Month: April 2005

Paper City Brewing, Holyoke, MA, USA

We stop in Holyoke as our half way point between Maine and home. Last year at a gas station I saw in the beer fridge one of the Paper City Brewing Company‘s ales and I recalled I liked it. This year I headed into town and found a variety twelve pack for 13.50 USD.

As I have said before, these variety packs are the best way for a brewer to get a fan base as you get to know the product without a great outlay. I look for them when travelling and this is one of three I picked up duing my week in New England. One hint – if you are not sure of your stock, a brewer ought to go with a 4 variety selection. The brave go with two bottles of six types. Sometimes this can mean you show your weak hand, as with Cooperstown, but Paper City is one of the brave and rightly so. In fact, this brewery does more than a few things right and really deserves to be better known:

    • Cabot Street Wheat: [click right for detail] This brew pours whipped egg white head, golden colour with a real lean towards a yellow tinge. A hefe-weizen which is light, crisp and fresh. The homage to this south German beer, under its clean green grassy wheat, leans more to the banana side of the spectrum rather than the clove. The hops have a rough edge which balance off well. The yeast is traditional hefe-weizen, an unfiltered reminder being left in the bottle. This is a vastly superior product to the eastern Mass. version produced by Sam Adams.
    • Dorado Lager: Holyoke has a significant latin presence and having a cervesa on its repetiore means Paper City is paying attention. This lager is fruity in the peachy/orange range with a slight astringent adge which neatly cuts its biggish rich malty mouthfeel. It is a denial of the tedious thin sway of pilsner on the lager market and it is masterful in doing so.
    • Nut Brown Ale: This is a favorite style of mine and one not done well usually. Paper City almost pulls it off. I’d call their effort a good decent nut brown. It is definitely not a US brown as it leads with the malt and not the hops. The yeast, however, is a bit out of balance and does not support the nuttiness of the grain which should be a hallmark of this moreish style. I am guessing that was created to be served cold which would cause the yeastiness to recede but also cause the nuttiness to hide as well. There is chocolate and something of the chalky side I like in a nut brown but it is all a slight bit out of balance.
    • Riley’s Stout: The day and the day before I had this beer I also had Gritty’s Black Fly Stout. Standing up to that competition is a great claim to fame and Paper City has earned it. They are not exactly of the same sort, however, the offering from Gritty being a creamy stout from heavy reliance on rolled barley in the mash tun. Riley’s Stout would be rich rather than creamy with a good claim to the classic black malt burned toast theme. It is tempered, however, by chocolate malt and a well balanced use of the minty hop Northern Brewer to create a very nice medium bodied stout. The head pours rocky and tan, hanging on and on to the side of the glass. The yeast is clean and supportive and all in all I am reminded of a lighter version Samuel Smith’s Imperial Stout. Worthy.
    • Banchee Extra Pale Ale: this straw coloured ale has a white fine rocky head and smells like sweet orange blossom. The malt is fruity with green and slightly astringent hops over a light but grainy brew. Very nice.
    • Goats Peak Bock Spring Lager: I really like this lager…and that’s sure something I never thought I would ever write. It has a big malty profile – more like a marzen than a bock, its tight off-white foam head sits over the red hued drink the colour of deep amber maple syrup. It is sweetish with cherry in the fruity malt balanced with a light touch on the German hops. The yeast is a little spicy and earthy, slightly dairy sour but more subdued than most lagers falling on the wrong side of the line.

All in all I was very impressed with Paper City. Hopefuly with a few more years it will get to more glasses than just those in its current western Massachusetts market.

New York: Ubu Ale, Lake Placid CBC, Plattsburg

This ale is the partner to Lake Placid’s 46’er reviewed last month. It is a fine ale but hard to pin-point for style. At 7%, it is like a low-hopped strong US brown or even a weak Belgian dark strong beer. At its heart it is a big malty brew with some definite notes of chocolate and even a bit of a plum note in the middle. Dandy. $7.99 US or so at upstate NY grocery stores for a six.

512 MB

Care of Best Buy and 65 bucks US, we can now take 831 1.2 MB photos with our digital camera.  That is 1/2 of the memory on the hard drive of my last computer – sure I bought it in 1996 but it cost 3,000 bucks so I thought I would squeeze it for everything it was worth.   Memory is like air now.

What am I going to take a 22 minute movie of anyway.

Mailbox Money

I recalled this morning, reading about the sponsorship inquiry from a certain distance…because I am down here…that twice in my young and fawn-like life I have actually heard about the same sort of thing happening from the horses mouths except it was money arriving from provincial governments – “the program without a name”.    But without the taint of the kickback, I suppose.  Or perhaps there is a difference between a kickback and a long-term relationship.  Dues served and all that.  Intergenerational patronage kind of thing.

Why do I have this suspicion that these guys either just did it so badly or they just got caught?

April In Portland

Isn’t there a movie where Maurice Chevalier sings about Maine’s industrial seaport?

Anyway, hitting the road for a week to eat marine life and boo the Yankees. So the mantraps have been set and the pride of lions released from their cages at our house. I have never taken more than a long weekend in the spring and certainly never gone south in the winter – being albino between the freckles it is a bit pointless – so I am looking forward to some version of that beach life even if a bit chillier. Beach.

Update: for my pal Michael – this is a mantrap.

Update #2: [Some road notes that you probably do not need to care much about.] As sweet a six hour drives as you would want with little people to Holyoke MA and the Holiday Inn: 401 to I-81 to NYS Thruway to Mass Turnpike to I-91.   We were here before and I will pay for a little time passing since refurbishment as long as there is a good indoor pool. Ninety-nine bucks.   The Mohawk Valley is quite a something and around Little Falls there steep incline in the highway for six miles that makes me wonder about those poor saps that actually built the Erie Canal.  WRVO Oswego NPR is audible from Kingston to halfway between Utica and Albany – 350 km or so.  I bought some instant grits to bring home even though AA Gill described it as something like the throw-up of someone else’s child.   Also Friendly’s never disappoints and never surprises.  If you think sugar is a poison you probably should not go.  Not that there is much sugar but I’d have to put up listening to you bitch about everything else as I ate a few booths over.

Two of the Gueuze

 

gueuzeHappy was the lad, then, who came across these two examples of the Belgian style gueuze, which has been described as follows:

Gueuze – a word derived from gueux, or begger – is a blend of lambics of different ages, bottled with a champaign-type cork to undergo a second fermentation. It ages well.

“Beers of the World” by G. Delos (pub: CLB, 1994) at page 82

Miachael Jackson in the first edition of his World Guide to Beer describes lambics as follows:

These spontaneously fermenting beers are produced by traditional methods in only a very limited area…called Payottenland, and its atmosphere is held to contain micro-organisms which promote the fermentation of beer without the assistance of the brewer. (at p.117)

So they are rightly called “wild beers”. I have never had a gueuze before though I have had a fair number of the fruit lambics like the little raspberry number I reviewed a couple of weeks ago as well as the cherry version called kriek… including one instance with the brew 19 years ago leading one Parisian barkeep to suggest that we Nova Scotians and the lads from Gascony ought to take out discussions out into the street. But I digress.

So a little pitter-patter of excitement welled up when I saw there on the LCBO shelf not one but two examples of gueuze. Apparently not as much excitement as the guy ahead of me who I was told bought 30 or 40 – which, pushing 4 bucks per 375 ml, was a sure sign of dedication. I was familiar with the line Mort Subite by Brouwerij De Keersmaeker to the west of Brussels so I popped it first. It smelled like a late harvest Riesling or Gewurztraminer white wine as I poured. Fresh, light and only 4.5%. It is brightly acidic but not tannic. I expected more of a sparkling beer but it still effervescent. It is like fruit juce without all aspects of the fruitiness – or perhaps sort of a cross between apple juice and orange juice but not in any forefront manner. Despite this fruity zing, the water is quite soft leaving a very moreish mouthfeel. There is a light bit of the oak cask in the finish, some green antiqued hops as well as the barley, wheat and corn. It is incredibily tasty stuff and quite unlike an ale or a lager. Beyond lovery. Beer advocates have trouble with this one but I think you have to consider that Belgians do challenge. Recently, commenting on someone who gave obvious offence taking the defence that they were merely being “ironic” – despite the implication of cynicism that word connotes – I suggested that such a use of irony was not unlike the defence of a brewer of a bad batch claiming “it’s not off…it’s Belgian!” You have to expect the new and strange from the Belgians and when you do it is wonderful.

So on to the St. Louis by Brouwerij Van Honsebrouck N.V. – the maker of Kasteel quadruple reviewed here last year. It is slightly cloudy and a little bit of an orange tint to the light butterscotch hue. In the mouth it is also fresh but bigger, perhaps sweeter with a drier oaker finish. I could not do better than to repeat the words of Naerhu, a contributor at the beer advocate’s reviews on this beer from Osaka Japan:

White fluffy head on any amazing amber body. Light aroma of red fruit, maybe rasberries. Very lightly sour and pretty sweet. I can hardly imagine this to be a gueuze as sweet and friendly as this is. Where as gueuze normally tastes like how a unclean barnyard smells, this is bright and cheerful, zesty and clean. Very enjoyable.

That being the case, perhaps these two examples of gueuze do not exemplify the style at all. Any input on this point would be very useful for its own sake as well as comment on the LCBO itself. Have they picked only two easy beers rather than great examples or the ur-gueuze? Are they treating us like gueuze mooks or possible future connoisseurs? Neither had any sediment which does raise questions when it comes to Belgian brews.

Gueuze. We can add more examples as the days turn to months and the months to years.

First Post-Gomery Poll

The Ipsos-Reid firm has released the first polling since it has been revealed that the Federal Liberals are, well, not quite recalling what is “theirs” and and what is “ours” in terms of money. [Maybe they just listened to Raffi’s children’s song “It’s Mine But You Can Have Some” one too many times.] Anyway, the poll results are astonishing…almost explosive:

The survey found that if an election were held tomorrow, 34 per cent of decided voters would vote for the Liberals, down three percentage points since February 2005, when Ipsos-Reid conducted its last poll. Thirty per cent would vote for the Conservative Party and 15 per cent would vote for the NDP. In the June 28, 2004 election, Liberals received about 37 per cent of the popular vote, while Conservatives took about 30 per cent and the NDP about 16 per cent…The greatest shift regionally was seen in Alberta. There, the Conservative Party has seen a 14 percentage point shift in its popularity, to 57 per cent, while the Liberals have seen a 16-point drop, to just 13 per cent.

So the Tories finally hold a difference-settling policy convention while the media is on fire with the fact that the government is playing light with the books…and the Tories pick up exactly – not – one – voter. This is pathetic and they should be as embarrassed as Liberals by these figures. The funniest thing is that it does not matter if Alberta shifts from the Liberals as if every seat is one by 100% conservative vote they will still have only pretty much all the seats.

The rest of us really must have clear recollections of Mulroney.

Garbage Plate Law

Linda has the details over the treats of law suits over these two meals. Can you tell which is the authentic garbage plate and which is the tony phony?

Lew Bryson has a great description of the garbage plate in his seminal text New York Breweries at page 156:

Hot dogs are one of the “meat” possibilities for a classic Rochester “garbage plate (or “rubbish plate,” to use the upstate cant). The garbage plate is a late-night apres-bar favorite in Rocehster and originated at Nick Tahou Hots (320 West Main, 315-436-0184). The original Nick’s is no longer open late, but there’s another Nick’s that is, at 2260 Lyell Avenue (315-429-6388). To build a garbage plate, first take a paper plate. Layer home fries, macaroni sald, and a meat (chicken, burger, or hot dogs) on it and then cover everything with Greek sauce and chopped onions: you can add baked beans to it as well. Most people then slather the whole mess with about half a bottle of ketchup and plenty of hot sauce. You can see how it got its name.

My only quibble with my guide to all things US north-eastern and snacky (and ale-ish) is that the idea of one meat appears to have be thrown out from the above photos.