscure and slipshod. Let us give this style the name of "Continental" or "Postmodern" philosophy - being careful to keep the quotes in place. In this sense, many continental and postmodern (without quotes) philosophers - namely the ones Leiter wants to save - in fact turn out to be "analytic," or may at least be understood by that style. And the reverse is regrettably true also for obscurantist, "continental" analytics, as the same page of the PGR hints (I remove a set of quotes to fit my terminology):
It is fair to say that "clarity" is, regrettably, becoming less and less a distinguishing feature of analytic philosophy.So, to review. Neither "analytic" nor "continental" philosophy should be taken as having any specific content - they are methods, tones, styles. The former is good, while the latter should presumably be "exiled entirely to literature departments" alongside the so-called "Party-Line Continentalists." For Leiter philosophical rigor, as well as philosophical carelessness, transcends the boundaries of geography and even of content.
With this distinction in place, then, let us read the anonymous poster again, but correct him with the appropriate quotation marks:
Like many "Analytics," Leiter's attitude towards the "Continentals" (and especially towards the "Postmodernists") is of barely concealed contempt. With few exceptions, "Analytics" tend to reduce the thought of their "Continental"/"Postmodernist" foes to easily dismissed, facile generalizations...Is this now correct? Well, in Leiter's blog post we find not only "Derrida is a charlatan," "phenomenology is our 'modern scholasticism,'" and "Heidegger and (most) of the post-structuralists... were not...very good scholars or philosophical expositors," but also "most Anglophone normative theory is embarrassing" and "I think 'analytic metaphysics' is a seriously wrong turn in the field and ignore it." Well, to me at least, this looks a good deal like contempt. But perhaps we should allow Leiter this point. Perhaps, after all, none of those figures are really worth taking seriously.
Leiter closes his post by writing:
...we may really enter a period of philosophical scholarship in the Anglophone world in which "analytic" and "Continental" as terms of partisan battle are largely uintelligible to those drawn to the problems of philosophy.In this way, the twin terms of analytic and continental philosophy (Leiter uses quotes where I wouldn't) can be forgotten. Especially since the one is dead and the other is dying. What, then, does Leiter see replacing these two? There are many lines about this, but my favorite is where he cites Europe as increasing in "rigorous historical scholarship...and Anglophone-style philosophical work." Clearly, of course, this is not to be confined to Europe: this is happening all over the rest of the world. Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted something important about this: it does not suggest any specific content to philosophy, any specific project, but only (once again) a style, and indeed the style we have called "analytic." The future of philosophy is not a position, not any particular thought, but a style.
We need to nail down more specifically what "analytic" philosophy is supposed to be. For an example of this "rigorous historical scholarship," and an example of "analytic" philosophy in general, I use Leiter's own comments on Nietzsche in this essay. At the very beginning of the post he repeats a point made in the earlier Philosophy Bites interview, declaring:
Many postmodernist readers of Nietzsche (like Derrida and in a different way Foucault) misunderstand his views on truth and knowledge, in part because they rely too much on material Nietzsche did not publish, which expresses views it appears he rejected over time.I take Leiter to conceive of the project of historical scholarship in philosophy in the following way. The important thing to do is to identify something like the historical philosopher's considered view on a topic. This view must be re-presentable as a clearly argued, plausible position, or at least as close to this as the philosopher ever came. But this poses a problem: what if the philosopher in question - here, Neitzsche - may have changed his mind?
There are certain situations where we must ascribe different views to the same author. For example, the pre-critical and critical Kant both have considered, precisely argued, and re-presentable views that can be debated and scrutinized, and then accepted, denied, or modified. There is no difficulty here, and both views will be philosophically legitimate. But if Leiter means to say something similar about Nietzsche's views in the Nachlass versus his later, revised views, this (it seems to me) would simply concede some legitimacy to those readers whom he is at pains to show as "misunderstanding" Nietzsche. Misunderstanding means not that they have understood a view that Nietzsche once held, but one that he never held. So now it looks like Leiter means to say that Nietzsche
A) held certain views (those written in his famous notebooks) on truth and knowledge
B) rejected these views over time
C) did not hold those views
This looks like a straightforward contradiction. It cannot be that Nietzsche held that P at one time and also never held that P. Of course, this is a rather uncharitable reading. Well then, is there another possibility?
The most charitable reading seems to me to be this, namely that Leiter believes Nietzsche never held (in a considered way) the views "expressed" in the unpublished notebooks. Rather, what we find there is (for example) an imprecise working-through of ideas, a free play of thought. They are merely bi-products, remainders left behind in the making of Nietzsche's real philosophy, and thus we should not take them seriously. Nietzsche's view is Nietzsche's view. This view is (or can be made to be) rigorous and clear, and the notebooks are not representative of it.
The deluded party-liners and their ilk may simply reply that Nietzsche nevertheless wrote what he wrote. One finds, beyond the umbrellas, ideas that frequently exceed what is present in the published works. By what right does one deny that these, too, are not legitimate views? Leiter has a very good answer to this objection: he says that the illegitimacy of these texts is "the consensus view in the scholarly community."
Why must we not take seriously the unpublished notebooks, and by extension the commentaries written on the basis of those notebooks? Because the scholarly community has decided that this work is not serious. The scholarly community - that is to say, researchers in philosophy legitimized in their own way by various titles, institutional status, etc. - has chosen and delimited which texts and which positions can be officially considered under the name of "Nietzsche scholarship." Or, better put, they have established a hierarchy of such positions (ranging from the very plausible to the completely unacceptable) which any work must fall into and be scrutinized under. The unacceptable is pushed to the margins and ignored. These structures can of course be changed, and one can, for example, make good arguments that perhaps the Nachlass should be more carefully considered. But in the end, the decision as to the legitimacy of any such philosophical work must rely on a positive answer to the question: do the experts find it plausible?
Up until now I've mainly been limiting this exploration to historical research, but it can be easily broadened to any work in the academic field of philosophy. Trying to publish a paper on ethics? Then you'd better make sure you've read and carefully cited all the hot names, formatted your endnotes correctly, and written in the accepted style. Hoping to write a dissertation on Collingwood? Unfortunately, Collingwood was not a serious or important philosopher, so you probably can't. I might cite more examples, but this is probably enough. We are increasingly enmeshing ourselves in a situation where the deciding element of philosophical value is the opinions of professional philosophers. If it pleases the right sort of people - including, presumably, a certain UChicago law professor - then it is legitimate; if not, it falls into the damnable style that we have called "continental/postmodern." All of this strikes me as troubling.
Leiter has often praised the recent compartmentalization of philosophy into specialties. And he has a point: to name one example, we are finally beginning to get a sizable body of decent literature on Spinoza. This pleases me considerably. Even so, there's something questionable about this: is philosophy fundamentally about pleasing the tastes of scholars, each in their own tiny area? Is it about increasingly getting clear on "what Nietzsche/Spinoza/Kant/Frege really meant," or gaining agreement on the "plausible" approaches to metaphysics or ethics or the theory of science? Is it really all a matter of "the consensus view in the scholarly community"? Leiter would like the "party-liners" exiled to the literature departments, yet precisely what he is celebrating is philosophy itself having become a literature department. Serious "analytic" philosophy must be clear, precise, rigorous, scientific, etc., and it is a small cadre of professionals who decides whether a work has met or failed these criteria. "Analytic" philosophy is simply that which is approved by scholars of philosophy in the relevant area.
I may, of course, be accused of overreading Leiter, which is a fair enough point. I like to think he would say that there is of course more to academic philosophy than pleasing the prevailing orthodoxies, and that such orthodoxy is precisely what he is objecting to in the "party line continentalists" (which is a straw man if there ever was one - Leiter can't really believe, e.g., that anyone who takes Derrida seriously is simply a "careless reader and listener"). I like to think he would see a deep problem with any "philosophy" whose worth is gauged in such a way. But I am hard-pressed to find another criterion in his post by which we could say what work is philosophically interesting, aside from "the scholarly consensus says so."
Allow me to seem a bit naive. Perhaps it is not a particular "style" that makes some philosophy worth paying attention to (a personal letter, written in haste with many obscurities, may be more worthwhile than a referee'd journal article). Perhaps it is not the approval of today's scholarly tastes (need I list off the number of great philosophers who were "refuted" and even ridiculed in their own time and afterwards?). No, perhaps the whole question rides on just whether or not a philosophy is true, or at the very least, whether it helps us along the road to truth.
Philosophy is not the study of what is plausible to journal referees. And philosophy is not the study of philosophers and their "positions," but rather of what the philosophers themselves were interested in. Strictly speaking, I do not think we should care whether what is written in Nietzsche's manuscripts is his considered position or not, for we are (strictly speaking) not interested in Nietzsche himself. The rather banal fact is that these writings provoke us; they surprise and astound us; they force us to think anew the matters at hand. They can and do teach us something, whether rejected by Nietzsche or not, whether approved by the scholarly community or not. Even if I disagree with these writings, the fact that they instruct me, force me to respond, and (most importantly) prod me into looking again into the truth of the matter is of sufficient weight. I submit that this is all that is required for good philosophy.
The picture I'm proposing is, of course, considerably messier than a philosophy which is valued according to its approval by a consensus. Perhaps it is even a bit romantic. And yet: I think it is the only real standard. So the question that should fall upon us as philosophers should not be whether we are enlarging our field or satisfying our colleagues. The question that should matter most is "Is what we're saying true?" - and if we cannot fully affirm that, then we must at least be able to answer, "Are we teaching anyone anything?"
(What's rather odd is that if you read them closely, many of the hateful "continentals" and "postmoderns" - several of the ones I study, at least - are actually quite concerned with these questions. They are not unique in this, obviously, but most others of this sort are not much willing to doubt the concept of truth itself even as they chase it. So do these "continentals" subject truth itself to interrogation in spite of a concern with teaching the truth? Or - more paradoxically - do they do so because of it?)
I leave the question for others to consider. All of that out of the way, then, what is there to say about Great Lakes' Glockenspiel?
This thing is a weisenbock, which is not a style I've ever had before. So far as I can tell, a weisenbock is a wheatbeer that does benchpresses - whereas most of the wheats I've had have happily moved about around the 5%-6% alcohol range, this clocks in at a hardy 8%. That's well into high gravity lager territory, which is not the sort of place I expect wheatbeers to be happy at. And I should mention that I've never been a big fan of wheatbeers. That's not to say that I don't like them - when forced to put one down I usually enjoy it. However, when it's been a long day and I just want something to relax with I'm usually happier with a bock or a porter or somesuch - the sort of beer that's like a faithful old couch you just flop into. I need to be in a very special sort of mood to buy a sixer of wheatbeer: the complexity of the malts and the general fruitiness doesn't lend itself quite so well to taking it easy.
Nevertheless I was curious, especially since (as I've mentioned before) the Great Lakes Brewing Company seems constitutively incapable of making a bad beer. So, now lighter by $3.19, I'm ready to give it a try.
A very easy pour produces a slightly murky deep amber beer with a one-finger white head. The scent is very sharp, and actually quite boozy as well (you can definitely gauge the strength of this one by smell alone). Beyond the edge, the most dominant presence is banana nut bread and yeast. It's pleasant, but powerful.
The first sip. Hmm, the texture is lighter than I expected, it's actually pretty smooth. You can tell it's a strong bugger, though - no danger of this stuff sneaking up on you. It's oddly tart on the front end, like a slightly unripe cranberry - not unpleasant, just striking. Beyond that, the beer is very much a "middle-range" puncher (if I can be allowed that expression). There are no real extremes to the taste; think of a Handel oratorio or something. Actually, yes, that's exactly what this beer is, a Handel oratorio. The main flavors are of wheat, berries, banana, and some of the yeast I found in the smell. The aftertaste, as you might expect, is quite fruity (there's the banana nut bread again), but clean and easy to live with.
Once again, you can definitely sense the 8% alcohol in this. After all the stouts, I'd forgotten what it was like to drink a beer that was open about being a little hot. And I can even say that it's a very warming beer - perfect for a chilly autumn night, for instance.
Is it something I'd buy again? Probably not, unless my tastes change dramatically. But it's instructive, and that's what I enjoyed more than anything. This has a very different taste profile from all the stouts I've been quaffing lately - everything I've had in the past month, really. Where the stouts have been bittersweet, this has been fruity, and where they've been thick and creamy this has been boozy (pleasantly so). It's given me a lot to think about, this big cloudy wheatbeer, and that's more than I can say for most of the beer I've had recently. Or most of the approved, credentialed, well-praised articles and books I've recently read, for that matter.
Grade: A-
Summary: A hot but delicious (and surprisingly drinkable) wheatbeer. Pricey, though.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Stout Month Review: Walter Payton's Bourbon Barrel Imperial Stout
I'd like to talk, if you'll indulge me, about a piece of music - namely, Górecki's Third Symphony.
This is one of those pieces we've all fucking heard at some point in some movie or other (e.g., this). Written in 1976, it lingered in obscurity for a decade and a half before Nonesuch released it on CD. To the surprise of everyone, it became wildly popular and is now among the tiny handful of 20th century classical works to go platinum. The most infamous bit is probably the first movement. It's almost stupidly simple in construction: it begins with a slow canon, leads into a folksong-like soprano aria, and then repeats the canon in reverse. This takes about a half-hour. I haven't looked at the score in some years, but as I recall the writing is a minor masterpiece of canonic counterpoint (Ockeghem would have been proud). That's not the important part, though. The important part is that it's all in nice, friendly E-Aolian (i.e. it's all white keys except for an F#), so despite some very thick sonorities it's still something that can be appreciated even by those who somehow find Mahler too dissonant. The other movements are somewhat different but similarly approachable; your grandma will love them.
So it's completely daft, right? Well, not quite. The thing about Górecki is that he didn't start off his career writing sappy music for adoption in Oscar movies. Y'see, Górecki's Polish, and that puts him in the company of some very hard-nosed composers. There's Penderecki and Lutoslawski just for a start. And if granny bought Gorecki's Second Symphony by mistake somehow, she was bound to be horrified: there's weird chords, freaky chromaticism, loud crashing, and generally nasty stuff of all sorts. And this is one of the early Górecki's more mild works. So the question is: why did a composer who wrote music hated by grandmas the world over suddenly come out with the motherfucking Third Symphony?
I have no idea. And it wasn't understood at the time, either (the piece was universally panned at its premiere). The strange thing is that, much like Pärt's breakthrough anti-garde work in the same year (namely, Für Alina), I don't think a piece this simple could have been penned at all if not on the back of decades' worth of writing grandma-hated music. It's as if the mass sonorities of his avant-garde period, thick and jolting enough to knock you on your back, were retained and yet mellowed by being shoved back into a modal scheme. Rather like barrel-aging a very powerful stout, in fact. Anyways, you can be as much of a music snob as you want and it's still it's hard to listen to that canon in the first movement and not be a bit dumbstruck. The way the thing grumbles around in the low strings only to be slowly picked up by the violas and violins - well, it's quite majestic, not to mention beautiful. Honestly, I don't know where this piece came from and sometimes I don't even like it, but I can tell you this: when you hear those first eight notes sounding in the lowest double bass register, there is nothing to be done except Pay Attention.
Which brings me to Walter Payton's Bourbon Barrel Imperial Stout.
I don't know anything whatever about "America's Brewing Company," except that they're in Aurora and apparently hang the Star-Spangled Banner and the Betsy Ross over their brewing facilities. Whoever they are, they don't seem to be big time: this beer came in a nondescript four-pack box with a yellow sticker on it declaring "Bourbon Barrel Imperial Stout." Thankfully the label on the bottle itself is less vague; it's pleasantly old-timey and really rather nicely done. The top says "34." I have no idea what this means.
Onto the beer itself, then. The website declares that this stuff has been aging in a bourbon barrel for 457 days. That's a lot. I've had gold rums that've been in the wood for less time than that. Plus, it's apparently 12% alcohol, which will make it (confession time) the strongest beer I've had to date. It handily beats the previous champion, namely the Axe Head (aka Liquid Shame) that Village Foods sells here in Hyde Park. Needless to say, I'm expecting this one to be Strong. Happily, it's also relatively Cheap - this four pack cost ten bucks, and I expect the remaining bottles to last me at least a couple of years.
So let's give it a pour.
God Jesus, this stuff is dark. I mean, I know it's a stout and all, but this is on a completely different level. It has the color and the viscosity of the oil you'd drain from a 1956 Ford pickup. There's a half-finger's worth of a tan head desperately trying to assert itself, but it's no use: nothing's going to escape from this stuff. It's a black hole, a stout singularity. And the smell! I don't even have to agitate the stuff before getting a good whiff: as I type I've got it sitting on a desk about a yard away, and I can still smell it. The odor is just tons and tons (and tons) of roasted malt, flanked by bourbon. If you put a cup of pure cocoa and a shot of Maker's Mark into a blender and mixed them together, then zapped the result with Incredible Hulk radiation, the smell would be roughly like this. There's not a lot of complexity to it, but who cares?
The taste is... well, it's not what I expected at all. First impression: good lord this is thick. Really, really thick, but with a slight chili tingle to it. Other than that, it's very hard to put one's finger on up-front taste. There's almost nothing beyond the aftermentioned thick creamy texture, the spicy tingle, and a little booziness. It's only after it goes way back that anything else comes out. After the swallow, I get bittersweetness - heavy on the bitter, light on the sweetness - and also (finally) oak and bourbon.
I don't really know what else to say about it. It tastes like this sounds: grungy and crappy and bass-happy, but yummy. It's even nice to drink, albeit not quickly. I wasn't trying too hard, but it took me an hour and a half to finish a single 12oz bottle of this. An hour and a half. Yep, drinking slowly is preferred here. Unless you're superhuman or have a death wish, you're not drinking more than one of these in a night. In fact, split one with a friend if you can.
I love this for the same reason that I would love owning a pet triceratops, namely because both are hopelessly impractical and deeply stupid. And this is, indeed, a stupid beer: after three sips you've found all the surprises it has to give. Bourbon or stout fans in general might find lots to love, but only if they're willing to forgive that simplemindedness. And as much as I adore the sheer daftness of this stuff, I have to admit that there's just too much missing to make it a classic. To show you what I mean, think back again to the Górecki. Imagine that the canon gets going - it builds up through the basses, and then the cellos. And then, when the violas and the violins should enter, they just don't. All the other string players have been locked out of the hall, leaving the low strings to burble and saw away for a half-hour. That wouldn't necessarily be terrible (I love my double basses), but one would no doubt get bored after awhile. It'd be a bit of a letdown, to be honest, and it certainly wouldn't go platinum.
Grade: B+
Summary: The thickest, blackest, bourbonest stout ever. Heavenly for the first sips, but then you have to finish the rest of the bottle.
This is one of those pieces we've all fucking heard at some point in some movie or other (e.g., this). Written in 1976, it lingered in obscurity for a decade and a half before Nonesuch released it on CD. To the surprise of everyone, it became wildly popular and is now among the tiny handful of 20th century classical works to go platinum. The most infamous bit is probably the first movement. It's almost stupidly simple in construction: it begins with a slow canon, leads into a folksong-like soprano aria, and then repeats the canon in reverse. This takes about a half-hour. I haven't looked at the score in some years, but as I recall the writing is a minor masterpiece of canonic counterpoint (Ockeghem would have been proud). That's not the important part, though. The important part is that it's all in nice, friendly E-Aolian (i.e. it's all white keys except for an F#), so despite some very thick sonorities it's still something that can be appreciated even by those who somehow find Mahler too dissonant. The other movements are somewhat different but similarly approachable; your grandma will love them.
So it's completely daft, right? Well, not quite. The thing about Górecki is that he didn't start off his career writing sappy music for adoption in Oscar movies. Y'see, Górecki's Polish, and that puts him in the company of some very hard-nosed composers. There's Penderecki and Lutoslawski just for a start. And if granny bought Gorecki's Second Symphony by mistake somehow, she was bound to be horrified: there's weird chords, freaky chromaticism, loud crashing, and generally nasty stuff of all sorts. And this is one of the early Górecki's more mild works. So the question is: why did a composer who wrote music hated by grandmas the world over suddenly come out with the motherfucking Third Symphony?
I have no idea. And it wasn't understood at the time, either (the piece was universally panned at its premiere). The strange thing is that, much like Pärt's breakthrough anti-garde work in the same year (namely, Für Alina), I don't think a piece this simple could have been penned at all if not on the back of decades' worth of writing grandma-hated music. It's as if the mass sonorities of his avant-garde period, thick and jolting enough to knock you on your back, were retained and yet mellowed by being shoved back into a modal scheme. Rather like barrel-aging a very powerful stout, in fact. Anyways, you can be as much of a music snob as you want and it's still it's hard to listen to that canon in the first movement and not be a bit dumbstruck. The way the thing grumbles around in the low strings only to be slowly picked up by the violas and violins - well, it's quite majestic, not to mention beautiful. Honestly, I don't know where this piece came from and sometimes I don't even like it, but I can tell you this: when you hear those first eight notes sounding in the lowest double bass register, there is nothing to be done except Pay Attention.
Which brings me to Walter Payton's Bourbon Barrel Imperial Stout.
I don't know anything whatever about "America's Brewing Company," except that they're in Aurora and apparently hang the Star-Spangled Banner and the Betsy Ross over their brewing facilities. Whoever they are, they don't seem to be big time: this beer came in a nondescript four-pack box with a yellow sticker on it declaring "Bourbon Barrel Imperial Stout." Thankfully the label on the bottle itself is less vague; it's pleasantly old-timey and really rather nicely done. The top says "34." I have no idea what this means.
Onto the beer itself, then. The website declares that this stuff has been aging in a bourbon barrel for 457 days. That's a lot. I've had gold rums that've been in the wood for less time than that. Plus, it's apparently 12% alcohol, which will make it (confession time) the strongest beer I've had to date. It handily beats the previous champion, namely the Axe Head (aka Liquid Shame) that Village Foods sells here in Hyde Park. Needless to say, I'm expecting this one to be Strong. Happily, it's also relatively Cheap - this four pack cost ten bucks, and I expect the remaining bottles to last me at least a couple of years.
So let's give it a pour.
God Jesus, this stuff is dark. I mean, I know it's a stout and all, but this is on a completely different level. It has the color and the viscosity of the oil you'd drain from a 1956 Ford pickup. There's a half-finger's worth of a tan head desperately trying to assert itself, but it's no use: nothing's going to escape from this stuff. It's a black hole, a stout singularity. And the smell! I don't even have to agitate the stuff before getting a good whiff: as I type I've got it sitting on a desk about a yard away, and I can still smell it. The odor is just tons and tons (and tons) of roasted malt, flanked by bourbon. If you put a cup of pure cocoa and a shot of Maker's Mark into a blender and mixed them together, then zapped the result with Incredible Hulk radiation, the smell would be roughly like this. There's not a lot of complexity to it, but who cares?
The taste is... well, it's not what I expected at all. First impression: good lord this is thick. Really, really thick, but with a slight chili tingle to it. Other than that, it's very hard to put one's finger on up-front taste. There's almost nothing beyond the aftermentioned thick creamy texture, the spicy tingle, and a little booziness. It's only after it goes way back that anything else comes out. After the swallow, I get bittersweetness - heavy on the bitter, light on the sweetness - and also (finally) oak and bourbon.
I don't really know what else to say about it. It tastes like this sounds: grungy and crappy and bass-happy, but yummy. It's even nice to drink, albeit not quickly. I wasn't trying too hard, but it took me an hour and a half to finish a single 12oz bottle of this. An hour and a half. Yep, drinking slowly is preferred here. Unless you're superhuman or have a death wish, you're not drinking more than one of these in a night. In fact, split one with a friend if you can.
I love this for the same reason that I would love owning a pet triceratops, namely because both are hopelessly impractical and deeply stupid. And this is, indeed, a stupid beer: after three sips you've found all the surprises it has to give. Bourbon or stout fans in general might find lots to love, but only if they're willing to forgive that simplemindedness. And as much as I adore the sheer daftness of this stuff, I have to admit that there's just too much missing to make it a classic. To show you what I mean, think back again to the Górecki. Imagine that the canon gets going - it builds up through the basses, and then the cellos. And then, when the violas and the violins should enter, they just don't. All the other string players have been locked out of the hall, leaving the low strings to burble and saw away for a half-hour. That wouldn't necessarily be terrible (I love my double basses), but one would no doubt get bored after awhile. It'd be a bit of a letdown, to be honest, and it certainly wouldn't go platinum.
Grade: B+
Summary: The thickest, blackest, bourbonest stout ever. Heavenly for the first sips, but then you have to finish the rest of the bottle.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
The Gran(d)-Off: Grand Marnier vs. Gran Gala vs. Gran Torres vs. Harlequin vs. La Belle Orange vs. Tuaca
I love knock-offs. As a member of the Napster generation I find in myself no real passion for intellectual property rights, and this carries through in my long-time love of cynical copies of established products. I cannot in good conscience spend money on licensed cereal when Frosted Mini-Spooners are to be found just down the aisle; I'm convinced that, if my dystopian future-city is being destroyed by crime, Robert Cop 3 will do just fine in protecting it (and on a budget, at that); and, if I were to ever direct a B-rate action movie, I'd immediately cast Treat Motherfucking Williams. It's just a weird aesthetic thing I have.
Then again, the reason why most people ever buy knock-offs is because it's cheaper. This is a reasonable point: after all, those of us in the Napster generation will also be paying off college debt well into our sixties, so we have to cut corners somewhere.
And yet, for some reason, for the most part we don't buy knock-offs. We ignore generic Acetaminophen (usually with an appealingly bland name, like Nice Value) and buy Tylenol. We snub the Hyundai Genesis and buy a Lexus GS or an E-class. We skip the Naxos recording of the Mahler 8 and buy the one off Sony Classical. Why?
Surely not because the original is better. Sometimes it is, of course, but not enough to explain the tendency.
Nor do I think it's about conspicuous consumption. To be sure, there's something inescapably petit-bourgeois - or worse, cultish - about buying something entirely for the prestige of the brand, and those who'll shell out for German cars or for whatever happens to have "Apple" stamped on it should be called on their shit. But while this explanation makes sense for cars and clothes and accessories (and to a certain extent a laptop or a mp3 player is an accessory), it doesn't make much sense for (say) root beer. We buy A&W, not Shasta, and not because we want to impress our friends.
In the end, I think we tend to buy "originals" because we often don't know any better - or, more to the point, we think we don't. Stuck in a store, trying to decide between two sorts of instant pancake mix, I buy the one I've heard of. Why? Because, while the other one may work just fine, I can't be sure about it. And so I will go on kicking an extra dollar or so to the bigger brand each time, not because it's necessarily better but because I don't want to take a chance on something that I don't consider under my ken. This state of affairs will continue until something changes.
So what changes? How does the change happen? A friend who's tried the cheaper pancake mix talks to me about it; I see it reviewed with approval online, or in a consumer magazine; in investigating, I find that both mixes share a supplier and are substantially the same thing. Let us call this kind of thing an doxic event. A doxic event is an equalization of my knowledge, or (more importantly) an equalization of the perception of my knowledge. I may (strictly speaking) have still had no real experience of the thing, but I gain a sense of familiarity with it regardess. I feel safe buying it. In any case, with both boxes of mix operating on more or less the same level, I am far freer to choose for the other option. And the internet, it seems to me, has a very special power to produce doxic events - it does so, for example, through reviews like this one.
But that's enough philosophy for one review. Assuming a kind of doxic equality among brands and excepting special circumstances and my own bizarre aesthetics, I would say this. When the real thing is substantially better, then it's worth buying. On the other hand, if a cheaper copy works just as well - and especially if it's better - well, why wouldn't you buy the knock off and pocket the extra green? Put it towards those student loans, why don't you.
And that leads me nicely to the topic of brandy-based orange liqueurs and the Gran(d)s.
Grand Marnier's been one of the granddaddies of orangey booze goodness for a long damn time. If you ever make yourself, for example, a high-class margarita, the liqueur that goes into it is probably either Marnier or Cointreau. Cointreau is something like curacao on meth (I like it a lot, but it's not really comparable to anything in this test). Grand Marnier, in contrast, is XO cognac infused with "the essence of wild tropical oranges," dialing back its rival's zest and brimstone assault in favor of something a little more sippable. The standard opinion on these two seems to go: you buy Cointreau to have a saber of firey orange and sugar to cut through your drinks, but you buy Marnier if you also regularly like to sip your liqueurs unmixed. For the latter's style, in general, is the perfect exclamation point to a fine night - many have been warmed for their walks home with a shot of Marnier over rocks.
Now, that sounds great, and it is. But here's the problem: Grand Marnier is a Brand, and that means a bottle will run you well over three Hamiltons. At that price point you're deep into single malt scotch territory, which is not a good place for a liqueur to be. And not just that: $33 is two bottles of Sailor Jerry's, three bottles of Sobieski, four six-packs of a good oktoberfest. All of which is a hell of an opportunity cost. People will continue to buy it, of course - it's a Brand, after all. But the price raises the question, Is it worth it?
Enter today's knock-offs, Grans Gala and Torres. Both these guys cost about $20, and you've probably seen them lurking on the shelf just below Marnier - the Carolans to its Bailey's, the Kamoras to its Kahlua. Heck, maybe you've even been tempted to buy one. Probably, though, you didn't, on the grounds that Marnier was a known quantity and the interlopers looked sketchy. Nevertheless, there they remain, waiting for the adventures of someone curious or poor enough.
So what are Gran Gala and Gran Torres, anyways? Well, they're not French, for one thing: Gala is Italian and made by Stock (yes, the vermouth guys), while Torres is Spanish and made by a company with possibly the most broken website in the entire world. Gran Gala's bottle is a shameless rip-off of Marnier's ribbon-and-seal look, while that of the Gran Torres (or just "Torres" here) is much more generic - just a green glass bottle with ORANGE in huge cursive letters on the front. Gala makes no claims to being anything but "Italy's answer to Grand Marnier," "a blend of VSOP brandy infused with the choicest oranges from around the world" (I particularly like the word "choicest" there). I like Gran Gala's attitude: it knows it's a knock-off, and doesn't pretend to a long proud tradition behind it. Torres, in contrast... well... "In Spain, in the 19th century, Jaime Torres recovered a secret recipe for an ancestral liqueur that had reached the Antilles islands during Columbus' travels." C-O-L-U-M-B-U-S!!! Now THAT is a tradition. Nya nya, Grand Marnier, we were making our orange booze while you guys were still under the Ancien Régime. Anyways, it also claims a whole hodgepodge of ingredients that's too long to list here, but which sound absolutely delicious.
I've now poured my rocks glasses with the three liqueurs. Gran Torres is the lightest of the three in color, a very gentle gold, while the Marnier is a few shades down the line. The Gran Gala is WAY darker, bordering on a rusty red. If you handed it to me and said it was whiskey I'd probably believe you, if it weren't for the smell. And good LORD, the smells of these things. Taking a closer whiff, Grand Marnier smells like - well, like orange juice cognac, really. There's a slight edge from the alcohol, of course, but overall it scents the smoothest of the three. Gran Gala smells like a tangerine on fire. It's harsher than a birthday breakup, although it's not necessarily unpleasant. The Torres, in contrast to the other two, doesn't smell like pulp so much as zest, mixed with some indeterminite other scents. Is that cinnamon back there, maybe some mint? Whatever it is, it's very nice indeed, despite being nearly as firey as the Gala.
Okay, down the hatch.
First, the Marnier. Sweet, and more sweet. It's more complex than its scent would let on, but not by much. After a touch of cognac cloves on the front end, it's just sugary orange for a long, long time. Way too much sweetness for my taste (and I'm a sweet tooth if there ever was one), although I can't quite call it cloying. It's as if someone dropped a packet of sweet n low in my bottle before they shipped the thing. At the very end I get a hint of a burn, followed by just a touch of orange acid. Generally though, Marnier is not the bottle for people who dig some sour in their orange liqueur: this stuff is comfort food, it's candy. It strikes me as the sort of thing that most of the 20-something office girls I have known would absolutely swear by. It's quite smooth for an 80-proof quasi-cognac too - something I chalk up to the age of the stuff - but in my case even this works against it. The age of the cognac base keeps the stuff from being too hot, but as a result it ends up something much worse: it's boring. Sweet, smooth, easy to drink, and probably pretty good in the right cocktail, but there's just no sparkle.
Next, the Gran Gala. Wow, today's show is brought to you by the letter HEAT and the number FIRE. It's not exactly Wild Turkey 101, but as a child of bourbon I feel very much at home here. There's definitely more going on in the Gala than in the Marnier, for better or worse. It's still quite sweet, but a lot of it's been dialed back in favor of an almost lemony sourness. Towards the end a strange, almost chemical astringency pops in - I'm not sure what it is or whether I like it, but it's interesting. This demonic citrus taste holds on for awhile, is momentarily overcome by the alcohol explosion, reasserts itself, then fades off into a very pleasant sweet and sour orange aftertaste. Well, this is exactly the kind of orange liqueur I would have expected from the country that brought us the Lamborghini Countach. My office girl friends, I'm afraid, are not going to like this one. No, they're going to run for the hills the moment they see it coming 'round the corner, its gigantic mediterranian testes swinging about in the wind. Their loss. For drinking neat I think I slightly prefer this over the Marnier, but I could see a reasonable person going the other direction: it's a question of sugary elegance versus stomping-mad passion, Faure versus Verdi.
Finally, the Gran Torres. Holy lord, I love this stuff. There's way more initial spice on the front end than the other two (which don't give you much of anything before the sweetness bites). It tingles all the way down, in fact, which I'm chalking up to its mad ingredients list. The star player here is orange zest, as the smell suggested, but unlike the other two's close focus on sweet or sour orange pulp there's a heck of a lot more going on here. Cinnamon again, cardamom, black pepper, mint leaves... I could go on. There's just a flurry of flavors in this thing. The sugar's even more subdued than in the Gala, which (for me) makes it easier to take. At the end there's a lot of heat, almost as much as the Gala, while the rest of the flavors and the general tingliness hang on until the next sip. Man, what a hyperactive drink. As far as drinking neat goes, the Gran Torres beats the other two hands down. It's like rereading a really great novel: I'm finding new things with every mouthful, whereas the Marnier and the Gala are out of ideas around sip two or three. On the other hand, with the flavors this diffuse I worry about how it'd come out in a cocktail. The Torres' mystery and subtlety, as well as it plays in a snifter, might simply be muffled if all one needs is a cosmopolitan for a cute date.
Speaking of mixing, I suppose I should probably try these things out in some drinks; they may be relatively high class, but they're liqueurs after all. Time for me to break out the lemons and tequila, then.
Now, he margaritas I'll be mixing are going to be stronger on the liqueur than I typically make them. Normally I use about a 8:3:2 ratio of tequila to orange liqueur and lemon juce, but here I'm using 3:2:1 (i.e. about 33% liqueur); the hope is that this will allow the stuff to come to the forefront a bit more. I'll be drinking the 'ritas in the same order as before: Marnier, Gala, and finally Torres. For the record, I'm expecting that first two will be very different but about equally good, and that the Torres will fall a bit flat.
And here we go.
With the Margamarnier I was looking forward to a fairly sweet drink, with the Marnier's sugar being balanced off against the lemon. It ended up being unlike anything I was expecting. Most of the Marnier's presence is in the smell, which remains dominated by the sugary tropical oranges I scented before. When mixed, though, the sweetness of the stuff just doesn't come through as I was expecting; there's a little bit of sweet orange right up front and starting to move back, but the rest of the taste is dominated by the lemon juice (and at 1/6 of the mix, there's not even that much lemon in this!). I wasn't looking for the assertiveness of a Cointreau here, but I was expecting the Grand Marnier to show its character far more than this. Disappointing.
After the Margamarnier I was ready for anything, but the Margalarita is pretty much exactly how you'd expect it to be - with the exception of the smell. The tangerines I'd scented out before have completely disappeared, in favor of a kind of bland margarita odor. Actually drinking the stuff, though, things improve by a lot. Unlike with the Margamarnier, the Gala is very present in this. It's very, very sweet, for one thing. This really comes off as the sweetest of the three drinks by a decent margin, and I suspect it'd be worryingly easy to down about a dozen of these in a sitting. Even better, now that it's in a drink that strange astringency I tasted before starts to make sense. It breaks out of the general sugar-and-lemon taste like a clarion call, and adds a nice little extra thrill to the mix. On the whole, this is a damn good (not spectacular) margarita. If only I could do something about that smell...
Finally, there's the Margatorres. The smell is - well, it's basically Gran Torres and margarita. Which isn't the greatest scent in the world, but it still comes off better than the Margalarita. Drinking it, my first impression is how well the orange peel taste harmonizes with the lemon. The varieties of sourness are the stars of the show here. This thing isn't quite as sweet as the Margalarita, but drinkability-wise it'd still be very easy to make a night of it. On the downside: though the orange peel taste is great, the liqueur loses quite a bit of its style in its move to a mixer - just as I feared. None of the really subtle stuff that I was picking up before shows up in the Margatorres, and that's a damn shame. Overall, there's way less to separate these three in a mix than in the sipping contest. I think the Gran Gala produces the best margarita of the bunch, despite its sucky nose, but to be honest I'm not bowled over with the performance of any of these guys.
So, this concludes the drinking I'll be doing tonight. Let me first repeat the question from before. Grand Marnier - is it worth it? Answer: well, no, not really. For those who prefer their liqueurs smoother and sweeter, with price being no object, it's surely the way to go. But me, I just couldn't force myself to get excited about it: both in a rocks glass and in a margarita, it's underwhelming. On the other hand, in the nights that I've had these three when I've downed a beer or two and I've just wanted an ounce of something pleasant to cash me out for the night, I've found myself going for the Marnier almost as often as the Torres. It's simply better at that palatte-cleansing task than the Gran Gala. And though the bourbonhead in me doesn't want to admit it, in the end this makes it a better sipper than the Italian stallion. And heck, I'll give it this as well: it has by far the best bottle design.
So the original isn't demonstrably superior, and that means the cheaper knock-offs win it. They are, happily, just as good or better. The Gran Gala wins the mixing contest by a nose, while the Gran Torres is by far the most exciting to sip neat. So, how do you choose between the knock-offs, then? Well, if you're only going to be mating this stuff with tequila, then... actually, you should just buy some Cointreau, really. But Gran Gala is the best of the choices here, if that's your thing. Otherwise, for God's sake buy the Gran Torres. It's not bad in a mix, and it'll take me years to sort through all the favors of the stuff.
And with that I wrap up. The conquistador is the surprise winner here, and not by a small margin. If only all knock-offs were this good, we'd have no need for originals.
Grand Marnier
Grade: B+
Summary: A sweet, very smooth, but overpriced and ultimately somewhat dull brandy-based orange liqueur.
Gran Gala
Grade: B+
Summary: More sour and much more firey than the Marnier, this liqueur is the (relative) best of the three for mixing.
Gran Torres
Grade: A
Summary: Also a good mixer, but far more interesting sipped neat. Holds more secrets than J. Edgar Hoover.
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ADDENDUM, Jan. 18 2010:
So it's now about two months after my initial Gran(d)-Off comparison of various brandy-based orange liqueurs. I concluded that Grand Marnier was the smoothest, Gran Gala was (by a nose) the best for mixing, and Torres was the most interesting for sipping and the best booze all-round. I was never fully satisfied with the results, though, for two reasons. First, those three bottles by no means exhausted the sheer mass of the liqueurs of this sort on the market. The main impetus to go back to this comparison and add some more shit was discovering two (2) new bottles - Harlequin and La Belle Orange - during my trip east for the holidays, and also buying a fifth of Tuaca in a moment of weakness. I now have six bottles of this stuff to work through (pity me); more importantly, it means I may have to reassess the standings from before. Second, I was less than satisfied with my choice of cocktail from the last time, namely, the margarita. I have since discovered, through some experimentation, that this is just not a good drink for investigating these liqueurs. A typical margarita needs something direct, highly orangey, and very sweet - it needs triple sec, in other words, not something that gives away brute strength for brandy subtlety. As far as classic cocktails go, sidecars tend to work much, much better with these liqueurs, so that's what I'm using this time around.
So, this addendum will do two things. First, I'd like to sip these three new bottles and see how they compare to the earlier ones. Second, I want to retest all the liquors' mixing potential in a simple bourbon sidecar. Everything gets a new grade at the end, and we come one step closer to knowing where we stand when it comes to orange-infused brandies.
If any one of these liquors is going to get you accused of being a horrible cheapskate, it's Harlequin. It screams "IMPORTED FROM FRANCE" just about everywhere, but looking at the label from a distance you'd think it was a $10 fifth of bottom-shelf whiskey. From the goofy jester design to the fake wax seal, it just looks kind of sad. No mention at all of who actually makes this stuff, but it's imported by something called "Premium Imports Ltd." Ringing any bells? No? How about the fact that PI is located in Bardstown, Kentucky?? You know about Bardstown, don't you? ...It's the place where certain a famous and rather huge distillery is housed?? Yup: the bunch selling Harlequin can be none other than our pals at Heaven Hill. They claim that it's "produced in France from a rich blend of the finest aged cognac and Mediterranean oranges renowned for their distinctive flavor" - and this is literally the only information I can find on the stuff. I can only presume it's sold to HH by the Illuminati or something.
La Belle Orange is also fairly obscure, albeit far less so than the Harlequin. This time it's imported by White Rock in Lewiston, Maine, which sells quite a lot of things I've never seen nor heard of. Still no telling who in France ultimately makes LBO, but at least the importers actually bothered to put up a section on their website for it this time. The bottle design itself is, overall, probably my favorite of all the liqueurs save the (much more expensive) Grand Marnier. LBO doesn't bother with a fake wax seal or a ribbon (unlike Gran Gala or Harlequin), but it's more appealing than the similarly humble Torres: just a big orange LB badge and a label on nice paper. On the other hand, it's the only thing here with a screw-off top, but I can't hold that against it too much. La Belle Orange claims to be a "marriage of sun ripened oranges and the finest cognac," and a "harmonious blend" of "rich fruity aromas and elegant cognac flavors." Hmm. Well, we shall see.
Tuaca is the odd duck here, especially among these two. Where they're more or less French attempts at a cheaper Grand Marnier, this (like the Gran Gala) is Italian. Second, at 35% ABV, it's significantly less strong than the other 80-proof bruisers I've got here. Third, and most importantly, it's not just orange we're dealing with this time. Rather, Tuaca is a brandy "artfully blended with hints of vanilla and orange flavors." The addition of vanilla already promises to make this more bizarre than my previous favorite, the Gran Torres, so I've got high hopes for this stuff. Also like the Torres, it claims to date back an absurd amount of time - like, 16th century absurd. Wikipedia, which is always right, claims that Lorenzo de Medici quaffed this stuff. That's pretty cool, and will (if nothing else) make a fine story for parties. Anyways, the bottle itself is classy but rather uneventful; it just looks like a generic brandy or something.
All right, enough cockteasing: I've now poured all three liqueurs into individual glasses for comparison, along with (smaller) samples of the original three liqueurs. First, there's the colors. Of the newcomers, Harlequin is definitely the lightest of the bunch, roughly on a par with Torres; both are a kind of gentle champagne color. The LBO is darker still, perhaps just a touch darker than the Grand Marnier. The real champion here, though, is the Tuaca, which is a thick rich gold even darker than the Gran Gala from last time.
Then there's the aromas. The most notable thing about Harlequin's smell is that it's a dead ringer for Grand Marnier. If you really try you can detect some subtle differences - the Harlequin comes across as slightly rougher, slightly hotter - but if I didn't have these two side by side I'd be completely fooled. Harlequin pulls off the cognac orange juice aroma thing almost perfectly; think of it, then, as Grand Marnier in a dirty t-shirt. La Belle Orange, again, smells most like the Marnier. It's not quite as good a copy as the Harlequin, but I think I might actually prefer it over both. If anything, though, it comes off as even sweeter and smoother, and maybe even a little lighter; you can think of it, then, as Grand Marnier in a schoolgirl uniform. The Tuaca, as expected, is totally unlike all of these other liqueurs. The aroma is - I don't know if I love it or hate it, to be honest. It's unique, to say the least. The nose is extremely rum-like; there's no hints of brandy in here at all, just a lot of wood, cola, maybe some orange at the edges, and above all, vanilla. And, despite the (relatively) low proof, this actually comes across as hotter than the others as well, about on par with the Gran Gala's heat. It's odd.
Now, though, we get into the stuff that matters: the tasting. Down the hatch. (Again.)
The Harlequin, true to its aroma, once again comes off as a cheaper, rougher twin brother to the Marnier. There's some sweet-and-sourness right up front, which then evolves into a very sweet (but hot) orange flavor that, well, doesn't really change. I get another splash of heat at the swallow, but that's really the most interesting thing it does. Like the Marnier, it's slightly cloying. Actually, it's just like the Marnier in almost all things, just less well-sorted about it. If GM were an XO version of a brandy, I would take Harlequin to be the VS. It's rougher, and it's weaker. Now, it's not bad - especially at $18 - but a copy is all it is, and a copy that's slightly worse than the original at everything.
Wow. If I thought Grand Marnier was sweet, La Belle is off the fucking charts. This stuff is really sweet: it's as if they took the sweet n low taste of Marnier and turned it up to eleven. It's so sweet, in fact, that I find it genuinely difficult to drink neat; I feel like it's going to throw me into a seizure or something. Right up front there's a familiar clovey bite, which then evolves into what can only be described as Mega-Marnier. It's sweet orange squared. It gets a little sour at the swallow, but that's the only real relief one gets. Not only that, but it's smoother and there's even less of a burn. Everything I liked (and hated) about Marnier is here, severely amplified. Sipped neat it's like being tackled by a linebacker smothered in sugar. That isn't to say it's bad - it isn't. But next time it's getting a few drops of water.
The Tuaca tastes more conventional (in many ways) than I was expecting from its aroma. It has a very minimal, very toned back orange taste remotely reminiscent of the Gran Gala, but then over that there's a strong current of vanilla. From the initial moments all the way up until the conclusion of the flavor development, it really does come across as a spiced rum of some kind. Only at the end do the flavors separate themselves, so you can tell it's a Marnieresque liqueur with a lot of vanilla rather than some kind of especially vanilla-y Sailor Jerry's. There's a little bit of a burn going down, but nothing like what I got from the nose. Here's the weird thing, though: the vanilla flavor makes it pretty heavy, but Tuaca's actually pretty pleasant to sip on its own (moreso than the other two newbies, anyways). I can't down it with anywhere near the speed of Torres, say - it's more of a savor-a-half-ounce-over-twenty-minutes kind of drink - but it definitely has an appeal. I have absolutely no clue how this'll do in a sidecar, but it definitely strikes me as something that mixing geeks would enjoy playing with.
Speaking of sidecars, I guess it's time to see what's what in the mixing realm. To repeat, I'll be making bourbon sidecars. I'll be using a a bourbon to liqueur to lemon juice ratio of 2:2:1 - that should be leaning towards the sweet side for a sidecar, but frankly I want some sweetness to shine through here. For this test I'll be using my go-to budget bourbon, the lovely (if somewhat rowdy) Evan Williams 1783, which I've been using to make sours as of late. The newbies go first, starting with the Harlequin.
Despite the already-low amount of lemon juice, the Harlecar comes out on the sour side of things. So far as I can tell, the Harlequin just folds: aside from a rather dull sweetness, it doesn't assert itself at all here. The sugar is there for the beginning of the sip and most of the middle, but by the end it goes very sour indeed. No real orange flavors are detectable, either. I found this sidecar rather lame, though it's by no means something I would turn down. All the liqueur is doing is providing a sweetener, and there are other things that do that job much better.
The Bellecar is next, and I was expecting the LBO to just give me another toothache with its sweetness. Instead this sugar-happy little liqueur surprises me: it's sweeter than the Harlequin, yes, but along with the sweetness comes a much more pronounced orange flavor and an unexpected amount of nuance. There's a kind of lemon candy opening to it, and then the orange juice tang cuts in at the end to deliver a very novel, almost bitter (but still sweet) blood orange twist. It's extremely nice, and I prefer this Bellecar to the Harlecar by leagues. Some will probably find it too sweet for a sidecar - I'm tempted to add more lemon to this next time I make it, and there will be a next time - but even with this version I find it delicious and refreshing.
And third comes the Tuacar, which is the real dice roll. Will it work? Will it be horrible? Well, it smells pretty awful. There's just a confusion of all sorts of flavors: first there's the vanilla and a bit of oak from the bourbon, and then a lot of lemon. Lemon and vanilla, just to tell you, are not good pals aroma-wise. In terms of taste, it's much the same story. The relatively subtle flavors of the Tuaca are completely covered over here, leaving only a messy and nearly-unrelieved lemon rush. Only in the aftertaste, when I start to breathe out vanilla, do I recall that I've actually been drinking a fairly nifty liqueur. As a drink, then, the Tuacar is a failure. It's the clear loser among these three, although this is reall an unfair test - a sidecar is just not the right drink for this stuff. I have some ideas about what would be, but that lies outside the scope of this test. (Since it's very rumlike, for example, could one use it like a rum? How about mixing it with cola?)
Now then, on to mixing the three from the previous test. The Marnicar is a really pleasant surprise, considering Marnier's rather lackluster showing last time. The first thing I notice is a really lovely aroma which is rather difficult to describe. Brandy suspended in a cloud of orange pulp, maybe. In terms of sweetness, it fits nicely in-between the Bellecar and the Harlecar - maybe leaning a little more on the side of the latter's subtlety. Sweetened lemonade is the first impression, but as it moves back the orange pulp starts to poke itself through so that by the swallow it's totally dominating the other flavors. It doesn't quite have the sharp fruity jab at the end like the Bellecar, but in exchange it's a little more laid back and balanced. I think I slightly - slightly - prefer the Bellecar, but which one I would choose would really depend on my mood. In any case, the Marnicar is a fine damn drink. It's reserved without being boring, it does a fine job whetting the appetite without being overly tart - it's the perfect apéritif.
Oh crap, it's the Galacar. Honestly, the more I've quaffed the Gran Gala, the less I've liked the stuff. When I initially started doing the taste test way back in November, I actually preferred its sour firey Italian personality over the rather boring Marnier. But, like hanging with a really rowdy friend, the charm ran out after awhile. Truth be told, Gala's just too damn harsh to enjoy on its own. On the other hand, it does still shine as a mixer, and it makes a fine showing here. The sour-orange-on-fire aroma is here right from the start, right out front, and that's not something I much care for. What I do like, on the other hand, is the taste. The lemon might as well not even be here - it's totally overpowered by the Gala, which immediately pushes its way to the front with (happily subdued) tangy orange tastes. It's surprisingly sweet, too, almost up there with the Bellecar, but the Galacar's finish is much more sour than the Bellecar's bittersweet blood orange. Again, it's tough to say which is best: factor in the aroma and I'd give it to the Belle by a nose, but for pure taste I honestly think that Gala might produce the best drink here.
Finally there's the Torrecar. It is, as I was expecting, a letdown. The aroma is wonderful, of course - it's got all the deep orange zestiness that I love about the stuff - but the taste just doesn't bear it out. Torres, as a sippin' liqueur, is all about little nuances and subtleties. Forced to provide the sweetener role in a classic cocktail, though - well, it does the job, but it loses everything that makes it special. All I get up front, again, is sweet lemon, which blossoms out slightly as it moves back but doesn't really do much. In a lot of ways this comes across like a better smelling, slightly sweeter, slightly tastier version of the Harlequin, and that's not quite good enough in this company. I love Torres with a burning passion, but none of what I like about it is here in this drink. Frankly, the Torrecar is a waste of the stuff.
And that's it - six liqueurs, six cocktails, and we're done. So, which is the best?
Well, as before, I think it finally depends on what you're using it for. The Gran Gala, if you can ignore the force of its aroma, remains the best mixer, followed by La Belle Orange and (maybe) the Grand Marnier. The Torres may be a mediocre mixer, but for my money it destroys everything else for sheer sipping joy (the bizarre Tuaca comes in at a very distant second). LBO and the Marnier are probably the best all-rounders. And Tuaca, well, that's something for the cocktail scientists among us. And, while we may not have a clear winner, we at least have a clear loser in the Harlequin. Harlequin isn't horrible, it's just weak and comparatively rough, and there's very little it does that the others can't do better. Its only significant plus is that it mimics the classic Grand Marnier flavor and aroma better than anything else here. If you're a cheapskate, you could presumably use it to fake out your foodie friends.
And that leads the final point to be made: Grand Marnier is pretty good, but it's fuckin' expensive. Even the Harlequin, as weak as it is, is (I think) a better value for the money than Grand Marnier. And if that's the case even for the worst stuff here, it's doubly true for everything else. So, then, let the conclusions stand thusly: Harlequin is the clear loser, Grand Marnier is overpriced, and for everything else, go by your own needs and preferences.
Grand Marnier
Grade: A-
Summary: Smooth, sweet. It's good stuff, neither too strong nor too laid back, and it's relaxing to sip (if a little one-dimensional). And it works well in a drink, used properly. But at $32 a pop, it isn't really worth it.
Gran Gala
Grade: B+
Summary: Vile but interesting. The aroma's way too pungent and it's hard to sip neat, but it mixes like a champ.
Gran Torres
Grade: A
Summary: Smells and sips the best of anything here. Incredibly nuanced stuff on its own. But if it's a mixer you want, well, subtlety isn't really the way to go.
Harlequin
Grade: B-
Summary: It's a cheap knockoff of Grand Marnier. Period. Pour it into an old GM bottle and pretend not to be the shallow cheapskate that you are. I won't tell if you don't.
La Belle Orange
Grade: A-
Summary: Grand Marnier Xtreme. Even smoother and sweeter, and that can be good or bad depending on taste. It does cost about 40% less, though, and that's a lot.
Tuaca
Grade: B
Summary: Odd, vanilla-y orange liqueur. Nice enough for sipping neat (slowly), but I suspect its real brilliance lies in finding the right cocktails for it.
Then again, the reason why most people ever buy knock-offs is because it's cheaper. This is a reasonable point: after all, those of us in the Napster generation will also be paying off college debt well into our sixties, so we have to cut corners somewhere.
And yet, for some reason, for the most part we don't buy knock-offs. We ignore generic Acetaminophen (usually with an appealingly bland name, like Nice Value) and buy Tylenol. We snub the Hyundai Genesis and buy a Lexus GS or an E-class. We skip the Naxos recording of the Mahler 8 and buy the one off Sony Classical. Why?
Surely not because the original is better. Sometimes it is, of course, but not enough to explain the tendency.
Nor do I think it's about conspicuous consumption. To be sure, there's something inescapably petit-bourgeois - or worse, cultish - about buying something entirely for the prestige of the brand, and those who'll shell out for German cars or for whatever happens to have "Apple" stamped on it should be called on their shit. But while this explanation makes sense for cars and clothes and accessories (and to a certain extent a laptop or a mp3 player is an accessory), it doesn't make much sense for (say) root beer. We buy A&W, not Shasta, and not because we want to impress our friends.
In the end, I think we tend to buy "originals" because we often don't know any better - or, more to the point, we think we don't. Stuck in a store, trying to decide between two sorts of instant pancake mix, I buy the one I've heard of. Why? Because, while the other one may work just fine, I can't be sure about it. And so I will go on kicking an extra dollar or so to the bigger brand each time, not because it's necessarily better but because I don't want to take a chance on something that I don't consider under my ken. This state of affairs will continue until something changes.
So what changes? How does the change happen? A friend who's tried the cheaper pancake mix talks to me about it; I see it reviewed with approval online, or in a consumer magazine; in investigating, I find that both mixes share a supplier and are substantially the same thing. Let us call this kind of thing an doxic event. A doxic event is an equalization of my knowledge, or (more importantly) an equalization of the perception of my knowledge. I may (strictly speaking) have still had no real experience of the thing, but I gain a sense of familiarity with it regardess. I feel safe buying it. In any case, with both boxes of mix operating on more or less the same level, I am far freer to choose for the other option. And the internet, it seems to me, has a very special power to produce doxic events - it does so, for example, through reviews like this one.
But that's enough philosophy for one review. Assuming a kind of doxic equality among brands and excepting special circumstances and my own bizarre aesthetics, I would say this. When the real thing is substantially better, then it's worth buying. On the other hand, if a cheaper copy works just as well - and especially if it's better - well, why wouldn't you buy the knock off and pocket the extra green? Put it towards those student loans, why don't you.
And that leads me nicely to the topic of brandy-based orange liqueurs and the Gran(d)s.
Grand Marnier's been one of the granddaddies of orangey booze goodness for a long damn time. If you ever make yourself, for example, a high-class margarita, the liqueur that goes into it is probably either Marnier or Cointreau. Cointreau is something like curacao on meth (I like it a lot, but it's not really comparable to anything in this test). Grand Marnier, in contrast, is XO cognac infused with "the essence of wild tropical oranges," dialing back its rival's zest and brimstone assault in favor of something a little more sippable. The standard opinion on these two seems to go: you buy Cointreau to have a saber of firey orange and sugar to cut through your drinks, but you buy Marnier if you also regularly like to sip your liqueurs unmixed. For the latter's style, in general, is the perfect exclamation point to a fine night - many have been warmed for their walks home with a shot of Marnier over rocks.
Now, that sounds great, and it is. But here's the problem: Grand Marnier is a Brand, and that means a bottle will run you well over three Hamiltons. At that price point you're deep into single malt scotch territory, which is not a good place for a liqueur to be. And not just that: $33 is two bottles of Sailor Jerry's, three bottles of Sobieski, four six-packs of a good oktoberfest. All of which is a hell of an opportunity cost. People will continue to buy it, of course - it's a Brand, after all. But the price raises the question, Is it worth it?
Enter today's knock-offs, Grans Gala and Torres. Both these guys cost about $20, and you've probably seen them lurking on the shelf just below Marnier - the Carolans to its Bailey's, the Kamoras to its Kahlua. Heck, maybe you've even been tempted to buy one. Probably, though, you didn't, on the grounds that Marnier was a known quantity and the interlopers looked sketchy. Nevertheless, there they remain, waiting for the adventures of someone curious or poor enough.
So what are Gran Gala and Gran Torres, anyways? Well, they're not French, for one thing: Gala is Italian and made by Stock (yes, the vermouth guys), while Torres is Spanish and made by a company with possibly the most broken website in the entire world. Gran Gala's bottle is a shameless rip-off of Marnier's ribbon-and-seal look, while that of the Gran Torres (or just "Torres" here) is much more generic - just a green glass bottle with ORANGE in huge cursive letters on the front. Gala makes no claims to being anything but "Italy's answer to Grand Marnier," "a blend of VSOP brandy infused with the choicest oranges from around the world" (I particularly like the word "choicest" there). I like Gran Gala's attitude: it knows it's a knock-off, and doesn't pretend to a long proud tradition behind it. Torres, in contrast... well... "In Spain, in the 19th century, Jaime Torres recovered a secret recipe for an ancestral liqueur that had reached the Antilles islands during Columbus' travels." C-O-L-U-M-B-U-S!!! Now THAT is a tradition. Nya nya, Grand Marnier, we were making our orange booze while you guys were still under the Ancien Régime. Anyways, it also claims a whole hodgepodge of ingredients that's too long to list here, but which sound absolutely delicious.
I've now poured my rocks glasses with the three liqueurs. Gran Torres is the lightest of the three in color, a very gentle gold, while the Marnier is a few shades down the line. The Gran Gala is WAY darker, bordering on a rusty red. If you handed it to me and said it was whiskey I'd probably believe you, if it weren't for the smell. And good LORD, the smells of these things. Taking a closer whiff, Grand Marnier smells like - well, like orange juice cognac, really. There's a slight edge from the alcohol, of course, but overall it scents the smoothest of the three. Gran Gala smells like a tangerine on fire. It's harsher than a birthday breakup, although it's not necessarily unpleasant. The Torres, in contrast to the other two, doesn't smell like pulp so much as zest, mixed with some indeterminite other scents. Is that cinnamon back there, maybe some mint? Whatever it is, it's very nice indeed, despite being nearly as firey as the Gala.
Okay, down the hatch.
First, the Marnier. Sweet, and more sweet. It's more complex than its scent would let on, but not by much. After a touch of cognac cloves on the front end, it's just sugary orange for a long, long time. Way too much sweetness for my taste (and I'm a sweet tooth if there ever was one), although I can't quite call it cloying. It's as if someone dropped a packet of sweet n low in my bottle before they shipped the thing. At the very end I get a hint of a burn, followed by just a touch of orange acid. Generally though, Marnier is not the bottle for people who dig some sour in their orange liqueur: this stuff is comfort food, it's candy. It strikes me as the sort of thing that most of the 20-something office girls I have known would absolutely swear by. It's quite smooth for an 80-proof quasi-cognac too - something I chalk up to the age of the stuff - but in my case even this works against it. The age of the cognac base keeps the stuff from being too hot, but as a result it ends up something much worse: it's boring. Sweet, smooth, easy to drink, and probably pretty good in the right cocktail, but there's just no sparkle.
Next, the Gran Gala. Wow, today's show is brought to you by the letter HEAT and the number FIRE. It's not exactly Wild Turkey 101, but as a child of bourbon I feel very much at home here. There's definitely more going on in the Gala than in the Marnier, for better or worse. It's still quite sweet, but a lot of it's been dialed back in favor of an almost lemony sourness. Towards the end a strange, almost chemical astringency pops in - I'm not sure what it is or whether I like it, but it's interesting. This demonic citrus taste holds on for awhile, is momentarily overcome by the alcohol explosion, reasserts itself, then fades off into a very pleasant sweet and sour orange aftertaste. Well, this is exactly the kind of orange liqueur I would have expected from the country that brought us the Lamborghini Countach. My office girl friends, I'm afraid, are not going to like this one. No, they're going to run for the hills the moment they see it coming 'round the corner, its gigantic mediterranian testes swinging about in the wind. Their loss. For drinking neat I think I slightly prefer this over the Marnier, but I could see a reasonable person going the other direction: it's a question of sugary elegance versus stomping-mad passion, Faure versus Verdi.
Finally, the Gran Torres. Holy lord, I love this stuff. There's way more initial spice on the front end than the other two (which don't give you much of anything before the sweetness bites). It tingles all the way down, in fact, which I'm chalking up to its mad ingredients list. The star player here is orange zest, as the smell suggested, but unlike the other two's close focus on sweet or sour orange pulp there's a heck of a lot more going on here. Cinnamon again, cardamom, black pepper, mint leaves... I could go on. There's just a flurry of flavors in this thing. The sugar's even more subdued than in the Gala, which (for me) makes it easier to take. At the end there's a lot of heat, almost as much as the Gala, while the rest of the flavors and the general tingliness hang on until the next sip. Man, what a hyperactive drink. As far as drinking neat goes, the Gran Torres beats the other two hands down. It's like rereading a really great novel: I'm finding new things with every mouthful, whereas the Marnier and the Gala are out of ideas around sip two or three. On the other hand, with the flavors this diffuse I worry about how it'd come out in a cocktail. The Torres' mystery and subtlety, as well as it plays in a snifter, might simply be muffled if all one needs is a cosmopolitan for a cute date.
Speaking of mixing, I suppose I should probably try these things out in some drinks; they may be relatively high class, but they're liqueurs after all. Time for me to break out the lemons and tequila, then.
Now, he margaritas I'll be mixing are going to be stronger on the liqueur than I typically make them. Normally I use about a 8:3:2 ratio of tequila to orange liqueur and lemon juce, but here I'm using 3:2:1 (i.e. about 33% liqueur); the hope is that this will allow the stuff to come to the forefront a bit more. I'll be drinking the 'ritas in the same order as before: Marnier, Gala, and finally Torres. For the record, I'm expecting that first two will be very different but about equally good, and that the Torres will fall a bit flat.
And here we go.
With the Margamarnier I was looking forward to a fairly sweet drink, with the Marnier's sugar being balanced off against the lemon. It ended up being unlike anything I was expecting. Most of the Marnier's presence is in the smell, which remains dominated by the sugary tropical oranges I scented before. When mixed, though, the sweetness of the stuff just doesn't come through as I was expecting; there's a little bit of sweet orange right up front and starting to move back, but the rest of the taste is dominated by the lemon juice (and at 1/6 of the mix, there's not even that much lemon in this!). I wasn't looking for the assertiveness of a Cointreau here, but I was expecting the Grand Marnier to show its character far more than this. Disappointing.
After the Margamarnier I was ready for anything, but the Margalarita is pretty much exactly how you'd expect it to be - with the exception of the smell. The tangerines I'd scented out before have completely disappeared, in favor of a kind of bland margarita odor. Actually drinking the stuff, though, things improve by a lot. Unlike with the Margamarnier, the Gala is very present in this. It's very, very sweet, for one thing. This really comes off as the sweetest of the three drinks by a decent margin, and I suspect it'd be worryingly easy to down about a dozen of these in a sitting. Even better, now that it's in a drink that strange astringency I tasted before starts to make sense. It breaks out of the general sugar-and-lemon taste like a clarion call, and adds a nice little extra thrill to the mix. On the whole, this is a damn good (not spectacular) margarita. If only I could do something about that smell...
Finally, there's the Margatorres. The smell is - well, it's basically Gran Torres and margarita. Which isn't the greatest scent in the world, but it still comes off better than the Margalarita. Drinking it, my first impression is how well the orange peel taste harmonizes with the lemon. The varieties of sourness are the stars of the show here. This thing isn't quite as sweet as the Margalarita, but drinkability-wise it'd still be very easy to make a night of it. On the downside: though the orange peel taste is great, the liqueur loses quite a bit of its style in its move to a mixer - just as I feared. None of the really subtle stuff that I was picking up before shows up in the Margatorres, and that's a damn shame. Overall, there's way less to separate these three in a mix than in the sipping contest. I think the Gran Gala produces the best margarita of the bunch, despite its sucky nose, but to be honest I'm not bowled over with the performance of any of these guys.
So, this concludes the drinking I'll be doing tonight. Let me first repeat the question from before. Grand Marnier - is it worth it? Answer: well, no, not really. For those who prefer their liqueurs smoother and sweeter, with price being no object, it's surely the way to go. But me, I just couldn't force myself to get excited about it: both in a rocks glass and in a margarita, it's underwhelming. On the other hand, in the nights that I've had these three when I've downed a beer or two and I've just wanted an ounce of something pleasant to cash me out for the night, I've found myself going for the Marnier almost as often as the Torres. It's simply better at that palatte-cleansing task than the Gran Gala. And though the bourbonhead in me doesn't want to admit it, in the end this makes it a better sipper than the Italian stallion. And heck, I'll give it this as well: it has by far the best bottle design.
So the original isn't demonstrably superior, and that means the cheaper knock-offs win it. They are, happily, just as good or better. The Gran Gala wins the mixing contest by a nose, while the Gran Torres is by far the most exciting to sip neat. So, how do you choose between the knock-offs, then? Well, if you're only going to be mating this stuff with tequila, then... actually, you should just buy some Cointreau, really. But Gran Gala is the best of the choices here, if that's your thing. Otherwise, for God's sake buy the Gran Torres. It's not bad in a mix, and it'll take me years to sort through all the favors of the stuff.
And with that I wrap up. The conquistador is the surprise winner here, and not by a small margin. If only all knock-offs were this good, we'd have no need for originals.
Grand Marnier
Grade: B+
Summary: A sweet, very smooth, but overpriced and ultimately somewhat dull brandy-based orange liqueur.
Gran Gala
Grade: B+
Summary: More sour and much more firey than the Marnier, this liqueur is the (relative) best of the three for mixing.
Gran Torres
Grade: A
Summary: Also a good mixer, but far more interesting sipped neat. Holds more secrets than J. Edgar Hoover.
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ADDENDUM, Jan. 18 2010:
So it's now about two months after my initial Gran(d)-Off comparison of various brandy-based orange liqueurs. I concluded that Grand Marnier was the smoothest, Gran Gala was (by a nose) the best for mixing, and Torres was the most interesting for sipping and the best booze all-round. I was never fully satisfied with the results, though, for two reasons. First, those three bottles by no means exhausted the sheer mass of the liqueurs of this sort on the market. The main impetus to go back to this comparison and add some more shit was discovering two (2) new bottles - Harlequin and La Belle Orange - during my trip east for the holidays, and also buying a fifth of Tuaca in a moment of weakness. I now have six bottles of this stuff to work through (pity me); more importantly, it means I may have to reassess the standings from before. Second, I was less than satisfied with my choice of cocktail from the last time, namely, the margarita. I have since discovered, through some experimentation, that this is just not a good drink for investigating these liqueurs. A typical margarita needs something direct, highly orangey, and very sweet - it needs triple sec, in other words, not something that gives away brute strength for brandy subtlety. As far as classic cocktails go, sidecars tend to work much, much better with these liqueurs, so that's what I'm using this time around.
So, this addendum will do two things. First, I'd like to sip these three new bottles and see how they compare to the earlier ones. Second, I want to retest all the liquors' mixing potential in a simple bourbon sidecar. Everything gets a new grade at the end, and we come one step closer to knowing where we stand when it comes to orange-infused brandies.
If any one of these liquors is going to get you accused of being a horrible cheapskate, it's Harlequin. It screams "IMPORTED FROM FRANCE" just about everywhere, but looking at the label from a distance you'd think it was a $10 fifth of bottom-shelf whiskey. From the goofy jester design to the fake wax seal, it just looks kind of sad. No mention at all of who actually makes this stuff, but it's imported by something called "Premium Imports Ltd." Ringing any bells? No? How about the fact that PI is located in Bardstown, Kentucky?? You know about Bardstown, don't you? ...It's the place where certain a famous and rather huge distillery is housed?? Yup: the bunch selling Harlequin can be none other than our pals at Heaven Hill. They claim that it's "produced in France from a rich blend of the finest aged cognac and Mediterranean oranges renowned for their distinctive flavor" - and this is literally the only information I can find on the stuff. I can only presume it's sold to HH by the Illuminati or something.
La Belle Orange is also fairly obscure, albeit far less so than the Harlequin. This time it's imported by White Rock in Lewiston, Maine, which sells quite a lot of things I've never seen nor heard of. Still no telling who in France ultimately makes LBO, but at least the importers actually bothered to put up a section on their website for it this time. The bottle design itself is, overall, probably my favorite of all the liqueurs save the (much more expensive) Grand Marnier. LBO doesn't bother with a fake wax seal or a ribbon (unlike Gran Gala or Harlequin), but it's more appealing than the similarly humble Torres: just a big orange LB badge and a label on nice paper. On the other hand, it's the only thing here with a screw-off top, but I can't hold that against it too much. La Belle Orange claims to be a "marriage of sun ripened oranges and the finest cognac," and a "harmonious blend" of "rich fruity aromas and elegant cognac flavors." Hmm. Well, we shall see.
Tuaca is the odd duck here, especially among these two. Where they're more or less French attempts at a cheaper Grand Marnier, this (like the Gran Gala) is Italian. Second, at 35% ABV, it's significantly less strong than the other 80-proof bruisers I've got here. Third, and most importantly, it's not just orange we're dealing with this time. Rather, Tuaca is a brandy "artfully blended with hints of vanilla and orange flavors." The addition of vanilla already promises to make this more bizarre than my previous favorite, the Gran Torres, so I've got high hopes for this stuff. Also like the Torres, it claims to date back an absurd amount of time - like, 16th century absurd. Wikipedia, which is always right, claims that Lorenzo de Medici quaffed this stuff. That's pretty cool, and will (if nothing else) make a fine story for parties. Anyways, the bottle itself is classy but rather uneventful; it just looks like a generic brandy or something.
All right, enough cockteasing: I've now poured all three liqueurs into individual glasses for comparison, along with (smaller) samples of the original three liqueurs. First, there's the colors. Of the newcomers, Harlequin is definitely the lightest of the bunch, roughly on a par with Torres; both are a kind of gentle champagne color. The LBO is darker still, perhaps just a touch darker than the Grand Marnier. The real champion here, though, is the Tuaca, which is a thick rich gold even darker than the Gran Gala from last time.
Then there's the aromas. The most notable thing about Harlequin's smell is that it's a dead ringer for Grand Marnier. If you really try you can detect some subtle differences - the Harlequin comes across as slightly rougher, slightly hotter - but if I didn't have these two side by side I'd be completely fooled. Harlequin pulls off the cognac orange juice aroma thing almost perfectly; think of it, then, as Grand Marnier in a dirty t-shirt. La Belle Orange, again, smells most like the Marnier. It's not quite as good a copy as the Harlequin, but I think I might actually prefer it over both. If anything, though, it comes off as even sweeter and smoother, and maybe even a little lighter; you can think of it, then, as Grand Marnier in a schoolgirl uniform. The Tuaca, as expected, is totally unlike all of these other liqueurs. The aroma is - I don't know if I love it or hate it, to be honest. It's unique, to say the least. The nose is extremely rum-like; there's no hints of brandy in here at all, just a lot of wood, cola, maybe some orange at the edges, and above all, vanilla. And, despite the (relatively) low proof, this actually comes across as hotter than the others as well, about on par with the Gran Gala's heat. It's odd.
Now, though, we get into the stuff that matters: the tasting. Down the hatch. (Again.)
The Harlequin, true to its aroma, once again comes off as a cheaper, rougher twin brother to the Marnier. There's some sweet-and-sourness right up front, which then evolves into a very sweet (but hot) orange flavor that, well, doesn't really change. I get another splash of heat at the swallow, but that's really the most interesting thing it does. Like the Marnier, it's slightly cloying. Actually, it's just like the Marnier in almost all things, just less well-sorted about it. If GM were an XO version of a brandy, I would take Harlequin to be the VS. It's rougher, and it's weaker. Now, it's not bad - especially at $18 - but a copy is all it is, and a copy that's slightly worse than the original at everything.
Wow. If I thought Grand Marnier was sweet, La Belle is off the fucking charts. This stuff is really sweet: it's as if they took the sweet n low taste of Marnier and turned it up to eleven. It's so sweet, in fact, that I find it genuinely difficult to drink neat; I feel like it's going to throw me into a seizure or something. Right up front there's a familiar clovey bite, which then evolves into what can only be described as Mega-Marnier. It's sweet orange squared. It gets a little sour at the swallow, but that's the only real relief one gets. Not only that, but it's smoother and there's even less of a burn. Everything I liked (and hated) about Marnier is here, severely amplified. Sipped neat it's like being tackled by a linebacker smothered in sugar. That isn't to say it's bad - it isn't. But next time it's getting a few drops of water.
The Tuaca tastes more conventional (in many ways) than I was expecting from its aroma. It has a very minimal, very toned back orange taste remotely reminiscent of the Gran Gala, but then over that there's a strong current of vanilla. From the initial moments all the way up until the conclusion of the flavor development, it really does come across as a spiced rum of some kind. Only at the end do the flavors separate themselves, so you can tell it's a Marnieresque liqueur with a lot of vanilla rather than some kind of especially vanilla-y Sailor Jerry's. There's a little bit of a burn going down, but nothing like what I got from the nose. Here's the weird thing, though: the vanilla flavor makes it pretty heavy, but Tuaca's actually pretty pleasant to sip on its own (moreso than the other two newbies, anyways). I can't down it with anywhere near the speed of Torres, say - it's more of a savor-a-half-ounce-over-twenty-minutes kind of drink - but it definitely has an appeal. I have absolutely no clue how this'll do in a sidecar, but it definitely strikes me as something that mixing geeks would enjoy playing with.
Speaking of sidecars, I guess it's time to see what's what in the mixing realm. To repeat, I'll be making bourbon sidecars. I'll be using a a bourbon to liqueur to lemon juice ratio of 2:2:1 - that should be leaning towards the sweet side for a sidecar, but frankly I want some sweetness to shine through here. For this test I'll be using my go-to budget bourbon, the lovely (if somewhat rowdy) Evan Williams 1783, which I've been using to make sours as of late. The newbies go first, starting with the Harlequin.
Despite the already-low amount of lemon juice, the Harlecar comes out on the sour side of things. So far as I can tell, the Harlequin just folds: aside from a rather dull sweetness, it doesn't assert itself at all here. The sugar is there for the beginning of the sip and most of the middle, but by the end it goes very sour indeed. No real orange flavors are detectable, either. I found this sidecar rather lame, though it's by no means something I would turn down. All the liqueur is doing is providing a sweetener, and there are other things that do that job much better.
The Bellecar is next, and I was expecting the LBO to just give me another toothache with its sweetness. Instead this sugar-happy little liqueur surprises me: it's sweeter than the Harlequin, yes, but along with the sweetness comes a much more pronounced orange flavor and an unexpected amount of nuance. There's a kind of lemon candy opening to it, and then the orange juice tang cuts in at the end to deliver a very novel, almost bitter (but still sweet) blood orange twist. It's extremely nice, and I prefer this Bellecar to the Harlecar by leagues. Some will probably find it too sweet for a sidecar - I'm tempted to add more lemon to this next time I make it, and there will be a next time - but even with this version I find it delicious and refreshing.
And third comes the Tuacar, which is the real dice roll. Will it work? Will it be horrible? Well, it smells pretty awful. There's just a confusion of all sorts of flavors: first there's the vanilla and a bit of oak from the bourbon, and then a lot of lemon. Lemon and vanilla, just to tell you, are not good pals aroma-wise. In terms of taste, it's much the same story. The relatively subtle flavors of the Tuaca are completely covered over here, leaving only a messy and nearly-unrelieved lemon rush. Only in the aftertaste, when I start to breathe out vanilla, do I recall that I've actually been drinking a fairly nifty liqueur. As a drink, then, the Tuacar is a failure. It's the clear loser among these three, although this is reall an unfair test - a sidecar is just not the right drink for this stuff. I have some ideas about what would be, but that lies outside the scope of this test. (Since it's very rumlike, for example, could one use it like a rum? How about mixing it with cola?)
Now then, on to mixing the three from the previous test. The Marnicar is a really pleasant surprise, considering Marnier's rather lackluster showing last time. The first thing I notice is a really lovely aroma which is rather difficult to describe. Brandy suspended in a cloud of orange pulp, maybe. In terms of sweetness, it fits nicely in-between the Bellecar and the Harlecar - maybe leaning a little more on the side of the latter's subtlety. Sweetened lemonade is the first impression, but as it moves back the orange pulp starts to poke itself through so that by the swallow it's totally dominating the other flavors. It doesn't quite have the sharp fruity jab at the end like the Bellecar, but in exchange it's a little more laid back and balanced. I think I slightly - slightly - prefer the Bellecar, but which one I would choose would really depend on my mood. In any case, the Marnicar is a fine damn drink. It's reserved without being boring, it does a fine job whetting the appetite without being overly tart - it's the perfect apéritif.
Oh crap, it's the Galacar. Honestly, the more I've quaffed the Gran Gala, the less I've liked the stuff. When I initially started doing the taste test way back in November, I actually preferred its sour firey Italian personality over the rather boring Marnier. But, like hanging with a really rowdy friend, the charm ran out after awhile. Truth be told, Gala's just too damn harsh to enjoy on its own. On the other hand, it does still shine as a mixer, and it makes a fine showing here. The sour-orange-on-fire aroma is here right from the start, right out front, and that's not something I much care for. What I do like, on the other hand, is the taste. The lemon might as well not even be here - it's totally overpowered by the Gala, which immediately pushes its way to the front with (happily subdued) tangy orange tastes. It's surprisingly sweet, too, almost up there with the Bellecar, but the Galacar's finish is much more sour than the Bellecar's bittersweet blood orange. Again, it's tough to say which is best: factor in the aroma and I'd give it to the Belle by a nose, but for pure taste I honestly think that Gala might produce the best drink here.
Finally there's the Torrecar. It is, as I was expecting, a letdown. The aroma is wonderful, of course - it's got all the deep orange zestiness that I love about the stuff - but the taste just doesn't bear it out. Torres, as a sippin' liqueur, is all about little nuances and subtleties. Forced to provide the sweetener role in a classic cocktail, though - well, it does the job, but it loses everything that makes it special. All I get up front, again, is sweet lemon, which blossoms out slightly as it moves back but doesn't really do much. In a lot of ways this comes across like a better smelling, slightly sweeter, slightly tastier version of the Harlequin, and that's not quite good enough in this company. I love Torres with a burning passion, but none of what I like about it is here in this drink. Frankly, the Torrecar is a waste of the stuff.
And that's it - six liqueurs, six cocktails, and we're done. So, which is the best?
Well, as before, I think it finally depends on what you're using it for. The Gran Gala, if you can ignore the force of its aroma, remains the best mixer, followed by La Belle Orange and (maybe) the Grand Marnier. The Torres may be a mediocre mixer, but for my money it destroys everything else for sheer sipping joy (the bizarre Tuaca comes in at a very distant second). LBO and the Marnier are probably the best all-rounders. And Tuaca, well, that's something for the cocktail scientists among us. And, while we may not have a clear winner, we at least have a clear loser in the Harlequin. Harlequin isn't horrible, it's just weak and comparatively rough, and there's very little it does that the others can't do better. Its only significant plus is that it mimics the classic Grand Marnier flavor and aroma better than anything else here. If you're a cheapskate, you could presumably use it to fake out your foodie friends.
And that leads the final point to be made: Grand Marnier is pretty good, but it's fuckin' expensive. Even the Harlequin, as weak as it is, is (I think) a better value for the money than Grand Marnier. And if that's the case even for the worst stuff here, it's doubly true for everything else. So, then, let the conclusions stand thusly: Harlequin is the clear loser, Grand Marnier is overpriced, and for everything else, go by your own needs and preferences.
Grand Marnier
Grade: A-
Summary: Smooth, sweet. It's good stuff, neither too strong nor too laid back, and it's relaxing to sip (if a little one-dimensional). And it works well in a drink, used properly. But at $32 a pop, it isn't really worth it.
Gran Gala
Grade: B+
Summary: Vile but interesting. The aroma's way too pungent and it's hard to sip neat, but it mixes like a champ.
Gran Torres
Grade: A
Summary: Smells and sips the best of anything here. Incredibly nuanced stuff on its own. But if it's a mixer you want, well, subtlety isn't really the way to go.
Harlequin
Grade: B-
Summary: It's a cheap knockoff of Grand Marnier. Period. Pour it into an old GM bottle and pretend not to be the shallow cheapskate that you are. I won't tell if you don't.
La Belle Orange
Grade: A-
Summary: Grand Marnier Xtreme. Even smoother and sweeter, and that can be good or bad depending on taste. It does cost about 40% less, though, and that's a lot.
Tuaca
Grade: B
Summary: Odd, vanilla-y orange liqueur. Nice enough for sipping neat (slowly), but I suspect its real brilliance lies in finding the right cocktails for it.
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