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The Session #91 – Forgotten Friday: My First Belgian

September 5, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

(I missed the last few Sessions due to travel and exhaustion and illness, but I’m back! This month’s topic is “My First Belgian” hosted by Breandán and Elisa over at Belgian Smaak.)

Occasionally, the many moving parts of my writing life line up in a perfect row, like some rare celestial event where arcane energies mingle and a portal to other worlds opens very briefly. As the Session falls on a day I had other writing plans, I can feel the gears of my mind click and sync, suddenly whirring together as one as the clutch reengages. I typically write “Forgotten Friday” posts about places and items that have been lost in plain sight, but today, I’m using the literal definition of my favorite nostalgic infinitive: “to forget.”

This month’s topic asks me to recall the first Belgian beer I ever managed to sneak down my gullet. The problem is, no matter how far I stretch my brain, how many stories I pull from the depths of my hippocampus, how many bottles and labels I recall on the selves of the dozens of fridges of my life, I cannot remember my first Belgian beer. I can remember the first beer; it was a Boddingtons Pub Ale, at the dinner table with my parents, around 7th grade. Although, photo evidence says I probably drank a bit earlier than that (thanks, Dad), that’s my first fermented memory, the first time I remember drinking beer.

I also remember thinking it tasted like bitter instant oatmeal that someone had added way too much water to, followed by a quick internal question, “why would anyone want to drink this stuff?”

Don't judge, it was the 80s in England. Just look at that red table.

Don’t judge, it was the 80s in England. Just look at that red table and white leather couch.

If I had to guess, my first was probably one of the big boy Belgian beers: Duvel, Hoegaarden, maybe even a stray bottle of Delirium Tremens left to age in the back of our family fridge after a party. It’s possible, in all its wasted decadence, that my first Belgian was Trappist; my mom would often keep a bottle of Chimay Red on hand during the holiday season, for reasons I don’t quite understand, because neither she nor my dad drank it. But I cant’ say for sure. It’s a black void in my mental vault, one of those things I never built a place for in my memory palace, that will probably be forever lost in the deep dark ocean of my memories.

I’ll confess; I probably don’t remember because I’ve never taken to Belgian beer. I’ve homebrewed it, tried countless styles and brands, forced my tongue into a steel-cage death match with funky fermentation, hoping to one day emerge bloody but victorious, the Champion of Brussels. While I’ve gotten in a few good punches, I’m still likely to brace myself before taking a sip of saison, clench my jaw when quaffing a quad. I appreciate the artistry and heritage of many Belgian breweries, but something in the bready unmistakable yeast character of Belgian beer is antithetical to what my taste buds want.

While that may seem tragic (and trust me, for years I was convinced there was a fundamental flaw in my mouth), it has allowed me to finally accept a reality a lot of modern beer enthusiasts forget, try to dance around to avoid appearing unlearned or inexperienced: it’s OK to not like a certain style of beer. It’s OK to not like super hoppy, high ABV imperial IPAs. It’s OK if you find the salty sour of a gose a bit too much for your particular preferences. It’s OK to say, “I have tried this, and it is not for me.”

The only thing you’re obligated to do is appreciate that someone else, somewhere, probably does like that style. Maybe likes it so much they’re known to throw “favorite” in front of it whenever it comes up in conversation. You don’t have to like a beer, but always keep in mind: your not liking it doesn’t make it bad. Subjective bad and objective bad are wildly different beasts. If you’re into beer enough to have opinions (and don’t just enjoy it as a drink), it’s on you to be able to acknowledge when a beer is well made but not to your tastes, verses poorly made, and not up to the quality standards of excellent beer.

Memory is tied to taste, and I was hoping that sipping on some Belgian beer would cause a chemical cascade of mnemonic flashes. But it didn’t. It just reminded me of all the ways I’ve tried to force myself to like a style because of faux cultural pressure and personally manufactured expectation, and how, when looking at it in hindsight, that seems like a very silly thing.

hsredskyatnight

Session #83 – Against the Grain

January 3, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

Leading the charge into a beery 2014, this month’s session is hosted by Rebecca over at The Bake and Brew. The topic? “Against the Grain – How much is our taste or opinion of a craft beer affected by what friends and the craft beer community at large thinks?”

The American craft beer community owes Herman Melville’s estate some serious royalties. Beer drinkers have, with the help of limited regional distribution and internet hysteria, revitalized the idea of the phantasmagorical white whale, resurrected the self inflicted psychological torment that comes from bending one’s mind and will to a singular, oft unattainable pursuit.

I’m talking Pliny the Elder. Heady Topper. Bourbon County Brand Stout. Those highly rated, near flawless, crafted wonders by which the quality of the rest of the culture is measured. Beers made elusive by design. The bottled and canned Pollacks and Picassos. Works of art that somehow, through the neural network of the collective unconscious, most drinkers can objectively identify as “great,” even if they’ve never actually tried it.

They’re out there, lurking below the surface, dodging whaler’s harpoons, appearing for a few seconds to those lucky few, disappearing just as quickly for anyone actively looking for them. They’re evil only in that they won’t play nice, that they won’t just show up on the shelf in our local beer store at a reasonable price, whenever we want them.

We know the hype for these beers exists. We’ve all seen it on Twitter, or in magazine features, or as a that shining perfect 100% gracing BeerAdvocate or RateBeer. But the question Rebecca asks is simple: does hype represent reality? Are our brains pre-wired to assume rare and expensive means good? Is it possible that we’re psyching ourselves up and in turn perceiving the beer to be better than it really is?

Subjectivity swims in everything we eat and drink. Everyone’s tongue is a slightly different patterned plot of budded farmland, harvesting different kinds of flavors in different yields, ultimately resulting in what we understand as taste. Our noses, too, make unreliable organs of comparison, as we’re all dealt a different olfactory hand at the beginning of the game, and that hand can change from exposure to other chemicals, physical damage, or even just competing local smells.

We’re already at a disadvantage, biologically, because we can’t even use our senses to establish a singular ideal. Our “taste” is as unique to us as our fingerprints, as beautifully random as each snowflake in the flurries of a nascent blizzard. We’re destined to disagree about the things we lick and sniff, because our individual anatomies are about as congruent as 113th Congress.

But like art, objective good has to come from somewhere. Like say, from an established set of basic rules that do their best to form a consensus among those who’ve spent their lives fighting their unique perspective of the world. Painters are measured by their mastery of medium, or composition, or realism. Brewers are determined good by virtue of defects, or a lack there of. Our human standard for “good” is artificial, manufactured, a best guess created by experts in hope of wrestling down subjectivity and triumphing over our physical limitations.

In some ways, when considering that the rules are doled out by man, and the word of trained experts is taken as a baseline, hype and perception do become reality. If a person who has dedicated their years to hovering their nose a few centimeters above a settling head to pull out individual lupulin notes in a hop melody or the malty chords of Cigar City’s fifth concerto, who am I to tell them their educated opinion is wrong? If they say that Pliny the Elder is objectively the best beer in the country, I’m loathe to disagree. If a large majority of my beer peers also agree, by the time I’ve got the brew in hand, chances are I’m already expecting a pretty positive outcome.

So yes, while the quality of the beer is obviously what garnered the reputation in the first place, the hype trickles down through all our conversations, wriggling deep into your brain-meat where it sits and surreptitiously informs your opinions Our expectations are already tainted by what everyone else thinks and says, even if we try our best to come at a situation with the most neutral of biases.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It gives us all something to look forward to, a giddy little glee to exhale when we do get our grubby mitts on that beer we’ve so long coveted. But it also gives brewers a goal. A point of perfect that can be aimed for, met, possibly even beaten.

All that hype gets people talking about beer – and excellent beer at that – which I think we can all agree, is a great thing for our whole community.

headyt

In Defense of the Alternative Beer Review

May 13, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

If you’ve been around for some of my Beer Fiction Fridays it’s not exactly breaking news worthy of auto-tune treatment that I don’t write traditional beer reviews. Sure, I’ve written quite a few nonfiction, more review-ish reviews, but even those tend to fall more on the side of narrative story than they do classic, “here’s what I think and why,” no-frills review.

An article from Focus on the Beer had me doing a Ctrl+F on my soul this weekend, delving deep in my psyche and emotional past for the reasons I write beer reviews at all. I think the obvious reasons are because I like beer and because I like to write. The rest just seems inconsequential, the unimportant details that seem to work themselves out without much extra thought.

But I’ve never been the type to actually read reviews of food and drink with an air of seriousness, never acted like the opinion of the critic or reviewer or dude in his basement somehow matters. I do often find my browser landing on Beer Advocate because, hey, checking out what the collective hive-mind thinks can be fun and a hands-on lesson in collective sociology. But I’m pretty sure I’ve never consciously recalled any of those reviews in the liquor store, saying to myself, “beerstud1991 only gave it a 2.63, no way I’m buying that junk.“ I can say with confidence that I’ve never let a beer’s “score” influence whether I’m going to purchase it or not.

Why?

Because taste is subjective. More so, I’d argue, than any other sense. We can pretty much agree (short of color interpretation) that we all see the same things. Aside from the thickness of different ear drums slightly adjusting incoming MHz, we all hear the same things. We can also agree that week-old cat litter smells bad and a freshly baked apple pie smells good. We can even agree that 300 thread count sheets are soft, 60 grit sand paper is rough, and a baby’s butt is the unequivocal standard unit of smoothness against which all other smoothness should be measured.

But taste has few standards; it is permeable, water soluble, in constant flux. Some people out there legitimately don’t like cupcakes. Others legitimately do like tripe.  Every late-to-work scalding coffee burn, every jalapeno charged capsaicin rush, every chewing-too-fast-bit-the-side-of-your-tongue is part of the formula that always equals how you go about tasting, no matter what variables are added or changed.  Your tongue, like a gross pink snake, sheds its skin and taste buds often, reacting to all kinds of things you put in your mouth, making it so you can’t even trust your own opinions over the course of your life.

And because taste is flawed, the classic beer review is flawed. Just because you liked a sextuple dry-hopped Imperial IPA, doesn’t mean everyone else will. Just because your palette isn’t as open to bitters and coffee malts, doesn’t mean that a coffee stout is bad. Reviews will always be biased and tainted by the reviewer’s in-born, unavoidable subjectivity and thus can’t logically be universally valid. There is no basis against which the goodness of a beer can be measured (although the BJCP is certainly trying to establish one) and as a result, what another person thinks about a beer will remain forever nebulous, floating in a foamy, lacey, off-white head of doubt.

I sound like I’m about to give up on the beer review. Far from it. Actually the opposite. The beer review is still a great thing, still has a place in our writing and beer worlds, but maybe not in the traditional Appearance+Smell+Taste+Mouthfeel form.

When you drink a beer, you’re doing a lot more than just putting some water, malt, hops, and alcohol into your body. You’re doing a lot more than just tasting a drink and reporting your findings. You’re becoming part of an ancient tradition that dates back ~10,000 years. You’re joining a enthusiastic community of like-minded brewers, maltsters, yeast-biologists, and hop-farmers who toil away to bring life to a beverage, a drink that has shaped and supported mankind’s rise to greatness like a pint glass supports an ale. You’re raising a glass to salute the infinite muse of alcohol, and sharing good times with your family and friends. Beer is more than the sum of its ingredients, it’s a glorious gateway, a cultural connection.

When you write a review, you’re telling the story of how you made that connection. You’re filling your reader’s head with the same warm, spinning buzz that filled yours, via a story or anecdote or worded snapshot of life. You’re not just telling them about the beer, you’re taking them with you on the experience you had drinking the beer. Write your reviews to show us the truth that was hard-brewed into the beer, the connection to that timeless tradition that inspired you to take bottle-opener to cap in the first place.

Don’t be so caught up in what people expect from a review. If you want to write about the hop characteristics because that’s just your thing, go for it. If you want to write about a memory that this beer brought surging back to the front of your brain, by all means. If you’re like me, and you want to write a story based on the taste and appearance of the beer, don’t let anyone stop you.

Drink what calls to you. Write what the beer inspires you to write.

“How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.”  ― Benjamin Disraeli

“How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.”
― Benjamin Disraeli

Review: Heavy Seas The Great Pumpkin

October 1, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

I’m not going to talk about Charlie Brown, so if that’s what you’re expecting, Peanuts to you.

Awwww, Schulz.

In preparation for my own mad experiment, I had to do a lot of field research. This involved spending a lot of money on a lot of different pumpkin ales in an attempt to find the perfect harmony of hops and spice and pumpkin and bring it to life in the bubbling fermentation bucket of my imagination.

P.S. I kegged it this weekend. It’s alive! And all that.

Smuttynose Pumpkin is heavy on the bittering hops, which detracts from the overall pumpkinoscity. Wolaver’s Organic Pumpkin Ale is tasty, but finishes off more like a malty brown ale with only tiny residual pumpkiny bits left to slide around your palette. Shock Top Pumpkin Wheat and my beloved Harpoon UFO Pumpkin come off as too light, nearly tasteless compared to their full bodied breatheren. Oddly enough, the best pumpkin flavor I found was in Woodchuck Pumpkin cider (I know, WTF), but I still can’t decide if the taste seems artificial when paired with cloyingly sweet apple cider.

And little to my surprise, sitting on the top of the discard remains of my research sits Dogfish Head Punkin Ale. The stuff is just stupidly good. I’m serious. I get stupid(er) when drinking it. Even stupider than when I normally drink large amounts of beer on an empty stomach over a short period of time while trying to do my homework that is due in 18 hours.

Not that that sort of thing happens often.

But just as I was about to crown Dogfish Head the undisputed champion of my Fall drinking habit, Heavy Seas – The Great Pumpkin steps in, punching me straight in the jaw with a right jab of deliciousness. I’m usually wary of anything with the word “Imperial” in front of it (porter, IPA, storm troopers) because of the implications of such a specifically applied word. Imperial usually means sweet, strong, high ABV, higher than normal “fall out of your chair” count. It has always symbolically stood for the opposite of why I drink beer, standing in bold opposition to refreshment and crispness.

Heavy Seas has proven me wrong. The Imperial Pumpkin Ale that is “The Great Pumpkin” is, excuse the empty word, amazing. Perhaps the sweet spiciness of pumpkin ale as a style lends itself to the Empire. I don’t know, I’m not from a galaxy far far away.

But I do know that this beer does everything right. Unlike Imperial pilsners, it pours with a small white head that fires cinnamon and nutmeg aromas up your nose if you get too close. It is a brownish gold, like the top of a perfectly baked apple turnover. It smells sweet and buttery, as if someone stuck an entire pumpkin pie – crust and vanilla ice cream included – into a Blendtec blender and left it on “eviscerate” for 10 to 12 hours.

Will it blend? Hell yea it will blend.

The result is a beer that may actually be the physical embodiment of the whole season. Deep inside of each sip you can see the leaves changing color, hear your family bickering over who gets lights versus dark meat, smell the wood smoke of freshly lit fires on a cold October evening. It is the best Pumpkin Ale (that I have tried) in the WORLD.

Sorry DFH, you had a good run. I still love you though. Now, come in slightly cheaper six packs and we may be able to rekindle this love affair. Until then, HS: TGP is my gal.

10 out of 10.

“Research.”

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