Drinking in place: Pub appreciation

Ideal pub

Earlier this year Donavan Hall began sort of a running diary – officially an online book right now, with a print version in 2008 – about drinking in a pub he has adopted as his local.

He’s accumulated enough posts now that he has a Table of Contents that I can link to, and that means enough posts that you can dig in to.

I quite like the leisurely pace at which he is proceeding and the mix of beer, pub and patrons. Here’s a beery example:

One of the interesting things about drinking in one place, and especially about drinking the same beer day in and day out, is that you get to track the development of the keg as it ages. At Callahan’s they have about five different taps. One of the taps pours the local microbrew, Blue Point Toasted Lager. You can tell if a keg of Blue Point Toasted Lager has been sitting on the tap for along time when you detect a faint but detectable degree of smokiness in the finish. …

Last week I went into Callahanâ’s and sat down at the bar. Stephanie, on of the bartenders, asked me what I would be drinking. I asked for the Blue Point Toasted Lager. She poured me a pint. I detected that signature smokiness of a well aged Toasted Lager. I was having lunch that day, so I ordered a second pint. And since there are no other microbrews on tap, I had a second Blue Point Toasted Lager. While Stephanie was pouring this second pint the keg ran out. Stephanie called into the back and asked someone the switch the keg. Within a few minutes a new keg of Blue Point Toasted Lager was on and she poured me the new pint and brought it to me.

“I’s on the house,” she said. I like this custom of getting of free pint if you finish a keg. Very civilized.

This second pint of Blue Point Toasted Lager drawn from the fresh keg had none of the smokiness associated with the aged keg.

My previous post (on tasting Three Floyds Dreadnaught) was about evaluating a beer as it exists in the glass. But the appellation in Appellation Beer refers to place, which can mean where the beer is enjoyed as well as brewed. Sometimes magic happens outside the glass, and who are we to complain?

In the The Great Good Place Ray Oldenberg writes about the tavern as a “third place.” Third places (after home, first, and workplace, second) provide informal gathering spots essential to the survival of any community.

Hall has named his adopted third place Callahan’s (after a couple of months of reading about the place I forgot he made the name up). Blue Point Toasted Lager is a damn fine product, so it’s not like he exiled himself to a year of boring beer, but if you drop in you’ll soon realize there’s more to a good local then 30 taps pouring exotic beer.

What makes a good tasting note?

Beer umpireThis review of Three Floyds Dreadnaught Imperial IPA tickled the heck out of me.

Jay at Hedonist Beer Jive gave it a 3.5 out of 10 and explained why. After reading his comments (please take the time to read the whole thing) my only question would be, “Why so high?”

He’s pretty persuasive, writing among other things: “What I do have a beef with is the exaltation of extreme beers that taste like garbage, simply because they’re BIG and DARING and OUTRAGEOUS.” Can I have a Hallelujah?

So I’ve got an assessment from somebody whose palate I find myself in alignment with more often than not, a blogger I take the time to read because he doesn’t always follow the crowd. Does that mean I should pass on Dreadnaught?

Since I’ve had the beer I could tell you that it would have been a mistake. I don’t love Dreadnaught as much as the legions at Beer Advocate or Rate Beer, but I enjoy it.

Does this mean this is not a good tasting note? Or perhaps not a good one for me, but a good one for you?

(I think we can agree Nick Floyd wouldn’t like it.)

Is the Sam Adams glass really better?

A couple of years ago Boston Beer founder Jim Koch was talking about innovative beers.

“. . .(A) product has to be truly superior and good on its own,” he said, later adding, “We’re not trying to make a pet rock of beer, but new styles that are cherished 100 years from now.”

He made a similar point a few minutes later. “It can’t just be a marketing gimmick. It has to be rooted in product difference. Typically, it’s not just better, but uniquely so,” he said.

Boston Lager glassI thought of that conversation when we were talking about the new tasting glass commissioned for Samuel Adams Boston Lager. To introduce the glass to the press the company sent out a package with two bottles of beer, a Samuel Adams branded shaker glass and the new Samuel Adams Boston Lager glass. It was no contest, but other than the spill factor, pouring Boston Lager into cupped hands might also have been better than a shaker glass.

Is this glass not only better, but markedly so? In fact, I think so, but we’ll get to that.

Koch said that Boston Beer spent several hundred thousand dollars developing the glass. (The details are here.)

“This had to be a legitimate, bona fide, verifiable improvement,” he said. “So much of this can be smoke and mirrors.”

By the 1700s “the proper glass” began to take on meaning with wine drinking types (in other words, all “proper society”), and by the 1800s each type of wine was to have its own glass. For purposes of form, not function.

Thus Champagne was poured in a coupe – a shallow, wide-mouthed glass – although it was the perfectly wrong vessel. Even today, when we know a flute best serves Champagne, you still see it served in coupes because that’s the way it is pictured in somebody book of etiquette.

Just a generation ago American wine drinkers didn’t pay that much attention to glassware, but producers – most notably Austria’s Riedel – have done a great job of convincing drinkers they need a different glass for every style of wine. To persuade us, Riedel promoted the so-called “tongue map,” which is about 100 years out of date.

So Koch approached the project with a proper amount of beer drinkers’ skepticism.

“I wanted this to be rooted in science,” he said. He turned to Tiax, a Boston-area company that’s been combining technology and sensory testing since the 1920s.

“Jim’s approach was unique,” said Jonaki Egenolf, manager for technology marketing at Tiax. “He really wanted true objective analysis. That was different than just trying to leverage expertise within the industry.”

Sarah Garretson Lowery, the sensory analyst for the project, added, “It was unique to see somebody who wasn’t new to an industry come in with such a fresh eye.”

A blogger for Food & Wine magazine wrote the resulting glass looks “like the offspring of a lantern and a goblet, with a narrow base, bulbous center and outward-turned lip-like a translucent Alfred Hitchcock, I guess.”

But that outward turned lip (see the illustration) really seems to work, and the glass persistently delivers great aromatics (so credit that funny bulbous middle).

Koch has found the perfect line – “PBR (Pabst Blue Ribbon) is not going to taste like Sam Adams in this glass” – to make his point that this glass is designed to make Boston Lager taste better, not with other beers in mind. But that doesn’t mean we can’t take a few other beers for a test run.

I did. Ales and lagers. Hoppy beers and not. Some were a little better, some significantly better. Of course, I often could have done just as well with another glass from the cabinet.

And not every beer tasted better. I tried an India Pale Ale that I previously found not particularly well balanced. It was worse. The hops were harsher and even more out of balance.

I didn’t try PBR. There’s only so much I’m willing to do in the name of science.

Session #3 announced: Misunderstood Mild

The SessionJay Brooks has made his pick for our third round of Friday beer blogging.

The theme is “Mysterious Misunderstood Mild.” He picked it to coincide with CAMRA’s May promotion, Mild Month, writing:

“Saturday the 5th will also be National Mild Day on the other side of the pond. For those of us here in the colonies, we may have a harder time finding a mild to review. But several craft brewers do make one, even if they don’t always call it a mild.”

May 5 is also National Homebrew Day and Big Brew for homebrewers.

Although milds are usually, well, mild and low in alcohol, they don’t have to be. The Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) classifies milds as English brown ales. The guidelines note that most are 3.1 to 3.8% abv, but lists Gale’s Festival Mild as an example. That beer is 5.6% abv.

The Brewers Association Style Guidelines (for commercial brewers) on the other hand state that both pale and dark milds should be between 3.2 and 4% abv. English-style brown ales may be 4 to 5.5% abv.

The bottom line, as you may have noticed with Day of the Dubbels, is that we’re not going to be style Nazis about this. Find a beer, drink it, write about it.

Session #2: Chama River Demolition Dubbel

The Session(This is my contribution to our monthly Session. Alan McLeod will be recapping them all.)

One Sunday last May, Ted Rice lifted a glass of beer homebrewed in the spirit of a Belgian dubbel.

“That’s the aroma I’m looking for,” he said, putting it to his nose.

This was literally one of the first batches brewed with the dark candy syrup that Brian Mercer (www.darkcandi.com) was just beginning to import from Belgium. Mercer had shipped samples to a few homebrewers and we invited them to enter their beers in the Enchanted Brewing Challenge. We’d judged the homebrew competition the day before at Chama River Brewing Co., where Rice is the brewer, and today we were drinking the leftovers while sitting on the deck at Il Vicino Brewing.

The dark syrup contributes rich caramel, rummy and dark fruit aromas we associate with beers brewed in Belgium. Westmalle started used caramelized sugar syrup in its Dubbel in 1922. (More about the syryp.)

Ted RiceNot surprisingly, it wasn’t long before Rice (shown at work in this un-glamorous photo) brewed a dubbel with the syrup. He’s since brewed two more, the latest of which is on tap now.

Tasting it as it matured, the consensus has been that it is the best Demolition Dubbel yet (to our count, this is the sixth edition since the first won a gold medal in the 2004 New Mexico State Fair). So I intended on Tuesday to ask Rice: “Are we there yet?”

I took along the previous version, bottled last summer for entry in the Great American Beer Festival and stored in a temperature-controlled chest freezer since October (we don’t have cellars in New Mexico). The GABF version was bottled-conditioned, meaning fresh sugar and yeast were added to kickoff re-fermentation in the bottle and carbonate the beer to a level not generally available on draft.

And it was carbonated, much more than when I last tried a bottle six months ago. Beer came surging out when I opened the cap, onto Rice’s desk in the brewery and the floor, leaving just enough in the 22-ounce bottle for three of us to sample. We quickly assured ourselves that an infection wasn’t to blame.

We didn’t find any off flavors or sourness, but one friend picked up a bit of tinny thinness in the finish and much preferred the one on draft. Even though the bottled version was cloudy (yeast in suspension) Rice and I decided we liked it better because of spicy character contributed by the yeast (this version was brewed with a different yeast than last). A bit of a surprise.

Is there a point (or are there points)? For one thing that when you brew in small batches not every edition has to taste the same.

For another, earlier this week Andrew at Flossmoor Beer Blog mentioned that American brewers “try to do a little of everything” (there’s more in his post worth commenting on, but that will have to wait). Well, Rice has won seven medals at GABF or the World Beer Cup in five different beers styles. None of which are among the six regular offering at CR, so brewing an every changing lineup for the other four hasn’t affected quality.

I’m not sure when we’ll next see Demolition Dubbel, but I do know that it will be different again.

“I could do this the rest of my life (and still be working on it),” Rice said.