Shiner 100: Commemorator

The Spoetzl Brewery is 100 years old this year, and that means their series of anniversary beers that started at Shiner 96 -- a Märzen -- has come to a culmination in Shiner 100 Commemorator, a lean, drily malty doublebock...kind of. At 6.8%, this is a big bock, a kind of low-side doublebock.

It's brown, but not dark brown; sweet, but not cloying (I mean, at all); big, but not huge. I know a guy at Shiner, and I can tell by the way this beer tastes that he had a hand in the formulation: it's not too big, it's wicked drinkable for the size, and it's not cloying. It's got the little bit of raunch I have come to like in dark, malty beers, that edge that comes from using dark-roasted malts instead of malt-based coloring agents: the taste of authenticity.

I'm actually on my second one already, and it's tasting like there might be another one in my glass before this Pittsburgh/Baltimore game is over. Hope the Steelers put the Ravens away and put one Pennsylvania team in the Super Bowl...

Good Beer Day

I had no business whatsoever going to the IPA Project at Sly Fox today. Work, a concert to sing tonight, family issues that I don't want to go into...I should have stayed home. But I didn't, and it's all worked out. I should worry less.

I did go, and immediately ran into Matt "Beer Yard" Guyer, who confirmed my thought about the best way to go at the IPA Project: eschew the flights and just pick something to get a real size of. I grabbed a flight attendant (the ever-popular and brilliant Corey Reid (portrait of whom you see to the left...) and ordered up a 12 oz. Aurora.

Quick explanation: the IPA Project is a series of single-hop IPAs. In December, at the Sly Fox's anniversary, they pull out kegs of all the IPAs and offer them all at once. Brilliant. Except this year...Well, the Aurora was okay. The Fuggles was okay. The 2008 Odyssey (DIPA, multi-hopped, cask) was okay. The Mt. Rainier? A bit better, but in a crisp refreshing way, not a knock-out way. By this time, I'm starting to think, what the hell, the hops shortage has made all hoppy beer boring? Hate to dis Sly Fox IPAs this way, but damn, my socks were not being knocked off! (Kinda cool when former Sly Fox (and Independence and Stoudt's and Sunnybrook) brewer Bill Moore showed up, though; and yeah, Uncle Jack was there, looking pretty good after his brush with severe abdominal discomfort last month: that's Guyer, Jack, and Bill in the pic.)

Then Uncle Jack kind of talked me into getting one more 12 oz. glass, and I got the Galena. Now, Galena is generally considered to be an industrial-grade hop, a bitterness source, and that's about it. But...I remember back in the 1990s, Great Lakes (before Andy Tveekrem left there to become the wizard behind the curtain at Dogfish Head) had a barleywine they called Steamroller that was never offered for sale (as far as I know), just an "under the table" beer at festivals: huge, hi-alcohol, bitter, and dry-hopped on a bed of Galenas. And it was brilliant, as I recall. And so was this. The Galena was easily the best IPA of the day. Well, at Sly Fox, anyway.

Because when I left Sly Fox, I realized, I've got just time enough to stop at Victory and get maybe a growler or two of the great beers I've been hearing they had on tap right now. So I did. And it was good. Although it did take too long to get a beer, because two bartenders had a long talk about boyfriends, and Oh MY God!, and school, and NO WAY! right in front of me, and then walked off in opposite directions...till the guy sitting next to me at the bar called out to the one and said, "Hey, this guy's thirsty, you know?" Bless him. Bartenders at Victory; what's it take?

Anyway, I got me a pint of Uncle Teddy's Bitter (great, as always), and two growlers: St. Vic (which I'm polishing off right now, although I planned on saving it till Sunday, but I caught the bail on the flip-top when I was setting it down, and I had to drink it...really) and Yakima Twilight, a dark DIPA that tasted just fantastic when a guy at the bar offered me a sip. The St. Vic is great, smooth, malty, just a tad raunchy/smoky/chewy, and I love that. More about the YT when we drink up that one.

All in all: hell of a good beer day. And the concert went well, BTW, thanks for asking.

Thumper

I used to be scared of some beers. Guinness Extra Stout shocked me the first time I had it. Heineken Dark, too. I got over it, and learned to love 'em. Old Peculier we laughed at and dumped. Dumped. I should do penance... Orval took some getting used to. Hefeweizen...that clove, that banana, what the hell was that? Now I buy them by the keg. Thomas Hardy's, wow, the first one I had was not a good experience, but man, did I love it once I got it.

After all those realizations, there was still one beer that spooked me, intimidated me, "got the skeer on me and kept it on," to paraphrase N.B. Forrest. EKU 28 Kulminator Ur-typ Hell. EKU 28, the Malt Bomb, the icy German challenger to Samichlaus for world lager domination. It was like drinking a ghost, and if you've read Tim Powers, you know what I mean. Or Douglas Adams, for that matter: "What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" "Ask a glass of water."

EKU 28 was huge, powerful, a jackbooted sturmmann of malt and alcohol kicking me right in the teeth. I'd heard a definition of a "good" doublebock being one that gave you no clue of how strong it was until you tried to stand up: by that definition, this was very bad doublebock indeed. I used to keep a bottle in my fridge like some kind of life-affirming threat.

Then one day, about thirteen years ago, after drinking pretty wild stuff over the course of the previous ten years, I got a wild hair up, and I cracked open that bottle. I poured it -- ruddy gold, thick-bodied, and cold as winter wind -- and tasted it anew. Whoa! Happy German! This was no storm trooper, no Teutonic Knight, this was a steamroller hauling an oompah band, eight fully laden Oktoberfest waitresses, twelve guys with pipes and steins wearing lederhosen, and a pipe organ on a big wooden wagon, Bavarian whoopee on wheels.

The beer, of course, hadn't changed; it was me. I was finally up to double-doublebock speed, a beer speed of approximately 7R, again referencing Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ("R" being the maximum safe speed for a given situation). I could feel myself getting wazooed in the course of that single bottle and, seated in front of my computer and logged into the old Prodigy Online service, I proceeded to open a second one.

After I spent the next two days apologizing to people online that I'd insulted while marching through Oompah-Oompah Land, I realized that despite the consequences, I'd made a friend. The sumo style of EKU 28 was just the thing for some occasions; a need for anti-freeze, for instance, or a long snowstorm. I'm oiling up for a walk with the dog in cold windy weather right now.

I've become quite fond of deep-winter doppelbocks (and yes, I'm quite aware that someone, somewhere, is angsting something fierce that EKU 28 isn't a doppelbock... bite me. It's what I'm drinking today) as a tonic to push off the cruel cold, and the realization that January is upon us, the very depth of winter, with months to go before the leaves bud in green (and the pollen comes out, and the mud returns, but who thinks of that in January?). Doppelbock is an elixir of life squeezed from the malty sprout of birth, the green essence of spring in the quickening of grass. If there were household gods, if there were spirits, if a beer deity existed...surely this would be his potent ichor.

And it has god-like power, friends. For when I drink EKU 28, when it floods my heart and flashes all the lights in my mind, I know that I will live forever...today.

Wow. This stuff really got right on top of me. I'd better go walk the dog...but first, I'm loading Alte Kameraden and Wien bleibt Wien on my MP3 player. Damn. Does anyone else see something silly in writing about doppelbock and calling it "The Session"? Whew. Might have to have more when I get back.

The Session is all about doppelbock this month, hosted by Jay Wilson at Brewvana. When you're done here, double back and read the rest.