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  • woolwine 7:31 pm on February 15, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Town Hall, Twin Cities   

    Town Hall Tap: we tapped it. For science. 

    I’ve never made it to Town Hall Brewery proper (Flash crazytown, iPhones beware), but its reputation precedes it. They’ve just opened a new brewpub not far from myself and ze Table, and — for science! — we checked it out a while ago. Highlights!

    • Beer cheese soup in a bread bowl is on the menu.
    • And I didn’t even order it
    • because I was swayed by Brie cheese curds with blackberry jalapeno chutney. When I say curds, I mean Brie chunks the size of ice cubes, deep-fried.
    • Also, beer pretzels stuffed with jalapeno cheddar.
    • Plus, there was beer. I KNOW!!

    We ordered a nice study in contrasts: I had a Summit Winter Ale on cask, a little mellower and woodier than its usual festive self. I was incredibly, nerdily psyched to see this on the menu. It isn’t the crazy flavor epiphany that Surly Furious on cask was for me, but still really pleasant. For my compatriot, Town Hall’s Belgian brown ale: dry, sparkly, crisp. Yeast is up front and after my Summit, it seemed very hoppy indeed. By my lights it’s a little more saison-ish than brown-ale-ish, but tastier, to me, than a proper saison. A favorable first impression, and among the other Town Hall beers and the rest of the pretty sizable tap list are plenty of things I’m excited to drink for science on future visits.

    (I didn’t quite have my head around the whole deal with barrels and casks and firkins; Wikipedia on cask ale is helping me set myself straight. Briefly: a cask is a beer storage container. A firkin is a cask with a capacity of nine imperial gallons [and a cute name]; a barrel holds thirty-six. Kegs are a subset of casks; they have a delivery mechanism for nitrogen or carbon dioxide. But although “cask” is the broader term, cask ale is its own thing. Like the Summit, it’s unfiltered, unpasteurised, and lives in a cask with no added gas pressure, where it goes on fermenting and might be left for some time to mature, particularly if it’s a strong, dark beer. The end product is warmer, flatter, and maybe smoother than keg beer; depending on the particular beer and one’s preferences, this may be awesome.)

     

  • woolwine 7:03 pm on January 28, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: blueberry, cherry, , Flying Dog, Lagunitas, , , , raspberry, , , , , Twin Cities,   

    The back of 2010, the front of 2011 

    Recent beers in roughly ascending order of recentness…

    New Glarus Unplugged Old English Porter: Oh my god, this beer made me do a dance of joy. Thrilled that I have one more bottle, sad that I have ONLY one more bottle. It’s recognizable as a porter, but so sour that a warning sign was posted next to it: “This beer is SOUR!” Flavors that I don’t even ordinarily like throw a party in my mouth: black cherry, wood, kombucha — and I’m dancing despite myself. It’s really kind of like listening to Girl Talk for the first time.

    Surly Furious on cask: Delight. I remembered how good Sam’s was at the Happy Gnome and jumped at the chance to order one at Ngon on the evening of the winter solstice. Grapefruity, endlessly smooth, so great, even Meghan liked it. If my girlfriend likes an IPA, then that IPA is an IPA that everyone should put in their mouth.

    Lagunitas Brown Shugga: Baby’s first Lagunitas. I didn’t chill mine nearly enough the first time I drank it. Candied piney hops? No thanks. But in a frosty mug? Fresher and not too sweet. Yes, actually, I think I will, thank you.

    21st Amendment Fireside Chat: Surprisingly kinda weird! I figured the brewery that knocks watermelon wheat ale out of the park could do no wrong, but I found Fireside Chat bitter and clovey.

    New Glarus Raspberry Tart: Cracked on the occasion of my thirty-first birthday. Oh yum. Like their Belgian Red, sweet and tart but still recognizable as beer. I heart raspberries and the raspberry flavor here is just as real as expected. My only complaint is I’m now spoiled for Lindeman’s Framboise.

    Kasteel Rouge: Wow, and this one is like a Belgian Red spiked with concentrated cherry juice. Good and sour and intensely juicy-sweet. I wasn’t sure about this at first, but it grew on me. Alternated sips with a Bell’s Best Brown Ale, while I was at it.

    Dark Horse Tres Blueberry Stout: I’m into it. I think this has exactly the right amount of blueberry flavor. What I really need to do, FOR SCIENCE!, is make a clafouti or crême brûlée or something to eat alongside it.

    Flying Dog Gonzo Imperial Porter: Very nice indeed, though maybe not quite as sublime out of a bottle as I remember it from a tap at the beer fest last summer. But this is nice and robust, and as it warms I detect a little bit of the sourness I adore in New Glarus’s sour porter. I have a barrel-aged version of this too! Exciting!

    Summit Winter Ale: Number one with a bullet my new Summit favorite! Dark dark dark, thick creamy head, the smell of faraway woodsmoke in cold snowy air up top and creamy vanilla on the bottom with toasty malt sandwiched in between. Nice with ice cream.

    And a discussion question: What do you pair with macaroni and cheese? Common Roots has had a delicious truffle mac&cheese for the past month or two. I’ve tried it with a brown ale, a cream stout, and most recently Finnegan’s Irish Amber. None objectionable, but none perfect either.

     

  • woolwine 10:30 pm on September 28, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ice cream, , , Twin Cities   

    Two great tastes that — oh, YOU know 

    Izzy’s Summit Oatmeal Stout. What? It’s not a mixed drink.

    I have tried a couple of Guinness ice creams before and found them nothing to write home about. A Guinness float, ditto. The Surly Bender ice cream at Sebastian Joe’s a while back was nicer; complemented the chocolate nicely; and (best of all!) at a party when the weather was still warm here I had the distinct pleasure of tasting a homemade Coffee Bender ice cream: beer poured into the custard during the freezing, leaving the alcohol intact and the finished product all late-summer-melty latte sweetness.

    Right now I’m licking the last couple drops of Izzy’s out of my bowl and fumbling for words; this stuff is delicious, but the Summit, my first oatmeal stout and one I happily return to, is mostly unrecognizable. The effect is of strong, sweet, yeasty vanilla and sticky malt. Strange things happen when the beer goes in the custard and all the alcohol gets cooked out, but I’m into this; I want it in a cone, with chocolate, with a pint, maybe all of the above.

     

    • smole 3:48 pm on October 2, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Sounds delicious. You could always have it in a beer float, too.

  • woolwine 11:36 am on September 8, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Flat Earth, , kolsch, , Lift Bridge, , orange, , , , tripel, Twin Cities   

    Drinkin’ beers with mrbeefy 

    That’s right, I had the distinct pleasure the other week of enjoying some adult beverages in the company of a fellow NMDer. The venue was the Happy Gnome and our agenda (read: Sam’s agenda that I copied shamelessly, because yum) was to drink some sour beer. I started out easy, though, with a Lake Superior Kayak Kolsch. This was a happy surprise at the beerfest for me, and it was pretty good on tap too, though best enjoyed while still cold. Sam got to the bar ahead of me and went right for the Surly Furious on cask. My experimental sips of the Furious were a happy surprise too — those, right there! Those are the grapefruit-tasting hops I’ve been hearing about! Whatever kind of hop this is, I’m going hunting for more of it. Racer 5 is already on my list to try.

    Out on the patio, we ordered second beers and a Humboldt Fog cheese plate. My second was a Lift Bridge Minnesota Tan. What’s up with so many beers having names that sell the beer itself short? Tan is more complicated than the name implies: a cloudy yellow-orange ale in the Belgian tripel style that is stuffed full of lingonberries — you know, like you get in the little cup at the Ikea restaurant. It’s strong and tart with a lingonberry kick that is not kidding around, and not sweet either. They filed it under fruity and not sour, but I’m checking this one off as a win in the sour column. Sam, meanwhile, had the only tap beer on the sour list, a Monk’s Cafe Flemish Sour Red. The first whiff was a little bit like vinegar or kombucha, but the flavor was really more like sweet and sour cherry, getting rounder and tastier as the glass warmed. Besides the Humboldt Fog, there was some kind of cherry compote with almonds, a bunch of tiny microgreens, I think a balsamic reduction, and a few fresh berries: all serendipitously great pairings for the Flemish Sour Red, and not half bad with my tripel either. In fact, the flavors on the tasting plate were so interesting that my entree, a gigantic Juicy Lucy made from layers of crispy fried vegetables, couldn’t really compete despite being fantastically executed. Next time it’s kolsch with the sandwich for me — or, even better, a procession of tasting plates and strong beers.

    Dessert was an ice cream cake roll and a Flat Earth orange-infused porter — the Internets tell me that it was in fact a Xanadu Cygnus X-1. See the orange cast to the head in that picture? No joke. I say orange zest with black coffee underneath; Sam says Orange Milanos. I note with interest that this is one of several infused porters Flat Earth released at the end of last month, and one is s’more-infused. A s’more-infused porter. If I can get my hands on some, I’ll tell you all about it.

     

  • woolwine 4:41 pm on June 17, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , Twin Cities   

    Schadenfreude is delicious! 

    Perhaps you were aware of that. But I’m here to tell you that Schadenfreude, the oak aged dunkel lager, is delicious too. Its oak flavor’s nicely subtle, and I was as happy drinking it with my grilled cheese sandwich as with a little bite of triple chocolate torte: Schadenfreude pairs well with sweet and creamy without having so much sweet or creamy flavor of its own that it tastes like a dessert beer. A little pretzel, a little smoke, a little toasty malt, maybe even a little bit of licoricey cola: a little of many things and not too much of any of them. Also nice is that it stays pleasingly balanced from start to finish: no hops jumping out at me in the bottom half of the glass. I tend to linger over pints and I found the last sip of this one refreshing and genuinely drinkable, just like the first.

    Compare and contrast: New Holland Dragon’s Milk, of which I have a couple in my fridge. This one is a bourbon-barrel-aged strong ale that most certainly does come on strong, and it makes its barrel nature evident right out of the gate. Oak and smoke and sherry and vanilla and really quite a lot of alcohol, like a Christmas pudding with extra hard sauce. That one time when I left the house, I had a few sips of Dragon’s Milk from a tasting glass that circulated the room; more recently I drank a bottle of it lounging on my couch late in the evening. I was surprised, but maybe shouldn’t have been, to find myself a little wobbly and fuzzy-headed when I got up to go to bed. Serious business.

     

  • woolwine 5:20 pm on April 6, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Twin Cities   

    Surly Smoke 

    I didn’t realize that Common Roots had tapped some Smoke last week and I was almost going to give it a pass until Nikii offered a sip of hers. Four was plenty smoky for me, like I said, and I was expecting Smoke to taste like sticking my face in a campfire frying bacon. Not so! I liked the sip and I bought one to go with my flourless chocolate cake in strawberry sauce. I’d forgotten: it’s a porter and I seem to like those. The smoke is very nice, front and center but not overpowering. In the background are dark chocolate, sweet-sour fruit (dried cherries, maybe), and a little red-wine astringency with just a whisper of hops.

    Speaking of which, I finally made a hopchart account. You should too! Then you should bring me some more porters.

     

  • woolwine 12:41 pm on June 8, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , Twin Cities   

    Bell’s, Schell’s, a pairing machine, and breaking the rule 

    First off, I must call myself out and confess that I drank a mixed drink a couple nights ago, with an umbrella in it and everything, as I’d unofficially resolved not to do. It was technically free; there were no non-mixed drinks available; and the citrus juices in it were tasty, but the citron vodka wasn’t all that. Also I stuck the umbrella in my hair afterward, as you do.

    Onward to the real stuff: I made an ill-considered pairing choice at a party the other week. I drank a Schell’s stout from the bottle and ate baba ghanoush, hummus, and salad. Blech. It improved with baklava and tasted truly awful with strawberries. I imagine that if I’d done it right, the beer would have had some nice coffee flavors.

    The old yeast and sugar sensitivity has been coming back some lately, so I’ve had to lay off drinking whole beers for a little while. Over the appetizer course of a delicious Thai dinner the other night, I had a couple of sips of Gregg’s beverage, which was a Bell’s Double Cream Stout. Yum! I’ve had, I think, a Bell’s Two Hearted and maybe an Oberon before; I remember both tasting just OK to me, but that was before NMD and my realization that I’m not about the hops. The stout was very creamy indeed; I think this is the first beer I’ve had in which I perceived toffee flavor. I wouldn’t say I paired it with anything so much as I had my couple of sips in pretty close proximity to a cream cheese wonton, a labb salad with tofu, and some drunken noodles. I’d order one with the noodles, I think.

    Speaking of pairings, NMD readers (who am I kidding, that’d be you guys who post here) might be interested in the Beer Sommelier, brought to me by Metafilter. My take is that it’s a neat idea with a slick interface, but that the food part of the database needs a lot of work for the app to be really useful (and usable).

     

  • woolwine 9:18 pm on April 28, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , pizza, , Twin Cities   

    Surly Bender, spinach pizza 

    surly bender, spinach pizza

    Unwinding with some Pizza Luce before heading over to clean out my old apartment. Beer seemed like a good idea. Of course, I don’t like anything that goes with pizza worth a damn. I forged ahead with a Bender anyway. (I had in mind a pleasant memory of finishing off the Coffee Bender from Nikii’s Surly flight at Common Roots the other week, yum. Anyway!) Surly calls it “an oatmeal brown ale that defies traditional categories” and it is a tasty beer even though spicy pizza sauce erases the tastiest part, which is the vanilla-caramel at the end, thereby making the hops taste more explodey. Because I could, also tried it with the after-dinner chocolate mints; I would not do that again, but I would cheerfully drink this beer with a non-minty dessert. For the record, near the bottom of the glass, I made the bitter beer face and had to throw in the towel.

    (Fact: Surly Brewing and Surly bikes are both in the Twin Cities, but are unaffiliated. Opinion: Surly bikes are so goddamn pretty.)

     

    • mrbeefy 9:30 pm on April 28, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      You make me want beers I probably can’t have. They sound tasty. A hoppy brown ale is my favorite pizza beer so far, but I’ll keep trying other styles.

  • woolwine 12:54 am on April 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Twin Cities   

    Summit Maibock: such is my devotion to NMD 

    So I took a detour from stoutville, sort of a calculated rookie mistake. I went to a party tonight and my choices were some kind of Leinenkugel, Summit Maibock, and a mojito. Well, except clearly the mojito is not a viable option at this juncture. I knew going in that I wasn’t going to love either beer, but I forged ahead in the name of science. I enjoyed the hell out of some Leinenkugel Honey Weiss last summer at the peanut bar, but this was not that, so no. Maibock is another type to which I haven’t graduated, but I predict that I still won’t love this stuff when I do; I tasted bitter, dry, and bitter with notes of more bitter that turned to an aftertaste of ass on the way to the next party. Maybe some malt in there somewhere. Mostly just bitter. Admittedly, I drank it straight from the bottle and pairing choices weren’t so great. It was just ok with Humboldt Fog (delicious, delicious go-to party cheese; deserves better) on a cracker, and the less said about the chocolate macaroon, the better. I also ended up wearing the Maibock due to an incident of startlement involving our hostess’s dog. It smells like beer. These are the lengths I go to for you, No Mixed Drinks!

     

    • mrbeefy 9:04 am on April 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I haven’t gotten too into Bock’s yet; Trader Joe’s has one that I didn’t think all that much of. Bock’s might be the graduate school that I drop out of to play World of Warcraft all day.

      I’m with you that drinking something bitter out of a bottle isn’t going to help. It’s going to take all that bitter and throw it in your facehole.

    • Karen 2:45 pm on April 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Maybe the beer had just turned?

      Also I can’t read “Maibock” without thinking “Maybach”, a very different kind of thing. :)

  • woolwine 1:35 am on April 24, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Twin Cities   

    Summit Oatmeal Stout: a new hope 

    Hello. This was my dinner tonight at Common Roots, where I knit on Thursdays.

    The beer is a Summit Oatmeal Stout. (In real life, I could see just a little bit of reddish light coming through near the bottom of the glass.) The sandwich is tempeh on rye with greens, tomato, spicy brown mustard, and onion marmalade.

    I tried Summit’s EPA once before, at a bowling alley, because that’s what everyone else was drinking with their delicious greasy bar food. Pleh. That was a rookie mistake. Like I told Nikii tonight when I tried a sip of her Horizon Red Ale (you can see her glass behind mine), I haven’t graduated to ales yet (but it was an educational sip; I could taste a citrusy light at the end of the bitter-sour hoppy tunnel). My first oatmeal stout was a few weeks ago; same place, same Summit, but I eased my way in with an espresso truffle alongside it. I’d got it in my head that oatmeal stouts are best with desserts and in the interim had a less than stellar encounter with a chocolate oatmeal stout and a bowl of French onion soup (don’t do that), so I was trepidatious about the sandwich, but it turned out to be an awfully tasty pairing. I got mostly coffee flavor from the stout in the beginning, which brought out something in the tempeh that I can’t quite put my finger on but was nice and savory; it played nicely with the sweetness of the marmalade too. As I finished the sandwich, moving on to the corn chips on the side and making my way to the back half of the pint, more flavors put in appearances: chocolate, caramel, smoke, and finally a sort of soft maltiness with some tannin that was a pleasant mirror of the tea I drank this morning (Yorkshire Gold, my go-to black tea, always with honey and Vitasoy). I like it here in stoutville. I think I’ll stay a while.

     

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