the session

Session #38 announced: Get in line

The SessionSean Inman has posted the theme for The Session #38. With Dark Lord Day 2010 right around the corner you should be able to figure out what he is aiming for.

What beer have you tasted recently (say, the last six months or so) that is worthy of their own day in the media sun?

And to add a little extra to it, how do “great” expectations affect your beer drinking enjoyment?

AND If you have attended one of these release parties, stories and anecdotes of your experience will be welcomed too.

“Was the beer worth it?” and “Was the experience worth it?” might be two different questions.

The Session #37: Just open it

The SessionThis is my contribution to the Session #37: “The Display Shelf: When to Drink the Good Stuff” or, if you prefer, “Raid the Cellar.” Visit The Ferm for links to more posts.

Is there a perfect beer for every particular special moment? Is there a time in every beer’s life when it tastes better than it ever otherwise will?

SirRon’s open-ended assignment for The Session spells certain trouble for me. I’m perfectly willing to spend all sorts of time contemplating questions that do not have answers.

Anyway, the topic this month seems particularly timely because we’ve recently been treated to a flock of stories about cellaring beer. Don Russell made it subject of his column last week, there was a story this week in The Washington Post food section, and a rather long feature in the Los Angeles Times (worth clicking through to for the photo alone).

Could this be dangerous? Although these stories emphasize the importance of picking the right kind of beers to lay down and having a proper cellar it’s easy to envision a reader skimming the story, grabbing who-knows-what beer, sticking it in the back of a closet and forgetting about it until it’s time for the next garage sale.

Last Christmas friends of ours brought out a large corked bottle of Budweiser that somebody had given them (thank goodness) at an estate sale. It was bottled in 2001 for the brewery’s 125th anniversary. We have no idea how it was stored, but that didn’t really matter. We opened it, sipped, talked about wet cardboard and dumped the contents. We could only dream about what that beer might have tasted like fresh.

Thomas Hardy's aleI must confess I’m a serial cellarer. When we moved to New Mexico and left our Illinois basement behind the idea was “no more laying down beer.” Didn’t take. Bought a chest freezer, hooked it up to a temperature controller and we were good to go.

But only a small portion of beer spends much time in that pseudo cellar. We buy beer, we drink it. Beer shows up at our door, we drink it. It seems it would be rude to do so otherwise. Oh, that beer you sent last week, we’ll open it in 2014 and let you know how it is doing.

So a few things I learned in February:

  • The bottle of Deschutes Jubel 2010 suggested it would be best consumed after Jan. 11, 2011. And now we’ll be buying a couple bottles to find out. I had a taste of Jubel 2000 (the last time the big brother of the season Jubel was bottled) in 2006 and that turned out to be too long to wait. This edition already hints of an old ale, with muted hops that will further fade with time (much as the classic Thomas Hardy’s Ale). Husky malt character, perhaps augmented by tannins from time in pinot noir barrels, leaves it a bit coarse on the tongue. Just feels like it is going to age well, and I suspect it will hold up more than six years this time.
  • Because Stone Brewing sent a bottle of 2010 Old Guardian Barley Wine I hauled out a 2006 Old Guardian (a $6.99 price tag still on the bottle) to share with friends before we went out to dinner (where some non-driving members of our group enjoyed Santa Fe Brewing’s Chicken Killer Barley Wine on draft). Two very different beers; not surprisingly the hops are much more apparent in younger beer, earthy and spicy. Some of that’s going to be gone a few years down the road, and while a luscious beer (like the 2006 edition) may emerge for some now is the time to drink this beer. Of course I headed to the store to make sure I’ve got a couple bottles of 2010 so I can make that comparison on a few years.
  • The Lost Abbey’s Angel’s Share Grand Cru takes Angel’s Share to a new level. Given what went into the blend that shouldn’t be a surprise. However, words can’t prepare you for the remarkable rush of flavors. If you don’t like spectacular or intense (such beers don’t work for everybody) stay away. Like many Lost Abbey beers there are layers of flavor. After you reset your palate, subtle textures emerge. Some of the beer in this blend is already four years old, so I’m calling it pre-cellared. If it gets much better I don’t know if Russell can find a piece of cheese to stand up to it, or if he’ll survive the experience.
  • Less can be more in a vertical tasting. Three vintages of Firestone Walker anniversary beers seems like a good number. Granted, we tried seven different Thomas Hardy’s a couple of years ago but those were smaller servings. One Sunday afternoon four us got together for the Firestone beers — one brought Firestone XI (2007), one Firestone XII (2008), one Firestone XIII (2009) and one a lovely selection of cheeses. That worked out to a little over 5 ounces of each beer apiece, a proper amount of leisurely sipping.

    • The beers were really good, but you knew that. I liked XII better than a year ago, and we might have talked about that over the course of about two hours. I’m not sure. Not until I was driving home did I consider that three of us tasted Firestone 10 together, Firestone XI the next year, Firestone XII the next and now XI-XII-XIII.

    We’re not some crusty war veterans who need an excuse to get together, but this is a nice little tradition that I expect will continue. So to SirRon’s question about “finding a drinking occasion that lives up to the reputation of the bottle,” I’d suggest sharing beer with friends should be occasion enough.

     

     

    Session #37 announced: Raid the cellar

    The SessionSirRon at The Ferm has announced the topic for Session #37, so we begin the fourth year of first Friday drinking with marching orders to write about “The Display Shelf: When to Drink the Good Stuff.”

    The explanation:

    “The topic is open ended and the rules of The Session are close to nil. You can use your post to be persuasive or therapeutic. You may choose to tell a story of a great bottle you once opened or boast of your own beer collection.”

    I’ve been to the “cellar” (we live on sand, a basement is out of the question, so we forego romance, using a temperature-controlled chest freezer) and asked for volunteers.

     

     

    Session #36: Cask ale – trading bubbles for flavor

    The SessionThis is my contribution to Session #36: Cask-conditioned ale that involves actual drinking of beer. Host Tom Cizauskas has the recap (plus plenty himself). I also wrote a little about cask ale in U.S. 15 or so years ago and posted an additional story (from 1997) in The Library.

    This seems like a good Valentine’s Day story: Cask ale meets single hop. Together they make beautiful grapefruit and lemon aromas.

    It’s a true story. I tasted it.

    Marble Brewery in Albuquerque puts a firkin of cask ale on the bar every Friday. Il Vicino Brewery, also in Albuquerque puts a firkin out on Wednesdays. Turtle Mountain in nearby Rio Rancho regularly keeps a beer on cask. Friday I was at Marble because it was the first Friday of the month and time for The Session #36.

    The plan Friday had been to serve a porter, but Friday morning it didn’t seem that would be in proper condition (have sufficient carbonation) and a cask of Centennial pale ale was also put on the bar.

    The Centennial pale is not a brewery regular. In fact, you often won’t find a pale ale on. From the time the brewery opened less than two years ago Marble IPA has been the flagship. Because the 2009 hop crop has arrived the brewers at Marble made the Centennial-dominated beer to get to know how 2009 differed from 2008 (or 2009 from another field).

    The only malt is pale and the beer is bittered with what brewers call CZT (Columbus, Zeus and Tomahawk are basically the same hop). Centennial hops are added 15 minutes before the end of the boil, at knockout and in dry hopping. (Quick aside, doesn’t dry hopping sound like a strange name for something involving liquid?)

    “With zero specialty malts we can truly discover what that hop is all about,” said brewmaster Ted Rice. Next they’ll do the same with a Simcoe pale ale. In other words, he wants to know how these hops may best serve Marble IPA, and the occasional Double IPA.

    Friday the brewers were trying something different with Amarillo hops in the IPA, adding the Amarillo at different times in two batches in an attempt to get the best (tangerine) out of that hop and avoid the less pleasant (garlic).

    Centennial poses no such problems. The pale ale “reinforced what we knew. It’s a flawless hop,” Rice said. “You can use it in the kettle, the whirlpool, dry hop with it, hop the hell out of a pale ale and it retains its drinkability.”

    I didn’t think this is the same drinkability Anheuser-Busch InBev touts on billboards. Centennial pale brims with zesty lemon and grapefruit flavors, and of course finishes with a firm bitterness.

    This was not a flat out perfectly conditioned cask ale. The foam could have been tighter, the bubbles smaller, the mouthfeel a little fuller, but I suspect Steve Hamburg would have given it high marks. Particularly since a cask pint was as bright as the keg version.

    Let’s be honest — plenty of drinkers are going to prefer the keg version, a little cooler, more carbonation, a more straightforward hop experience. And the beer was not designed to be a particularly complex. Not with a single malt, one hop for flavor and aroma, and a yeast that mostly gets out of the way.

    However in my opinion time in the firkin and the lack of top pressure made the beer more interesting. The cask version was softer on the palate, fruitier (both malt/yeast flavors and hops). “It allows the hop character to open up, to become more aromatic,” Rice said.

    I love happy endings.