Author: Stephen Body

Okay, so you have these two beer styles, one of which has been tweaked and yanked and messed with and grafted upon more than Dr. Frankenstein’s patchwork freakzazoid and you feel that there’s nothing at all that anybody could do to either one that would surprise you. The Red/Amber ale has been notable for all the multitude of things that have NOT been done to it, flopping out of breweries everywhere as almost an afterthought, give or take gems like Troeg’s Nugget Nectar and Bear Republic Rocket Red and Cigar City Tocobaga. It’s safe and predictable and a crowd-pleaser and, apart from a Mac & Jack’s African Amber and those previously mentioned…kinda, uh, b-o-r-i-n-g…

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First, let’s stipulate that what you’re about to read comes from a very unapologetic Beer Snob. MAJOR beer snob. I’m not a snob about wine or Whiskey or Vodka or anything else I review and, even in beer, I’m a snob about ONE thing: cheaply made, cynically conceived, watery, insipid, mass-produced adjunct Pilsners like BudMillerCoorsPabst. That’s it. That and anything else made along those dumbed-down lines.

I’ve had people who took this to mean that I just don’t like Pilsners; some even extrapolated that to include all Lagers…which is crap. I adore a well-made Pilsner but, until the past eight or ten years, most Americans had never tasted a well-made Pils. My own fave is Pinkus Ur Pils but there is an ever-increasing number of American craft breweries that have taken to making Pilsners and the results have ranged from wretched to stunning – leaning strongly toward “stunning”

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The Lucky Seven Selection

Blame Guinness for declaring St. Patrick’s Weekend. Not that I’m complaining. Stouts of all stripes are among my favourite beers, after all. Guinness has also given me an excuse to bundle my occasional Saturday Six-Pack Series together with the commemoration of a saint who drove snakes out of a country that has never seen a snake. We’ll leave that to naturalists and hagiographers to debate while we tuck into a few stout beers.

Stouts, though. Not exactly a clear-cut style. Case in point: the marked proliferation of sub-styles in the 2015 edition of the BJCP Style Guidelines compared with the 2008 edition –– proof positive that style categories are anything but static. And then we have all those legends worthy of St. Patrick, guaranteed to keep self-styled beer historians debating till the wee hours. Though I’m not (yet) what I’d call a historian of beer, I know enough about the shifting sands of beer styles to say that you’re not alone if you’ve ever confused a porter with a stout. And don’t even get started with Russian Stouts. Or do. Interesting stories of icy sea journeys and opulent courts abound, along with no shortage of confusion over nomenclature. For now, I’m content to let the legends be. If nothing else, the heated debates and sedulous myth-busting make for entertaining reading.

 

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Ah, the poor, sad Porter…

A little background: in England, truck drivers are called “porters” – and were even before there were trucks. They’re manly men, just like here, and – just like here – they don’t exactly scoff at a cold pint of something. But, in Britain, that “something” was usually a brawny Stout and often at lunchtime…which led to the too-frequent spectre of lorry (Brit for “truck”) drivers being peeled out of crumpled cabs, up against bridge supports, sometimes without a pulse. It was a problem even back when all the porters hauled their wares with horse and cart and Porters were born of necessity, somewhere in the 1722 to 1730 window, when a notable London brewer, Ralph Harwood, was experimenting with blending lots od beers that were lying about in his warehouse. Harwood came up with a lower-alcohol dark that he originally called “entire” or “entire butt” (butt was the old-timey term for “barrel”). and offered it to porters at a nearby produce wholesaler, who liked it so much that Harwood dubbed it “Porter”, in their honor. Drunken porters – believe it or not – was a serious problem and transport company owners, police departments, and Parliament all harrumphed around for years, issuing warnings and scolding drivers and generally being ineffectual…just like here. So when a viable alternative to Stout-driven road rage became available, most of England lapped it up immediately.

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This will be short and sweet because it’s very simple:

Garrett Marrero owns Maui Brewing Company.

Period, end of story.

He started Maui Brewing in 2005, after buying pioneering Hawaiian brewpub, Lahaina Fish & Game Brewery and Rotisserie. With partner, Melanie Oxley, Lahaina morphed into Maui Brewing, the success of which, spurred by some truly great beers, turned a local Maui brewpub into a modern state-of-the-art brewery, whose beers are now available in several states and even overseas.

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My 2017 resolution to write shorter posts is sitting at about fifty/fifty, pass/fail. So I’m going to climb back on the bike, here:

Jim Vorel is a beer writer from Atlanta; a guy who – despite what he probably thinks – I actually like but have frequently gone after like a dog on a hamburger for some of his apparently uninformed lists, many of which read as though he had simply scanned RateBeer and BeerAdvocate and then compiled them. He has also done several lists which I thought were dead-on. I know he has the capability of doing them well, so I go after him because I’m hoping he’ll devote the same care to all of them that he does to that occasional gem.

 

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The FedEx guy is my beer pimp. Unintentionally, of course, but in the past month or so, that guy has dropped off some seriously superior stuff on my narrow little front porch and, if he keeps this up, I see a fruit basket in his future.

The first was a couple of cans from a brewery about whom I’ve been crazy intrigued for several years now. Upslope Brewing, located in one of my favorite places on any map – Boulder, Colorado – has been on tap a couple of times when we’ve been in Denver, visiting our son. I first tasted their IPA and Brown at a bar in Denver’s Larimer Square, back in 2015, and was instantly a fan. They weren’t distributed in Seattle, though, and I struck out, back then, in finding anything in packages to take home. Those two stayed with me, though: the seamless, resiny, finely-malted, user-friendly character of the IPA and the malty, subtly spicy roundness of a truly fine Brown. So, when I opened the box to find two cans of their new Upslope Citra Pale Ale, I was instantly excited, both because of the brewery and my ongoing quest to find that ultimate Citra Pale or IPA that I can imagine but have not yet found.

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I’ve had to make a couple of exceptions to my iron-clad rule against reviewing any brewery that’s even obliquely affiliated with Anheuser Busch. It wasn’t prompted by any sort of softening of my stance about the heinous history of this avaricious pack of shit-weasels. They are still among the most amoral, vicious, and unprincipled thugs ever to occupy any business category in US history but I’m all for great independent breweries using them as they use so many, many people and situations and two breweries in particular have managed to sing on with AB and use their massive distribution system to their advantage, while otherwise telling the consultants and “efficiency experts” from the Brazil/Belgium mothership to go f**k themselves – politely, of course.

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