BridgePort Hop Harvest 2011

Got this sample last week, and when today's work was done -- singing, plumbing, trip planning, and I had to mow the lawn in the sopping humidity; not hot, just disgusting -- Cathy and I split the bottle. It's a hazy light apricot in color -- heading the other way, maybe a ruddy straw -- with lemony and sweet dough aromas. Flavors headed much the same way, with the hops more grassy and lemony than anything else...green and fresh, really. This makes me think of English-hopped IPAs in that it's not necessarily what most -- not all, but most -- American beer enthusiasts are thinking of when they think "hoppy beer." But still tasty, and a nice seasonal rarity.

I don't know why I didn't post this when I wrote it, back in September. My apologies to BridgePort; least I can do is to put it up now...and wait for next year!

BridgePort Hop Harvest 2011

Got this sample last week, and when today's work was done -- singing, plumbing, trip planning, and I had to mow the lawn in the sopping humidity; not hot, just disgusting -- Cathy and I split the bottle. It's a hazy light apricot in color -- or heading the other way, maybe a ruddy straw -- with lemony and sweet dough aromas. The taste? Not overwhelming; understated. I'm not surprised to get more hop flavor than bitterness from a BridgePort beer; these guys aren't about beating you over the head. There's not too much bitter, not too much sweet. I liked it, and I'd be happy to take a few more glasses in the course of an evening.

Cafe Negro Porter

Finally getting to a sample of Cafe Negro Porter I got from BridgePort...and you know, I wish I'd gotten to it earlier. This is black coffee, not a sweetened-up lattemochafrappawappa; it's a nice dry porter, with some bite to it, and a big rush of fresh-roasted coffee coming in about 2/3 of the way through. At 5.5%, it's not quite a session beer, but I could see drinking a few of these on a rainy afternoon at the pub. Nicely done!

Tradition! A Fallen Friar at Easter Vigil

For over ten years, I have had a tradition of drinking strong beers before singing at the Easter Vigil services at my church. It began when my brother-in-law Carl arrived at the train station for Easter one Saturday afternoon, oh, years ago, when we still had a Taurus station wagon, when Nora was a baby. We loaded his luggage in the back, and he got in the front with a shoebox. What's that, I asked, and he grinned and opened it up: three bottles of Old Dominion Millennium. ... In later years, I would attend the Split Thy Skull barleywine event at Sugar Mom's on the afternoon in question, and make my way home, and sing. Yes, I did, and beautifully, I'd say; others have said so.

I did not falter this year. This afternoon, while cutting up leftover turkey for a skillet of hash (nice, too, with the Worcestershire sauce tang), I polished off a 22 oz. bottle of BridgePort Brewing's Fallen Friar Triple. It was nice: spicy, not flabby and sweet (just the way I like tripels), with a woody/brett tang to it, almost like someone had mixed a bottle of Chimay White and Orval. Tasty. I followed that with a 12 oz. bottle of the newly re-launched Dundee Pale Bock from Genesee. And that, which I am still finishing off, is just plain good: malty, juicy, authoritative.

Fear not. I'm losing weight, but I'm still big enough to ground that much beer. I'm ready to sing. It is the pinnacle of the Christian year. Christ is risen, risen indeed!

BridgePort Hop Czar

I'm watching the Eagles/Vikings game, it's just after the Vikings went up 7-6. I decided to pop a sample: BridgePort Hop Czar, an imperial IPA at 8%. (And in the time it took me to get that picture and crop it, the Eagles are now up 9-7. Sweating it out.)

Anyway, BridgePort sent me this sample (along with the Raven Mad Porter I wrote about a few days ago) -- whoa, interception, Eagles up 16-7! -- and I've been looking forward to it. So I poured some for Cathy, and some for me, and I'm drinking it. Hey, it looks great! Cloudy-sticky, incredibly long-lasting creamy white head, fine carbonation, and wacky strong grapefruit and pine aromas.

The hops are ringing my chimes, seeming to change with every sip, there are so many flavors here I'm only picking up bits and pieces as I go. We're told Hop Czar is "triple hopped," more than BridgePort usually uses, and I'm feeling it. Hop Czar is also damned bitter, clinging bitter, ripping bitter. But the malt's there to beef it up and sweeten it up, balancing that bitter. There's also some substantial fruitiness that keeps it all interesting. (Peterson does it again, 16-14, Philly still hanging on at the end of the first half.)

That's the good stuff, beerwise. It's good, it's bitter, it's hoppy, but it's missing the liveliness, the verve of something like the Blind Pig I had on New Year's Eve. The Hop Czar goes for the straight-up slam, a bit blunt, and I'm not nuts about that...except that's just not all there is to the Czar.

Look, I've made fun of Bob Klein's beer reviews in which the beers seem to change flavor in mid-sip. But I keep getting different impressions, every time I lift the glass. Sweet, blunt, fruity, pine, bitter, solid...a protean IIPA? Or is it just that there's so much going on it's hard to get it all at once. I'd still like to see more of that liveliness...but that's not the only kind of beer. I can get into the bludgeoning, too. Thumbs-up for the Czar. (Halftime, by the way, and I'm feeling like a Philly fan...how are they going to figure out how to lose this one? (Whoa, holy crap, Westbrook breaks loose for a big one: we win! This is getting weird...))

BridgePort Raven Mad Imperial Porter

Happy New Year!

We celebrated with my parents in Lancaster County, the same way I've celebrated New Year's Day for as long as I can remember: with a big pork and sauerkraut dinner. It's what Pennsylvania Dutchmen do. If you have pork and sauerkraut on New Year's Day, it's good luck the rest of the year. Well...you at least get a good meal.

My mother let me cook the pork and kraut this year (well, actually, she followed my suggestions while I worked on my dad's computer). We patted brown sugar on the fat of the roast and put it in the 425-degree oven without a cover for 20 minutes. Then I took it out, turned the oven down to 325, laid in the lightly rinsed kraut (from a local Amish family), and poured a 22 oz. bottle of Victory Baltic Thunder all over it -- a fine sacrifice -- then covered it and put it back in the oven for two hours.

Yum! It was mighty fine, and the big bottle of BridgePort Raven Mad Imperial Porter we had with it was pretty damned good, too. The 3-D glasses had gotten misplaced somewhere, so we couldn't get the full glory of the label, but the full glory of the beer did come through. RMIP had a light burnt bitterness to it, a smooth drinkability, and a nicely understated wood/barrel character to it -- not an upside-the-head wallop -- almost like an 'easy-drinking' version of an imperial stout. Once again, BridgePort comes through with a beer that focuses on the drinker and not the person who's looking to be knocked out in one glass. At 7.8%, I could have had the whole bottle and a bit more. Wouldn't have minded that one bit, either.

SBP #2: BridgePort Beertown Brown

I'll say this for BridgePort: they know how to send samples of a session beer. Two weeks ago a 12-pack of their new Beertown Brown showed up at my mailbox, just before we had my daughter's 13th birthday party. It was the hit of the party, enjoyed by all (the adults, yes, of course, the adults). And why not? It's a light-brown beauty, with a nice ruddy touch to it, a tenacious cap of foam, and a wonderfully malty nose with a nutty earthiness: very British, and so it's supposed to be. The nose follows through perfectly on the palate: this is a very honest, up-front beer that tastes just like it smells, and it tastes wonderfully fresh. It's hovering on the edge of SBP parameters at 5.2%, but it was with beauties like this in mind that I made it 5.5% in the first place...

I was not a brown ale fan at all for years. Things slowly chipped away at that, and when I did the brown ale tasting panel with Eric Asimov at the New York Times last year, the old prejudices were overthrown. I liked these beers, they were tasty, not overbearing, and quite good with a wide variety of foods. To use a horrible word...they were friendly. And they are archetypical session beers. Find one -- if you're going to find a Beertown Brown, better hurry; it's a seasonal -- and make friends.