"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." -- Susan Ertz
Weltenberger Kloster Asam Bock
Doppelbock
Niederbayern, Germany
Coming at you like a runaway haytruck full of soy cuttings, braised string beans, chocolate mash and eggnog, this thick-as-a-brick doppelbock is especially double-Dutch out of the gate, maintains traction three-quarters of the way through, and then wilts away a little, perhaps disappointing but unbuttoning the blouse for more. The very-veggie tone of this "asam" specialty – sporting a respectable but not fierce 6/9% ABV – can tamp your ambition down a little, but it’s not your average Teutonic tipple.
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Serafijn Tripel
Tripel
Itegem, Belguim
A classic Belgy tripel, inky and caramelly and malt-topped, and lingering with a robust after-echo and a lovely dose of fizz and spark. Think of it as a good brown ale but with sex appeal, svelte and saucy and slim-hipped – and tart, too, like a pickled plum. But of course it’s actually as muscly as a sterroidal iron pumper, so treat it with respect or walk home.
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Aktien Hell
Helles
Kaufbeuren, Germany
A kind of gentle pilsener, cut with rose water, cloudy with yeast, thin yet agreeable. It’s one of the cleanest-smelling of all beers, but at what cost? Is there a use for such a trifle in Germany?
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Einbecker Mai-Ur-Bock
Maibock
Einbeck, Germany
I once had a German maibock, in a young man’s pub days, probably imported to the East Coast by accident, its brand and make long forgotten, that seemed heaven itself, but until I can find it again, this easy-to-find stalwart will happily do, however "ur-" it may or may not be. Both hoppier and ‘festier than your workaday bock (an oxymoron, truly, "workaday bock"), and both genuinely smoky and redolent of bakery odors, it pays off in that grand, marbley, rare-pork-loin way that complex seasonals so often do.
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Belhaven Wee Heavy
Scotch ale
Dunbar, Scotland
Apparently, a "wee heavy" is a rather twee name for a strong Scotch ale, but this baby, weighing at 6.5% alc., is no world-classer. I love Belhaven’s St. Andrews Ale, but this subgenre plays like Belhaven’s main brew: watery, maltless, semi-flat, restrained and repressed like a highland patriarch that can’t admit he loves his son. You barely taste the alcohol, or much of anything else. Is this the Colt 45 of the north country?
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De Proef Flemish Primitive Wild Ale
Pale Ale
Oost-Vlaanderen, Belguim
Holy shit – a ruby-port odor heads into a buttery-&-apricoty full-on assault, so deceptively smooth and refreshing you could find out about its alcohol kick in the hospital. But omiGod, so delicious and damnably delicate – it looks like a semi-golden ale, but it’s got the allusions and flavor-jolts and sensual experience of an entire meal. If I had to vote a big-bottled beer as a champagne replacement – for that summer evening when you’ve just learned of a six-figure advance offered for the novel no one ever had faith in, for instance – this is your honey.
"Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch." -- John Andrew Holmes
Spaten Maibock
Maibock
Munich, Germany
Hopes for a maibock catharsis, fresh on tap this April of 2008, were dashed by what is, essentially, a decent and hoppy pilsener. What’s happened to Spaten?
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Chimay Ale Cinq Cents
Belgian Ale / White Ale
Chimay, Belgium
For the ale-lover quite like a raining down of fiery, heavenly benedictions – other beers make this crystalline beauty feel like Judgment Day. You can’t drink it all the time, even if you’re a Trappist, but there might not be a finer, more unforgettable, more seismic celebration brew to be had on the planet. Unless you are more blown away by another one of the Chimay variations, anyway. This one – you can taste raw pollen in it, and prime rib and lilac – is why the O’Dougals never fight with Belgians, though we can only approach it carefully, sideways, about once a year. In the spring. "Trappist" is a trademark (held by whom?) for a reason – if you’re hunkered down in a monastery and whipped by those medieval Belgian brewing laws, you’d better make a beer worth every trouble in the world.
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Rheingold Beer
Yankee Recreational/Swill
New York, New York
Fart-water, with a marketing push aimed at nitwits.
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Kasteel Donker-Foncee
Belgian Ale / Dark Ale
Ingelmunster, Belgium
This Flemish dark comes on like a cosmic mating of tropical cocoa, fresh maple sap, port, and a 50-year-old single malt – except it’s a sharp, rosy, tart, distinctively Belgian cleansing of the soul, no mistaking it. Really, this castle-brewed monster exudes an almost unfathomable richness, neither merely malty or hoppy or any such thing, but other-worldly, beer as a live-or-die ritual. Drink it every year, but only once – you don’t want to get used to it. You want it to stun you into epiphanic silence each and every time.
Steal Your Happiness Back!
McEwan’s Scotch Ale
Scotch Ale
Edinburgh, Scotland
Dark as the Saragasso Sea, and by turns malty-honey-tinged and rich with smoky peatness, this strong and underrated highland bruiser comes with its own oil-light, mutton chop and pewter tankard. It’s the O’Dougal winter beer of choice at the moment, locating a satisfying middle-ground between too-sweet dunkels, stouts that fill the belly but suffer from weakness (draught Guinness, love it as I may, has less alcohol than Budweiser), and Belgian monk concoctions on which a diesel engine can run; in any case, no one can accuse you of taking life lightly or without zeal while you drink it.
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Victory Old Horizontal
Barleywine
Downingtown, Pennsylvania
I cannot tolerate snarky microbrew names and jokey-fratboy labels, but this is a bulldozer, from the merciless seditionists at Victory, not as brutal as less deftly-forged barleywines (some can seem like penitence) and rich, like a marble pound cake made from dynamite. Nuance, in this game, is everything, and this lovely, bedevilling potion balances the nuts-up burn (11% alc.) with an echoing malty canyon chant. It could ruin you if you drink too much of it, but that’s life, isn’t it?
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Hoegaarden Witbier
White Ale/Blonde
Hoegaarden, Belgium
An effervescent classic, bright and citrusy and untroubled by that phlegmy syrupiness common to many hardcore blondes, and thus the Belgian Americans have embraced, even if they too often drink it in English pint glasses (!) with a lemon wedge (!!) – it’s already got lemon zest added in, you stun mope! Go suck on a Blue Moon! Anyway, this serene, massively refreshing paradigm keeps its yeast in a cage, the coriander’s brewed in like faerie dust, not ladled in like gravy (as with so many microbrew "winter ales," which seem to be manufactured by people who believe beer in December should taste like a rum cake), and it's infinitely savorable. A happy marriage for even lightweight beeristes of diamond-cutter brewcraft and sunshiney drinkability – call it the Pinot Grigio of Euro-imports, but in a good way.
Corripe Cervisiam!
Liberty Ale
Ale
San Francisco, California
The finest straight, old-world ale brewed in North America? Let's define our terms: "finest" meaning the burliest, wordiest, tinniest, foodiest, the most devoted to a balance of comfort and combat, of weight and flow, of the glories of pewter-stein-days workingman's rewards, and the satisfactions of hurling down bitter-edged brews that awaken your tired self to the defiant joy of being alive. It's a man's business, it would seem, and no small importance can be attached to the idea that perhaps nowadays drinking ales like this is an act of mucho-macho nostalgia for men, an opportunity for them to hearken back to ages when their vitality didn't depend upon salesmanship or computer competence or any other such pitiful quality so ubiquituous these years. Whatever: the roundness of this Anchor brew is like a 100-voice chorus belting out the 9th, depths and heights and ranginesses everywhere you look. You can taste the autumnal snap of wild grain fibers in it, so help me. It hasn't changed in decades, and, some nasty pagan god willing, it won't ever.
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D. Carnegie & Co. Stark Porter
Porter
Falkenberg, Sweden
Carlsberg raps out their own version of porter, which is in the drinking mellow, substantive, rather musical, if I may say so, rich in flavor collisions, and, finally, rather unmemorable. What can you do: once you go to the stout/porter outlands, you’d better go with horns and swords, or else your brew will taste like a merely charcoaly/chocolatey version of a nice lager (rather like Carlsberg’s). I do’na mean to be cruel: it’s a big-bottle pleasure in the short term, especially for porter non-lovers, despite the labeling of it by some as an old-fashioned "Baltic porter," simply because it comes from north Europe and not the British isles. (Nor do I appreciate the Anglo-Celtic moniker they've slapped upon it, evoking a crusty craft brewer that doesn't exist.) How much it resembles the authentic Baltic porters of yore, which were high-octane salmagundi concoctions of other left-over beers and brewing fug-ups devised for a highly alcohol-resistant and undiscriminating audience of Finnish sailors and Polish dockmen, is something only my great grandfather Dingnes O’Dougal could’ve told us, had he been ignorant of Irish brewing and lived in Helsinki, which he wasn’t and didn’t.
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Samuel Adams Boston Lager
Lager
Boston, Massachusetts
Having secured its position as the Clinton era’s high-end go-to semi-microbrew, this marketing phenom is by now an American standard for drinkers who 1) want flavor, weight and substance to their beer but don’t want to venture forth into obscure, inky, complex Euro-liquids, 2) still want, like any dull American, their brew to be absolutely consistent season to season, year to year, and/or 3) just want a vacation from challenging beer consumption without copping out altogether like chicken-hearted turncoats willing to drink from aluminum cans. That’s the hard line; the soft line is that we as a nation hardly deserve to have a beer this grainy, malty, well-balanced, repeatable and satisfyingly cooperative with grub, available everywhere but the OTB and at reasonable prices. It shines in contrast to what has passed for American brewing in the last century, and that’s the context it’s earned in the end, because thanks largely to it thick, saucy, risky, wacky microbrews now fill the shelves in every small town’s groceries and beverage distributors; if you remember back even two decades like I do, that’s a revolutionary change, a democratic explosion of options and a Renaissance-like upkick in the sophistication of the American beer palate. If Samuel Adams isn’t even among the top ten American lagers anymore, and never could quite catch up to Anchor Steam, then it still requires our respect and veneration, like the old cook who taught the hotshots how to flambe but now sits at the back door relaxing with a smoke.
Front Me a Beer, You Faithless Shit-Heel
Dogfish Head 90 Minute Imperial IPA
IPA
Milton, Delaware
Usually, IPAs are at their most hoppy-beloved as steel-edged brews pale enough for hot summer nights and ale enough for the working brain pan; they are the only-live-once refreshment choice for those to whom refreshment means something substantially meatier, nuttier, braver, crazier and more contemplative than water (or Mexican beer). But here we have Dogfish Head’s transmutation of the paradigm, a substantial leg up-and-out from their 60 Minute IPA, and substantially more "imperial" – which only means, in the end, it’s less IPA than resonant, musical mashup between oktoberfesten, brown ale, microbrew hyper-lager, dunkel and barley wine (seatbelts, please: 9% alcohol). How you prefer your IPA experience to shape up in the moonlight will determine your stance toward this ambitious thing (and award-winning, we’re told), but free of categorization, it’s a beautiful, rounded romance, not Olympic in its final stretch but furiously calisthenic until then.
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Victory Whirlwind Witbier
Fake Belgian
Downingtown, Pennsylvania
PA’s Victory is a famously hardcore attempt at replicating things beery-Belgian, and at least one franchise, their Golden Monkey, might be the best and ballsiest stateside monastic gold ale not actually brewed in a Flemish monastery. This faux-blonde, which goes out of its way to avoid calling itself "blonde" in a blonde-crazy world, is a good deal thinner, though it is lemony-perfumey, in that intoxicating way Belgian-style wheat ales have without utilizing any lemon at all. Notes! of rose, beechwood and grapefruit! But, alas, halfway through one bottle, the vibe becomes kinda harmlessly bathroom-cleaner perfumey instead. Two bottles and the difference is moot anyway. If you can get a real, true blonde, in beer and in life, do it.
~~~
Corona Extra
Lager
Mexico City, Mexico
A sound example of a beer that means something -- that represents an abstract, woozy idea in the brainpan of America, and did so long before the Grupo Modelo admen became clever enough to exploit that idea. It's not a beer, that is, a brewed beverage intended to be drank and appreciated for the drinking alone -- no, it's our collective idea of tropical refreshment, a hula-girl-&-palm-tree daydream derived largely from Americans' utter ignorance of how unidealizable life in equatorial countries actually is (except if you're an American tourist), not derived from the flavor of the beer itself. Which is close enough, I'd think, to Miller High Life to justify a taste-bud cease and desist order. So what to make of it? Do we sandblast the barnacles off of the dreamboat and expose it for the thin trivia it is, dependent upon the lime wedge and upon being ice-ice-cold to be potable? (In fact, calling it a "lager" is a foolish act of generosity.) Or do we set sail, and surrender to its culturally-occurring mental margarita? Do as you will, but if beer counts in your days, then you already know that any German or Belgian wheat brew would be ten thousand times lighter and more refreshing, no matter that neither Germany nor Belgium are places we'd like to visit in our luxurious summer-vacation reveries. It depends on what's more important: how your beer tastes or what frame of mind you enjoy putting yourself into as you drink it.
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Blue Moon
Fake Belgian
Denver, Colorado
I didn't begin with a liver lesion spitting bile onto my diaphragm about this Coors-Molson imitation Belgian white -- it seemed to serve as a workable, affordable alternative that could, unlike some true Belgian wits, be tossed back for hours. But then it became popular, and the more popular it became, and the more tongueless trogs stuck wedges of orange into the beer, as if it were a sugary girl cocktail, with an umbrella, the more loathing I became. (This despite the perfectly lovely, old-fashioned label design -- someday I'm going to write a book, and I could, don't doubt me, about the associative-sensory impact a beautifully designed beer label has on one's experience of that beer.) Blue Moon has clearly emerged as the ubiquitous brew meant only for those who don't really like beer -- it's predictable, isn't it?, that corporate America's version of a Belgian white would so overdo the orange and coriander add-ins, just as we destroy every other variety of cuisine with salt, sugar, ketchup and MSG. Really, this is virtually a soda. The requisite yeastiness is undetectable; knowing Coors, they probably cloud the beer up with flour. But, anyway, garnishes? No real Belgian adds fruit to his beer (unless it's an unadorned lambic, and even then), just as Germans only add a lemon slice to big fat weissen and that's goddamn it. Next, I'll bet: a Mexican beer designated by Madison Avenue to be served with a fat semi-circle of pineapple, like a Sunday ham. Only in America.
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Barons Superior Black Wattle Seed Ale
Ale
Sydney, Australia
Easily seduced by brews that dare to brew in phyto-products that no brewer has as yet ever brewed with before, I dared a six on this Aussie ale, which out of the gate closely followed the Samuel Adams paradigm, only perhaps a touch creamier, malty like malt cake, and quite gentle without being pussified. A black wattle seed, I'm told, belongs to a common Australian shrub, and offers this beer absolutely no flavor distinction whatsoever; thus, my rare-ingredient buzz was short-lived. But by default it's the tastiest and most substantial Down Under beer we've had the fortune to experience the importation of; there is little significant competition.
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Budweiser
American Macro-Swill
St. Louis, Missouri (that is, everywhere)
Barnum hath said it, that thing about nary an underestimation, which may approach being a mathematical proof if this, America’s most widely consumed malt beverage, is to be considered. It is, no argument, like drinking car exhaust based in seltzer, with a mouthful-of-mosquitos consistency and a faint rusty-wax-bean-can flavor that together make you wonder why Anheuser-Busch bothers to brew it at all and don’t instead pump a few droplets of alcohol and a few hundred thousand CO2 bubbles into barrels of horse urine. But satisfaction is had from it, every day and across the land – and neither can I fathom those that whip themselves for God’s pleasure, smoke tasteless cigarettes until their teeth are the color of mold, watch reality TV that is virtually defined by the insulting regard with which the producers hold their audience, and care a single shluffed skin cell for the outcome of NASCAR races that entail, let’s face it, driving in circles. I do not purport to understand man; as H.G. Wells wrote in The Island of Dr. Moreau, sometimes often I look about me at my fellow-men, and I go in fear.
"The time has come," the Walrus said
Arrogant Bastard Ale
Ale
Escondido, California
Arrogant is right – but as with paranoia, it doesn’t count as an epithet if you’re right. This monster brew is an open, post-Scotch-ale combat between uber-hops and bloodthirsty malt, loud, mean-spirited and stormy, with trumpet blasts of prune, rose, pumpernickel, anchovies, and nose-punches of the past. It does indeed feel as if it’d be impossible to drink this bull without thinking something fantastically vital, and maybe a little dangerous, is happening, right now. It’s the vibe you get from eating caviar, or chewing cacao beans, or eating chili peppers off the vine or making love to an authentically crazy woman. Let’s call it living fast and hard. And yet, is this a great beer? Simply because it feels like a life-affirming risk drinking it? Doesn’t brewing, after thousands of years, deserve qualifications for grace, for nuance and memory and ancestral emotion? This beer lives in a damned-on-holiday now, and that in the end seems to be its weakness.
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Newcastle Brown Ale
Brown Ale
Newcastle, England
Oddly brisk and watery and drinkable for such a famous, and hearty-flavored and sharp, British ale, but it does not present itself as a problem. Rather, this might be one of the great dining beers, never obliterating the need for solid matter as some octoberfests and bocks and stouts and abbey ales do, but instead cleansing the palate like a firehose and bracing you for round two or three or four. It is a trifle sweet, so steer it clear of pork and sauces, but instead serve it proudly with grilled beef or seafood, with stew, with turkey and pot roast and sausage and fried chicken, and with Cajun.
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Beck's
Lager
Bremen, Germany
I'm drinking it, don't for the love of all things holy ask me why, and I'm wondering, did they brew this with apple juice? Did they keep the hops, what few of them were involved, in a rusted tin can for a year prior to brewing? Why am I not drinking ginger ale? -- at least that'd have some spice to it. This is, I'll say it yet again, the kind of drivel beer-haters drink, because they can't stomach anything stronger and are too chicken-shit to just admit in public that they'd really rather have a wine cooler. A big pink one, watermelon maybe. Go ahead, nancy, fess up, get your feather boa out and yer high heels.
String Up Your Idiot Kings
Samuel Adams Octoberfest
Octoberfest?
Boston, Massachusetts
Labeling does this mass-produced brew no good; no responsible beer devoteé could be fooled, before they even sniff the bottle, into thinking this is actually meaningfully seasonal, actually aged, actually re-reciped from the Sammy mainstream that has proven so popular across the land. And the proof is in the grog: someone threw a little malt sugar, or something, into the vat of regular Sammy lager and that’s about it. Inoffensive and even serviceable in any number of social situations, this beer is otherwise a travesty of the notion of autumnal Germanic froth, not necessarily in the drinking, which is hardly a chore, but in the temerity of likening it to the Mozart of lagers. Think of it as someone saying they’re a genius at theoretical physics because they wore an Einstein wig. The rule is inviolable: octoberfests that aren’t German aren’t octoberfests.
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Hofbrau Oktoberfest
Octoberfest?
Munich, Germany
C'mon! Do I look like a goat?! This is easily the worst German Octoberfest available on these shores (and maybe that's because I haven't had Beck's in years and would only deign to do so now under threat of mongrel scrotum torture or some such thing), because it's not an Octoberfest; in other realms, a cabernet makes a pretty bad shiraz. This is the same old Hofbrau lager you'd buy with a plainer label, which is itself one of the more pilsener-y Teutonic lagers out there, which is fine if you weren't expecting a normal, ordinary, robust German lager but instead a secret delivery system of adequate-but-hardly-robust pilsner-ishness. In any case, it ain't a 'fest, and it bearly breaks a sweat trying to be one.
Herbstlich!
Ayinger Oktober Fest-Marzen
Oktoberfest
Aying, Germany
It’s October, damn your idiotic miseries! Time to spank the baby for a louder cry, kick the goats to make the yelp at the treetops, throw down with your mate in the smelly hay at sunset! Every year, and I’ll say this more than once, I wait for the autumn brews to come like a Brighton maiden awaiting her French-sent soldier-lover, holding a tear-damp kerchief to her breast on the dock. Some may call it malt-love – and it may be, though I have been determined to resist learning about exactly what makes the beer I love what it is, the bottom-fermenting this, the noble that, the aging and yeasting whatever. That’s a brewer’s business; as a drinker, an imbiber, a salty-mustached swiller of the very old school, I care only for what kind of beer it is and whether or not it’ll make me dream of my grandfather’s lusty laugh. Of course I know a hoppiness and a maltiness and a wind-crisp wheatiness when I happen upon them, but talk shop to me at your peril, Mr. I Took a Brewing Class. Shut up and drink, particularly if it’s October, and the German 'fests – not, St. Augustine of Hippo forbid, the American microbrew counterfeits, much less the poisonous autumnal scourge of "pumpkin ales" – come shuttling onto our shores. Here we have one of the breed’s more exclusive, and less marketed, examples, and it’s a perfectly fine, mellow, round-malty-sweetness-like-dinkelbrot-with-raisins-to-a-starving-man achievement. If, finally, a little underwhelming, and reserved in the last quarter-mile. Which does not for a heartbeat imply that you shouldn’t trample your neighbor to obtain a case and make it an autumn you’ll remember on your deathbed. In any case, the season will see me run through all of the major imported Deutsche ‘fests, which are supposed to be (but probably aren’t any longer) brewed freshly and differently each year in March and then aged for the harvest. I doubt Ayinger will come out ahead, but I may be wrong.
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Paulaner Oktoberfest
Octoberfest
Munich, Germany
When I was but a wee stein-drainer, ‘fests were rarities on these shores, and a single, odd Patchogue venue was all by itself in getting Hacker-Pschorr Oktoberfest on tap every autumn. Then, it was the cat’s meow, the ne plus ultra, the rich, compulsively satisfying seasonal banquet beer to end all beers; others were either airy swamp water or clumsy sludge by comparison. In the decades since, HP has fallen, relatively speaking, into a lagery, formulaic rut, and Paulaner has emerged as the greatest of the imported ‘fests, walking that razor’s edge between malt and barley, aging and freshness, autumn and eternity, that allows this form’s five-dimensional presence to wipe bad memories from your mind and place an indelible scorch mark on your emotional calendar. Of course, all things are relative – there well might be an unimported Teutonic oktoberfest we haven’t seen that trumps it decidedly – and it’s the beer’s uniformity, indeed all of the imported ‘fests’ lack of recipe rhythm and crop fluctuations in recent years, that leaves my suspicious mind and tongue asking questions. Clearly, what’s supposed to be an aged seasonal treat is being brewed year-round by all of the major players (HP, Paulaner, Spaten, Hofbrau, Ayinger, Dinkel Acker, et al.). The days of Grandma Tiernan fetching fresh craftbrewed ‘fest or bock from a horse-drawn barrel in the October streets of Brooklyn are of course long-gone; what we might be witnessing is the McDonald’sization of seasonal Euro-beer. Goddamn the profiteers! The numbers men, the narrow-nosed squeezers of joy from craft and art and pleasure! I’m not reneging on my love for Paulaner, and when September is upon me I dash for the draft pulls covered in Bavarian-flag checkers. But I can’t help wondering about what our throats no longer know, just as it’s estimated that uncircumcised men retain up to 40% more feeling than do we the sadly butchered men of the earth. We just have no idea how good or bad we have it, and we may never know.
~~~
Hacker Pschorr Oktoberfest
Octoberfest
Munich, Germany
For long the reigning seasonal Prussian brand, also probably compelled nowadays to brew this mixture around the calendar, but among the rosiest brews of the year HP now falls to a silver or bronze, coming off a little too thin, a little too salty and and a little too skimpy on the magical richness of the brew that makes it seem so much closer to the food of the gods than other beers. But if Paulaner isn’t handy, you belly up to this old-schooler and rejoice; therein lies a critical dilemma, and the reason why I eschew rating systems altogether: an adequate ‘fest is still a gangbusters gift you should fall to your knees for, outpacing the greatest ordinary lager like a thoroughbred against a dray horse. A poor ‘fest (and I do not mean a Yankee micro-faux-‘fest, mind you) from your average prime German brewer is still, probably, a better bet than that brewery’s standard lager – though I say probably because I’m not at all sure if I’ve ever tasted a poor German Octoberfest.
Hoi, Hoi and Hoi Polloi
Ureich
Lager
Mannheim, Germany
Simple: it’s not a Heineken manque, it is Heineken; I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that someone had industrial-espionaged the Heineken recipe and a reservoir of Dutch water to make it. Or, in fact, that they’d bought Heineken at a bulk-vat discount and resold it. It’s Heineken, just a smidgeon cheaper, which puts it automatically at the bottom of the import heirarchy, below the St. Pauli Girl imitators and just above Beck’s itself. But I’m preaching to a dozing choir: if you’re sitting here with me, you don’t travel in these territories.
~~~
Guinness Cream Stout
Stout
Dublin Ireland
Once long ago (the ‘70s), this variation on the world’s stout standard was peddled perfunctorily in the States, but only in the bravest of drinking establishments, the barkeeps of which had to plop each open bottle down bottom-first in an "activating bath" – which was like a large, deep square ashtray, filled with water and plugged in, with a switch – in order to ignite its creamery head. (I also netted a Cream Stout t-shirt in a pub giveaway, which I still own but of course can no longer fit into.) If this sounds a little like the device planted into the snap-off tops on Guinness Draught cans, and entirely like the new activating-bath-like "Surger" device the company is hawking in the UK to replace them, then it would seem that my memories of "Cream Stout" were just a marketing skew on "Draught." So it may be. (Draught Guinness was nigh but impossible to find on Long Island during the Ford Administration.) But since three decades have passed and I can’na taste-compare the two, I shall let this stand as an independent entry. I recall a darkling, rich experience hardly as thin nor fully uncarbonated as the contemporary Draught, but my cerebral cortex is somewhat aged now, somewhat braised in beer, and anyway, I was a wee shaver then and could hardly be relied upon for accurate historical reportage.
"Democracy," H.L. Mencken once said, "is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
Peak Organic Pale Ale
IPA
Portland, Maine
I could give a sick weasel’s sneeze about the very notion of "organic" beer – isn’t "organic" supposed to denote bio-nutritively beneficial foods, and aren’t the brewers therein aware that alcohol is a saintly poison to which mere traces of pesticide or GMOs cannot hold an organ-damaging candle? – but this Maine project’s I.P.A. is a dizzingly hoppy seven minutes in heaven. It’s so redolent with that saliva-seducing hops bite, leaving its gleeful teeth marks all over the back of your tongue and throat, that you might in fact be tempted to think that organic hops are uber-hops, allowed to grow to resonant, big-testicled maturity without the emasculating taint of synthetic chemicals. Maybe. Maybe it’s something else, and frankly who gives a crap: it’s one of New England’s sharpest, smartest ales.
~~~
Peak Organic Amber Ale
Ale
Portland, Maine
Organic or not, the hops teeth are dulled and so this brew is tamer, softer, easily drunk and easily forgotten. This "amber" business needs a righteous vetting at any rate – no one used this adjective, as far as I heard, until the late ‘80s, and then first by smark-alecky admen looking to hawk Samuel Adams or any of its macrobrew imitators to the Bud-loving millions, as if the "rich" color is all that might distinguish one beer from another. Back when real men drank real beer, the hue of a beer was only an idicator of its ingredients. Only in America, where the distinguishing ingredients in most beer are water and carbon dioxide, leaving beer with a color generally indistinguishable from a marathoner’s miction, could the color of ale become its defining characteristic. None of which is really Peak Organic’s fault; it’s a friendly enough timekiller.
~~~
Bass Pale Ale
Ale
Luton, England
Labeling nomenclature will out: this is not only not a "pale" ale, it’s also the same Bass Ale sold under the red triangle for decades. Inevitably, it seems, comparison of this sad, wilting lily to the Bass-drinking memories of our younger days leaves the present-day concoction in the lurch. Is it the same beer, or has it in fact gotten paler, tamer, more tasteless, like its new name? We’ll never know, but I tend to doubt it: the Pale One before us is shockingly oomph-less, with the tang of a malt ball and as hoppy as a jugged rabbit. I remember a muscly brew that lightning-struck visions of cobble streets, tavern fireplaces and engraved volumes of Carlyle onto my internal movie-screen; it may’ve been me, and it may’ve been the ale, but Lord knows it’s not the brew today.
