Brewing day!

It's brewing day in the House of Fermentation.  I've been dying to brew up my second batch o' homebrew, this time a steam style (aka California common) beer as a nod to one of my first true beer loves, Anchor Steam.  And, since the style involves using lager yeast fermented at ale temps, it should work well in our house, which we keep cool in the winter.

I've had a lot of time off lately, using up leave from what will shortly be my old job and getting ready for a new gig, but I've managed to be really busy anyway.  Just when I was starting to wonder when I'd get some time off during my time off, I got today.  The Queen of Fermentation planned a bunch of activities for her and the kids, and I woke up knowing that TODAY WAS THE DAY!  Brewing day!

So, I am writing this quick post surrounded by hop-scented steam swirling around the kitchen, the sound of boiling wort emanating from the brew kettle.  I love this.  I love the aroma and the sound, the attention to detail and the anticipation.  The fermentation bucket is sanitized, I'm almost ready to add the finishing hops, and then it'll be on to cooling the wort, transferring it to the bucket, and pitching the yeast.

The brown ale I brewed up has been really well-received by various friends, which of course just encourages me to brew more.  I'm thinking about getting a carboy for secondary fermentation - hey, if you have thoughts on this, add them to comments - and I might even get another fermentation bucket so that I can do more than one batch.  Beer is intoxicating.  Brewing might even be more so.  There's the timer... time to add the finishing hops.

Homebrewed English Brown Ale: a postscript

A few extra days of cellaring and conditioning has really rounded out the homebrew's flavor profile.  Served in a red wine glass at cellar temperature, it has a malty aroma: a bit of bread, lots of brown sugar, some chocolate.  Hops are present too, just a bit of flowers coming through.  The taste is a touch sweet, the brown sugar is there, as is the chocolate.  It has a nice, medium mouthfeel, and the carbonation is feeling just right.  The hops provide that key bit of balance, with the floral notes and bitterness coming through softly.  The finish is rather long, with that brown sugar and chocolate combo remaining balanced off by the hops.

Now, it's not like I made this recipe up.  Far from it!  My hat's off to Brewer's Best for putting the kit together.  So, don't take this post as me saying that I've come up with something great.  Rather, I'm quite impressed with the kit, and this beer has turned out very nicely, particularly for a first batch of homebrew.  If you're reading this and thinking about homebrewing, go for it!  You can make some good beer right from a kit and learn a ton in the process.

My boy, Sir E, is proud of his English Brown Ale.

Homebrewing: Batch brewed, lessons learned, part two

Welcome back to the House of Fermentation!  When we left off, I had managed to spill some water into the wort from the unsanitized airlock.  Not the most auspicious moment, but everything is a lesson.  The question was whether this lesson would be a harsh one.

I put the fermenter in the laundry room and set our space heater, which has a thermostat, to what had been described by the Adventures in Homebrewing folks as an ideal temperature for the particular strain of yeast I was using.  I wanted those sweet babies to be comfortable.

The next morning, I went in there first thing, hoping for bubbles in the [potentially germ-ridden and thus catastrophic to my brew because of my idiotic spill] airlock water.  And there were!  Signs of life!  The right kind of life!  At least so far!  Fermentation confirmed!

In the meantime, in the spirit of sibling harmony, I had already promised my 7-year-old that the next batch would be named after her.  In fact, I already know the style: steam beer, aka California common.  The reasons were straightforward enough.  As a reader of this blog, you may recall from an older post that I have a particular love of Anchor Brewing, including its flagship Anchor Steam Beer.  I want to brew something like that.  Obviously, on just my second batch, and using extracts instead of having the control of all-grain (where you mash the malt yourself), it might not match up, but I want to try.  But it's not just about love and reverence.  There's also a practical reason: steam beer is made with lager yeast but fermented at closer to an ale temperature.  Lager yeasts ferment at much lower temperatures than most ale yeasts, and I don't want to be using that space heater quite so much next time around.  So, by using a lager yeast at the temperature at which the House of Fermentation hovers in the winter, I can brew up a batch of steam beer without resorting to the heater.

Down in the basement, the yeasts continued to work their magic.  Day after day I went down, and day after day I saw triumphant, burbling bubbles rising to the surface of the airlock at regular intervals.  If I sniffed at the right time, I could catch a whiff of the developing beer.  The aroma was still on target.  Hope was building.

Instead of the 4-6 days that had been described, I had active bubbles for 7-8 days, and then let it rest as instructed for 2 more days.  There are stories out there of exploding bottles caused by bottling beer that is still fermenting too actively.  Glass shrapnel, huge mess... hmm, best avoided, no?

Waiting to bottle the beer, I finally did something that I'd suggest a novice homebrewer do much sooner. I watched the incredibly helpful, straightforward videos at homebrewingvideo.com.  I started off watching the ones about the bottling process and ended up watching them all.  Lots of useful tips in there!  In fact, Video-man mentioned the importance of sanitizing the airlock.  Ouch!  Anyway, I was ready to bottle my elixir.

I sanitized my clean bottles, bottling bucket, and all other equipment.  Then I opened the fermenter, and the aroma of freshly brewed beer filled the kitchen!  Malty, a bit bready, some lovely floral overlay of hops... I had made beer!  Flat beer.  Now it needed to condition in the bottles.  I boiled up a solution of priming sugar as instructed and put it in the bottling bucket.  My dear yeast would be well-fed one last time and carbonate my beer in the bottles.  Perhaps I should mention here that by now, I had fallen in love with the yeast.  It feels a bit odd to fall in love with a microbe.  Sure, I have always had a healthy respect for yeast, given my admiration of beer and bread, not to mention hard cider and wine, but working with them on this first batch, I think I fell in love.  I'm not proud to admit it.  In fact, I should probably get some help for this, but I want to be honest here.

Now, on to the transfer from fermenter to bottling bucket.  Siphoning looked very easy on the video. Obviously, since I went through all the trouble of sanitizing everything, sucking the tube to get it started wasn't an option.  I primed the racking (siphon) tube using sanitizing solution, as instructed, and got it started by running some water "backward" into the tube and then lowering and opening the tube to start the flow, as instructed.  It took me three tries to get the flow.  Video-man did it in one.  Video-man was an expert, but really, we're just talking about siphoning.  I have no excuse.

I got it flowing just in time to stave off panicky thoughts of failure, stopped the flow, transferred the racking cane and tube to the fermenter, and let the flow start again, first into a cup to let the sanitizer out.  Once beer was flowing, I lowered the tube into the bottling bucket, and within minutes I had a lovely bucket of beer there, ready to bottle.

Bottling was straightforward enough.  There's a handy (when it works) valve on the end of the bottling tube that only allows beer to flow (when it works) when it touches the bottom of a bottle.  Did I mention that it didn't work all that reliably?  I mean, it definitely allowed beer to flow, but let's just say it didn't always stop on cue.  Video-man had said to put towels under the bottling area, and never, never, never bottle over carpet.  I listened to Video-man.  Whew.  I quickly learned to re-tap the valve against the bottom of the bottle every now and then to keep it from sticking.

By the way, it is a painful thing to spill beer that you went through the trouble of making.  When that valve stuck and beer overflowed the bottle and soaked the towels, I wondered if it would be undignified to suck on the towels later.

Capping (remember, sanitize those caps!) was a breeze. I put the bottles back in their warm, cozy, pro-fermentation environment and prepared to wait two weeks.  After bottling, there was a tiny bit of beer -- and a lot of sediment -- left in the bucket, and my wife and I isolated a bit of the liquid and tried it.  Sure it was flat and needed to mature, but it actually tasted pretty darn good!  It was definitely beer.  I appeared to be on the right track.

I looked ahead to the two week wait, and it sounded painfully long.  Lucky for me, my friend Sean -- an experienced homebrewer -- said on the 8th day to go ahead and try it!  It's probably ready!  My wife and I put two in the fridge, and close to dinner time we took them out and let them come up to cellar-ish temperature.  I held my breath opening the first one.  Remember that unsanitized airlock spill-over?  Well, I was sure thinking about it, but the bottle opened with a healthy, sharp hiss and didn't crazily froth over -- which can be a sign of infection -- and it poured beautifully.  Nut-brown color, a nice head, aroma of malty sweetness with just a bit of background hops.  And it tasted... GOOD!  Not fantastic.  But good!  A touch sweet, a bit roasted, a hint of chocolate, nice bittering from the hops along with just a breath of floral quality.  It was an English brown ale, as planned.  My wife and I both enjoyed it.  Sean had said to shoot for drinkability with the first batch.  This one exceeded that expectation.  This homebrewing thing is a whole lot of fun.  Sure, there were anxious moments.  There were even moments of utter folly.  But I'm hooked.

Before the first taste, my 5-year-old was watching intently, and as I sipped it, he asked eagerly, "Is it good?  Is it good?"  And when I told him it was, he crowed gleefully.

After all, it's his namesake beer.

Homebrewing: Batch brewed, lessons learned, part one

Friends, since my last post, I have embarked on the homebrewing journey.  For better or worse, I have joined my wonderful wife in playing with microbes here in the "House of Fermentation."  She makes sourdough, yogurt, kefir, and kombucha.  She also soaks grains before cooking with them, just to get a touch of fermentation going and increase digestibility.  Perhaps more to the point, she looks like she's having a hell of a lot of fun, and I gotta say, the results are darn tasty.

I had thought for months about joining the microbial circus by homebrewing, but I would stop myself by thinking about the simple fact that there are a lot of wonderful beers out there.  Did I really need to make beer when there are so many lovely ones to drink?  Eventually, I answered "yes!"  I just couldn't shake the idea!  So, I went to Adventures in Homebrewing in Taylor, MI, where the helpful folks set me up with an equipment kit and ingredients to make English brown ale -- it's a style that I know and like, and the recipe kit was labeled "easy."  I also attended their Teach a Friend to Homebrew Event, where I mingled with novice and expert homebrewers alike and got a lot of good tips.  I was ready.  I was inspired.  I was thirsty.

The next day, I commenced my journey.  I read the instructions and laid out the ingredients in their handy little packets.  As the clerk at Adventures in Homebrewing told me, making beer is not rocket science.  Perhaps not, but by the end, I knew that it might take a minute to learn to brew a beer, but it takes a lifetime to master.  Othello, anyone?

At the homebrewing shop, I had contemplated buying a 5-gallon stock pot, but I was told by one helpful homebrewer that for the boil -- the only step where the pot is needed -- I could get away with a 3-gallon pot.  Hey, we had one of those!  Yes!  Money saved!  Alas, another homebrewer -- one of the super-experts -- had talked about rinsing steeped grains in warm water, which would add to the volume.  And yet another had mentioned that getting into homebrewing to save money on beer is like buying a fishing boat to save money on fish.  It just doesn't work that way.  So, in hindsight, it was misguided to try to go with the 3-gallon stock pot, but try I did.

I put 2.5 gallons of Ann Arbor's finest water into my 3 gallon pot, brought it up to the designated temp, and put the muslin bag of malted grains in.  Glorious!  It steeped to make an aromatic barley "tea," and that was my first hint of what it would become.  Homebrewing is a process of constructing a beer while deconstructing your idea of beer.  Just when you think you know about beer, homebrewing breaks it down to its components, and for me, smelling that steeped barley was a signal moment.  There would be other such moments, like when I broke open the bags of hops, but the first was powerful.

After steeping, I ran warm water through the bag of grain just like one of the homebrewing experts told me, nice and slow, rinsing those additional sugars into my developing wort.  No, I wasn't getting a lesion on my hand or foot.  I mean wort, pronounced wert, which is basically beer pre-fermentation.  It was time to add the malt extracts.  In this recipe, there were liquid and powered malt extracts.  Before pouring in the malt extracts, it occurred to me that the pot was looking awfully full.   But what the hell, I thought, and poured anyway.  All I can say in my defense is that it didn't overflow.

OK, now I had a really full pot of hot, sweet, barley-sugar water.  As in, up-to-the-brim full.  Crap!  I needed a 5-gallon pot right then.  Turns out that these are somewhat harder to find than they should be.  Or than they used to be.  My 5-year-old was standing there, and I asked him if he was up for a little adventure.  As usual, he was, and off we went.  I'll spare you the details, but let's just say he was a total trouper, and after running all over town, we found what we needed.  As an aside, I'll mention that I'm convinced that the relative unavailability of 5-galllong stock-pots is due to the decline in American home cooking.  Several merchants mentioned unhelpfully (but with very helpful looks on their apologetically-smiling faces) that they used to carry them.

Anyway, we finally got a pot and ran home again.  For his troubles and help, I promised my 5-year-old that I would name this beer after him if it turned out.  He appeared pleased at this and then went off to do something more interesting, like play knights or police or something.  There was a ginger transfer of the hot liquid to the new pot, and I was off and running again.  A bit humbled.  Perhaps even ashamed.  But still in business and full of hope.

The rest of the boil went well.  I kept time precisely and added bittering, aromatic, and flavoring hops on schedule.  The aroma was amazing and seemed right.  Simply right.  Fabulous!  After the boil, I cooled the whole shebang in a sink full of cold water, draining and refilling that several times until the wort was at the right temperature.  Then I transferred it without incident to the sanitized fermentation pail and pitched the yeast and aerated it.  I breathed a sigh of relief, but one remaining moment of total shock came next.  I was pressing the airlock into the lid of the pail when some of the water in the airlock went over the edge and into the beer -- totally predictable, given the fact that I was pressing that sucker into a small hole in an otherwise air-tight bucket.  Well, dear reader, I hadn't sanitized the airlock.  I had sanitized everything -- EVERYTHING -- else.  But not the airlock.  It wasn't a lot of water, but let's just say that the same medium that yeast love so much is a wonderful place to grow bacteria.  After some choice words under my breath and some basic relaxation exercises, I shrugged (que sera, sera) and put the pail in the laundry room with a space heater to keep it at fermentation temperature.

Time would tell.

Time did tell.

Just a friendly reminder

Please check out my craft beer articles on the Ann Arbor edition of examiner.com.  You can find my articles here.  If you want e-mail notifications when I write a new examiner article, just go to my examiner.com site, click "subscribe" next to my name, and enter your preferred e-mail address.  Based on my experience subscribing to other examiners' sites, you won't be hit by other examiner.com e-mails when you subscribe.  You'll just get notices of when I post a new article, and the notice will indicate what the article is, so you can easily choose whether to bother clicking on the link in the e-mail.

Shameless self-promotion?  Perhaps.  It is really good to have subscribers.  But I figure that if your eyeballs are reading this, then you're interested in the topic and might dig my examiner.com articles, where I'll be posting much more frequently.

Thanks!  And may the beer joy be with you.

Harvest Beer Festival was fantastic!

I cannot get over how wonderful the Harvest Beer Festival was, and my hat's off to the Michigan Brewers Guild for pulling off a wonderful event.  Actually, it was cold enough there that I'd better keep my hat on.  Despite being a chilly, blustery day at Eastern Market in Detroit, with some intervals of rain that mostly stayed light, the festival was amazing, with 38 Michigan micro's offering samples of over 200 beers.  And nearly 2,500 people feeling the craft brewed love.  Heaven!

I did a write up in Examiner.com.  Check it out here!

Next stout review coming soon...  mmmmm, stout.

Michigan stouts: Arcadia Cocoa Loco

Arcadia Brewing Co. is a Battle Creek brewery specializing in British-style ales.  I don't know that their Cocoa Loco stout is really "British-style," but it is an interpretation and expansion that is well worth drinking!  I picked up a single at Arbor Farms for $2.79, and it is fairly widely available.

This deep, dark, brown-black stout pours quietly, with a fairly thin, reluctant, caramel-colored head that dissipates quickly. The aroma is roasty-burnt, with a strong blackstrap molasses presence mixing with coffee, all against a background of chocolate that promises some pretty glorious flavor.  There’s a touch of alcohol aroma, too, in this 7.0% ABV stout.

The brew is assertively bitter followed quickly by a wash of chocolate.  There is plenty of coffee here,   roasted to dark, fragrant perfection.  The carbonation is fairly small, a bit more noticeable than I thought it would be when the beer poured so quietly, but it’s no distraction.  This beer has a medium body, less heavy than I expected.

In the finish, there’s a bit of alcohol and associated warming.  Later in the long, pleasant finish, a vanilla note springs forward, superb and worth waiting for.  It took considerable time to form, so pause awhile over this brew.  As it warms, it doesn’t sweeten much, and the flavors continue to deepen.  This is an unabashedly burnt-roasted, coffee-inflected, chocolaty beer.

Cocoa Loco is an outstanding, big beer, completely worth lingering over.  It would make a wonderful after-dinner drink.  It’s made with chocolate malts, cocoa nibs, and 63% cacao bittersweet chocolate, as well as molasses and lactose.  Arcadia describes it as a “triple chocolate milk stout.”  Well said indeed.

Harvest Beer Festival: October 24, Eastern Market!

The Michigan Brewers Guild's inaugural Harvest Beer Festival is coming up October 24, 1:00-6:00 p.m., at Eastern Market in Detroit.  It looks to be an amazing event.  Click here for details and a slew of links to sponsors, participating breweries, etc.  I hope to see you there.

Ann Arbor Craft Beer Examiner

Apparently, the page is up and running.  Visit at www.examiner.com/x-27116-Ann-Arbor-Craft-Beer-Examiner!  Thanks, and enjoy!

Good Beer, and Good Beer News

As I write this, I'm feeling like dreck due to a head cold that hit late last night.  I had hoped to continue my stout reviews, but that will have to wait a few days.  A beer doesn't sound like the best idea right about now.

I did want to mention a couple of things, though.  First, I went out to dinner last night with a friend who was in town to visit his folks (he grew up here).  He wanted to go to Cottage Inn Restaurant.  We were pleasantly surprised to find two excellent craft beers on their "special" list.  One was Magic Hat's #9, a terrific beer from Vermont that my friend, Sean, tipped me off to.  Turns out it's not hard to get here -- in fact, I saw a six pack at Kroger the other day -- but finding it on tap was very nice.  Luckily, I was drinking it before my cold set in, though by the end of the evening I knew I was coming down with something.  I won't review it here other than to say it's got a nice combo of floral, bitter, and fruit flavors and was a joy to drink.  The brewery describes it as "not quite pale ale," and that was about right.

The other beer on tap was Bell's Best Brown, which is always delicious -- or at least it was supposed to be available.  My friend ordered a pint only to be told that they were still finishing up the last keg of Oberon.  Now, that didn't necessarily say much for its freshness, perhaps, but my friend was more than happy to have one last pint of Oberon before it disappears into hibernation.  I'm guessing the Best Brown will be tapped soon.  I'll admit that I never thought of Cottage Inn as a place to grab a craft beer, but I'm happy to have been proved wrong.

On a completely different note, I've been selected to be the Ann Arbor Craft Beer Examiner for the Detroit edition of Examiner.com.  Once my articles are up and running, I'll post more info here.  Some content will overlap with this blog, and some won't.  I will be continuing the Michigan stout series at both venues.  For Examiner.com, I'll write beer reviews, tip readers off to beer-related events, and get a chance to explore and write about Michigan's brewing community and rich craft beer offerings.  Please stop by and check it out.  And if you have any tips, please send them my way!

Orange. Banana. Beer.

Just a quick entry to comment on Sierra Nevada Kellerweis, their golden-orange, cloudy hefeweizen.  Obviously, it's not from around here, but it's not that hard to find and certainly isn't one of their more popular brews.  Sierra Nevada is known for their pale ale, of course, but this brew is worth a mention.  Maybe it's my way of bidding final farewell to summer.  Sigh.

The label recommends pouring 2/3 of the bottle into a glass, swirling the rest, and then pouring the remainder into the glass, since yeast is suspended in the brew.  It forms a big head that recedes pretty quickly to soft peaks and then a nice layer of foam with a touch of laciness on the glass.

The aroma struck me as mostly orange with a touch of banana.  As for the taste, it's a whole lot of banana with subtle spice notes, followed with a nice bitterness, a touch of sweetness that doesn't quite balance it out, and a finish that sees the bitterness soften and disappear pretty quickly, mingling with fruit and leaving a bit of malty breadiness at the end.  As I was getting to the end of my glass, I noticed a new taste: a distinct cinnamon quality at the back end that was really quite good.  A nice surprise.

I'd drink this beer on its own or with food that isn't too salty or otherwise strong.  It wouldn't take much to overpower the flavors of this beer.  That's not to say it's not flavorful.  It certainly is, but the flavors are delicate, and the interplay between them is subtle.

Michigan Stouts: Bell's Special Double Cream Stout

My beer tastes shift with the seasons, and with the cold, rainy weather that's set in, I want stout.  Dark, rich, roasty, bitter, creamy stout.  Now, I enjoy stout year-round, but it's this time of year that the urges really get going.  So, I went off to Arbor Farms, where I like their collection of singles and the fact that they put useful little "Made in Michigan" flags on the shelves below the Michigan beers for quick reference, and bought several different Michigan stouts.  I'll be reviewing them one at a time.  Today: Bell's Special Double Cream Stout.  It's available seasonally November to March.

Of course, Bell's is a truly beloved brewery in Michigan.  They do a lot of different styles quite well, and many Michiganders mark the true start of summer by when Bell's Oberon becomes available on tap.  In fact, Oberon is inevitably the seasonal tap during the summer at good bars.  Served with a slice of orange, it's like a pint of sunshine.  We do love our Bell's.

It sure isn't Oberon season any more.  I need something with more heft, and this double cream stout fits the bill.  It has a creamy head the color of strong coffee with a touch of milk.  The head dissipates fairly quickly to a thin foam.  The brew is a molasses color: almost black.  The aroma is strong and complex, with a slight sour note that's not unpleasant.  Kind of fruity and initially hard to place.  As I took it in, it struck me as a cherry note.  Some chocolate and coffee aroma, too.

The flavor screams coffee!  Oh, the coffee!  Lots of stouts have coffee flavors, but this one is impressive.  It's really strong in the finish and combines beautifully with dark chocolate.  That touch of cherry is there, too, toward the front end.  This stout is impressively long in the finish, with coffee and chocolate that won't quit and stay delicious for a long time -- as opposed to some long finishes that, well, don't stay pleasant.  That dark chocolate flavor is really assertive.  If you've often heard about chocolate notes in beer but haven't been able to detect them, try this one.  Can't miss it here.  The beer sweetens considerably as it warms, but coffee remains the dominant flavor, along with that dark chocolate, and the result is a nicely balanced, creamy, delicious beer, with a rich mouth feel.

6.1% abv.  The single was $2.19 at Arbor Farms.  Enjoy!

Damn the Torpedoes!

Sierra Nevada isn't a regional brewery by any means, and many are already familiar with their beers, but I did want to toss in a mention of their Torpedo IPA. I have a certain fondness for that brewery, since my mom lived in Chico, CA, for a number of years.  I've had the good fortune of tossing back a few at their pub, and it's well worth a visit.  Just getting the beers on tap at the peak of freshness while sitting up at the bar, admiring the dark wood and beautiful stained glass of the company logo, makes for a fine afternoon or evening.

Their Torpedo IPA earns its moniker by exploding on impact with your tongue.  You remember learning as a kid how different regions of the tongue are specialized for different flavors?  This is a back of the tongue beer from the start.  Huge flavor, pronounced bitterness.  As it warmed, a balancing sweetness peeked out.  Medium thick head.  Medium-fine carbonation; nothing distracting there.  Flowery aroma.  Smooths in the finish.  Like with most beers, I'd recommend letting it warm a bit before drinking, though I'll admit it's plain hard to wait once it's poured.

This is a 7.2% abv beer and widely available.  I picked it up at Arbor Farms Market as a single.  A big but eminently drinkable beer.  It would stand up well to strong food flavors and complement them nicely.

Spontaneous Beer Bliss

Three weeks have passed, but I'm still savoring the pleasure of joining one of my oldest and dearest friends, Sean, for an evening at the Great Lakes Brewing Company in Cleveland.  The trip came about unexpectedly.  Sean had sent an e-mail a week before: he was going to Cleveland on business and asked me about Great Lakes Brewing because he saw that I'm a fan of theirs on Facebook.  I turned rhapsodic about their excellent beer and beautiful restaurant, though it had been years since I had last been to the restaurant itself.  Then his next message noted that I live only three hours from there.  I glanced over the schedule, cleared it with my family, and we were on.  


Great Lakes makes a pretty impressive variety of terrific beer, with a nice selection of seasonals and pub exclusives as well as their "family" of five beers that are always available: Dortmunder Gold Lager, Edmund Fitzgerald Porter, Burning River Pale Ale, Eliot Ness Amber Lager, and Commodore Perry IPA.  Like many craft breweries, though, they also feature some great eats and are seriously dedicated to their community and the environment.  The pub features fresh food from local, organic ingredients, including some grown on the company's own section of a farm in Bath, Ohio.  It's a company to feel good about.  And did I mention that they make great beer?


Sean and I had a blast.  We each ordered flights, which were generous and beautiful to look at.  In fact, several other patrons eyed the flights and admired the colors of those 5 oz pours of all nine beers they had available that night: the five flagships as well as Oktoberfest, Grassroots Ale (a saison), The Stein Bach (a pale bock; pub exclusive), and Nosferatu stock ale.  Other than the bock, the other seasonals are available as 4- or 6-packs.

This post isn't about the food or intended to be a review of the beers.  It's too many weeks ago to do any of that in detail.  Suffice it to say that all of the beers were impressive.  The Stein Bach was a bit too sweet for us but was nevertheless a nice example of its type -- I prefer their Rockefeller Bock, also a pub exclusive that I had many years ago and still remember as a bit more balanced.  The Nosferatu blew our socks off as an amazing, complex, and delicious beer with a noticeable alcohol taste.  The porter is an outstanding one, rich with coffee and chocolate.  I'll review Great Lakes beers from time to time here.   And the food was terrific, fresh and popping with flavor, including the burgers we had.  Even the fries were excellent.  But I won't go on about that, either.


Instead, as is already becoming apparent in this blog, I'm thinking about the totality of the experience.  Sean and I are close, really close, but we live far apart and hadn't seen each other in about six years.  We've known each other nearly forever.  We share a lot of interests.  In fact, he's the St. Petersburg, FL, Craft Beer Examiner.  And we share even more history: too many fun times to count, close calls, tough times and triumphs, growing up together and all the craziness that involves, celebrations of marriages and kids and accomplishments.  The chance to spend time together on the spur of the moment, go to the gorgeous and historic pub belonging to one of my favorite breweries, and just catch up, drink amazing beer, and eat well was simply priceless.  It seems obvious, but I'll say it anyway: the food and beer tasted better hanging out there with Sean than they would have had I been alone or if I had been with just about anyone else.  Going to the Great Lakes Brewery pub would always be great.  But that night, it was a peak experience.

Drink my Short's!

The weather has turned here, going from low 70's and sunny one day to low 50's, blustery, and raw the next.  The storm windows have come down, and I always think of that as initiating a quiet time of the year, since the outside noises are shut out.  I can't believe it was just a couple of weeks ago that we were at the home of friends, celebrating a birthday with a massive gardening party.  Not a garden party.  A gardening party.  Sod removal, building berms and swales for rain gardens and erosion control, planting native plants, and all on a gorgeous day.  Taking a break with my friend and a growler of porter from Grizzly Peak Brewing in Ann Arbor, we started talking about music, art, politics... and beer!  Another guy joined us, and as we were saying that the porter was hitting the spot -- dark and flavorful, but easy to pour down -- he asked if we had tried anything from Short's brewing in Bellaire, MI, up north.  Neither of us had.  He said we should make a point of it.

I did, and now I'm trying to think about how to get up to Bellaire and visit their pub.

Just before the fall chill, soon after the party, a friend came into town for a couple of days, and we went out to a mutual favorite, Old Town Tavern.  They had Short's Huma Lupa Licious IPA on their rotating tap.  Really terrific beer.  It's a big IPA, flowery, bitter, citrusy.  I was impressed.  And I'll admit: the name is fantastic.  A few days later, I was in one of our very good local markets perusing their beer section, where I've been particularly taken by the selection of singles, and there was Short's Pandemonium Pale Ale.  This was an astoundingly good beer, with a rich, creamy head that gradually dissipated into craggy peaks and amber color so intense that I wouldn't have been surprised to find a mosquito encased in it.  Assertively floral, hoppy nose.  Slightly heavy mouth feel -- this was a maltier pale than I expected, though once poured, the head certainly was a clue.  This beer was laced with floral and bitter notes, but also a hint of sweetness that just made it come together perfectly.  It was like a tango on my tongue.  As it warmed a bit in the glass, the citrus notes became more pronounced, a kind of orangey hint that was a nice addition to what was already a complex beer.

While the brewery's website shows distribution within Michigan, I'm not so sure that it's gotten out of state yet.  It should.  Go drink your Short's!

First Loves

We all have first loves.  Those life-shaping experiences that imprint themselves on our often-wee psyches. I'm not talking about romance -- at least with a person -- but experiences that tweak our brains and set the stage for what me might continue to love in the future.

For me, these include:

Going to Knott's Berry Farm with my grandparents at age 5.  They always came to L.A. from Chicago for my birthday.  Even then, I knew that was special, but now I'm so much more exquisitely aware of what a statement of devotion those trips were.  One year, they took me to Knott's Berry Farm.  Not only did we do all the rides and shows, but they sprang for the special tour of the park.  I still have a treasured, somewhat faded photo of that trip, the three of us in front of some rustic, western cabin.  I'm squinting into the Southern California sunshine.  I still love that place, though it's been years.  Maybe now, if I went back, it would simply disappoint, so perfect is the memory.

Pancakes and waffles.  I have always loved breakfast food, especially these treasures of the carb kingdom.  There's nothing quite like them.  They were a rarity at home growing up, so it was extra-special when we'd bust out the clunky old waffle iron or skillet and fill the house with the smell of breakfast goodness.  When my dad got a job as in-house counsel for a major restaurant chain that has something of a specialty in pancakes, I was in heaven.  To me, it was like some sort of birthright had come to fruition: my destiny was complete.  I had become the prince of pancakes.

Chocolate souffle.  Believe it or not, this was the first dessert dish that I declared to be a favorite.  I went out to a French restaurant with some out-of-town relatives when I was around 5 or 6 and ordered a chocolate souffle for dessert, probably because I saw the word "chocolate" and went right for it.  When that beautiful pillow of decadence came -- I remember it as being HUGE -- I broke into it.  Even the aroma was enough to take me into the next dimension.  But the taste, oh the taste... that was beyond the beyond.  It was like some sort of perfect distillation of chocolate.  I last had one probably 6 years ago, but it remains a true favorite.

And then there were the beers...

I have always loved the taste of beer.  When I was really young and would swipe or beg a sip, I loved the combination of bitterness with a hint of sweetness, the fizz of the bubbles, the mustache from the head, the peculiar yeasty smell.  My first really conscious experience of craft -- as opposed to any -- beer was probably on a trip to Boston with my dad.  This was back around 1988.  We went to a restaurant, and when the server came to our table for drink orders, Dad asked him what he might recommend.  He said, "Sam Adams."  This was before Sam was widely distributed, and we west coasters certainly hadn't heard of it. It came to the table, and when Dad tasted it, his eyebrows flicked up in appreciation and he immediately said, "You have to try this."  I glanced round to make sure no one was watching and took a sip.  Sheer pleasure!  Later, back in the hotel room, Dad discovered that there was a mini-bar that had -- you guessed it -- two Sams in there!  We broke those out along with some snacks and settled in to watch a movie.  Now, people can debate whether Sam Adams is a craft brew, and it certainly ain't no micro.  But back then, as I said, it wasn't yet ubiquitous.  Maybe it was the setting, having it on the big trip with Dad and getting a chance to hang out with him in a more concentrated way than usual, but context is indeed part of experience, and I've seldom had a finer beer-drinking experience than that one.

We all have our personal trips to a "promised land."  In 1993, after graduating from college, I had a cross-country drive with a college buddy to get home to California.  After hanging out in Southern California, we headed north, and San Francisco was one of our destinations.  I had had Anchor Steam now and again, and I really wanted to visit the brewery.  We got to this haven of deliciousness and I went straight to the desk and told the lady there that I wanted to go on a tour, please.  Oh naive boy!  She paused a moment and then told me that she was really sorry, but the tour had already headed out for the day, and she gestured in the direction of the brewing area.  I said that maybe we could join them, and she again said she was really sorry, but it was full.  She added that reservations were generally required.  Well, I thought, we were staying in San Francisco for a few days, so I said that I'd like to reserve a spot on the next available tour.  That's when she told me that tours were booked weeks -- or was it months? -- in advance.  My face fell, outpaced only by my heart, and I didn't know what to do.  Then I took a deep breath and did something that shocked me then, though nowadays I'd probably try it without hesitation.  I told her that I had just driven across the country, all the way from Ohio, and that the one thing that I had most wanted to do was tour the Anchor Brewing Company.  I explained that they made my favorite beer ('twas true!), and that I wanted -- almost needed -- to see where it was made.  I used words like "pilgrimage" and "desperate," not to mention lots of superlatives.  I told her that the drive had been very difficult ('twas also true!).  I told her that I was extremely sorry and utterly embarrassed that I hadn't thought to make a reservation, but that I was new at this and just had no idea that one was required.  I asked her whether there was any way, any way at all, that I could join the tour.  Then I stopped and hoped.  There was a long pause.  And then she looked at me with the kindest look you could imagine and said, "Tell you what.  They are about to get to the tasting room.  Why don't you join them there?"  I looked back at her the way one might look at someone who had just carried them out of a burning building, thanked her every which way, and let her guide us to the tasting room.  I think I tried every beer they had in there, most of which I'd not had, including a delightful barleywine.  I had reached the pinnacle up to that point.  Total bliss.  First love.

"Oh, that's good!"

That's what my grandfather used to say at the table when he ate something really really tasty.  He'd get a happy, satisfied look on his face and slowly say, "Ohhhh, that's gooood."  And it was; he was always right about this.  It was such a trademark phrase of his that my brother actually mentioned it when speaking at his funeral.  And we all smiled when he said that and pictured things like my grandmother's apricot chicken or brisket, two of the several things that prompted that statement of totally blissed-out satisfaction.

I want this blog to be about good stuff.  Satisfying stuff.  The kind of thing that might make one say, "Oh, that's good."  For me, that means craft beer, and few places are as rich in great breweries as Michigan and the other great lakes states.  That's what I'll be covering, along with some more general commentary on food and drink, both local and far-flung.  I'll also throw in random musings, and -- because I can't help myself -- some curmudgeonly commentary.  It's in my nature, and my work as a lawyer in child protection matters simply reinforces it.  But don't worry: this is not a law blog.  There are enough of those already.

If you're reading, welcome!  Sit back, pour yourself a tasty, local brew, and enjoy.