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Jun19

Grimm: Super Going

by mynie on June 19, 2015 at 7:26 pm
Posted In: Beer Reviews

grimm

In a desperate effort to avoid real work, I did a little research (i.e., a single google search) regarding the etymology of the word “Grim.” Did it come, I wondered, from those fairy tales? Because I’ve heard that the non-Disney versions of them are pretty bleak, filled with children being turned to maggots and daughters having their intestines ripped out for disobeying their father’s curfew. In the real Snow White, Snow’s hair is made of worms and the talking mice are her enemies, not her friends.

Turns out, the two-m’ed “Grimm” is just a surname. And as German people apparently enjoyed their horror stories enough to share them with dozens of generations of children, they probably didn’t mean to imbue the name with any negative connotations. Plus, the English use of the term precedes the brothers’ fairy tale collection by a couple hundred years.

But still, this strikes me as an odd name for a company that brews spritely beers. I know they’re from Brooklyn, a land where meaning is utterly secondary to aesthetics, but the word is sort of hideous. It doesn’t roll off the tongue so much as it grates against the teeth.

Eh… I got nothing to connect this discussion to the beer. This is the third Grimm I’ve sampled. The first, Color Field, was underwhelming. The second, named after a Terry Riley piece, was quite good, but still contained some of the off cereal-flavored nodes that made Color Field not so great. This is free of all such nodes, and the result is fantastic.

Pours a thick, pale yellow. Smells about as fruity as most American gose’s but much more aggressively salty.

Throughout, the salt cuts fantastically into the sour lacto. The effect isn’t at all like a traditional German gose, which is like a tart pils with a light dryness to the finish. This is more like a seasoned mango soda pop. The oak conditions thickens the body while dulling the tartness even further, leading to a beer that’s wonderfully balanced even as it’s strange and adventurous.

└ Tags: Brooklyn, Grimm, Super Going
 Comment 
Jun17

Craft beer and the identity economy

by mynie on June 17, 2015 at 8:30 pm
Posted In: Beer Reviews

IMG_2694

I was shocked, a few years back, to learn how little most brewmasters make. I mean, it’s understandable if your local brewpub only pays their head guy or gal 30k—that’s a small scale operation, after all. But most brewers aren’t that small. They just take pride in paying their most important employees shit wage, providing them instead of vague status perks.

The influx of Millennial liberals into the entrepreneurial economy has lead to some comical, and very sad, effects. There was a sign up at an Indianapolis charcuterie asking for applicants for an apprenticeship position. The pay was $500 a month, and a yearlong commitment was required. Good news, though: you got all the fatty meat you could eat, and every second Sunday was a day off.

“Is this for serious,” I asked the young man with the handlebar moustache.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “You work here, you’re a rock star.”

And as everyone knows, rock stars are famous for how little money they make. But so goes the vagaries of our sad, broken country: a generation of young people have abandoned all hope of financial stability and will accept instead a chance to become known locally as that cool dude who works at the meat packing place.

So head brewer positions have their perks. You get to drink all day, for one. Bloggers and cicerones kiss your ass. And you get to go into the VIP area at Dark Lord Day. But 30k at a big-name, mid-size brewer? You can’t retire on that. You can’t afford to get sick, even, or take a day off, or do anything that might mildly annoy your employer, who is statistically one of those icky Ayn Rand guys who thinks that treating people like shit is a sign of moral intelligence. He is a job creator. You are a mere maker. He’s given you your maker space and you have utilized that space to craft a socially favorable identity—what more could you possibly want, you ungrateful piece of filth? You—ugg, people like you make the ubermensch feel all shruggy, if you get my drift. Keep yapping and we’ll transfer brewing operations to Vietnam. Over there you can throw sass-mouth child laborers right into the boiling tank.

Long story short, I was quite pleased when I heard that Toppling Goliath’s old head brewer had left the business on short notice. Because, frankly, fuck the business owner. Fuck all business owners who aren’t also practitioners, or who refuse to adequately value their employees. I met that guy, and he had the same air of holier-than-thou self-possession as every other coked-out degenerate restaurateur I’ve ever known. These are the guys who give their employees mealy-mouthed lectures on being team players, on the morality of grit and selflessness, but then shut down operations overnight and refuse to issue the last three week’s paychecks. These are the people who conflated selfishness with honor, the rat bastards who’ve taken control of every single aspect of this country and consider themselves the only true victims of the horrors they’ve wrought upon the world. In 2055, when potable water is as valuable as gold and a lucky few toilers survive to literally lick the shit from these people’s assholes, they will cry about the good old days, about how government and unions brought down the glorious systems that used to make life so pleasant. Fuck them. I hope they all die.

And so rumors abound regarding the fate of TG. None of them are good. They’ve had to abandon several batches. Other beers have been renamed because they can’t stop fucking up the recipe. This, 1492, is from their Hop Patrol series, and it resembles a decently hopped homebrew. The carbonation was off—no sound was made when the cap was removed, as if I were unstopping a bottle of Sam Adams Utopias. It glugged out with minimal fizz and smelled pleasant but uneven. The unevenness continues throughout the flavor, with green and fruity hops blotting out everything else, ending on nodes of juice and water.

Topping Goliath is in trouble. And that’s a good thing.

2 Comments
Jun15

SoMe Brewery Apostrophe IPA

by mynie on June 15, 2015 at 4:55 pm
Posted In: Beer Reviews

Some Apostrophe

I headed up to Kittery last month to check out Tributary, which is run by the old prospector dude who used to brew at Portsmouth. It was super nice, almost dream-like. A folk singer named Cormac McCarthy played a set, which was weird, because he looked enough like the writer Cormac McCarthy to make me almost ask if they were the same dude. (He also looked a little like Greg Popavitch, but less splotchy.) Tributary’s beer was fantastic and the setup seemed to cater not to beer people, thank god, but to grizzled Mainers, the sort of folk who don’t think it odd that a porter named Porter be the flagship of a brewery founded in 2014, who believe, dagnabbit, that fruit juice should taste like fruit juice and beer should taste like barley. Amen to that. A goddamn men.

Wh-what was I talking about? Kittery. It was a hazy and indistinct sort of place if only because the vibe at Tributary was so nice. We high-tailed it Portsmouth immediately afterward because it just didn’t seem like there could be much more to that part of Maine. Upon further inspection, it turns out we were wrong: there’s actually big-ass outlet mall and then, right past it in the back of a credit union, there’s a place called SoMe Brewery. You will have to drive past it at least once before you figure out where it is.

Did the proprietors intentionally choose an unGoogleble name? It stands for Southern Maine, of course, but as it stands it looks like “some,” which has to be one of the fifty or so most commonly spoken English words. Everything about the place seemed willfully, gleefully inaccessible. Aside from the place itself, that is. The actual place was very friendly.

We only had time and brainspace for one beer, so I went with the flagship IPA. On tap, it was fantastic: huge nodes of mango and grapefruit so juicy and intense it was comparable to Cycle Brewing’s fantastic Crank IPA. From a bottle, it’s not as good. The aroma is still loaded to the brim with fruity mosaic hops, but this is balanced rather harshly by rough, earthen barley. It still tastes quite good, but just not as good as it was on tap.

└ Tags: Apostrophe, Maine, SoMe
 Comment 
Jun02

Jack’s Abby Berliner Styler Lager

by mynie on June 2, 2015 at 6:46 pm
Posted In: Beer Reviews

IMG_2620

Lifts trap door leading to crawlspace, pulls out vellum-sheathed tome labeled “Beerhole Scthick.” Leaves door open, takes several steps upon the dusty hardwood before sitting down laboriously and opening the book.

ME
Lessee… “Bitch about pricing,” “Bitch about Beeradvocate reviews,” “Bitch about extremeness,” “Thinly veiled suicide threat…” Ack! None of these work! Wait… what’s this? “Gimmick review.” Yes! That will do nicely.

Turns to camera. Several teeth are missing. Eyes are welled with tears. Begin speaking in tone that is absolutely flat and normal.

ME
Jack’s Abby is only lagers. They make some very good beers. They also popularized India Pale Lagers, which are stupid because the back ends get all weirded out from lagering. I do not know if they lager their exquisite Baltic Porter, but I think that would be illegal since that’s not how you do porters.

Sighs deeply. Turns momentarily to face a mirror. Turns back toward the camera. Skin is to beginning to peel off my face, melting.

ME
Berliners are kind of popular in America now. The first one I remember that was really good was from New Glarus. It was nearly as thick as Weinstephaner’s Hefe, which is perfectly thick, only the NG beer was soured wonderfully by lacto. The result was like a wheat milkshake that was also a citrus soda. It was fabulous and completely different. After trying something like that, it’s no wonder other brewers would want to try to emulate it.

Looks downward toward hands. They are tiny and frail, veins sticking through the skin as blue as the sky and as thick as earthworms.

ME
Traditional Berliners are not as sour as New Glarus’. They were traditionally only lightly soured and then flavor would be added in pubs. There’s Red Syrup (raspberry) and Green Syrup (woodruff). Michael Jackson’s first edition of the World Guide to Beer showed all three colors lined up like a traffic signal. It was cool, and it seeing it made me realize how differently Americans had interpreted the style. There was a booth at the recent American Craft Beer Fest, in Boston, that actually had the syrups on hand. I drunkenly explained how cool that was, how I’d just read about it in an old book. The woman running the booth said that no one ever used them, and she disappointed, on a personal level, that I requested the woodruff.

Turns toward window then snaps ahead away. Camera pans upward, toward window. The sky is red from pollution and blood. A hairy, three-fingered hand, perhaps belonging to a disfigured chimp, taps lightly on the glass and then beckons us to follow it.

ME
So… Jack’s Abby. Their Berliner seems remarkably traditional, at least as I understand the style to traditionally exist. Lightly sour up front, leading to a middle that’s like a combination between a Shock-Tart-Flavored American Berliner and a nice, traditional municher, with lights nodes of cereal against sunshine and hay. The finish is fabulous, really shows off their brewing acumen. Zero esters. Delicious dryness.

Sigh again, more loudly. No longer any energy to lift up head. Camera pans towards the still-open crawl space door. A line of ants, each the approximate size and shape of a Coronita bottle, is streaming out of the hole. The ground is alive with them.

 Comment 
May31

Trillium: Galaxy Dry Hopped Fort Point Pale Ale

by mynie on May 31, 2015 at 8:01 pm
Posted In: Beer Reviews

IMG_2607

Jesus, that’s a lot of words for a beer name. What happened to the good ol’ days, when we’d call it “Joe’s IPA,” (or “Frank’s,” or even “Jessica’s,” I’m open-minded). Back then, a man had pride in his work. Didn’t go hiding behind no hoity-toity references to the most caucasian neighborhood in the world’s most caucasian non-Wisconsin city.

Procured this bad motherfucker yesterday, right after the American Craft Beer Fest. Me and lady split early, partially because she got punching drunk quicker than usual, but also because the line up was a goddamn snooze. Row 34 wasn’t open until later, but–miracle of miracles–Trillium was actually fucking open!

You remember in the mid-aughts, when every couple of months some moron would try saying Three Floyds burned down, or that they moved to Winnipeg, or that the Gary, Indiana zoo bought a pack of tigers on the cheap that turned out to be heavily tattooed, steroid-laden Thai teenagers who ran amuck all through Northwest Indiana, burned down the Floyds, and forced the owners to move operations to Winnipeg? That’s kind of literally been happening to Trillium. All sorts of shut-downs and restrictions and weird ticky tacky bullshit limiting my ability to actually walk in an buy beer.

Anyhow, they were open. And busy, as usual. And gigantically friendly, as usual. They couldn’t pour samples for some godforsaken reason, but GDHFPPA seemed the hypiest of their available bombers.

Pours out thick as a banana smoothie. Smells of dense, dark hops. Big punch of mango dulled out by aggressive yeast spiciness. Tastes good, but not much like I’ve heard it described elsewhere. Nice balance bewteen dry and fruity hop nodes, very clean finish with a wee bit of mango lingering on the back of my tongue.

└ Tags: Boston, Galaxy Dry Hopped Fort Point Pale Ale, Trillium
 Comment 
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