All About Beer Magazine

Meandering

Posted March 5, 2010 by Julie Johnson 0 Comments | Post a Comment

My fourth blog post, and I’m already going to wander off-mission, at least a little. Last week our friends Shawn and Angie called to ask if they could drop by the office together with a visiting mead-maker they represent. And so, just after lunch, in came Brad Dahlhofer of Michigan’s B. Nektar Meadery, beautiful blue bottles in hand, for an impromptu tasting.

Brad’s meads ranged in style from a traditional Wildflower Mead, with the honey character very much in evidence; to a spicy Vanilla Cinnamon mead, which was a dessert in a glass; to a cutting-edge Bourbon Barrel mead, with layers of oak complexity. He also makes meads flavored with strawberry, raspberry and chipotle, cactus pear, chocolate, and chai tea, as well as “The D’s Bees,” made from contraband honey collected in Detroit, where bee-keeping is illegal.

In short, this ain’t your Renaissance Faire tipple.

Brad winced when we started cracking Viking jokes, as well he might: mead will never take hold as long as it is shackled to that rather twee, Olde Worlde image. Mead, like cider, has been poised to be the next hip beverage for years now, always falling short of predictions. To make that leap to broad acceptance, it will need promoters who are willing to be just as bold and experimental as their craft beer colleagues.

Brad fits that bill. Not surprisingly, he got his start as a homebrewer before specializing in mead, and he talks like a homebrewer when he describes how he formulates new mead recipes. He likened the choice of orange blossom and buckwheat honeys for the barrel-aged mead to building the grain bill for a new beer, with the orange blossom playing the role of a base malt and the potent buckwheat honey adding character as specialty malts would in beer. This can be mead for the 21^st century.

And now, with a glass of the wildflower mead in hand, I’m inspired to muse further…

Mead is in a category all its own. Fermented grain beverages are termed “beer”: even sake, which is often called rice “wine” is technically a beer. Fermented fruit beverages are wine—and that definition extends to ciders, even though they are regulated separately. It’s grain versus grape.

And then we have mead, a rare alcohol beverage made from an animal product (and an insect product, at that). Human cultures have used fermentation (the action of micro-organisms) to transform mammalian milk in the making of cheese, yoghurt, kefir and so on. And, very rarely, milk can be dosed with yeast, and a slightly alcoholic beverage results: in Mongolia, mare’s milk is fermented into a low-alcohol beverage called “kumis.” I understand that fermented goat milk booze exists, as well.

But why are animal-based alcohol beverages so rare? To create alcohol, yeast needs simple sugars to ferment: are those not abundant enough in animal products? Not that we’d want to, perhaps, but could we ferment eggs or blood into alcoholic drinks? Homebrewers and biochemists, fill me in.

And, while we’re puzzling, do vegans drink mead?

I Can, and I Do

Posted February 20, 2010 by Julie Johnson 6 Comments | Post a Comment

Along with their greater safety for beach trips and golf courses, and lighter weight on backpacking trips, there’s another reason to value craft beers in cans. It’s one the breweries can’t extol—so I will.

A cold night, a dark cinema, and film in which there is lots of jolly eating and drinking. I have come to see “It’s Complicated” with a band of friends. The movie is laugh-out-loud funny. I reach into a largish purse, and pull out a plastic pint glass in which nestles a can of Oskar Blue’s Ten Fidy.

Position the beer, wait for a big laugh line, then psssst. I pour the inky stout into my glass—hey, I’ll bring it in a can, but I won’t drink it from a can. All around me, patrons are munching from barrels of bad-smelling popcorn and glugging down 64-ounce sodas. And there, in row M, I have a generous serving of a wonderfully satisfying imperial stout—from a can.

I’ve tried this trick before, with bad results. I brought a nice bottled IPA to “Lost in Translation,” then had to dig around in the dark for my bottle opener before I could open and pour it. I settle in to enjoy the beer and the film, only to knock the empty bottle over with my foot during a touching scene, and have to concentrate Very Hard on the screen as the bottle rolls gudda-gudda-gudda under every row of seats to the front of the theatre. Thus, my enthusiasm for the can.

I don’t sneak beer into theaters to protest the outrageous concession prices—though they are outrageous. It’s the selection that’s a problem—that, and the insult of having to pay $9.50 to see a grown-up film without the pleasure of grown-up beverages. At the local performing arts center, one can sip fairly decent wine or beer during “Mama Mia.” I’ve nursed a drinkable cabernet through the second half of “Swan Lake.” And the local independent movie venue offers a small but tasty range of craft beers, another reason they win my support.

The day the multiplex sells Bell’s Two Hearted next to the vats of Pepsi, I’ll patronize the concession stand. Until then, I’ll smuggle my contraband into the seven o’clock showing. See you at the movies.

The World’s Greatest Job

Posted February 11, 2010 by Julie Johnson 5 Comments | Post a Comment

Last week, the staff of All About Beer Magazine had the kind of day that our readers think we have every day:  before noon, we moved straight from our morning caffeine fix to drinking lots and lots of different beers. Here in the office, on the clock, we got paid for drinking beer.

The night before, our publisher had hosted a beer and chocolate tasting for a local non-profit, and there were leftovers from nearly every pairing. Wanting to share the evening’s bounty with the office, the Pub detained the staff at the close of our editorial meeting and spread out the selections.

There was some urgency concerning one of the beers. Having been tapped for the event, the sixtel of Sexual Chocolate, the once-a-year release from Foothills Brewing Co. in Winston-Salem, needed to be drained while the beer was still at its best. We made the effort. In fact, had it been possible to wring a metal keg dry of its last drop, we would have done so.

We tried munching cocoa nibs of the sort used to brew the beer, an experience I found more educational than enjoyable. Nibs are chocolate-in-the-making, not the finished product. Just drink the beer.

The dark horse hit with our group, as was the case with the formal fundraiser, was Charles Wells Banana Beer. Bananas in beer sound bizarre until you think of the dominant banana notes in a traditional hefeweizen. Combine with malted milk balls and, voila, banana split!

The Pub is writing up the charity tasting on his blog (Bradfordonbeer.com), but here are some impressions:

Young’s Double Chocolate Stout has its fanatic followers. I find it well made though very sweet, but when paired it with the same Cadbury milk chocolate that goes into the brew, the common profile is remarkable, and as English as chocolate digestives.

Chocolate Indulgence from Brewery Ommegang couldn’t have been more different. Even though there’s a lot of chocolate aroma, this is a very dry beer, very adult. The fact that I can’t recall its chocolate partner suggests it was better on its own.

Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout was beer enough to marry with dark chocolate truffles from Whole Foods—delectable.

Duck Rabbit Märzen teamed with Lindt White Chocolate, but we also sipped it and sampled ad lib from the chocolate selection. Message: the automatic pairing of dark or very strong beer with sweets works, but we can go beyond that now-conventional pairing and experiment with other styles.

Lion Stout, a big, strong, and sweet tropical stout from Sri Lanka, cosied up with milk chocolate kisses—but I long to try it with a fiery curry.

The moment of truth came after we’d worked our way through all the chocolate duos. The Pub called us to ragged order and gave us a choice: either we could return to our desks and resume work, or he would order pizza and we could keep drinking. Hmmm, tricky.

Out came the Good Stuff: the bottles that no one would dare take home from the office for private consumption. First up was Tactical Nuclear Penguin from BrewDog in Scotland, reputed to be the world’s strongest beer at 32% ABV. Since it gets its strength through a sort of cold-distillation, a la eisbock, I doubt it will show up on U.S. shelves, unless it is taxed as a spirit. (This also leaves Boston Beer as the holder of the “Strongest Beer” title for Utopias, which depends on standard fermentation for its 27% AVB.)

Penguin is not a subtle beer—it’s hot and syrupy, a brew to check off your life list, but I liked sipping it, so many thanks to the BrewDog guys for sending a precious bottle.

And so went the afternoon, with one remarkable bottle after another popped, and small pours all around. The mail lady passed through, followed by the FedEx and UPS guys, all doing their jobs; the phone calls rolled over to voice mail.

If every day went like this, there’d be no magazine and no festivals. But it was great to head home—later, sobered—and realize this is the kind of days our fans imagine when they ask wistfully if we need any volunteers at All About Beer. And, yes, every once in a while, we really do spend the whole day enjoying beer. What a great job.