Leffe Blonde

Perspicacious.  That’s an interesting word.  I used to know what it means, I think.  I should look it up before it drives me crazy all day.  Un momento…  Ah, there we are!  Perspicacious: having keen mental perception and understanding; discerning.  Okay, I’m back in the knowing-what-perspicacious-means game!  Hold on, what’s this?  Often confused with perspicuous.  Hmm…  Perspicuous: clearly expressed or presented; lucid.  I can see how those are similar.  Most perspicacious people are likely also perspicuous.  Of course the former is more difficult than the latter.  Someone who is perspicuous could be clearly expressing drivel.  Or is it?  Someone with a connection to the autistic spectrum would probably disagree.  And I have witnessed very thoughtful people with keen insights get crushed in debate by deft rhetoric.  I guess we should strive for them together but be content with either and hopefully never fall short of both.

I should just let my musings sink in and then apply them to my reviewing and writing styles but I like to use them directly in a kind of zymurgic personification.  How does Leffe’s Blonde exhibit keen mental perception and how does it lucidly express it?  Concretely it doesn’t.  It’s water and sugar and alcohol after all.  But I can imagine.  If a baby can recognize faces on inanimate objects, I should be able to assess the cognitive abilities of a drink!  If it doesn’t work, no harm done.  If it does, I can call a psychiatrist.  Either way I get a beer.  Here is Leffe Blonde.

Well the color is clearly expressed!

That aroma does not beat around the bush.  It pops up right away saying “I’m Belgian and you love me!”  Sure there’s complexity in the nose between mild notes of astringency and banana, but they all point with one hand.  The flavor speaks of the joys of non-fruit Belgian beers.  It briefly mentions alcohol bite, yeast funk and horse blanket but never delves into any on them.  It even gives a small hint of that quintessential dry mouthfeel in the aftertaste.  Definitely perspicuous.  Short winded and prosaic.

As for its perspicacity, I’m drawing a blank.  It could have just hobbled the flavors together and chanced upon a good combination or it could have very particularly chosen every ingredient so as to exemplify the beer making tradition to which each is wed.  If I had to choose one I’d go with the latter simply because it’s more optimistic and optimism always makes life happier.  But I can’t seem to get inside the head of Leffe Blonde.  I guess my psychiatrist will have to spend today alone, sitting on the couch perspicaciously thinking about other people’s problems.

Vanilla Stout, Big Muddy Brewing

A common exercise among aficionados of either food or drink is to pick out optimal pairings of the two.  White wine with fish, IPA with Thai, etc…  It’s really the same game brewers play within their recipes.  “Would fuggles work with crystal?  What about centennial with black patent?”  By discussing pairings you get to talk in analytical terms about your meal without having to know every ingredient that goes into each piece (though it does help).  Today’s beer, like any adjunct reliant brew, is a pairing in itself.  Big Muddy’s Vanilla Stout is a combination of, well, vanilla and, well, stout.  The vanilla is pretty straight forward.  We know what that’s gonna taste like.  But will the stout counter it with coffee or dark chocolate?  Either could work, just like multiple pairings for the same dish can be made depending on if you’re complimenting or contrasting the beverage.  Anyway, on to the beer!

Creamy.

Sniff sniff, yep.  There’s vanilla.  Nice creamy head too.  Feels like it could almost form a mustache.  To be alliterative, this beer is very vanilla.  There’s a little bit of coffee, but it’s mostly vanilla, as if you added the french vanilla creamer to french vanilla flavored grinds.  Or maybe it’s more akin to vanilla flavored soft drinks.  Now that I think of it, the nose gives that impression.  The mouthfeel leaves a sweet coating reminiscent of root beer.  It has its merits but I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to get it.  Though I am a guy who, given a blind choice between chianti and pinot noir, will always go with the chianti.  If you’re into sweets like caribbean rum drinks, it may be right up your alley.

Big Muddy Vanilla Stout doesn’t strike a perfect pairing between its own component parts.  The vanilla overpowers the rest in an act of ruthless domination.  But how did it do with dinner?

Quesadillas!

Definitely went with contrasting tonight.  The jalapeños and tapatio work to clear out the sinuses so you can taste every little detail.  The stout shoots back by relieving the heat.  The eggs help ward off hangovers.  Everybody gets along in a meal brought to you by random chance.  Pairings are a lot of fun and can add quite a bit to your culinary enjoyment, but you’ll still be happy if you eat and drink whatever you want at the time.

The Poet, New Holland Brewing Company

Today’s beer has in a roundabout way gotten me thinking about heaven.  It’s called The Poet and its label is a raven in the night.  A pretty clear allusion to Edgar Allen Poe’s poem named after the bird.  From my reading of it, the crux of the work comes in two stanzas near the end.

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! -

Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,

Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -

On this home by horror haunted - tell me truly, I implore -

Is there - is there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!'

Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!

By that Heaven that bends above us - by that God we both adore -

Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore -

Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels name Lenore?'

Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

In the first stanza the narrator learns that his ceaseless mourning has deprived him of the promise of heaven.  Worse yet, in the second stanza he learns that he’s also lost heaven for his beloved Lenore as well.  If heaven had never existed, the raven would have said “no,” but it pretty consistently sticks to “nevermore,” pinning the blame on the bereaved lover.  It’s all kinda giving me second thoughts about drinking New Holland’s Poet, but it is an oatmeal stout.  Also beer.

Bubbly bubbly head.

The second thing I noticed about the label was that the moon is upside down!  The basalt lava plains mostly occupy the northern hemisphere of the near side, duh!  I’ll just focus on the glass.  This looks pretty darn good.  The aroma hits me with lots of milk chocolate.  The crystal malt brings the sweet feeling of smugly enjoying esoteric poetry.  It ties a rope around your waste and keeps you from losing yourself in the deep, dark abyss of the chocolate malt.  Each sip is a tightly controlled descent into the enveloping unknown while always tethered to safety.  Subsequent visits to the aroma as the beer scurries down the glass reveal the hop notes hidden in the 37 IBUs.  This is squarely a tasty beverage.  Even the tactile senses of the mouth get to revel in it’s velvety smooth texture.  No banishment from celestial existence here!

Poe was not at all the only poet to muse over the concept of heaven.  I recently encountered End of the West where Michael Dickman describes a quasi “What Dreams May Come” image where heaven is whatever you want.  The last page of his Wang Wei: Bamboo Grove reads,

You know

how we are going

to disappear

into the dirt forever

Or burn

into the sky

into oceans

Well, I love this about us

and I want to be able to do it

all by myself

It won’t be scary

or cold

Not like what they told us at all

If the are spiders

and there will be

spiders

they will not kill us

in our

New Cities

In the next poem, End of the West, he goes on to describe four of these “New Cities.”  Each one a personal heaven for a loved one and one for himself.  We all get a heaven that we construct through our experiences and desires.  Or maybe it’s even closer than that.  In a more straightforward way, Helen Lowrie Marshall wrote,

Heaven’s not a fenced-off place

In some far distant sky,

Nor is Eternity consigned

To some sweet by-and-by.

Heaven lies in every

Ordinary, common day.

We make our own Eternal life

Each step along our way.

Eternal time is measured

By a common hourglass.

We glimpse a bit of Heaven

As hours and minutes pass.

We only need the eyes to see.

The heart to count its worth,

To make our own Eternity

A Heaven here on Earth!

Three different poems from three very different directions that all have one thing in common.  They all paint an intrinsic link between the here and now and heaven.  Whether it’s Poe’s heaven that can be brought in and out of existence by our commitment to living, Dickman’s heaven that is formed by our life before death or Marshall’s heaven that is this present life, the onus is on us.  Heaven will not just come scoop us up one day.  We have to take charge of it.  Man!  I should start wearing floaties before reading poetry because it is getting deep!  Beer is such a small thing, insignificant when compared to the fundamental workings of the universe.  But I for one think it’s not a terrible place to start.  Even if it doesn’t know what direction the moon goes.  Cheers!

Sir Dunkle, Berghoff Brewery

When you walk into a beer garden in Bavaria there’s a good chance you will only have one brewery to choose from and only five options.  It’ll all be brewed in house and listed simply as Helles, Dunkles, Weiß, Pilsner and Radler.  When you walk into a brewpub in the United States you may have other breweries represented (depending on how restauranty it is) and every beer will have its own name.  Hoppy Hooligan, Summer Beach Fest, Boozehound Bruce, etc…  So when Berghoff Brewery in Stevens Point, Wisconsin decided to mix up a standard dunkel, it just couldn’t resist nameifying it into Sir Dunkle.  They even reversed the e and the l.  Lets see if their Americanisation stops at the name or if it permeates the beer itself.

Dark indeed.

Very lagery.  Lots of malt notes but the delivery is light and crisp.  That jives with the high clarity of the beer when held up to light.  If feels like a standard American lager with a bit of the same aftertaste to boot.  The sweetness from the darker malts does a very good job presenting itself without the smooth or creamy mouthfeel it often accompanies.  It lingers quite a bit and even thinly coats the mouth.  While not reminiscent of a South German Bräuhaus, I think I will remember Sir Dunkle if I’m headed somewhere with lots of American lager fans.

The label declares this to be a dark lager but Berghoff claims this beer as an altbier, which uses top fermenting yeast.  I just don’t know what to believe.  My mouth says lager, which means either it’s not an altbier at all or they really didn’t utilize the yeast strain to its full potential.  Not sure which would be worse.  It’s like taking an IPA and aging it or making it into an eisbier!  Damn you Americans and your twist top bottles! I feel so betrayed, bemused, bewildered…  Good thing none of those B words affect the beer itself.

Indica, Lost Coast Brewery

Mysticism is the idea that truth or understanding can be attained via subjective means.  One way to think of it is as Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness.”  Always go with the gut because books lie!  Another way to think of it is as a complement to concrete knowledge.  Much like Kierkegaard’s kennenschaft, implying discovery through personable intuition.  Or as any writer who tells you fiction is really nonfiction because it documents the human condition.  The bottle today’s beer comes in describes its aroma as mystic.  That’s not a common word used for the chemical compounds that waft from a glass of beer, but it very well could be merely a function of the India motif their label is going for.  Indica is an IPA so they’ve taken the I from the acronym and jumped on the western association of Hinduism with mysticism.  This association probably stems from the religion’s view of widely disseminated truth.  “May good thoughts come to us from all sides” being a common prayer.  Also because yoga and reincarnation can conflict with the dualism imparted on western religions by Greek philosophers.  I doubt the hops in Lost Coast Brewery’s Indica will unite my atman with the One, but maybe it can align my chakras or something like that.

Orange and cloudy.  Perfect IPA.

That mystical aroma is pretty leafy, but the bulk of the flavor doesn’t hit you until it’s in your mouth.  Another more colloquial usage of the word comes to mind.  That of something mysterious.  As in, where did Lost Coast get the zip file to transport such a hoppy flavor without puckering my face into oblivion?  It may even be on par with the inexplicably large cheese flavor in cheez-its.  Usually with a beer this bitter, my tongue would be having to brace itself for the onslaught of each sip.  Instead that aforementioned leafiness evenly distributes itself between my mouth and my stomach.  Good guy Indica gives you the hops you want without punching you in the face.

Perhaps this is the mysticism referred to on the label.  You can know there’s more to hops than bitterness and floral tones.  You can find beers with lots of IBUs that don’t shrivel your face.  But until you’ve experienced a beer that can deliver lots of bitter hops while simultaneously sidestepping lots of bitter hops, you can’t really know.  It’s a paradox of zymurgy.  Maybe I’m just overreacting.  Maybe I like beer too much to be objective.  Maybe I’ve just had too much.  What I do know is that my experience in this moment, as subjective as I must concede it is, is unquestionably positive.  Mystic, even.

Satin Solitude, Central Waters Brewing Company

Today’s beer comes from a brewery that strives to be green.  Central Waters Brewing Company sources most of their ingredients from local producers, going as far as founding a coop to meet demand.  They’ve switched to efficient light bulbs with motion sensors to automatically turn off when no one’s there.  They’ve even installed solar arrays to heat their water and provide 20% of their electricity.  I wouldn’t be surprised to find Jimmy Carter wandering the brewhouse in his signature cardigan turning down all the thermostats.  While green politics were unable to take root in the 1970s U.S., businesses like Central Waters are picking up the fight.  A local brewpub owner once ticked through a plethora of green techniques and policies he had in place despite having only one location at the time.  So much for the “environmentalism kills small business” trope.  Anyway, lets move on to the beer.  We can determine if the focus on greening has taken their eye off the ball.  I give you Satin Solitude.

So satiny.  So alone.

As the beer exits the bottle and falls through the air it looks brown, but once it has settled into its new home it is pretty darn close to black.  Good.  I like the dark ones.  The aroma hints this may go coffee on me but doesn’t assure it.  My tongue is a bit more confident.  The coffee notes do not dominate the game, leaving room for others like cream and small doses of carbon.  I can kind of see where the Satin in the name comes from.  The mouthfeel masks the alcohol bite so that this 7.5% stout feels not a point over, say, 6.8%.  Small change but noticeable nonetheless.  Other reviewers have mentioned this beer is a bit thin for an imperial stout.  I wouldn’t say that.  Not every stout is Old Rasputin.  Get over it.  Always remember that each beer style contains a diverse set of brews.  Satin Solitude takes a slightly less bombastic approach and rocks it.  So what if it’s not as thick?  If I want a second one, I can have it.  Try drinking multiples of the far end of the imperial stout spectrum.  I find assessing beers by their own merits leads to more enjoyable drinking.

Well, for Central Water Brewing Company at least, a focus on being green has definitely not detracted from the quality of the tipple.  Perhaps they can serve as an inspiration for us all.  Maybe we can reduce our carbon footprint without reducing our standard of living after all.  If the beer is good we might not mind even if we did have to sacrifice a few luxuries.  Here’s to good environmental stewardship and good beer!  Can we have both?

Si se puede!

Leffe Brune

Zythology is funky sounding word.  One of those words you really only ever use to make yourself sound smarter than you are.  So it peaked my interest when I saw it on the website of today’s beer.  You are invited to become a zythologist by touring the Leffe brewery in Dinant, Belgium.  It’s appearance seemed oddly familiar and as I read further, that familiarity only grew.  I had seen this pathos heavy rhetoric somewhere else…  A few minutes later I got my answer, AB-InBev.  I should have known!  Almost everything they publish uses the exact same writing style and graphic design in the aim of eliciting feelings of vague excitement and pristine cleanliness.  This bottle of Leffe Brune may have been brought to me by the “King of Beers,” but it still sports a claim to the year 1240.  Lets see if tradition trumps modernity.

So far so good.

Well, looks solid.  I couldn’t get a good picture of it, but when held against strong light, that darkness reveals itself to be a delightful ruby.  Smells just right for a Belgian Abbey ale too, sweet with a tiny hint of the toasty notes found in the darker malts.  Heck, the head even did that thing where it recedes from the edges of the glass but continues to poof up in the middle.

Ooh, ich mag es so gern!

I like the flavor, which seems a slightly more astringent version of your standard British or American Brown Ale.  Or I guess it would be more accurate to say the British and American types are slightly less astringent versions of Leffe Brune.  The mouthfeel is fairly smooth with only a little sharpness perhaps from the yeast variety.  Or maybe it’s the hops.  Or the water.  What do you think I am, a zythologist?  But seriously, it either the yeast or the malt if they used chocolate or coffee.  It’s hard to say.

I wasn’t around to taste the beer in 1240, but my guess is that tradition has trumped modern capitalism in this case.  Leffe Brune strikes me as a very European beer from the bottle to the finish.  Definitely one I’ll be remembering. Maybe I should stop by Dinant for that brewery tour. Looks like it's hosted in a beautiful space. Also quite European.

Bedlam!, Ale Asylum

Today’s beer is described by its makers in avant garde terms.  “Chaos as art” is apparently its motto.  The brewery’s web page for it is mostly a copied and pasted entry from beeradvocate  where a user waxes poetic over astronautical rhetoric.  I’m imagining a barley and hops Jackson Pollock or Reggie Watts.  That sounds good to me.  Artistic expressions that stretch your mind can be quite pleasing.  But they can also go overboard.  Think of the enjoyable dissonance of Bartok on one hand and phrase words of annoyance reordering a randomly the on the other.  The question is which one this beer will be.  So as your beer blog curator, I present to you Ale Asylum’s Bedlam!.

Nice deep orange color!

The bottle claims the citra hops and belgian yeast create notes of summer fruits.  Even though that’s a common term used by a lot of breweries and reviewers, I’m not quite sure which fruits specifically count as summer fruits.  And what’s the alternative?  Winter fruits?  I'll have to look into it. Anyway, if that term refers to oranges and grapefruits, then it’s right on. Maybe a hint of apricot as well.  The taste doesn’t immediately strike me as being particularly chaotic, but not because its component parts do not clash.  The single minded hops of the IPA side and the nutty curveballs of the Belgian side are diametrically opposed.  But instead of spinning off each other into an ambiguous cloud of cognitive dissonance, they seem to bore directly into one another and cancel each other out.  It’s like the airborne streaks of paint of the aforementioned Pollock just happened to fall into the outline of a Hirst.  You’ve got random streaks of paint, but the big picture is of monochromatic dots.

As far as where Bedlam! falls in the avant garde, my mind likes the task of dissecting all its moving parts but unfortunately my stomach sees it as the annoying reordered words.  Out-there art can be good for the brain.  However, beer ultimately gets processed by a dumb mass of cells limited to chemical reactions and pressure variances as a means of communication.  Physiological forums are not particularly ponderous.

Update! Apparently there are winter fruits. And spring fruits and autumn fruits. Who knew? Aside from millions of people all over the world, that is. Oranges fall into winter and spring but grapefruit and apricot are summer. Two out of three isn't too bad, right?

Shiner Bock, Spoetzl Brewery

I recently watched a short documentary called “How Beer Saved the World.”  This film contained a lot of interesting information, but it wrapped it all in the overly dramatic cliches of adult educational programming.  Every piece of trivia was shockingly revealed to you between three and five times by a host of experts causing you more to question their academic professionalism than to better absorb the lesson.  The music made each event in the history of beer sound on par with man learning to walk upright.  One speaker even suggested abandoning BC and AD for BB (Before Beer) and AB (After Beer).  That AB was the closest it ever came to mentioning a company other than MillerCoors (corporate sponsorship anyone?).  Of course the biggest cliche was all the secularised “sunday school questions” where the answer was invariably “beer.”  Come on, at least the little church going kindergarteners have to choose between “Jesus” and “God.”  As painful as it was to watch, this film was produced for a syndicated cable channel.  So obviously there’s money to be made here.  Maybe I should give it shot…

Texas is well known for cowboys, steak houses and capital punishment, but it also has a long history of something else.  Something liquid.  Something alcoholic.  Beer.  In the small town of Shiner, mere hours from the Mexican border, the brave men of Spoetzl Brewery create a famous bock.  But bock is a German style.  Yes that’s right.  This part of Texas was settled by Germans.  Germans who brought something with them.  Something bubbly.  Something very valuable.  Beer.  These industrious men and women built a society from nothing in a strange land surrounded by foreign people.  But they could never forget where they came from.  They sowed barley and transplanted hops so they could make something better than water.  Something older than the wheel.  Something with the power to save millions of lives.  Beer.  Their descendants have continued the legacy.  They have courageously toiled for over a century in back breaking labor to produce something delicious.  Something malty.  Something that saves a baby from a burning house every week as a warm up before flying all over the world to fight crime and drop jobs down people’s chimneys.  Spoetzl Brewery’s Shiner Bock.

Lovely ruby hues.

Okay, so we’ve got one of those quickly dissipating heads here.  Within about a minute it’s pretty much gone.  Noisy little guy too.  Kind of like rice crispies right after you add the milk to the bowl.  I love the color and clarity.  It’s simplicity seems like a visual approximation of the aroma.  The flavor quickly follows suit leading me to question why this has been labelled as a bock.  It tastes more like a pilsner with just enough darker grain to affect the appearance.  Bock may be an odd choice to describe this brew, but bock is an odd choice for a hot climate such as Southeast Texas.  If you approach it from the direction of the standard American Pilsner, it becomes a pretty tasty alternative to the big boys.  It also helps you feel better about the thin, highly carbonated mouthfeel and faintly acetic tones.  Bottom line, save this one for those hot summer days when you’re not particularly in the mood for sweets.

Oh yeah, I stopped writing in the superlative infotainment style.  I just couldn’t keep it going.  I guess I’m just too deadly serious about my passion.  Not able to crack jokes about this momentous invention.  This magical, life giving, evil defeating beverage.  This stepping stone from neolithic cave men to masters of nature, the universe and everything!

I mean beer!

Rampant Imperial IPA, New Belgium Brewery

Rampant.  What does that word make you think of?  Vikings?  Weeds?  An annoying social fad that is quickly engulfing all your friends?  While “rampant” has it’s own meaning regarding the leg position of a usually quadrupedal animal, the modern English usage of the word leaves it adjectivally tethered to its etymological sibling, “rampage.”  Think “rampagent” or “rampagey.”  That makes rampant the perfect word to describe today’s beer, a claimed Imperial IPA.  That combination conjures images of hops rampaging through an innocent mouth like Vikings through the North Sea.  I present to you New Belgium’s Rampant.

I even have the right glass!

Imperial of course is a reference to the imperial stout and its massive size.  It’s a more self confident way of saying double IPA.  That tells me I should prepare myself for the American style kick of hops popularized by the guys at Stone and others of their ilk.  But I also know New Belgium is most famous for following the zymurgic traditions of Belgium, so I should also be ready for a hint of fruity funk.  As I get my first whiff of the stuff, the imagery is of dry hopping a beer while the dregs in the primary are right there next to you.  So floral hoppiness mixed with grains and bready yeast for the non brewers.  Once it hits my tongue I instantly know this is nothing like Stone bitterness.  It’s firmly in the set of IPAs I like to call grapefruit beers.  Not bitter, but tart like citrus.  At 8.5% ABV I know there has to be a sizeable amount of malt in there, but it plays a purely supportive role.  I guess it’s busy counteracting the bitter punch of the hops.  It’s hard to believe the three varieties used (Mosaic, Calypso, Centennial) are all in the double digit alpha acid camp.

I was wrong at the beginning of this post.  That other meaning for the word “rampant” is a much better descriptor of this beer.  The aforementioned leg position is the well known stance of the lions in several European crests, so it has a strong connection to royalty.  New Belgium’s Rampant is a beer of the great power and sophistication you would expect from a king.  But it is also benevolent.  So what if I don’t have any democratic freedom?  If it tastes like this who cares?

Long live the king!