Worldofbeer.com is for Sale

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and have decided to sell the URL I’ve owned since the 1990s, worldofbeer.com. I’m still working out the details of the sale, but anyone who might be interested should drop me a note at worldofbeerbids@gmail.com.

This blog will remain here for the time being, but will eventually migrate to a new site. Please stay tuned for that announcement.

Oh No! A Future with Fewer Cheap MillerCoors Beers!

The US-based bastard stepchild of SABMiller and MolsonCoors, MillerCoors, has announced plans to streamline its portfolio by discontinuing some of its “economy” brand line-up. (Read: Ditching some of the cheap beers.) This led me to wonder just what they might be jettisoning, so over to the MillerCoors website I surfed.

The company says that the move will allow them to focus on core economy brands like Keystone Light and Milwaukee’s Best Light, and will also expand the Hamm’s brands, so it’s a cinch those are sticking around. So scrolling through the “Our Brands” section, I come to the following:

Ice beers: Remember the ice beers of the 1990s? I do, but I was being paid to pay attention to such things back then. Well, anyway, apparently MillerCoors still has four — count ‘em, four! — of the things in their portfolio: Icehouse, Milwaukee’s Best Ice, Mickey’s Ice and Keystone Ice. I’m thinking at least two are set for the high jump. (As an aside, I always loved the terminology behind these beers, which suggests they are “brewed below freezing,” never mind the physical impossibility of such a feat.)

Red Dog: Holy crap, MillerCoors still makes Red Dog. Not for much longer, I’m guessing.

Mickey’s: Hard to believe that the venerable Mickey’s Wide-Mouth — forever etched in my memory as the skunkiest beer I have ever encountered — could be discontinued. But then again, MillerCoors has given it one of the most minimalist websites you’re ever likely to find from a big company, so maybe they’ve tired of the whole thing.

Magnum Malt Liquor: When you have Olde English 800, do you really need Magnum? Perhaps not…

Steel Reserve: I admit that I haven’t the faintest idea what this family of three brands is all about, except that apparently it’s been around in various forms since 1998. Maybe or maybe not.

So those are my guesses. Any alternate theories out there?

 

 

Would the Aspen Food & Wine Classic Feature Yellow Tail in a Food & Wine Pairing?

I’ve never attended the celebrated foodie festival, but judging from a quick run-through of the wine seminar schedule – Showstopping Champagne, Single Vineyard Pinot Noir, Bordeaux’s Extraordinary 2009 Vintage – I’m guessing the popular party wine might not be a featured pour.

So why are organizers of the Aspen Food & Wine Classic featuring Stella Artois, then?

When I received the press release, which you can read in its entirety here, I was stunned. Here is a well-respected, nationally recognized gastronomic festival featuring what is, by almost any standards, a profoundly ordinary lager in a showcase seminar, specifically “Stella Artois Presents: The Beauty of Pairing Belgian Beer and Food.”

If it were merely the sponsor beer being poured at the Welcome Reception and Publisher’s Party, which it is, I’d be able to give the event a pass. Sponsorships are a big deal for such festivals and I’m sure Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest brewer and owner of the Stella brand, are paying for the privilege of being associated with Aspen Food & Wine. But to take it into the seminar level, featuring it in such credibility-defying partnerships as “Chocolate Panna Cotta, featuring endive foam, orange coulis and blue cheese” and an unnamed lamb dish is to undermine greatly the event’s claim as “the crème-de-la-crème of culinary festivals.”

Aspen Food & Wine, you disappoint me. Twenty or even ten years ago, it might have been okay to engage in such foolishness, but beer and food pairing has come a long way since then and people aren’t about to be fooled by such obvious pandering to a big money brand. In your actions you have done a great disservice to the multitude of Belgian beers that actually do pair well with complex dishes, not to mention the many domestic breweries who craft their own wonderfully food-friendly beers. (And by coincidence are featuring them this weekend at Savor in New York City.)

Most of all, however, you show your ignorance as to the state of craft beer around the world today. Maybe in the future you should just stick to food and wine.

Tasted!: Molson Canadian Wheat

Molson has jumped into the wheat beer racket! Okay everyone, simmer down, I know that you’re all excited by this momentous development, but we need to evaluate this beer first. So let’s get started.

It must be said that this looks like a wheat beer, although more the Belgian variety – its light colour evokes the unmalted wheat typically used in that style – as opposed to the generally more robust Bavarian version. On the nose, however, something is lacking. Okay, everything is lacking. There is no banana-clove of a Bavarian weissbier and neither is there the fruitiness of peppery spiciness of an orange peel- and coriander-flavoured Belgian bière blanche.

So, what’s left?

Honestly, not much. Most of the aroma notes I get are reminiscent of fresh grain or maybe a breakfast cereal. It’s lightly sweet, vaguely perfumey and, well, just grainy. The flavour isn’t much different, either. There are some light lemony notes from the wheat, but mostly it’s just an off-dry, Wheaties-crossed-with-Saltine-crackers sort of taste, with a drying in the second half to an off-dry, slightly cloying finish. For some reason, Molson apparently elected to ferment this with a lager yeast rather than take the more traditional ale yeast approach, which I suppose contributes to this beer’s generally lean and straight-forward flavour profile.

Conclusion? If you’re expecting a typical wheat beer of almost any sort, Belgian or German or even basic North American wheat ale, expect to be disappointed. If, however, you’re looking for an innocuous summer quaffer meant to be consumed ice-cold and in a fairly expeditious manner, this might be just what you’re after.

3 Bottles + a Book: Harrington’s “India Style” Lager, “Secret” Altbier and Texan Cocktails

Today has gotten away from me and time is a-wasting, so let us leap straight into the bottles.

Harrington’s East Indies Lager, a 5% alcohol “Indian style” lager from New Zealand, presents itself in what seems a beer marketer’s package, complete with obscure references (what is an Indian style lager, anyway?), vague flavour promises (“distinctively smooth”) and predictable food pairing suggestions (“enjoy with spicy foods”). So let’s see if there is anything more to it than that.

Bright gold and faintly hazy, it has a mild, dry graininess to its aroma along with mild nutty notes and some hints of fresh hay. On the palate, it’s somewhat like the lighter Saddler Lager from the same brewery, with a dry and lightly bitter body showing some caramelly malt on the start and a more bitter dryness on the finish. All in all, a decent lager with just a touch of serious hoppiness, but not something I’d associate with India per se.

More readily identifiable in its inspiration is the new Sticke Alt, part of Beau’s All-Natural Brewing’s “Wild Oats” series of special releases. This reddish-amber altbier from Ontario’s easternmost brewery is lovely to look at and interesting in its aroma, with earthy malt and woody, almost peaty notes. (This confused me at first, until I read the neck tag and found that there is some oak aging involved.) The body certainly doesn’t speak of the wood, though, or at least not much, with instead a sweet and faintly chocolaty front leading to a drier, hoppier middle, with mild notes of raisin and date and a growing bitterness, even a hint of citrus oils, that reaches a crescendo, albeit a rather reserved one, on the finish.

Designed after the famed twice-a-year “secret” (sticke) altbiers of Düsseldorf, I’d say this is a fair homage, and a nutty, earthy, greatly satisfying brew I could grow quite used to drinking.

Today’s last bottle is perhaps the best-named double or Imperial IPA ever: 6-4-3 Double IPA, from baseball-themed Ontario contract-brewer Left Field Brewery. On the nose, this hazy gold, 8.4% alcohol brew is almost sticky in its resinous aroma, with notes of slightly spicy pine and citrus oils mixing with a faint hint of rosebud and lavender. The palate is actually relatively mild in comparison, with some peachy fruit leading off and a big bowlful of citrus-accented fruit salad batting second, followed by some herbaceous notes to draw a walk and load the bases. Alas, in this case, our clean-up hitter doesn’t make the Grand Slam, but rather chips a double play ball of aggressive and unrestricted bitterness in the finish, scoring a run but not giving the beer the support it deserves. Still, what we have here is a decent enough late-night hop bomb, more than satisfying but a trifle less than impressive.

Given that there were no spirits involved in today’s bottles, I thought I should choose something boozy for the book, specifically Tipsy Texan: Spirits and Cocktails from the Lone Star State by David Alan.

Now, I actually quite like regionally-themed cocktail books, especially when they have a healthy dose of history to them. But this book strikes me more as regional for the sake of it, even to the point of hampering the reader’s efforts to make some of the drinks! For example, I give you the Texas Mai Tai:

• 1 ounce Treaty Oak Platinum Rum
• 1 ounce Treaty Oak Antique Rum
• ½ ounce Paula’s Texas Orange
• ¾ ounce Orgeat
• ¾ ounce freshly squeezed lime juice
• Fresh mint, for garnish
• Lime wedge, for garnish

Now, I like a good Mai Tai, but without knowing the qualities of the two rums and the Paula’s Texas Orange, I’m at a loss as to what I should substitute! Flip to the Margarita recipe and I find that it’s an equivalent to Cointreau, which I had sort of figured, but should I really need to hunt for such info?

Bottom line, if you’re a serious Texas-o-phile and /or have access to a whole bunch of Texas spirits, this book might well please you. But if not, there are many superior books to guide you through the rudimentaries of mixology.

From the Spam Files

I just noticed that WordPress has caught over 134,000 spam comments to date over the course of the life of this blog. Here are some excerpts from the last few dozen:

“However, it is necessary to emphasize that median home prices in San Francisco
are down 31.” Really? 31 what, though?

“If all goes wellSolar Power found at 0:42Fri,” Damn, I guess all didn’t go that well.

“I say to you, I definitely get annoyed whilst folks think about worries that they just don’t know about.” Me, too! Those damn worries people don’t know about!

“Cats are wonderful canine and cats.” Don’t tell the dog.

“I don’t unremarkably comment but I gotta state regards for the post on this great one.” Why, thank you…I think.

And finally…

“Looks prefer klipsch is really made to partner with iProducts?” Absolutely!

Bourbon Basics from Beam

I was just flipping through an old press kit I received from the folks at Jim Beam and came across something I think might be the best delivery yet of the essentials of bourbon.

If you know your bourbon, then the following list will be old hat. But since there is so much misunderstanding about what makes a bourbon legit — Can it be distilled outside of Kentucky? Is Jack Daniels a Bourbon? What about those barrels? — I thought it might be worth reproducing here.

Again, this comes from the folks at Jim Beam, and the only reason I’m typing rather than linking to it is because I can’t seem to find it on their website. (Comments in parentheses are my own.)

American – It must be made in the United States (Outside of Kentucky is okay, though.)

Barrels – It must be aged in new, charred oak containers. (Note: Not American oak, just oak, meaning that Mongolian oak is allowable.)

Corn – It must be made with a minimum of 51 percent corn.

Distilled – It must be distilled at no more than 80% alc./vol. (Or, in other words, 160 proof.)

Entered – It must be entered into the barrel at no more than 62.5% alc./vol. (125 proof.)

Filled – It must be bottled at no less than 40% alc./vol. (80 proof.)

Genuine – It must have nothing added to it but water. (Hence why Jack is not a bourbon, since it is charcoal filtered.)

About the only basic Beam neglected to mention is that it must be aged for a minimum of two years, but I can’t figure out a key word for that beginning with H!