Golden ales and Bam Bam in the Big Apple

(Note: This post was amended Feb. 24 to eliminate babbling that got in the way of actual story.)

Tomorrow’ s The New York Times carries an article about “tasting Belgian golden ales.” Perhaps surprisingly American beers claimed four the first five spots although half of the 20 beers tasted hailed from Belgium.

The first and fourth favorite beers were from Dexter, Michigan — which as any card-carrying beer geek knows is home to Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales. Jolly Pumpkin’s own Oro de Calabaza claimed the top spot and Leelanau Good Harbor Golden, brewed under contract by Jolly Pumpkin, the fourth. Eric Asimov writes:

“Both of these beers were unfiltered, giving them a hazy appearance, and aged in barrels, but beyond that they are completely different. While the Good Harbor was funky, the Oro de Calabaza was spicy, fruity and floral, with soft carbonation and fresh, vibrant flavors. Same man (brewmaster Ron Jeffries), different yeasts, at the least.”

Yes, except of course, for the Dexter microflora, embraced by Jeffries.

“The primary fermentation does indeed use different yeasts,” Jeffries wrote in an email. “The Oro is our ‘house’ strain, and for Good Harbor Golden I use either a cool fermenting clean ale strain, or ferments with a lager at slightly elevated temperatures. I can’t decide which I like best, so I bounce back and forth between the two. Next batch I might blend them. Now that would be cool.

“The Good Harbor oak tun (1200 liters) does produce different flavors than the barrels we age the Oro in. Similar but different. If I had to pick, I would say it tastes most like the 2000L we use mainly for Bam.”

The large barrel that Leelanau bought for use at Jolly Pumpkin is on the left side in the photo above. The rest are Jolly Pumpkin barrels.

I first tasted Good Harbor in the spring of 2007 for All About Beer magazine’s Beer Talk. We liked the beer.

After I had written my notes I took the second bottle the brewery sent to share with friends I get together with semi-regularly.

When you see a bottle holding a brand you’ve never heard of, such as Leelanau, you might as well be tasting blind. But my friend, Bill, took one sniff and declared, “This is Bam.” He knew it wasn’t Bam Biere, the session Saison from Jolly Pumpkin but that was the impression.

Only problem, I said, this beer is 7.5% and Bam 4.5%. “OK, Double Bam,” he said, suddenly looking inspired. “No, Bam Bam.”

I don’t think I ever expected to be reading about the beer I’ll always remember as Bam Bam in The New York Times.

Weekend drinks links

In case you missed these blog posts last week . . .

  • Can you make money blogging about drinks? That was one topic of discussion at the Wine Writers Symposium last week in northern California. (You could have taken many of the panel topics, plugged in “beer” instead of “wine” and it would have made sense, such as “What wine writers need to know about wine.”) As far as blog advertising goes, Steve Heimoff (who works of Wine Spectator) says we’re “not even close” to a tipping point.
  • Jeff Alworth ends up in the woodshed, getting into a whole lot more trouble than I did when commenting on Malcom Gladwell’s “Drinking Games.” You probably need to start here (read the comments), perhaps detour to what Alan McLeod has to say, and then return to lessons Jeff might have learned.
  • Mark Dredge has tasted BrewDog’s Sink The Bismarck: “Maybe the hoppiest beer I’ve ever had, earthy, citrus, floral, imperial. So thick and full bodied, like syrup, like honey. It smells like a hop sack, so fresh, uniquely fresh, like hop resin, hop oil on the finger tips. It’s sweet like candy but hot like bourbon, it’s smooth but jagged, it’s bitter, it’s intense, it’s astonishing. Five months in the making, this is insane US Extreme IPA meets Scottish whisky, an unimaginable blend.”
  • 11 Things You Didn’t Know About Natty Light. Including No. 11, that Anheuser-Busch owns the domain name NaturalLightSucks.com.

    • You may now return to your glass of beer.

     

     

    Orange tree terroir

    Lord knows how scientists may have manipulated orange genetics since John McPhee reported this in 1966, but here’s a little bit about the where involved with oranges.

    He writes that taste and aroma vary based on “the position of the individual orange in the framework of the tree on which it grew. Ground fruit — the orange that one can reach and pick from the ground — is not as sweet as fruit that grows high on the tree. Outside fruit is sweeter than inside fruit. Oranges grown on the south side of the tree are sweeter than oranges grown on the east or west sides, and oranges grown on the north side are the least sweet of the lot. The quantity of juice in an orange, and even the amount of vitamin C is contains, will follow the same pattern of variation. Beyond this, there are differentiations of quality inside a single orange. Individual segments vary from one another in their content of acid and sugar.”

    In “Oranges,” his book developed from New Yorker articles, the Catch-22 becomes obvious to McPhee when he checks to see if a restaurant offers fresh juice at breakfast.

    “There were never any request for fresh orange juice, the waitress explained, apparently unmindful of the one that had just been made. ‘Fresh is either too sour or too watery or too something,’ she said. ‘Frozen is the same every day. People want to know what they’re getting.'”

    Then he strikes up a conversation with a couple at the next table. “. . . they had an orange grove on their property, with three kinds of oranges, so that ripe fruit was on their trees almost eight months of the year. All year long, they said, they drank concentrate at breakfast. They hadn’t made juice from the fruit on their trees for more than ten years.”

    People knew what they were getting.

    But what was the price?