Opus Dei

About 5 years ago, I was given a gift of two bottles of very special beer: Sam Adams Triple Bock 1995 Reserve, brewed with maple syrup. 10 year old bottles of beer. At the time I didn't fully appreciate what I had been given, but I didn't squander it either. They were buried and forgotten from time to time, peeking through piles in our storage room to remind me that I had these incredible-yet-mysterious bottles of whatever, waiting for god-knows-what before I finally drank them. The Pope? The end of the universe? Who knew.

Five years of seeing and forgetting these beers passed by. But finally, unearthed yet again under piles of useless junk I'll never use, I decided this was the time. Why wait any longer? What magic could possibly happen that hasn't already?

Fighting reluctance and embracing anticipation, tonight became the night. It was time. A 15 year old beer was to meet its fate, brewed to be consumed, not cherished like a collectors' item or ignored.

First, a glimpse of the bottle. The container alone created an atmosphere; dark blue bottle made black by beer, gold script and a cork are the details that Jim Koch uses to let people know that while he cares about his beers, this is one he really cares about.

As I peeled the wrapper from around he cork, I could smell Samuel Adams Triple Bock before I even removed the stopper. Already, hints of chocolate, plums and molasses peeked from around the cork and reminded me more of a cognac than a beer. The anticipation was almost too much.

I finally uncorked the bottle (notice the cork, dark with molasses-y beer), pouring it with a certain amount of reverence into my pint glass. Triple Bock poured like syrup (funny, it's brewed with maple syrup), leaving wine-like legs down the sides of the glass. There was no head; too much malt. Opaque dark brown, no foam, no effervescence, this beer was more liqueur than brew.

The aroma nearly knocked me off my feet. Brown sugar met molasses and chocolate, lingering long and beautifully. Plums and dried cherries worked around a cloyingly sweet malt backbone, telling me to forget hops. There were better things afoot here.

With the same emotion reserved for Christmas morning, I hoisted the glass to my lips, hesitated, and drank. The taste was almost overwhelming; had I not figured in my own mind the power of this beer, I might have been overpowered by it. The flavors weren't delicate hints at tastes. They were full-on robust flavors. A huge aged-beef steak dinner to other beers' fish dish. Maple syrup coated brown sugar. Fine cocoa melted over dried sweet cherries. Smokey grains bathed in thick, sticky-sweet caramel malt. No bitterness tried to shine; any attempt at it would have been a farce to this massive malt monster. Even long after each drink, plummy malts and chocolate clung to my tongue like a sweet memory.

Like a full-bodied cognac without the alcohol burn, each flavor simply got deeper and more complex as Triple Bock warmed. The beer was everything I anticipated and more. Massive flavors didn't compete, they complimented. They were each a part of a whole picture and honestly not one flavor dominated over the others. The whole beer was dominant as a whole.

Part of the magic of this beer was the wait; time only added complexity to a master work. Would it have been the same beer 5 years ago? 10? Ultimately, it doesn't matter. Triple Bock is so well-brewed that accidentally choosing now to open the bottle only added to the whole experience. It's an experience I'm glad I had.

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Bananarama

My good friend Greg is an enabler; every time he goes on a trip, he returns with several beers for me to try that neither of us have heard of. Some are horrendous (more on that in a future post; "Beers I Have Endured" is a feature I may bring to the blog), most are great and some are simply amazing. Greg is my favorite enabler.

While at his house last night, Greg presented me with a beer that could have been worrisome were it not for the fact that I'll try anything: the UK's Wells Brewery Banana Bread Ale.
(yes, that's the bottle for the pic on a table that includes my own tabletop gaming passion, Warmachine...not all dorks drink Mountain Dew all night; some of us drink beer)

My brain screamed out in terror: another fruit beer! Say it ain't so! From Cerise to Apricot Ale, fruit beers, with a few exceptions, tend to resemble alco-pops and wine spritzers more than fine balances between fruit and beer (Dogfish Head's Aprihop, Magic Hat's #9 and Unibroue's Ephemere are some of my favorite exceptions to that rule; Pyramid's Aprihop, Hilton Head's Blueberry Wheat and AB's Wild Blue Blueberry Lager are the worst adherents). But being of warped mind and tolerant body, I decided to dive in and give it a shot.

I am glad I did.

Wells offering pours like a loaf of homemade banana bread; golden brown, capped in a creamy fluff. Carbonation like the flecks of banana throughout. Lacing down the sides of the glass like the bits of sticky sweetness that hangs on to the pan. Looked tantalizing enough, and thankfully, none of that electric purple color you get in other fruit beers. Subtle like a Brit, this beer.

Blindfold me and I would swear this was a slice of banana bread. Banana taffy, sticky sweet, reaches out of the glass first. The beer bottle claims that organic bananas are used in every batch and I don't doubt it. Right behind that is caramel-toffee from lovely malts and even a walnut aroma from the interplay between malt and yeast. Not much in the way of beery aromas; the bananas dominate. But traditional British-style bready aromas work wonderfully with the bananas to fool any nose into convincing its accompanying palate into expecting bread instead of beer.

And fooled my palate was. Big bold banana taste, slight caramel, roasted nuts and toffee fill out the flavors in this beer. The banana is the star without a doubt. Maybe it's that bananas are more subtle and less powerfully-sweet (like berries or cherries can be), but I found that is wasn't overpowering. Like the aroma, my tongue swore (as it too often does) that this wasn't a beer at all.

My only criticism of this beer is that it is a bit of a one-trick pony; it's all banana bread and very little beer. It lacks the complexity of a truly world-class fruit beer. As a novelty, though, it's really well-done and I'd drink more than one on a night; it's not every day you drink a beer that makes you swear it's something else. If you don't like bananas or banana bread, I sure hoped you stopped reading at the title of the post! But if you want to try a nicely done, unique beer, give Banana Bread Ale a shot. What it lacks in intricacy it makes up for in tastes we all love from grandma's kitchen. In Yorkshire.

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Left-Handed Behavior

About 3 years ago, I tried and failed miserably at brewing a milk stout. By adding lactose, a milk-derived sugar, a beer gains a creamy feel and a residual sugary sweetness (lactose is unfermentable by beer yeast). On an especially roasty stout, the addition of lactose gives a coffee-and-cream impression that is just astounding when done right. This is what I failed to do!


That said, a brewery that has been quite successful at a milk stout is the Left Hand Brewing Company about 30 miles outside of Denver, CO, in the town of Longmont. I am generally quite happy with many of their selections, but my favorite one overall is their delicious Milk Stout. I don't think I'm alone in my enjoyment of their offering; they won the World Beer Cup in 2006 and 2008 for this delicious selection.

To the tasting.

Oh look! Another really dark beer in my fridge! Unsurprisingly, Left Hand Milk Stout pours a brown dark enough to be mistaken for black in my pint glass. Even in my basement's modest lighting, I saw lovely ruby-red highlights in the beer around the edges of the brown-black concoction. It was capped with a thick finger of creamy cappuccino foam. The beer as a whole could have been a glass of high-end latte as much as a fine beer. And as I drank, it left rivulets of lovely lace down the sides of my glass; sticky-sweet reminders of my too-quick progress through this pint!

So the beer looks, so the beer smells. The first aroma that hit my nose are coffee and cream. Left Hand gave me a big, bold roasted malt character topped with unmistakable sweet cream and chocolate. The sweetness didn't compete with the generous roasted character as much as cut it just enough to not be overwhelming. The aromas finished chocolaty and even just a little bready. But my nose can only play with beer for so long before my mouth wants a piece of the action (was that maybe a little dirty?).

While the roasted-coffee aromas played the dominant role on the nose, it's the cream and chocolate that play prominently on the taste. Beautiful sweet cream and chocolate malt play on top of the roasted coffee flavor like a cappuccino sprinkled with dark chocolate. Left Hand Milk Stout becomes a beery mocha latte; my tongue rejoices in its two favorite drinks becoming one! The stout finishes with hints of bready yeast and malts and a bitterness that comes from dark roasted malts more than from hops. I dare say that I didn't really detect much in the way of hops (there must be some in there somewhere!), but I didn't want them and I didn't miss them. The bitterness is like the kind you get from coffee; it comes from the roast and not some other foreign ingredient.

The silky, milky creaminess added a ton of body to this beer, making it borderline heavy, but without a heavy impression. Thick and creamy, not heavy and syrupy. The higher carbonation in this stout backs the body off just enough that this beer becomes easily sessionable without being too filling.

Everything in this beer just works right. Nothing seems out of balance and the shift from coffee aroma to creamy-sweet taste is pleasant enough that people hesitant to drink "dark beer" actually enjoy this one because it's not a huge challenge to the taste buds. Even novice beer drinkers are impressed with Left Hand Milk Stout's recognizable flavors and aromas. Pro drinkers (you know, everyone on this blog) love it for its complexity and adherence to a classic British style of beer so "nutritious" that it was historically given to nursing mothers. It has milk in it after all!

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Not Just Your Average Fruit Beer

As some of the ATK regulars know, contributor Sopor was recently hired as a brewer at the Mt. Pleasant Brewing Company in Mt Pleasant, Michigan. We are, of course, thrilled that one of our own is officially in the big leagues.

Sopor graciously supplies me with some of their beers so that we can review them. I promised him to be objective; if a beer needs work, it needs work, and it yields a better product. If a beer is truly great, then they can run with it (not that my reviews mean much...). Sopor is also going to post some pieces and pictures about days in the life of a real brewer. That will be some great insight and I look forward to his posts.

At any rate, one of the beers he dropped off the other day is Mt. Pleasant Brewing Company's Coal Stokers Blackberry Ale, with real blackberry juice added to the brew. Let's begin!

Sopor's beer poured a hazy amber into my pint glass. It added a purple hue to that lovely amber and yielded a bit of a purplish-white head that settled quickly.

Coal Stokers had a nice berry aroma over the top of everything; not too much, and not so scant that it was supressed. What was nice about the aroma with this beer s that th sweet berry wasn't all-powerful, like those horrid imitation blueberry beers. This was balanced by a solid malt backbone. The malty roastiness and sweetness really shined along with the berry.

Pleasantly, this beer was balanced between berry and malt as I drank it. There is a touch of sweetness to this beer; the fruit character is evident, but like the aroma, it's not overwhelming. The beer is also slightly tart. I got malt and roast first, followed by a run of fruit flavor: blackberry jam and juice and even raspberry notes. I didn't get a hop presence at all, and I honestly would have liked some for just a little variation on the taste. Maybe a West Coast hop for some citrus or a German hop for some earthy/spicy flavors to add some complexity. This was a medium-bodied beer, a little watery-thin, with moderate amounts of carbonation. The carbonation was enough to let you know it's beer without being too scrubby-bubbles about it or without being, as some fruit beers are, tragically flat.

All in all, this is a really nice fruit beer. It is unmistakably the kind of fruit it says it is, but it's not cloying and actually tastes very natural. I did not get a sense that this is artificial or extract-like. There are so many fruit beers that are over-the-top in their fruit flavors (see my review about Founder's Cerise), but this one struck a decent balance. I gave a bottle to one of my neighbors, who shared it with his wife who normally dislikes beer. They really liked this beer and are interested in getting more. It pleased both the beer crowd and the non-beer crowd.

Great effort from the Mt. Pleasant Brewing folks! I liked it as much as Sammy A's Cherry Wheat (though with all honesty, one of the best fruit beers ever brewed is DFH's Aprihop).

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Strange Brew

My favorite in-state brewery is a close tie between New Holland and Founders. They each brew beers that are mainstays of my beer fridge. Founders, though, brews what is my favorite beer: the Breakfast Stout. There is, simply, nothing wrong with this beer. It is perfect in every way.

Then, on rare occasions, they brew their Kentucky Breakfast Stout, which is the very same stout aged in bourbon barrels. Clever, no? And muy delicioso.

In a recent conversation with their sales and marketing director, I found out that Founders is unveiling a line of specialty beers called "Founders Backstage." They make a limited amount of barrels of these beers (no bottles) and send them along to bars that are Founders-friendly. One of these beers is the Canadian Breakfast Stout. It's Breakfast Stout (oatmeal, double chocolate, coffee) with maple syrup added and aged, as I understand it, in maple syrup barrels. What's not to love?

And I found this elixir in one of my favorite beer bars, Dusty's Taproom, on my and Mrs. Smitty's anniversary evening this past Tuesday. Of course, we immediately each had a snifter. This stuff is incredible.

Our bartender handed each of us a pitch-black glass topped off with a rich, thick lather-like 3 finger head that yielded a lacing that stuck like glue to the glass as we drank it down. It just looked thick and heavy, and along with the lacing also left wine-like "legs" down the glass as we swirled it.

One long drawn breath was not enough to uncover all of the subtleties Canadian Breakfast Stout. I noticed the sticky-sweetness of the maple syrup right on top of everything. Along with it was root beer, vanilla, cinnamon, and cocoa. And of course, it wouldn't be Breakfast Stout with a nice load of coffee along with it. This beer just smelled like breakfast. It was inviting, warm, and comfortable. It didn't have aromas so heavy that it invoked fear. No...it was breakfast in a bottle. Bathrobe and slippers and a newspaper.

To say that the taste mirrored the aroma would be to minimize what this beer offered my tongue. Maybe because of the barrel-aging of the beer, there was a hint of bourbon throughout each drink. The maple syrup added a huge complexity to the beer. The maple flavor we all love on top of our pancakes and sausages was clear as day. But it really added a depth of flavor through sugary sweetness that gave this stout a dark fruit character (plums) that is otherwise missing in the flagship style of this beer. Cocoa, root beer, molasses, malted milk, and coffee all played along in this breakfast of champions, and a interesting caramel taste thrilled me on the finish. These flavors, especially the maple, really lingered on my tongue well after each drink, and as the beer warmed a bit, all the flavors get more pronounced. This is a beer for the ages.

From the oatmeal, this lovely beer is smooth as silk, except for a slightly dusty cocoa texture. At nearly 10% abv, I never felt the alcohol burn, nor did the alcohol take away from any of the other flavors. There was no "maple syrup mixed with jet fuel" feel to this beer. It was just smooth, sticky, sweet and delicious.

Canadian Breakfast Stout. Would I pour it over pancakes? I might. In fact, I may actually mix pancake batter with it. This is an after-dinner sipper. This is a beer to be as much contemplated as it is to be cherished and drank. This beer is a rich, thick stack of pancakes covered in pure syrup with a cup of black coffee.

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A Pale Comparison To The Original

Last week in my beer news roundup, I mentioned Founders Brewing Company has recently released Cerise, a pale ale with loads of Traverse City-grown cherries in every batch. This week, I had the opportunity to try some on tap at my favorite local watering hole, Brannigan Brothers. Cerise is the replacement for the recently discontinued Rubaeus, a raspberry beer, which had a broad following and was a very balanced fruit beer. Rubaeus fans have been grousing, and unfortunately, Cerise doesn't do much to satisfy their concerns. It doesn't help when Cerise is French for Cherry. Are we still pissed at the French?
My lovely waitress handed me a full pint of a hazy, dark pink beer. It appeared quite effervescent but had virtually no head. As I drank, it left lacing, but it did retain that thin foam cap.

The beer's aroma was predominantly sour cherries with hints of malt behind it. It is impossible to mistake this beer for anything other than cherry. A hint of "christmas spices" (think: mulled cider) hang out behind all that cherry.

My problem with the taste is that while I am sure Founders is being honest when they say they use 30 gallons of cherries in every batch, something in the taste just doesn't quite seem natural. It's so cherry that it seems contrived. As the aroma, sour cherry is the dominant flavor. It finished like a cherry pie where someone forgot to add the sugar: pucker-tart. It's very flavorful, but is missing the malt and hop profile to confirm that this is a beer and not an alco-pop. It also finishes with a hint of a lambic-like yeasty funk, which is about the best part of the beer.

Ceris is medium bodied with a syrupy quality. The carbonation separates it from a wine cooler, really.

I have to say I was disappointed in this beer. I love Founders; it's my favorite in-state brewery. But this just left me lacking. I liked (and many other people liked) Rubaeus because while you could taste the raspberry, there was a big malt profile and hop character that reminded you it was a beer. Rubaeus was a marriage between raspberries and a solid ale. Ceris? Cherry juice with alcohol in it. Sure to please people who otherwise won't drink beer, Ceris could be a "gateway" beer for someone looking for an intro to the world beyond mixed drinks and Miller. But for ATK regulars? Stick with a cherry wheat if you must.

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The Right Way To Put Orange In Your Beer

Some day, I am going to try and brew a mead. Looking a mead recipes, they are a good deal less complicated than a normal batch of beer, which is also not that complicated. Heat honey, add water, boil, cool, pitch yeast. The only thing that holds me back is the bottle conditioning period, which is somewhere between "when your bottles start collecting a good deal of dust" to "after retirement." Mead just gets better as it ages, and the character of the mead changes depending on the type of honey used (clover, fruit blossoms, etc.).

The beer I tried for this week's review is one that, intentionally or otherwise, looks to bridge a gap between mead and beer. This is Thomas Creek Brewery's (Orange Blossom Pilsner. Despite being brewed in South Carolina, it is subtitled "Florida's Honey Beer. The base beer is a Pilsner, with orange blossom honey added for alcohol and flavor. I've seen, and had, plenty of honey beers in my drinking career, so I am always happy to give them a try. The right kind of honey can add a nice flavor to a beer without affecting the body much, and it usually dries a beer out a bit.

This beer Thomas Creek's OBP poured a crystal-clear golden body with orange hues to it. Light effervescence yielded a thin, pure-white head which dissipated quickly. As I drank it, it did leave white wine-like "legs" down the glass.

Putting the glass to my nose, I did detect some "classic" lighter pilsner aromas: grainy, malty, with a smattering of floral and slightly spicy hops. The beer did have a honey-sweetness on top of it all, but not in such a way as to overpower the pils.

The taste was a decent blend of classic pilsner with noticeable honey sweetness added. It was grainy, slightly earthy and spicy, and sweet (malty and sugary). Interestingly, the lingering aftertaste was oranges. Not citrusy, like so many beers described on this blog, but very specifically orangey. The lightly-tart orange and honey sweetness grew as the beer progressed, along with the pleasant floral notes and mellow maltiness of a pils.

OBP was very light-bodied with moderate carbonation. It is a very quaffable beer, especially for hot summer days on your back deck. I have read some other reviews of this beer, and many of them are highly critical, given that this beer relies on a heavy adjunct (honey) to achieve its flavors and strength. Sure, Miller and those beers use rice and corn as a way to add fermentable sugar without adding color or other flavors. But to compare this beer, which is quite drinkable (though not the greatest beer I have ever tried), with those beers simply on the basis that the brewer used an adjunct is to miss what the brewer was trying to do. It's the South. Huge, black, roasty beers just aren't as popular down there. They grow oranges. They made a marketable, drinkable beer using what is considered the symbol of Florida (outside the stupid alligators). Again, while it's not an earth-shattering beer of immense creativity, I would definitely grab one of these on a sunny afternoon.

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