food & drink

Stop Calling Hazy Beers IPAs

A.B. Kelly · July 6, 2021 · Musings · alcohol, beer, craft beer, food & drink, IPA · No Comments

That’s it. That’s all I have to say. Thanks for reading my blog.

Okay, okay. I’ll expound a little.

The latest beer craze has been Hazy IPAs. They’re, as you might guess, hazy in color. Opaque. Like Metamucil on a cloudy day. So the name of it totally fits.

Except for the fact that it’s not an IPA.

IPA, for those who don’t know, stands for India Pale Ale. It originally got this designation because it was the beer English sailors took on the long trek to India. In order to avoid spoilage, they put a shit-ton of hops in it. Medieval preservatives. Hence the hop-forward flavor profile of your typical IPA. Except not hazies.

When you remember that the I stands for India, the extra classifications sound silly. An IIPA is an Imperial India Pale Ale. Kinda redundant. When else were the Brits going to India? By the time India gained it’s independence, the Suez Canal existed, making the extra hops unnecessary. To say nothing of refrigeration.

A Double IPA? Triple? Is there more than one India? The British were known for fomenting differences between the various religions and ethnicities on the subcontinent, so maybe you could have a Triple India, but they wouldn’t all be drinking the same beer. And at least one of the three wouldn’t drink beer.

Maybe the Double and the Triple IPAs were extra hopped for multiple trips to and from? But couldn’t they refill their keg in between trips? In reality, the double and triple just refers to the extra level of douchiness of the hipsters who drink that swill. Maybe the D doesn’t really stand for Double, after all. You can go to a barbecue with a Triple Douchbag IPA, even if there isn’t a beer in sight.

In case it isn’t obvious, I’m not a huge fan of IPAs. Unfortunately, this means the selection of beers I could buy over the past decade was sparse. In a typical liquor store, the IPA section took up about seventy percent. Twenty percent went to the piss-water, your Budweisers and Pabsts, remnants of my father’s and grandfather’s era when they didn’t know beer was supposed to have flavor, leaving maybe ten percent of the shelf space for the Pales and the Browns and the Reds and the Stouts and the Pilsners and the Wheats.

Actually, fuck the Wheats. If I have to add fruit, it ain’t a beer.

By the time I was of legal drinking age, my grandpa was dead and my dad was an alcoholic. So I never really got a chance to sit and have a brewski with them. I wonder how they would have reacted if I busted out a Sierra Nevada Pale, or even a Newcastle Brown. Would they have oohed and aahed at the brave new world I’d opened for them? Or would they have wondered why my generation had to go fuck something up as simple and wonderful as beer? Kinda like I do when a Millennial waxes lyrical about his 100 IBU IPA.

IBU stands for International Bitterness Unit. The bitterness comes from the hops and the closer it gets to triple-digits, the more it tastes and feels like cotton. Budweiser and its ilk have IBUs in the single digits. Creamy ales and brown ales are in the low double-digits. The major microbrews, like Samuel Adams and Sierra Nevada, are in the thirties range, which I also call the happy range.

Hazies, on the other hand, have IBUs in the twenties or the teens. I’ve seen some as low as ten, maybe eight. That’s porter territory, no residual bitterness whatsoever. Calling a Hazy an IPA is like calling yourself an international coffee company but basing yourself on froo-froo caramel Frappuccinos and having baristas who look at the customer funny when they just want some fucking coffee, is that too fucking hard to do?

Sorry, where was I? Ah yes, the Hazy IPA is more or less on the opposite end of the beer spectrum from a standard IPA. Opposite side of the Earth, even, since they were once called New England IPA and nothing says India like Boston.

The hazy people claim that it’s still an IPA because of the amount of hops they put in it. But they put the hops in at the end of the process, after the boil, so (and they’ll admit this), the hoppiness doesn’t become infused into the flavor. A genuine IPA is like percolated coffee or a French Press, whereas a Hazy IPA is instant coffee being stirred into hot water.

It’s the equivalent of sprinkling a little garlic powder over your store-bought pasta sauce instead of cooking up chopped garlic in the oil before adding the sauce. You can call both of them garlic sauce, but they’re not going to taste the same. The Hazy IPAs end up more citrusy and, with tasting notes similar to a sauvignon blanc. “Hints of pineapple,” “Mango forward.” Who would have guessed hops had nuance when you don’t boil the shit out of them? Maybe that cottony bitterness is a defense mechanism, like when a lobster thrown into already boiling water ends up tasting like shit. Maybe nobody outside of 18th-century sailors and douchebag hipsters was ever supposed to pretend to like overly hoppy beer. The first because they were out at sea for six months straight and any port’ll do. The latter because, ugh, you’re so bourgeois if he has to explain it to you.

Restaurants are even worse than liquor stores. Twenty taps? Ten IPAs, two DIPAs, a triple, and an Imperial. Plus maybe a Double Imperial. It’s maybe gotten a little bit better, with porters coming back into vogue recently. Plus hazies which, I hope I’m establishing, aren’t IPAs. But it’s still rough. I was recently at two different eateries in Yosemite. Each had three taps, two of which were IPAs, but different IPAs. The third tap was either Coors Light or Michelob Ultra. I guess I’ll have a Sprite.

Disneyland was the same. California Adventure, really, because Disney has somehow decided to only offer alcohol at one of its parks. One of their stands had a wheat, a pilsner, an IPA, a double IPA, and a hazy IPA.

Good thing I’ve learned that hazies aren’t IPAs, because I wasn’t in the mood for a pilsner.

I think hazies took on the IPA moniker because of this very oversaturation. If you wanted your beer to hit the market in 2015, it must have the word “India” in the flavor. Like how in 2010, if you wanted to make a new movie or TV show, it had to feature zombies.

I assume a handful of hipsters realized belatedly that they didn’t like the taste, but didn’t know they could order . Here’s how I imagine the conversation went:

“Hey bartender, do you have any beers that don’t taste like ass?”

“I’ve got plenty. What flavor?”

“Anything that doesn’t taste like someone swiped a cotton-flavored brillo pad across my tonsils.”

“Not a hops fan, huh? Maybe you’d like a malty amber ale?”

“An Amber IPA?”

“It’s not an IPA.”

“I must have an IPA or I’ll be laughed out of the bar.”

“Let me get this straight. You want an IPA, but you don’t like hop flavors?”

“It’s not that I dislike hops. It’s just certain kinds. Like Galaxy and Cascade and Mosaic. Oh, and I’ve also ruled out Saaz and Sterling and Simcoe. Better avoid all the “s” hops. Do you have a type of hop that doesn’t taste like ass?”

Bartender, fiddling with the new beer that he can’t seem to move, “Here, try this. It’s an IPA, but it’s hazy.”

The classification hurts in both directions, though. Mythical dude-bro aside, most IPA fans don’t really like hazies. I took a flight with an IPA fan who ordered a hazy because the menu said IPA. He thought it was terrible. He almost sent it back, but I took it from him and, although it wouldn’t have been my top choice, I’d take it over a shitty-ass IPA any day.

I can’t be the only person who avoided hazies for a long while due to their designation. I know I was in the minority in my IPA-aversion, but I can’t be the only person. Furthermore, I should’ve been the target audience for a beer that tastes nothing like an IPA. You were never going to win over my airplane friend, you’re only going to make him distrust real IPAs from said brand.

The glut of IPAs in all their forms seems to be hurting the beer industry in general. The Total Wine by my house used to be roughly 40% beer. Now it’s closer to 25%. Some of that space has been taken up by the new kids on the block, those ciders and seltzers, but even including all of those drinks on the beer shelves, they’ve still lost market share.

My guess is we’re losing out on the next generation of beer drinkers. It’s not exactly “entry level,” and if it’s the only beer you can find, you’re not going to enter. Let’s say I decided I wanted my first beer at Yosemite, and my only three options were two IPAs and a Michelob Ultra. Let’s say, to give it that old college try, I sample all three. Two taste like cotton and the third like water. Guess I’ll stick to whiskey.

Here’s a thought: Call them Hazy Ales. Seems easy enough, distinct and descriptive. Nary an India in sight.

You’re welcome, Beer Industry. You know where to send my residuals.

Drinks on Friday

A.B. Kelly · January 23, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · aging, alcohol, beer, curling, drinking, drinks with friends, food & drink, getting older, happy hour · No Comments

I went out for some drinks last Friday night.

That’s it. End of story.

Oh, you want more?

At my age, that could pretty much be a post by itself. What was once so mundane as to be rote now requires a notarized writ of release, followed by a full physical and psychiatric evaluation.

But at least I get to spend the rest of the weekend patting myself on the back. Which isn’t easy to do with a goddamned hangover. Does anyone have any Advil?

It’s not like I’ve become a complete recluse. I’ll have a beer before bed sometimes. Our household made it through not one, but two bottles of Booze Nog in December. Scratch that, I just checked the fridge and we only made it through one and a half bottles. Maybe by the end of February we’ll find the promised land.

The kitchen table isn’t the only place I drink. Wife and I are pretty good at coordinating calendars to allow one of us to escape for an evening once in a great while. Just never together at the same time, as that would necessitate a second mortgage to pay for a babysitter.

Yes, thirty-year-old me, I have to plan and coordinate my drinking endeavors weeks in advance. Yes, even if it’s just happy hour. You got something to say to me? Guess what? You’re also going to have gout in the future. Enjoy your shellfish while you can, motherfucker!

I usually meet a particular friend for drinks after work once a month or so. Back when we were single, we met a few times a week. We’d have a couple pitchers of beer on a regular day, maybe add a third or a fourth on a Friday or a Monday. The first Monday of the NFL season was often brutal because they do a double header. That’s seven hours of football. Do you know how much Bud Light one must consume to stay glued to a barstool for seven hours of football?

Sure, we could’ve taken a breather. Only watched one game. Maybe jog around the block during commercial breaks. But that’s heathen quitter talk.

Occasionally, a text would emerge from one of our phones around 6:30 the next morning to the tune of, “Upon further reflection, perhaps those last two pitchers of beer weren’t strictly necessary.”

The first four pitchers weren’t mentioned.

But that was then. This is now.

Now we meet once a month, assuming we can fit it into our schedules. We both work 7:00-3:00 jobs, so we meet up at 3:30, have two beers, a firm handshake, and we’re on our merry ways.

Two beers, I said. Not two pitchers. But you wouldn’t know it, the way my body feels the next day.

To be fair, the beer I drink now tends to be of higher alcohol content than the old stuff. Since I drink less often, I might as well enjoy it. The goal is no longer to gorge myself on as much liquid as possible. The goal isn’t to merge with the barstool over the course of an evening.

So in terms of alcohol content, my per-beer average is up. But I only tell myself that when I’m standing in awe of my lack of tolerance.

I used to scoff at those BAC charts that tell you how many drinks you can have based on your weight. For instance, I’m 220ish pounds, so it tells me that if I have three beers in an hour, I’ll be impaired. At my fifth beer, I’m inebriated. That used to be a joke to me. Who is wasted after only five beers? Lightweight!

Hey, I just had to double-check those BAC numbers. Did you know that there are some BAC charts with a designation beyond “Legally Intoxicated” at .08? They list “Possible Death” starting at .30. I mean, that’s good to know, but it seems odd to put on the chart. Presumably, I’m looking at this chart to see if I can drive a car. So I’m probably in the .06-.10 range. Who the hell is checking their BAC when they’re in the .30 range? Can they even read at that point? I think the BAC people just put that in as a challenge.

One year at Camptathalon, we had a Breathalyzer. Don’t ask. We decided against making a competition of it. Sure, the primary competition most floated was a “guess your BAC” game, which shouldn’t be too dangerous. But a bunch of dudes, miles from civilization, trying to compete for the “best” result on a Breathalyzer is rife with problems.

“What’s that? A point-three is potential death? Hold my beer. (And grab me the Everclear.)”

Fortunately I don’t have to worry about possible death. Every chart I’ve seen ends at ten drinks in one hour, at which point my 220-pound ass is only blowing a .16. Possible death doesn’t show up as an option unless you’re under 100 pounds and have eight drinks in an hour. And really, if you’re a grown dude that’s less than a hundred pounds, you might need something to take the edge off.

So I met my friend for a few happy hour beers at around 3:30. I had two pints of beer (sixteen ounces, not those imperial 20-ouncers) followed by a “small” beer, which I assume to be in the 8-10 ounce range. We said our goodbyes and I was off to my next adventure around 5:30.

That next adventure was “Curling Night in America,” one of the worst ways to watch a curling match. It’s a program that NBC runs where they film some non-competitive games between the United States and some hand-selected teams that we invite over because we know we can beat them. You won’t see U.S. vs Canada or U.S. vs. Sweden. Instead, you’ll see Japan and Australia and Italy. Not places known for their curling prowess.

As if blowouts aren’t enough reason to avoid a sporting event, these things are also pre-recorded. The curling matches they’re showing now took place last August. We could totally look up the results if we wanted to. But we don’t, because they’re pointless exhibition games.

I know, who’s ever heard of NBC showing tape-delayed Olympic sports, huh? But “Curling Night in America” is even worse than, say, the Miracle on Ice or, I don’t know, every single Olympics broadcast EVER. Seriously NBC? It’s one thing when the Olympics are on the other side of the world and going on live when we’re all asleep, but the 2016 Olympics were in fucking Brazil, and you still tape-delayed most of them.

But “Curling Night in America” is even worse because it’s edited to fit into a two-hour block. So they’ll randomly skip an entire end of curling, the equivalent of an inning in baseball. So imagine you’re watching the World Series game. They go to commercial after the second out in the first inning and when they come back it’s the bottom of the third. And the score is 3-2, but they don’t bother telling you how the runs were scored. That’s “Curling Night in America.”

It gets even worse at the end of each broadcast, because you know precisely when the game is going to end. They try to build suspense, going to commercial right before the final shot of an end, a make-or-break rock that might tie up the game and force an extra, sudden-death end. Will he make it? Will she miss by an inch? Oh, so enticing.

But then you look at the clock. If it’s 8:35, they’re going to make the shot. If it’s 8:50, we’re coming back from this commercial break to see a miss and be done with it. How lame. That’s why sports are supposed to be broadcast live. If you know ahead of time that the pitcher is only going to throw one more pitch, it takes some of the joy of it. The NFL doesn’t say “Any Given Sunday.. except not this Sunday.”

But “Curling Night in America” works as a good recruiting tool for my curling club. The other people in the bar don’t know we’re exaggerating the oohs and ahhs. So once or twice a month a bunch of us head out to a local cantina and make a ruckus.

That’s where I was headed after my two-and-a-half beers last Friday night.

But first I had to stop for a coffee.

This was hardly the first time I caffeinated in between drinking sessions. On one Friday night when I was a new teacher. I went to happy hour, then hit Starbucks on the way back to school to announce the football game, then went back out to re-buzz after the game. Then it was back to coffee in the morning. I swallowed the cat to catch the bird. I swallowed the bird to catch the spider. I swallowed the spider to catch the fly. I swallowed the fly because cocaine is too fucking expensive.

That’s what that song is about, right?

Of course, back then, I wasn’t drinking the coffee to my buzz. Far from it. I might have been trying to mask it. Or I might’ve just wanted a coffee. Whereas this time, I was thinking, “Holy crap, I’ve already has a few beers and now I’m going out to get more beers and it’s almost my bedtime. Where can I find some meth?”

Unfortunately, I had to settle for coffee. With cream.

Not milk, mind you. Full fucking cream. I could’ve suckled up to a cow and not noticed much difference. I never get cream. I’m a black coffee guy. But I wanted more calories in my stomach. I wanted more volume in my stomach. If I could’ve ordered a coffee milkshake, I would have.

The hipster batistas were giving me the “gee I wonder why you’re getting coffee” look. Then, as if I wasn’t feeling old already, they asked what I was doing this fine Friday evening. I told them where I was headed. Each one blinked back.

“You know,” I explained, “the pub over on J Street.”

The blinks continued.

How the hell have they not heard of this place? It’s been there for… well, I don’t know how long it’s been there. But I’ve been going there a good twenty years. It was the hip, cool place to hang out after work when I was a restaurant server. Back in… the last century.

Holy crap! Do you mean to tell me the skeevy, decrepit bar filled with septuagenarians that my grandpa went to in 1980 didn’t start as a skeevy, decrepit bar filled with septuagenarians? Was the wrong side of the tracks, at some point, the RIGHT side of the tracks? Hmmm…

This might explain why people keep throwing their hips out at our Learn-to-Curls.

After I power through the large half-coffee-half-cream, spilling a bit for good measure as if the nose-ring-clad, twenty-something baristas hadn’t rolled their eyes at “grandpa” quite enough already, I was on my way to what might as well have been Howard Cunningham’s Leopard Lodge.

Where I promptly ordered a full plate of fish n’ chips. Can’t be too safe.

I also ordered a beer. When I handed over my card, the bartender asked if he should keep the tab open. I told him to keep it open. Mainly out of habit, but partly because it feels so wrong to limit myself. After all, the night was still young, at least according to the clock on the wall and not my internal clock. But maybe the pre-recorded curling match will feature a surprising come from behind and I’ll buy a round for the whole bar. Perhaps being in a bar that I frequented at 28 will make me feel 28 again. Who knows, I could have five more beers and Uber home in the wee hours of the morning.

And then get the look on Wife’s face in the morning when we’re have to come back downtown to get my car, which will probably have a parking ticket by then.

Aw, who was I kidding? I knew exactly how many more beers I was going to have and I had enough cash to pay for it. Sure enough, when I bought that second beer, tummy full of deep-fried breading n’ chips, I closed out the tab.

Then the moment the curling match came back from its final commercial break and the Japanese failed to send it to an extra end, as we knew they would, I beelined it for my car to head home. It was 9:00. I was exhausted!

Then came the harrowing drive home. Hoo-wee. A fog had settled on the land. Only it wasn’t fog. It was dark. I think they call it nighttime? Glare from car headlights blinded me. And it’s hard to recite the alphabet backward, even if I’m sober.

I was practicing all the lines I would tell the cop while I dutifully put my hands at the ten and two positions, except when they were prying open my droopy eyes.

But I also did the math in my head. I ordered my first drink at 3:30. It was now 9:15. I had consumed four-and-a-half beers.

Let’s give me the benefit of the doubt. The beers at the first place were strong, so maybe it’s the equivalent of three of the 4.5% beers mentioned on the BAC chart. And I think the English pub was pouring imperial pints. So maybe those two beers were closer to three.

Still, that’s six beers over a course of six hours. One beer per hour. Okay, the Fuller’s ESB is a whopping 5.5%, so let me be manly and up that number all the way to Shit, I’m going to be bold and round up to seven. Seven full beers!

Let’s put aside the fact that I used to do seven beers in an hour. Not that I’m proud of seven beers in an hour, but hell, even the 100-pound dude would still be marginally alive at that point. Seven beers in an hour, according to the chart, would put me at a .11. Back in the 1970s, that would’ve been barely above legally drunk.

But this time, I didn’t have those seven beers in an hour. I had them in six. The BAC chart says I burn off .015 BAC, or one drink, per hour. So even if I had drank them all in one hour, I would’ve burned off .09 of that .11. Notwithstanding the fish n’ chips, coffee, and cream.

That .02 is also the number the chart gives me for drinking one beer in an hour. Which makes sense, since I’ve effectively had one per hour, with only a slight addendum. Some charts are nice enough to say that, at .02, driving ability might be impaired. Of course, those ones put everything on the chart as “possibly impaired.” They’re trying to make a point.

The more honest ones don’t list the possibly impaired until .04. Because the first thing the cop’s going to do is smell your breath. And the .02 probably ain’t gonna show up.

If a cop had pulled me over that fine evening, I would’ve told him to take me into the drunk tank and he would’ve thought I was just trying to play the “fugue state” game from Breaking Bad.

“Sorry, sir. All you’ve had tonight is fish n’ chips.”

Like I’m Beavis and Butthead in the episode where they get non-alcoholic beer.

“You’re not drunk. You’re just a dumbass.”

I couldn’t agree more, Ozzifer.

My Wine Post, Part II

A.B. Kelly · January 29, 2019 · Musings · alcohol, Amador County, food & drink, Napa Valley, wine, wine tasting, wineries · One Comment

Last week I finally got around to writing a post about wine. I touched on pairings and varietals, and I was getting ready to delve into the best wine region, but I thought I’d hold off. Because I’ve got quite a few things to say about the wine-producing regions of California. And what should, and should not, be considered “wine country.” And this needs a post of its own.

My curling club is called “Wine Country Curling Club.” We were founded in Vacaville, about 30 miles southeast of Napa. But in 2011, the club moved to a suburb of Sacramento. This has occasionally led to some debate. Sacramento, the argument goes, is nowhere near wine country. Sure, there are a few wineries that dot the landscape in and around Sacramento. You can wine taste for an afternoon in Clarksburg, and maybe the better part of the day in Lodi. Midtown Sacramento has a few tasting rooms but no grapes, and Placer County, where our curling club is actually located, finally threw in the towel and renamed their wine trail a “Wine and Ale Trail,” which includes a microbrew every other block, just like every other city in America these days. It’s great for curlers, who tend more toward beer than wine, anyway.

Some people think we should change our name to avoid confusion or disappointment. And while we’ve unofficially gone with a generic “Curl Sacramento” route, the name that has been floated the most often is “Gold Country Curling Club.” Because gold was discovered in the foothills near here and Sacramento was the main destination for most of the 49ers heading west. The area around highway 49 (named for the gold rushers) from Auburn (about thirty miles northeast of Sacramento) to Placerville (forty miles east of Sacramento) calls itself gold country, and Coloma, where gold was first found, is smack dab in the middle.

But here’s where they lose the argument, and here’s where I get riled up. Because Placerville, old Hangtown, is pretty much the capital of Gold Country. And if we’re naming ourselves after Placerville, then we need to call ourselves Wine Country. Because Placerville is at the north end of what is, in my estimation, one of the best wine regions around. And more than the best wine region, it’s, hands down, the best winery region.

Some people say Amador County is what Napa County was in the eighties. And what Sonoma County was in the nineties. A nice, bucolic masterpiece of rolling hills with wineries who are happy to see you visit and employees who can talk to you about the wine they are pouring beyond the tasting notes that were printed by some conglomerate. Heck, the person pouring your tasting on any particular day might be the winemaker himself.

Last September, we found an out-of-the-way winery near Plymouth, California. Which is a pretty impressive feat, considering that Plymouth itself is already about as out of the way as something can get. You have to go through twelve different dead spots in cell coverage to get there. The town has one restaurant. And, as I found out at my last anniversary, if the one bed and breakfast owner in the town has had a cold in the past month, you’re pretty much sleeping under a tree or hoofing it back to Sacramento for the night.

But this particular winery is even out of the way for Plymouth. It’s not on either of the two or three main winery loops in Amador County. The only reason we found it at all was that we were looking for a back way into Fiddletown. And no, that’s not a euphemism. There’s a town called Fiddletown. Okay, “town” is being generous. There’s a place called Fiddletown. There are only two ways to get there. You can take Fiddletown Road or you can take the back road. And on the back road, way at the top of a hill, hidden from view of just about every human being in existence, is a winery called Distant Cellars. Get it? Distant! As in “no cell service.”

Anyway, when we stopped by this particular winery on a September midday, we were greeted by a spectacle of an employee. Or maybe he was a drifter. Dude was dirty and sweaty, wearing a beat up t-shirt. Wife and I pass a little bit of a look between us. I mean, I don’t need my sommelier to be wearing a tuxedo or anything, especially at a winery that only one customer stumbles upon per day. But Jesus, dude, would it kill you to bathe a little bit before you come into work? We’ve all had those hungover mornings, but you gotta fake it till you make it.

Except this wasn’t a rando employee suffering from too much Friday night. And it wasn’t a hobo, either. This was the owner. Sort of. He was the caretaker, the guy who ran the winery. His sons are firefighters and they bought the winery land as a retirement plan. Only they’re not retired yet, so it’s up to pops to run things in the meantime.

And of course, the reason he was dirty and sweaty and wearing a beater was because it was September, and September is harvest time. He had been up since 5:00 that morning picking two tons of grapes. And now he was preparing for a six-hour stint in the tasting room.

That’s more or less what you can expect from Amador County. Allegedly Napa was this way in the seventies and eighties. I’m not old enough to remember that, but nowadays, the winemaker at a Napa winery is probably housed in some secret bunker behind five layers of computerized and DNA-based security, his child being held at gunpoint until he can verify the proper tannin level of the cabernet-syrah blend.

Oh, and did I mention you don’t pay to taste in Amador? You used to not have to pay in Napa or Sonoma either. I’m old enough to remember that practice, but barely. It started to go by the wayside in the mid-nineties. First it was just a few wineries charging a nominal fee that would be refunded with a purchase. Kinda makes sense. They’d rather have you buy a bottle, but if not, you don’t get something for nothing.

And of course, if you were friendly enough with the pourer, you might not get charged for the tasting fee, anyway. The tasting fee was basically just there to dissuade the people who are only looking to go from winery to winery trying to get a cheap buzz with no interest whatsoever in actually making a purchase. But if you talk to the pourer about wine, or about their lives, or about current events, or pretty much treat them in any way other than, “Hey, fuckface, give me free booze,” then they’d probably “forget” to charge you. Or maybe they’d think you’re purchasing from the other guy. Or maybe they’d legitimately forget, because maybe they’re now splitting their time between you and a group of assholes that have no interest in purchasing.

Regardless, the initial tasting fees were primarily there to discourage douchebags, not a legitimate money-making device. Of course, back then the pourers were usually connoisseurs themselves. They moved to Napa or commuted to the valley for the day, because they wanted to be able to take a sip from time to time and be able to talk to like-minded individuals about oakiness and complexity. Kinda like Amador.

By the turn of the century, a few of the wineries in Napa were starting to charge for tasting whether you purchased any wine or not. I initially assumed they would lose a lot in their wine sales. One of the stories in the original “Freakonomics” book was about a daycare center that started charging people if they picked their kids up late, then were astounded when the number of late pick-ups increased. Because charging took away the guilt of showing up late. Now a parent could justify coming in late. Similarly, I’ve been to plenty of wineries where I thought the wine was mediocre, but bought it anyway out of a general obligation for the hospitality of their few sample pours.

But clearly, bottle sales didn’t drop enough to stop the practice, because by 2005 or so, you couldn’t go anywhere in the Napa Valley without paying for tasting. And they aren’t five dollars anymore. It’s twenty bucks now, and that twenty bucks doesn’t get you closer to purchasing. Not even the fancy cheese they’re all running out of their deli. Sorry, charcuterie. Deli’s aren’t nearly hip enough for Napa.

Now they charge you up front, before they’ve even gotten a glass out for you. Some places, like the Castle, you’re charged by somebody up front before you’ve even met your pourer. And the pourers, in kind, are not interested in making a sale or talking to you about wine or really anything other than pouring the properly-allotted volume of predetermined liquid. Ask them what their favorite is, or how that unopened bottle tastes, and they’ll shrug and tell you it’s not in the script.

In Amador, if you ask how that wine in that bottle back there is, the owner will probably open it right then and there and take a sip of it first before pouring some for you.

And look, I’m not taking anything away from Napa. I mean, if you can charge someone for something or offer it for free and not have your sales impacted enough to matter, then more power to you. And I guess I never realized how many people went wine tasting without purchasing or ever intending to purchase. In my opinion, anyone that gets free tastes with no intention to buy is a piece of shit. If you don’t like their wine, fine. But if you like it, but only want to take it for free, then you’re the one who ruined it for the rest of us.

And Napa absolutely had to do something, because they were becoming a destination for cheap buzzes. Party busses, party limos, party trains. They all descend upon a winery, pushing the rest of the customers off to the side or, more likely, to another winery. Then they spend a half-hour being obnoxious, not engaging the staff nor purchasing any product, then they’re back into the bus or limo or train and on to shill the next winery out of its hard-earned product. Even the Amador wineries have taken to charging these groups, because they are clearly only there for the “experience.” And usually they cost a winery in lost customers. Any time I see a limo out front, I drive to the next winery.

But when a winery charges you to taste, regardless of whether you buy or not, then they’re in the same business as the limo tours. It’s all about the tourists and day trippers, not the wine drinkers. As a result, Napa now markets itself more as an Adult Disneyland experience than a wine region. And the quality of their wine has suffered now that they cater to customers who are there for the experience.

I mentioned the Castello de Amarosa earlier. They are the most egregious and most epitomal example of what Napa has become. It’s a castle. Like, a legitimate castle. Not a replica. The owners purchased a run-down medieval castle from some defunct principality in Germany and paid to move it, brick by brick, to the Napa Valley. It’s… well, I was going to say beautiful, but only fake castles are beautiful. (See above: Disneyland) The real castles were more concerned with “workable for purposes of defense” than beautiful. But the Castello de Amarosa is majestic, if not beautiful.

They charge you to get in. There are a variety of tickets available. One just allows you entrance to see the grounds to peruse on your own. Another ticket will grant you a guided tour, but still no wine. If you want to actually taste the wine, you have to buy a separate ticket and find your own way to the dungeon tasting room. And no, I’m not being facetious. They literally have the wine tasting in the bowels of the castle, with a ceiling that a six-foot tall person would have to duck under. There’s no ventilation and a lot of people being jostled about as an automaton fills their glasses with all the regularity and grace of an assembly line worker. The Model T only comes in black and the castle only pours four tastings.

How was the wine? Well, as wine tasting goes… they have a very nice castle.

I suppose they’ve done a very wise thing to accentuate the winery itself, and not the wine. Because the wine was quite unpleasant. It was very young. They were serving a red wine with a harvest date two years earlier. And I don’t think they were the only Napa wines I saw that were eighteen months past harvest. Four years used to be the minimum, but now it’s all about turn-and-burn, baby.

Then again, I highly doubt the castle wine was going to cellar well. I’ve tasted some young wines, and done some barrel tasting, that age well. They are usually very smooth, probably even more accessible to a random non-wine drinker. The grape is the dominant flavor early on. The complexity comes with age. The Castle wine, on the other hand, tasted a little bit sour. Like maybe it’s best future would be mixed into a sangria. Or like its average customer has partaken in some of the two hundred wineries that lie closer to the Napa Valley entrance than it. And really, nobody’s here for the wine, anyway. Taste the good stuff first, then come look at our snazzy castle.

But hey, at least I got a good idea for a key scene in my novel, which is great, cause I sure as shit didn’t buy any wine. Nice to know the entry fee wasn’t a complete waste.

And that’s why I’ll also put the Amador wine up against most of what’s coming out of Napa these days. It isn’t just the experience and the hospitality that are better. These days, Napa is catering to Bay Area new-money newbies or travelers from afar, neither of which really want good wine. They might want expensive wine, but they want it to be consumed like craft beer. Chug, motherfucker, chug.

The typical winery in Amador County will have more varietals available for tasting and purchase. Napa’s pretty much doubled down on Cabernet and Chardonnay. Go to an Amador winery and you’ll see Barbera and Zinfandel and Primitivo and Syrah and Petit Syrah and Mouverdre and Grenache and Tempranillo. And there are white wines, too.

Their varietals have variety, too. Last September, we went to a Barbera Festival, where over fifty wineries were literally pouring only one varietal. But it didn’t get tiring, because the babera grape can go in a lot of different directions, especially with all of the micro-climates that occur in volcanic foothills. Far from the Napa Valley (and to a lesser extent, the Pinot-rich central coast), where they try to mimic the agreed-upon flavor as much as possible and the only variance is spectacular, good, mediocre, or castle.

So there you have it. My wine post, parts one and two. Now you can all dismiss my well-informed enlightenment and go back to your tannic cabernet and try to pretend it doesn’t feel like someone just scratched your mouth with a brillo pad. Or your buttery chard with its aftertaste of aftertaste. And hey, I didn’t mention it before, but a lot of pinots taste like Band-aids.

And when you’re done doing all that, check out an Alicante Bouchet from the foothills.

My Wine Post, Part I

A.B. Kelly · January 26, 2019 · Musings · alc, cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, drinking, food & drink, syrah, wine, zinfandel · One Comment

I’ve been promising a wine post for a long while. Well, not really promising one, but it seems like every time I write about coffee or beer, I throw in a “Maybe I should write about wine someday. So I suppose that day is today.

And sorry, this is as far as I go. Weed may be legal in my state, but I’m hardly a connoisseur. I’ve heard there are different types of marijuana. Okay, if you say so. Is it the taste? Or the high you get? Or whether you crave Cheeto’s or Tollhouse afterwards? Someone probably knows, but not me. I hit the wacky tabbacky once every three of four years, so it’s hard to judge consistency or differences. And if I do more than one hit, I’m pretty much down for the count.

So wine, it is. What would you like to talk about?

Food pairings? Fuck that. If you want wine with your fucking food, then drink wine with your fucking food. And don’t get me started on the restaurants that are now suggesting beer tastings with food. Oh, you think this salmon pairs with a hefeweizen? Well, hefeweizen tastes like it’s been strained through soiled underwear, so that doesn’t pique my interest in how you prepare your salmon. If I order it with an IPA, are you going to look down your nose at me and clap for your sommelier to come arrest me and put me in posh jail? Wait a second, do sommeliers even make up the bogus beer tastings or did you just ask Fred, the resident lush at the bar? Because I think I’d trust Fred first.

Best varietal? Again, it’s up to you. I personally go for zinfandels when I get to choose, especially a zin from the California foothills. Zinfandels used to have one primary taste profile, but a decade or so ago, I started to see more variety. You can get a jammy zinfandel or a peppery zinfandel. Peppery used to be the norm in the foothills because of all of the volcanic rock up there. But then they started planting more zin vines in the north-facing valleys that get less sun because that’s what was sells better. I don’t mind the jammy, and just like with the IPA craze, I know when I’m bucking the trend in the market. I also like stick shifts and time travel TV shows, but that ain’t what sells. So I’ve learned to just sit there, drinking my hoppy IPA and my jammy zinfandel while watching the series finale of Timeless, and shut the fuck up.

But man, when I encounter a place that still holds one of their zinfandels back for a bit o’ spiciness, it’s a little slice of heaven.

I know. I know. Who in the world would want to sully their grape juice with a nuance of cracked black pepper, right? You’re not alone. Pepper is for steak, not for alcohol. But, I ask you, what are you drinking WITH your steak. And you don’t have to have steak with your zin. Just think about steak while you’re drinking it, like a vegan who eats tofacon while dreaming of the real thing. If you imagine it hard enough, you can conjure the flavor. If I were a vegan, I’d stick to the booze to remind me of what meat was like. And I’d be one of the weepiest drunks in existence.

If I can’t have or don’t want a zin, though, I’ll probably turn to a syrah. Not a petit syrah, mind you. Syrah and petit syrah are entirely different grapes. You would think the latter would just be a smaller version of the former, but no. That would be too logical, and not intimidating enough for noobs. So a syrah’s got nothing to do with a petit syrah. A syrah is, however, the same thing as a shiraz. Sommeliers gotta sommelier, right?

Petit syrahs are probably the prettiest red wine. A good one is inky, almost violet. And they’re dense. My wife’s a big petit syrah fan. She’ll drink it by itself. I’m usually pretty good with them, but only paired with a steak or a meaty pasta. And yeah, ignore what I just said about no generic food pairings. You should only drink petit syrah with red meat.

My white flavor profile switches around a bit. Depending on the food or the weather or the time of day or my mood, I might want a fume blanc, a roussanne, a vermentino, a suavignon blanc (which, unlike the syrahs, is the same grape as a cabernet sauvignon). If it’s dry enough, I’ll take a Viognier, but most of those are way too sweet. And by dry, I mean the wine, not the weather. Dry is the opposite of sweet. Well, really they never use the word “sweet.” They say off-dry, just to be snooty dicks. Then again, some wineries call their off-dry wines dry because they tend to sell better.

This trend is going on with roses, as well. Roses are pink wines, which used to only be white zinfandels. But over the past few years, a number of the wineries we like have started to make dry roses which are quite refreshing. They’re like red wines that you can drink cold. Then again, many places just recycled their old white zinfandel recipes and slapped a rose label on it. When we were in Denver last year, Wife ordered two different roses at two different locations, one of which called itself a wine bar. The server listened toWife’s complaint about the residual sugar in the first one she had tried, then brought one out with pretty much the same damn taste.

You’ll note there were two varietals I didn’t reference: those creamy chardonnays and robust cabernets. I don’t mind the latter, if it’s paired right, but any food that tastes good with a cab probably tastes better with a petit.

But that famous white varietal? Pass the chardonnay, please! Seriously. Please pass it right the fuck past me.

And yes, I know all about oak aging and stainless steel and malolactic fermentation and the magic egg that leaves the liquid in constant motion. I’ve tasted the creamiest of chards and the tangiest. And while there are a scant few that I can tolerate, as a general rule, I’ll just skip past that varietal and go right on to the pinot grigio, thank you very much. Unless I’m in Napa and chardonnays are the only whites on the tasting menu and I just paid twenty bucks and only get to taste four.

One time we went wine tasting with a friend and her husband. Wife’s wine tasted with the friend often, but we were a bit skeptical about his wine acumen. He’s a sales guy, so I’m never a hundred percent sure if he has any real reactions to anything. His answer to most question seems to have been play-tested for audiences of strangers who you are trying to build a rapport with. When we asked him what kind of wines he liked, he paused for a second, looked up the answer in his mental rolodex and said, “I really like full cabernets and buttery chardonnays.” Wow, is that what Madison Avenue thinks of California wines? Well, unfortunately for this dude, we weren’t going to Napa Valley that day, so he was shit out of luck on rich cabernets or buttery chards. Hopefully the tasting notes you cross-referenced and committed to memory last night know what to say about a barbera.

You know what? That’s what I should be talking about. Wine regions. Forget pairings and varietals and proper storage techniques.

Wait, did I talk about proper storage techniques? Bottle down. Not straight down, but at a slant. Most wine racks are built for the proper angle, but most people put their wine slanting upwards. Cause it makes the label prettier, I suppose. But the cork needs to stay hydrated, you see. Dry corks crack, and can break when you open them. Even worse, dry corks contract, which lets oxygen in to the bottle long before you try to open it. And once you’ve got oxygen in there, you’re no longer aging wine, you’re making vinegar.

So I guess it’s time to focus on the wine regions. I’ve been to most of the ones in California, and a few more besides. Napa Valley, Sonoma Valley, Paso Robles, Lodi. I’ve sampled some near Walla Walla, Washington and Willamette Valley in Oregon. Each has their own positives and negatives. I don’t think there’s one that can properly be called the “best” region.

That being said, I do have a clear favorite. If you want good wine in a laid-back atmosphere where the winemakers and wine pourers like your company and your business, there’s really only one option. It’s a county in Northern California with acres and acres of vineyards planted on rolling hills. But the county ain’t named Napa, and it ain’t named Sonoma.

Hold on, I’ve got a lot to say on this. Check out Part II if you want to know about the hidden gem that should be considered the “real” wine country.

A Coffee by any Other Name

A.B. Kelly · September 21, 2018 · Musings · 1850 coffee, coffee, Folgers, food & drink · No Comments

If my last post was about beer, then I this one needs to be about coffee, right? That’s more or less my daily routine. Some coffee in the morning, a beer with lunch, iced coffee in the afternoon and beer all night long. At least that’s my routine during the summer. Obviously I don’t drink beer at lunch during the school year. At those lunches, it’s only 191-proof grain alcohol.

Maybe one of these days, I’ll bust out with a wine post. But for now, it’s coffee.

I’ve written before about my newfound appreciation for quality coffee and my newfound aversion to sub-par coffee. In my twenties, I could down any sort of swill, but now I’m willing to pay a little extra for product that wasn’t grown out of a toilet and roasted in a microwave. I’ve grown up from Miller Genuine Draft, too. See? The two always go hand-in-hand.

Recently, I was duped into buying a subpar coffee. In my defense, it wasn’t Lavazza this time. Fool me once, Lavazza, shame on you. But sometime around the eighth or ninth time, I might remember that an Italian name doesn’t mean good coffee.

No, this was a new product at my local grocery store. And from afar, it looked like quality:

I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover. But with a new coffee, I don’t really know how else to judge it. I can’t see inside the bag, so I might as well look at the bag. And usually it works. Pictures of green mountains or rugged individualists or, I don’t know, blue bottles usually signify that the company takes the coffee seriously enough to put a picture of a green mountain or a rugged individualist or a blue bottle on it. And if they have the time to google an image, well, they MUST roast only the finest beans.

The name matters too. You need something robust. Like Starbucks’ Veranda. Nothing says “robust” like sipping with one’s pinkie up on the veranda. But Veranda works because it’s a light roast. Peet’s, which I greatly prefer to Starbucks, uses names like “Big Bang,” which I assume is endorsed by Jim Parsons. And “Major Dickason’s Blend,” whoever the hell that is. But at least he was promoted all the way to major. And “Sierra Dos Yosemites,” which if you live in multi-lingual California you will know means “Sierra Two Yosemites.” Although, as far as I know, there’s only one Yosemite. Weird.

So I kinda, sorta, thought this new coffee had promise. After all, it’s named 1850. I assume that relates to the year, and there were lots of rugged individuals back then. From a California perspective, 1850 was the age of the gold rush. Grisly old dudes brewing their coffee out on the banks of mighty, untamed rivers. There’s gold in them thar hills. And that gold is in the form of coffee! Right?

I mean, I guess they could’ve been going for some other events of 1850. There was an abysmal compromise on slavery that year, which led to Bloody Kansas where a whole bunch of abolitionists and slaveholders moved to Kansas and had clashes wherein they killed each other. That’s a pretty solid historical time period, but I don’t know how that plays into coffee.

I assume the Mormons were also doing something in 1850. Maybe they needed coffee for the road as they were being kicked out of somewhere. Oh, but they don’t drink caffeine, so I don’t think it’s named after them. Maybe the 1850 coffee was lamenting the failed promise of the Louis Napoleon reign in France. Or… let me check Wikipedia… The Taiping Rebellion? The Scarlet Letter? Oh hey, cool, there was something called the Danish Stag Holocaust! Wherein, I assume, we get the nomenclature for “Stag Party,” which is European for Bachelor Party.

But no, I’m going with my original belief. The makers of 1850 are going for the Gold Rush. Hence the prospector on the front of the package.

But in retrospect, I don’t know if it’s the best idea to go the Gold Rush route. Sure, those dudes were rugged. But I doubt they were drinking stellar coffee. I imagine that in 1850, they weren’t plugging in their fancy bean grinders and pouring properly-steeped water over a brown #2 Melitta filter. I mean, the dude on the front of the bag appears to be using a percolator over a fire. Hell, it’s 2018 and I can’t seem to use a campfire percolator without the coffee being half grounds.

I imagine gold miners threw some sludge into the bottom of a carafe of water, then burned the shit out of it. And they probably used that same sludge many, many days in a row, making the coffee more and more watery. After all, if they went into town to buy fresh coffee, they might lose their claim.

Oh, and the “fresh” coffee in town might only be delivered twice a year.

So 1850 shouldn’t exactly bring up images of quality coffee. But hell, I bought it. And only partially because it was on sale. I had noticed it before it went on sale, and who knows, I might’ve bought it anyway. Because I was so blown away by the gold miner and the rustic blue coloring and, I mean, just LOOK at that font! I mean, you can’t just MAKE that font on a computer or something. There are rules about marketing! You have to go through a proper apprenticeship at Ye Olde Tyme Fonte Guilde, right?

I was so dazzled by the packaging that I didn’t read the fine print until I got home.

Did you read that little bit under the title? The Folger Coffee Co. Hmm…

Boy, somebody ought to tell these 1850 people that, long after they were dead, there came another Folger’s Coffee Company, and they probably don’t want to be associated with the latter. Sure, it’s not a precise correlation. One has an apostrophe, after all. It is showing possession. Folger and Folger’s. Two entirely different companies.

I bought this 1850 amongst the Starbucks and the Peets and the Death Wish coffees. The part of the aisle that sports Kona blends with a whole TEN percent Kona beans. That company, the Folger’s, is NOT allowed at this end of the coffee aisle. They just throw coffee-dust shavings into a giant red plastic vat.

1850, you look like a good kid. You come in whole bean variety. You are conveniently placed in a bag that will probably be impossible to open without ripping, with a fancy little white cardboard strip for re-clasping yourself closed that will probably fall off after one use. You really gotta check yourself before you wreck yourself, associating with that shit down at the Yuban and Sanka end of the aisle.

Unless… Why, they wouldn’t, would they? They couldn’t, could they? Is Folger’s trying to move on up like the Jeffersons? Are they staking a claim a claim amongst the boutiques? Is this going to be another Killian’s or Molson, glorified Coors for double the price? Only one way to find out.

First, the beans. And yeah, Folger’s, it ain’t looking good for you. Take a look:

What’s with the gristle? When I buy whole bean, I want whole beans. Not some whole beans mixed in with some specks and some grounds and whatever other schmeg is in there. And is it just me or are the beans roasted to different colors? Okay, maybe this is the real Folger’s, cause this is clearly just a big ol’ vat of beans that’s thrown together in a mish-mash faction.

Oh hey, as an aside, the plantation I went to in Hawaii had a “black and white” blend. Half the beans are light roasted, half are dark. So you get the flavor of the latter with the caffeine of the former, but way more complex than a medium roast. Yummy. Unfortunately, the “throw a bunch of whatever beans fell through the cistern” model employed by Folger’s ain’t being done for combination and nuance.

When I put these 1850… no, you know what? I’m going to call them by their proper name. They’re Folgers, through and through. So when I put these FOLGER’S beans through the automatic grinder in my coffee machine, the result was the exact kind of clusterfuck you’d expect. Most of the mist didn’t make it through the tunnel into the filter. To be fair, this happens over time with good coffee. A little bit more gets piled up each day until I come down one morning and get something the consistency of tea. The main difference between the Folger’s and even run-of-the-mill, replacement-level beans was the amount of time it took for the residue to accumulate. I usually have to clean the tube out once a week or so. The Folger’s clogged that shit up every other day. Even when the conduit had just been scraped clean, only about sixty percent of the grounds made it through.

If only I had known how fortunate I was to be sipping a twenty percent solution on that first day. Because when I finally put in enough beans to actually taste the flavor… blech. I asked my wife if she had a similar reaction, as she puts a fair amount of creamer in her coffee. She agreed she wasn’t a fan. It tasted simultaneously watered-down and sludgy. A bitter aftertaste followed the primary taste of bland. Creamer didn’t seem to do much good.

I tweaked it a little that night, only to find the tube had clogged. So even more watered down than usual. On day four, I went big. Clean out the conduit, put an extra scoop of beans and whatever that residual stuff is, and let’s see what we get.

“I think we need to put the 1850 aside until my mom visits,” I texted my wife from work.

“Agreed,” she responded.

Hopefully I’ve learned my lesson. A Folger’s by any other name is still a Folger’s.

Maybe I should try some of that Italian-named stuff, instead.

BEER! (Part III)

A.B. Kelly · September 10, 2018 · Musings · alcohol, beer, drinking, Fat Tire, food & drink, good beer, Innis and Gunn, Red Trolley · No Comments

Okay, so I’ve just spent two posts about the beers I don’t like. So what, you may ask, DO I like in my beer? Well, I’m glad ya asked.

Truthfully, my flavor profile has changed a few times in my life, and are in a bit of a flux right now, too. Perhaps this is why I don’t understand the continuance of the decades-old trends discussed in the previous posts. Then again, I’ve always tended to be along a somewhat tight variance. Browns and reds and pales. Somewhere in the middle of the hoppy vs. malty spectrum. I love me some balance.

Of course, in a begrudging nod to the IPA-philes, over the past few years, my preferred beer has gone farther up the bitterness scale. For a while, I was all about the Amber and Scotch Ales. Alaskan Amber, Kilt Lifter, Nutty Brewnette, Old Chub. Even Newcastle was an occasional go-to in a pinch. The benefit of Newcastle is its ubiquity. Even a bar that only carried the standards is likely to have Newcastle.

Fat Tire was my favorite beer for five years or more. And clearly I wasn’t the only one, because it’s the beer that put New Belgium on the map. The brand barely existed at the turn of the century, but as of now, it’s ranked #11 by volume, just behind powerhouse no-longer-microbreweries Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada. And yeah, I know they’re really pushing their Voodoo Daddy IPA these days, but all of that is on the strength of their flagship.

I’ll still drink Fat Tire. Sometimes I have no choice. When I’m visiting family, it’s the only one they can remember that I drink, as they try desperately to avoid saying “Flat Tire.” I don’t know why it’s such a difficult pronunciation. I know a flat tire is a thing, but it’s not like Fat is some obscure word. Yet every baby boomer I encounter asks me if I want one of those “Fla.. uh.. Fe-ua… Feat Tires?”

But Fat Tire tastes a bit too sweet for me these days. The nutty and caramely and malty beers that I drank for the majority of my thirties just aren’t doing it for me these days. I never liked stouts and porters, because they’re too sweet, and something clicked in me in the past year, making most browns exhibit the same syrupy consistency. Maybe it’s just a hundred degrees in summer kind of thing, or maybe my brain is subconsciously telling my tongue that hops are here to stay, so I’d better get used to it. Now a Fat Tire tastes like a Frappuccino to me. Or an iced coffee when they put all that syrupy crap into it. No, Starbucks barista, I don’t want fucking “room” in my iced coffee. Just black coffee and ice. Someone ordering an actual coffee at your coffee business shouldn’t make you so damned twitchy.

One fun brew I found many moons ago was Innis and Gunn. On my second trip to Scotland, we asked for a local beer. The waiter described something that we couldn’t understand, because he was speaking Scottish, which bears absolutely no resemblance to English. We nodded our approval and received one of the most wonderful concoctions ever invented. It’s aged in Scotch barrels. But there’s more to it than that, because after tasting Innis and Gunn, I tried a number of other beers that claim such a distinction and none of them have the smooth toffee flavor of Innis and Gunn. I’ve even, since then, tried some other Innis and Gunn flavors, including their rum-aged and Irish whickey-aged. None of them have that je ne sais pas of the original.

When we got back to America, we looked everywhere for Innis and Gunn. At the time, New York was the only place in the United States that carried it, and that seemed a bit far of a drive. But who said we had to purchase it in the United States? Vancouver’s only a fifteen-hour drive! My friend hit the Great North the following summer and brought back a case. Two summers later, I made the trek. The employee at the state-owned liquor store looked at me strangely when I wanted 30 bottles of something they usually sell by the single. But when I flashed the real-live, legitimate, international-standard American dollars, they were willing to do just what I said.

Just kidding. I think I paid with credit card. And I probably insulted the guy when I asked what it cost in “real money.” The guy selling joints in Nelson Park, however, was happy enough to take American cash.

We continued to check the Innis and Gunn website, plotting their progress on a map like they were the Allied army advancing against the Kaiser. First they were spotted in Washington, then Oregon. We went to the city walls waiting to cheer the liberating army as it came within sight. When my wife texted me a picture from the local Total Wine, I knew that life would never be the same.

Then again, at $14 for a 4-pack, the I&G is still going to be reserved for special occasions.

My IBU preference has been creeping up recently. The forties taste fine to me now. Although I suppose that’s where I started. The first beer I was actually able to get through being a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Then I avoided it fro a while, but it’s back in my favored wheelhouse. I can even tolerate beers into the sixties. When I was in Denver recently, I drank quite a few Dale’s Pale Ales, with an IBU of 65. It was fine. But I might’ve been suffering from altitude sickness.

But my favorites of late seem to be reds. Reds tend to add a bit of hoppiness to the typical maltiness of a brown. You know, like what hops were originally meant to do. There’s one here in Northern California called Heretic Evil Twin. The “evil twin” comes from the combination of the two flavors. If you’re a malt fan, the hop is the evil twin; if you’re a hop fan, it’s the malt. And they’re both in there. It’s a solid brew, with an IBU of 45, right in “the middle,” so to speak. But I think it’s ainly available in Northern California, so sorry if I got your hopes up. If you read on, you’ll see I’m right there with you on the torture. .

Let’s talk about Karl Strauss Red Trolley. It’s available everywhere, right? Its crispy nuance makes it my current favorite beer. It’s not that you can taste all the flavors, like in Heretic, but it’s also not all one flavor. Somehow it has an IBU below Fat Tire, which I consider bullshit because it’s definitely not as sweet. Of course now, after a decade of indoctrinating us that IBU is the be-all and end-all of a beer flavorness quotient, they’re saying it’s an incomplete measure. Now they try to distinguish between hazy and juicy and, I don’t know, fluffy IPAs? And New England IPAs, which are basically the same as West Coast Pale Ales. There are also Northwest Pales. It gets really confusing when you need an eight-directional compass just to figure out what the hell you’re drinking.

Or grapefruit. Don’t get me started on grapefruit. How very fitting that Ballast Point would be bought out by Coors.

Although the Grapefruit Sculpin works as a good transition into my most recent beer find. While in San Diego, my hotel bar had a local beer called Coconut Contender. This intrigued me, because I like coconut. Have I mentioned that I like coconut before? And that I worry they are on the cusp of jumping the palm tree shark? I think I have.

Coconut in beer isn’t a new thing. Coconut porters have existed for a while. I’ve had a few of them, and they’re okay in extremely limited quantities. Porters are sweet, coconut is sweet, so what you’re left with is the equivalent of adding caramel syrup to a white chocolate mocha, which is something I’m surprised Starbucks hasn’t done yet. Hell, I had some sort of Iced Vanilla Bean drink there a couple weeks ago, and I can still feel the granules of sugar coursing through my body. Dammit, Barista, I ordered a coffee frappuccino, not a caramel frappuccino. Repeat after me, barista! Coffee! What the fuck is wrong with just serving me the goddamn product you’re supposed to be known for! Y

Sorry, where was I? Ah yes, the Coconut Contender. What intrigued me about this particular beer was that it was not listed as a coconut porter, but a coconut IPA. So instead of using the sweetness of the coconut to augment the sweetness of a porter, they’re going to counteract the bitterness of the… hmmm…. Why, that sounds brilliant!

Of course, they’ve done this with other flavors. That grapefruit crap is the most famous, but I’ve seen orange and tangerine and raspberry IPAs. But most of those others are tart more than sweet. Plus, did I mention that I like coconut? So I asked for a pint. The bartender asked if I wanted a taste of it first. Maybe he’s had customers that were hoping for a coconut porter and were disappointed by a beer with nuance. I was ninety percent sure I didn’t need a taster of it, that I would drink the whole damn thing. But if I’m about to order sixteen ounces and I can get the seventeenth ounce for free, I’m taking that bargain.

Even better when I discovered it was 21 ounces for the price of 20.

Verdict? It was as sublime as I expected. The coconut was in the background, as was the hoppiness. I didn’t wince from the sweet or chew the bitter. No need to drink five gulps of water to remoisten my palate. (Remoisten my palatte sounds like a dirty book that might be written by the OTHER Tony Kelly, the one who forces Amazon searches for my book to a second page. Go ahead and check, I won’t hold it against you).

I could definitely see myself drinking more of those Coconut Contenders. For instance, I saw myself drinking it again the next night. And the night after that. After all, I was at the hotel for a week-long conference. Unfortunately, the rat bastard behind the bar must have recognized me the rest of the week, because he never gave me that free taster again. Then again, he did “accidentally” pour the wrong drink once, and then gave me the correct pour in a take-home cup. Tip your waitstaff, people!

So of course, the first thing I did when i got home was to hit the local liquor stores to get me some Coconut Contender at home.

BevMo? Nope. Total Wine? Nada.

Dammit, this Coconut IPA is not to be found anywhere in the Sacramento area. Or at least anywhere in the whopping TWO liquor stores I looked in. So I decided to google Coconut IPA. I found that the one I had in San Diego wasn’t the only one. There are at least three currently being brewed. And Total Wine stocked precisely zero of them. Didn’t double-check back at BevMo for the other two, but I’m not holding my breath.

According to one beer review, it’s the “New taste of summer.” I totally, totally agree. But at participating locations, only.

Oh Life, why must you mock me so?

BEER! (Part II)

A.B. Kelly · September 7, 2018 · Musings · alcohol, bad beer, beer, drinking, food & drink, good beer, IBU, India Pale Ale, IPA, Lagunitas · 3 Comments

Welcome back to Part Two. In Part One, I talked about Coors Light and the rest of its ilk, remnants of an older time that somehow persist in a world of much better options.

Today, I’ll talk about one of those better options that I don’t necessarily feel is a better option. Watch out, hipsters.

If you’ll recall what started this retrospective, I was visiting a new person’s house and he offered me a Coors Light. I declined. Except that Coors Light wasn’t the only thing he had available. He also offered me an IPA. Ugh.

And hey, hipsters? The fact that someone would have only two options of beer, one of which is an IPA and the other of which is Coors Light, should tell you all you need to know about how fancy your brillo-pad of a beer really is.

Now here’s where I know I part from true beer snobs. At their best, India Pale Ales are tolerable. At their worst? Pass me the Coors Light. Or better yet, I’ll just take some water.

Fortunately, in this particular case, it was Lagunitas, which is one of the most tolerable IPAs. In fact, their original IPA wouldn’t even be considered an IPA by today’s standards. It would be like Ronald Reagan in the modern GOP, or JFK trying to make it past two primaries in the 2020 Democratic party. It only has an IBU in the mid-40s. Nowadays if your IPA doesn’t have an IBU above 60, you might as well call it a lager.

For those who don’t know, IBU stands for International Bittering Unit. It measures the amount of hops in the flavor. Hops are those things that smell like really nasty marijuana. When they’re put in the beer, they help offset the sweet, caramelly flavor that comes from the malted barley. So a stout, which has the same bitterness as a bold chocolate milk, will have an IBU below 10. Ambers and browns usually range in the 20s, although some of the “nuttier” ones will be as low as ten. Twenty years ago, when Lagunitas was one of the few IPAs out there, a red or a pale ale was in the thirties and above forty was reserved for an India Pale. These days, if you’re not flirting with triple-digits, the millennials will only roll their pierced eyebrow at you.

India Pale Ales are supposed to have more bitterness because, historically, hops were used as a preservative, so the extra hops would keep the beer from spoiling on those long cruises from England to India. Note it was for preservation, not taste. Because, and me out here, hops taste like crap. They do. I know you there in the back, currently scraping a filmy layer of skin off the top of your arid mouth can’t admit it without worrying you’d have to shave your beard as penance, but it is not at all refreshing. It tastes like you’re drinking cotton. It’s dry, it’s scratchy. And last time I checked, you’re not supposed to consume cotton. Especially cotton that smells like dank weed that’s been left in the bong for a fortnight.

Hey, I think that might be the first combination of “bong” and “fortnight” in the same sentence in the history of the English language. Unless you’re talking about the video game.

On the West Coast, Lagunitas was one of the forebears of the IPA craze. As if on a dare, they started proudicing Double and Triple and Imperial IPAs, pushing that IBU up into the triple digits, just waiting for someone to have the balls to say it tasted crappy, but groupthink’s a hell of a drug. Just ask the Nazis. It’s ironic that Labunitas once had the balssiest IPA, and now their IPA is so tame. It barely even registers as a straight Pale these days. For comparison, Dale’s Pale Ale from Oskar Blues (a fun Colorado brewery that comes up with names like Old Chub and Mama’s Yellow Pilsner) has an IBU of 65. Their IPA has a bittering factor of 70, almost double that of Lagunitas.

New Belgium’s IPAs range from 50 to 70. They also have Hemp IPAs. Did I mention dank weed?

And IPAs are just the start. Now breweries have Imperial IPAs, Double IPAs, Triple IPAs, and, I don’t know, a-vine-of-hops-shoved-directly-up-your-ass ale. IBUs of 80 or 90, even triple digits, are starting to become the norm. Colorado and California breweries are now coming out with hemp IPAs. Hell, if it’s gonna taste like headache-inspiring weed, they might as well go to the source. I can only imagine that straight-up marijuana IPAs are on the horizon out here.

And I know I’m in the minority here. The reason I know this is because every brewery or taphouse I go to has a shit-ton of IPAs and their ilk. You’ll have maybe one red or one amber, but not both, one pilsner, and then seventeen beers with IBUs ranging from 65 to 120. Hey, this one has notes of citrus and that one has a whiffs of cotton-swabbed asshole. Oh, and Coors Light is tap #20.

Clearly the market has decided something that is not my cup of Indian tea. A friend of a friend started a brewery. He has a similar taste profile to mine, and was tired of seeing the same varietals at every brewery. He wanted to show what could be done with some of the forgotten flavors. A nutty brown versus a hoppy brown. A light or a dark lager.

But the substantial majority of the customers who came in had one request: more varieties of IPA. So now when I go in there, I’m relegated to my one option, but at least I can commiserate with the brewer.

And I cancross my fingers and hope that more brewers are like he and I. We’re all just waiting for this trend to end. Putting a whole bunch of recipes on the shelf, ready for the moment when hipsters and millennials grow enough balls to admit that the IPA trend has gone too far. Every culinary movement has a backlash at the end, right?

But dammit, I’ve been waiting for this particular pendulum to swing back for a decade now. And my liver ain’t getting any younger.

I know, I know. I don’t like mass-produced beers and I don’t like IPAs. What the hell do I like? Check back on Monday to find out.

Juan Valdez was a Hack

A.B. Kelly · December 13, 2017 · Blog Entries, Musings · alcohol, beer, caffeine, coffee, drinking, food & drink, wine · 2 Comments

I’ve been a wine snob for almost as long as I’ve been drinking alcohol.

I come by it naturally, living in Northern California. There are probably more than 200 wineries within a couple hours’ drive. In my early twenties, even most of the wineries in Napa were free or had a very small tasting fee that went toward the purchase of wine. Until five years ago, Sonoma County was almost entirely free, and even today, most of the wineries in Amador County are free. Amador is closer to my house and even if they’re ignored by the greater zeitgeist, I will put their wines in the Pepsi Challenge against Napa Valley any day of the week.

At these wineries, you can do side-by-side tastings of different varietals. Sometimes you can taste the same varietals from different years. You learn what you like and don’t like pretty quickly. Or, if not, you at least get a decent buzz.

If you pay a little extra (or join the club), you can taste the good shit. The reserves at some wineries aren’t much different than their standard swill, but at other places, there’s a marked difference. Sometimes a run-of-the-mill winery, or a mass producer that you wouldn’t expect to have anything special, like Gallo or Beringer, make some pretty decent $40 wines.

Who knows, maybe Charles Shaw even makes a Twenty Buck Chuck.

In addition to a geographical inclination toward wine snobbery, I spent a good portion of my twenties waiting tables in a nice restaurant. There I learned the difference between truly upper-end wines and the rest. Just as I will put Amador against Napa, there are a ton of excellent substitutes for the Opus Ones and Silver Oaks of the world. I can’t tell you how often I encouraged a customer who wanted something like Silver Oak to try Rodney Strong Symmetry. They loved the change and the $20 they saved was usually redirected to my tip.

But don’t ever suggest any replacement for somebody that wants Opus One. They’ll be none too happy, and it won’t help your tip. I’ve personally never tried Opus One. A lot of people will give their curious server a swig of their specialty wine. One time, when a customer brought in wine from 1974 and I told him that was the year I was born, he refused to let me leave until I had a drink. It was very smooth. Like, almost water smooth. If he had kept it in his cellar another year, it might’ve been water.

But nobody ever lets their server take a sip of Opus One. So I can only assume it tastes like shit. Bitter, sour-grapes, shit.

The biggest secret weapon in my arsenal for anybody that was undecided was Treana Red, a tiny imprint of a small winery in the totally unknown wine region (unless you’ve seen “Sideways”) of Paso Robles. You wouldn’t expect Treana to be good. It calls itself a “red blend,” which brings to mind the horrors of Carlo Rossi jugs and Franzia boxes. But to say no customer complained after I suggested it doesn’t go far enough. Every customer I ever suggested it to thanked me and wondered how such an excellent wine could be so reasonably priced and unknown.

Seriously, go find a bottle of Treana Red. You can probably order one for less than $40 if your state doesn’t suck. Tell ’em The Wombat sent ya. They won’t know what the fuck that means, but it’ll be funny.

While my destiny as cork dork was determined by location, my evolution into a beer snob took an alternate route. For the latter part of my single years, I was a Happy Hour Hound. Needing to be sober and somewhat white-eyed, not to mention ready to teach, by 7:00 in the morning, if I decided to get blotto on a particular evening, or every particular evening, it had to be before 7:00 PM. And the best, cheapest way to get to that particular nirvana is to drink whatever swill is coming out of the middle tap. Did I know about microbrews and IBUs and ABV? Sure. If I drank a beer out at dinner, it would’ve been a Fat Tire or a Sierra Nevada or a Sam Adams. If I was grabbing a six-pack on the way home, it would follow a similar pattern.

But if I was sitting at a bar trying to get drunk, then it’s “Pass the Bud Light.”

There was a point in time I could distinguish between Bud Light, Miller Lite, and Coors Light. I was doing a “blind taste test” put on by the Miller Lite girls at a baseball game. I knew which was which right away, so I picked their brand to get better swag. She didn’t believe me. We tried it again. I was right again. She was still skeptical. Whatever, lady, just give me my light-up beads.

When I moved in with my wife, my commute extended to fifty miles. I need to be awake by 5:00 to be out of the house by 5:45. That doesn’t leave a lot of hangover time. I also have a child. The number of beers I drink on a typical day, week, or month seems infinitesimal compared to a decade ago. Drinking alcohol on a weeknight is a rarity. As a result, on those Fridays and Saturdays where I feel like imbibing, my tolerance is virtually non-existent. Two beers, sixteen hours after I woke up, and I can’t even make it through my one half-hour of grown-up television.

Oh well, at least that episode of Dora the Explorer was especially scintillating.

A six-pack in the fridge will now last me a few weeks, not halfway through a Friday night. And if I’m only having one or two beers, I ain’t wasting them on shit.

It was a casual process, but I remember a moment last year when I met a friend for happy hour before going to a baseball game. I was three good beers in when I got to the game, which happened to be celebrating that most ubiquitous of all minor league promotions, Thirsty Thursday. I figured since I was already three beers in, I could probably switch to shit beer. After all, even Jesus said to drink the good wine before the crappy wine, then you won’t notice it as much.

Maybe wine, Jesus, but not beer. Holy crap, that was the most horrible thing I ever drank. Then I did the unthinkable: I paid for a $9 Sierra Nevada instead of the $1 Bud Light. The 30-year old inside me cringed.

But I make more money and drink less beer than the 30-year old me. So it’s quality over quantity now.

Then again, I’m not the best example of a beer snob, because I don’t like any of the hipster beer movements sweeping every microbrewery in town. Or the fact that every town has a microbrewery now. But that’s probably a story for another time.

What I’m here to talk about today is a third bit of liquid snobbery that I didn’t even know was possible, much less that it applied to me, until recently.

My name is the Wombat. And I am a coffee snob.

Did you know that there are still people in the world that drink Yuban?

Hoo-boy, there are some crappy coffees out there. I guess I kind of knew they were out there. The coffee aisle at the grocery store is full of them. In fact, now that I mention it, the part of the coffee aisle that I actually shop from is a small portion at the very end. I assumed the rest of the aisle was taken up by, I don’t know, tea and powdered creamer. Maybe filters. But I’ve seen an awful lot of Sanka in my peripheral vision en route to the cereal.

The coffee snob started innocently enough. There’s a hipster in my department who brought in a tea kettle and a pour over kit. We have a fifteen-minute brunch between first and second period, during which we can heat enough water for two people to have a freshly-crafted brew. A couple others can brew theirs during their prep period right before or after, and the pour over spot became the modern-day equivalent of ye olde water cooler. Could we have gone standard coffee maker? Sure, but then we’d come in, pour our cup, and lose the sense of community that comes with the slow, agonizing second-half of the pour over process. Seriously, I bet an opium-molasses hybrid would strain faster than the last few drops going through the waterlogged grounds.

Hold on for a moment while I go patent Opium Molasses.

Unofficially, the “Pour Over Club” brings coffee whenever we’re running low, but it’s pure communism once the goods have been procured. Somebody might be milking the process, but as a general rule, we all need the caffeine enough that we’ll make sure there’s enough coffee. One day, nobody remembered that we ran out the day before and we had to go without. The next day, our prep area looked like this:

coffee

This is when I started to realize I was a bit of a snob. Somebody brought in Lavazza. Sounded interesting. Italian name, so it MUST be good. Turns out I wasn’t much of a fan. I figured it was just a taste thing, like an IPA, which I don’t care for but I know many beer enthusiasts love. Still, I struggled through it, because it was the only thing present and even the ugliest hooker in the whorehouse can service some needs.

Six months later, I accidentally brought some more Lavazza in. It was on sale, and I thought, “Italian name, so it MUST be good.” Maybe a little more caffeine would’ve helped me remember. The next day, two of my co-workers had brought in replacements. Turns out I wasn’t the only one that thought it was subpar. It’s not terrible, just not that great. So we kept it as a backup for the next time we ran out. It lasted most of the semester.

But one day I came in, to my horror, to discover a giant vat of Folgers waiting for me. I thought it was a joke. “Who the fuck brought Folgers?” I demanded of everybody in my department. A few of my fellow teachers don’t really drink coffee, and when they do, they sully it with flavored creamer. I started my accusations there. They all denied it. I went in backward order of who I assumed to be the most kindred coffee spirit. By the time I made it to the other snob, I thought for sure someone had lied. Except the final interogatee admitted that yes, he was the culprit. It was leftover from some function he had gone to over the weekend. One of those get-togethers where they have a huge urn full of drudge. His wife asked if we might use it at work and it was either that or throw it out. He figured, “why not?”

I thought my derision would indicate “why not,” but that wasn’t even the biggest factor. A few days later, he brewed it once to prove a point. Even the non-regulars, with their Irish Creme creamer, took a few sips and opted out. The entire thirty-ounce tub sat patiently at the back of the area until the end of the year before we dumped it. There had been a day or two with no coffee available, yet we still didn’t bust into the red vat of mediocrity. Better to go dry for the day. The headache I have on the way home will remind me to stop off and buy some more coffee.

Incidentally, after we mocked the creamer-user enough, he tried some of our coffee black. It wasn’t the bitter crap he had assumed it to be. A week or two later, he admitted that he was now drinking black coffee at home. And now that he was drinking it black, he couldn’t do the Maxwell House. But the good news was that the money being saved on creamer could go toward buying better coffee.

It’s amazing how, once you actually start tasting the coffee, you want coffee with taste. A good portion of the industry hopes you never discover that coffee can taste good.

Fortunately for me, my snobbery seems to be coming at a perfect time. There’s been a resurgence (or maybe just a surgence) of good coffee shops of late. I wouldn’t have believed it five years ago, when the common narrative was that Starbucks pushing everyone out of business. As much as I love me some gingerbread latte, Starbucks isn’t a coffee business. At best, it’s an espresso business, although with all of the specialty Frappuccinos coming out, even that moniker is faltering. Notice how few of the mermaids, dragons, and Christmas trees have coffee as their base flavor? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve ordered the coffee frappuccino and had to send it back when they gave me a caramel one. “Oh sorry, we’re not used to people ordering coffee flavor.”

I’ve settled on ordering an espresso Frappuccino. They’ll give me an off look, but at least the order will be right. Or better yet, I’ll just get a Javiva at Peet’s.

But I feel like the “as sweet as possible” trend is reversing. Competitors are returning to what we now call “drip coffee,” aka coffee. The mom and pop shops have been replaced with hipster locales where they don’t crinkle their nose after I say “no cream or sugar.” Single origin, French press, Clover, and the pour over are becoming increasingly common. And don’t get me started on the wonderful things they are all doing with cold brew.

My favorite spot in this new trend is Philz Coffee in the Bay Area. Their motto is “One Cup at a Time,” and every single coffee they serve is a pour over. They have about fifteen varietals, each with tasting notes, and you can even blend more than one varietal into a single cup of coffee. After you order it, they grind the beans and “brew it” right there in front of you. When it is handed to you, there is a layer of bubbles on the top, and if you slap that lid on before you have slurped up some of those bubbles, the barista might have a nervous breakdown. How cool is that? They want you to sample the cup of coffee like it’s a bottle of wine. The entryway to snobbery is open and widening.

Unlike beer, where my preferences are very specific, I’m not particular about the coffee varietals. Dark roast, medium roast, light roast. All are fine, especially if the brewer knows that dark roast need not be the consistency of crude oil. Guatemalan? Honduran? Kona Blend and all of its attendant controversies? Sure.

Even decaf.

I’m just kidding. Decaf is a demon-spawn cocktail filtered through the devil’s own anus. Non-alcoholic beer is bad enough, but I can at least get my head around people who want to avoid alcohol. There is no reason on the planet that someone should opt to avoid the wonder that is caffeine.

And I’m not going to lie and say that I can actually taste all of those “notes of” that the descriptors say. Wine? Yeah, I can definitely sense the grapefruit in a sauvignon blanc. With zinfandel, I know I prefer a peppery one over a jammy one. But when the coffee says it tastes of hazelnut and cardamom, I’m just going to have to trust them. Even the very basic flavors or “fruity” or “nutty” doesn’t come through on my palate. I’m skeptical it’s on anybody’s. I wonder what temperature it needs to be at to get that flavor.

Whoever heard of “fruity coffee,” anyway?

But that’s okay. I’ve come to discover that there is only one flavor profile I need my coffee to have. It’s a flavor that might be a rarity in the coffee world but, thankfully, is becoming easier to find.

That flavor is: good.