Dutifully, I’ve tracked down a bottle of Franziskaner Hefe-Weisse Dunkel to round out the recent sampling of Franziskaner’s Hefe-Weissbier. Yeah, the bottle sported the same portly monk with the stein and the keys.

I found the dunkel to smell faintly of sweet malt in the bottle and it poured with a thick head in an orange-bronze color with medium lacing. Clear wheat taste was there but no strong hint of caramel and only a vague taste of banana that I’m accustomed to with dunkels. Not as good as most dunkels I’ve tried but given a choice of the two, I’ll key in on the Franziskaner Dunkel over the Franziskaner Hefe-Weissbier every time.

Now where did I leave my keys?

Programming Notes:

Sam Adams Chocolate Bock - Where's my wallet?

I scored a single bottle of Samuel Adams Chocolate Bock on Friday. At roughly $16 a bottle, this is one roller coaster I'll not be riding repeatedly. Now I've got to decide when to drink the stuff.

Shiner Holiday Cheer - Oh, Yeah!

I've been sampling a lot of winter/holiday beers the past couple weeks; so much so that I'm quickly losing track of them and more importantly, losing track of which ones I particularly like. So, in case I slip, bash my head and lose my memory, I want to proclaim, even at this early stage, that the Shiner Holiday Cheer is basically riding roughshod over the competition. I'll post a more detailed set of sampling notes later but in the meantime, here's a link to the
Shiner Beer Website. Buzz on over there and track down the skinny on their Holiday Cheer.

I've ambled my way through almost a case of the Shiner Holiday Cheer, having shared it with guests and family over the Thanksgiving holiday and sharing it with a co-worker. It's good stuff and on a par with the Cinder Cone from Deschutes. For you beer poachers who might be thinking of bagging some of this product right away, here's a picture of a now long-gone six pack trying to hide on a high shelf in the garage last week. Gotta love that retro label!

Key Indicators

I’ll confess there won’t be anything of value posted here today. Whew. That’s a load off.

What the heck is it with Germans and keys?

I’ve always been aware that the Beck’s logo sports a nice key symbol. I’ve always associated it, rightly or wrongly, with the logo used by the SS Hitler Youth during World War II. (In fact, I seem to recall that the use of the key symbol by the SSHJ was due to a connection between their outfit and Colonel Sepp Dietrich, whose last name I believe means “key” in German. And, of course if you doubt me, check it out here on a page that gives a translation for the word Dietrich. I don’t remember much, but what I do remember, I remember real good.)

So this somewhat useless bit of knowledge has been sludging round in my brainpan for years and I’ve been content to leave it alone until a couple nights ago when I sampled a bottle of Franziskaner Hefe-Weissbier. What the heck do you think was on the label but a happy little monk fellow swilling a stein of beer, with a ring of keys tied to his waist!

I did not encourage this fellow to rub his gut; he was doing that when I ran into him over at the Franziskaner website...go find it yourself.

The Franziskaner Hefe-Weissbier, eh, not so great really. Mildly sour smelling in the bottle with a strong wheat smell in the glass. Very frothy head with medium to heavy cloudiness. Just a typical wheat beer in my book and not something I’ll track down again, but I am eager to try their dunkelweizen. Maybe their dunkel is the dietrich!

Quick Riffs: A Plethora of Pumpkin Products (and some others)

Halloween is long past – but the candy hangover lingers. I gathered an assortment of pumpkin, spice and Oktoberfest style beers and dutifully noted my sentiments in this hear tasting notebook. Before Thanksgiving lands on us, let’s give some of these seasonal beers a quick go, shall we?

I provided some notes for Dogfish Head Punkin Ale in this earlier post.

And I posted some comments about Wasatch Beer’s Pumpkin Ale here shortly after my visit to Utah.

Here’s a mixed six to round out the fall drinking season; which is not to say I’m done with the spiced and pumpkin seasonals.

Flying Dog Dogtoberfest Marzen
Sampled October 15, 2008
I was expecting more from this outfit. Dogtoberfest smells a bit grainy in the glass. The smell has a mild alcohol bite to it. The taste is slightly chemical and slightly dry at the finish. Dogtoberfest has a thin mouth feel and presents a brown-orange color. Not the best marzen I’ve had.

Left Hand Brewing Oktoberfest Marzen Lager
Sampled October 15, 2008
Distinctly sour grass smell in the bottle but indescribable smell once poured, this one has a mild alcohol bite in the taste and tastes faintly of nuts – perhaps almonds. This one was better than Dogtoberfest, but not outstanding in my book.

Dundee Oktoberfest Marzen Style Lager
Sampled October 15, 2008
The ubiquitous grassy, slightly sour smell in the bottle, with a slight caramel smell in the glass, this one presents a nice head with medium beading. The taste is of sweet candy with a quick finish. This Oktoberfest is probably the best compared to the Flying Dog and Left Hand offering.

Widmer Brothers Okto Oktoberfest Munich Style Ale
Sampled October 16, 2008
This one gives off a cereal, slightly sour smell in the bottle and slightly malty smell in the glass. Appearance is brown with a tan head. Taste is sweet and malty with a slightly dry finish. There’s a vague hint of nuts and sweetness that grows as the beer warms in the glass.

Michelob Jack’s Pumpkin Spice Ale
Sampled on October 19, 2008
This mass-produced poser is faintly grassy smelling in the bottle and faintly sweet-spicy smelling in the glass. Jack’s pours a bronze/amber color with a decent enough head that disappeared quickly. There is no pumpkin and very little spice in the taste that I can discern but it was a touch chemical tasting to me.

Kennebunkport Pumpkin Ale
Sampled on November 1, 2008
Slight spice smell in the bottle with a very, very subtle taste. Thin mouth feel and week head with an appearance reminiscent of apple juice. Probably not a beer I’ll be seeking out next fall I have to say.

Gee, for a "quick riff" this turned into one long-winded rant. I'm thinking I'll step away from the sampling for a bit. Perhaps I need to dig through this slush pile for some of the old obscure rambling stuff. Hmmm.

Beer Moment: A Day At The Track With The VFW

Yesterday was my son-in-law’s birthday. As it happens, NASCAR is in town and, as it happens, the track offered a special corporate ticket package sponsored in part by Kevin Harvick Racing and the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). I, my son-in-law and a buddy from work spent the day at the track with the VFW.

As part of the ticket package we got to tour the pits, eat good food and drink all the Budweiser products we cared to. I’ll admit, I put away my share of the Bud and Bud Light. I figure beers were going for $7 a can in the grandstands. I'd estimate I drank about $42 worth of free beer during our approximately 12-hour visit to the track. But there's more to it than just the beer and the bargain. I was honored to spend time in the presence of some of our nation’s finest men and women, active and inactive and retired military veterans.

Beer? Sure, the beer was pretty good. Heck the beer was free. The company was priceless.

Book Review: Christmas Beer

It seems that Christmas literally starts earlier and earlier each year. I’m not kidding when I say that one radio station where I live actually started playing 24-hour Christmas music the day after Halloween! Okay, if we really must have 60- or 90-days of Christmas, let’s have good beers and good reading material to go with that ceaseless music, okay?

I stumbled upon Don Russell’s book Christmas Beer (the full title is Wishing You a Merry Christmas Beer: The Cheeriest, Tastiest, and Most Unusual Holiday Brews.) in Salt Lake City. You can find it on Amazon and not have to trust to dumb luck that you’ll just chance upon it in some obscure book and card shop. Either way, and no matter, if you maintain a “beer library” here’s a book you should buy. If you don’t maintain a beer library, here’s a great starting point. If you don't read beer books but know someone who does (or should) then buy them this book.

This great book works on two levels: it’s an interesting read, and, having read it, you’ll find yourself picking it up again and again just to browse the contents. If you’re like me you’ll first scan through it to see how many of the beers listed are beers you’ve actually sampled. My personal beer list is rather short so I only checked off 3 or four beers, but happily, most are listed in Russell’s top 50. I was happy to see that a couple of beers that I really enjoyed, Hibernation Ale and 2 Below rated fairly high. The trick now is to track down some of the other beers listed.

Author and journalist Don Russell is more commonly known as “Joe Sixpack.” He writes a weekly Joe Sixpack column for the Philadelphia Daily News and, for the record, he was Joe Sixpack before that term was hijacked by politicians, pundits and news hacks. The moniker Joe Sixpack conjures up an image of a regular fellow who would likely pick up his share of bar tabs now and then. I refer to these sorts as “beer folk” and they’re good folk (sure there’s always a few stinkers, but they don’t get to be called beer folk). As if to confirm this notion, when I emailed Joe Sixpack and asked if he’d be willing to field a few short questions for a review of his book, he quickly replied in the affirmative. So, without any more foot dragging, here are BeerRant’s questions and Joe Sixpack’s answers to some burning questions about Christmas Beer:

BR: Do you go by “Joe or “Mr. Sixpack”? (Heh, heh, bet he hasn’t heard that one a million times.)

Joe: Joe’s fine. Or Don. Or anything if you’re offering me a beer.

BR: How long did you go between idea and realization in putting together Christmas Beer:

Joe: About three years. Of course I’ve been drinking Christmas beer for much longer than that, but in the winter of ’05 I realized nobody had ever written a book about my favorite beers of the year. That’s when I started collecting the beers I needed for the book and began my reporting.

BR: Many beer books include what I call the “ensemble shot” with a bottle of the beer next to a full glass of the beer. Any reason why you or our editor’s chose to have pictures of the bottles alone?

Joe: Simple reason: I had a limited photography budget. Setting up those shots of poured bottles is extremely difficult – you need 3 people to do it right, and it takes a lot of time to get the pour to look good. That means you need a hell of a lot more bottles than I could round up. Remember: these beers are available only about two months a year, so I had to do a lot of organizational work just to put together the collection. In the end, it was just easier to present the bottle. Maybe the next edition will include more pours.

BR: Did you select the 50 best and are they in the order you chose?

Joe: Yes, I selected the 50. A difficult task paring them down, and that’s my lineup as originally written. I rarely “rate” beers because I’m one of those people who believes everyone’s palate differs. But I wanted to highlight these 50 as beers that are worth the effort to seek out.

BR: Do you have a guilty favorite you were reluctant to disclose in the book?

Joe: No. Actually, my guilty favorite is the No. 1 pick, Troegs Mad Elf. I knew from the start that it might be a bit controversial because it’s a regional beer, available only in the Mid-Atlantic. It would’ve been much easier to pick, say Anchor Our Special Ale or Sierra Nevada Celebration (both of which made my top 10) because they’re readily available. I picked Mad Elf because it’s truly my favorite Christmas beer. But honestly, I love every one of the beers in this book.

BR: What will you be savoring as a Christmas beer this Christmas Eve?

Joe: I wait till Christmas night to break out the best stuff. My wife and I make a big deal out of sharing something special in front of our fireplace while we exchange gifts. I have some four-year-old Mad Elf, some two-year-old Affligem and a few others. I was a huge fan of last year’s batch of Corsendonk Christmas – if I can round up an aged bottle of that, I’d be very happy.

BR: Besides beer in general, can you tell us what your next beer book is going to be about?

Joe: I don’t have a next book lined up, yet. It’ll most certainly have something to do with the culture of beer-drinking, as opposed to a guidebook.

I have a suspicion that Christmas Beer will find a place beside Michael Jackson’s Great Beer Guide on many bookshelves this holiday season, but because this is the holiday season, I imagine Christmas Beer will spend a lot of time off the shelf, in the hands of eager Christmas beer drinkers. And if that’s Christmas music I hear, it must be Christmas Beer that I’m drinking – and reading!

My thanks to Don “Joe Sixpack” Russell for kindly agreeing to field some questions for this review. You give beer folk a good name, Joe.

Utahhhhhhhh!

Okay, let’s get one fact straight immediately: there wasn’t a whole lot of beer drinking going on during my recent visit to Utah, but I did manage to secure a few beers from Wasatch Beer including a seasonal pumpkin ale, which I sampled while there along with a six-pack of their somewhat irreverent Polygamy Porter. Also, we paid a visit to Trolley Square where I dropped in to Desert Edge Brewpub for a quick glass of their stout.

When we left Utah, I squirreled 5 beers (one pumpkin ale, four porters) away in my checked luggage in order to have some samples for tasting back at BeerRant HQ. Four of the beers were wrapped carefully in paper and then in plastic grocery bags, then stuffed tightly into shoes while the fifth was equally well wrapped and carefully placed between layers of jeans and a sweatshirt (it snowed in Utah while we were there by the way).

Once home, I eagerly opened the bag and found that our friends from the Transportation Security Authority (TSA) had checked the bags contents and left me a note. Everything was in order and ship shape and I’m not at all bothered by this; in fact I fully expected that it might happen.

Here’s a neat page from the Wasatch website that gives some background into their history and their link with Squatter’s (Salt Lake Brewing Company). No doubt Utah is probably a rough place to make a go as a brewer; their booze laws were a morass of regulations and loopholes the last time someone sat down and tried to explain them to me. A visit by the Winter Olympics may have caused a change in their laws but I don’t know for sure.

Wasatch Pumpkin Ale
Oddly, there is no mention of the Pumpkin Ale on the Wasatch website, which makes me wonder if they’re ashamed of it. The folks at Beer Advocate think Wasatch Pumpkin Ale’s the shizzle and I’d tend to agree, generally. I sampled the Pumpkin Ale both in Utah and back at BeerRant headquarters and I was tempted to save the last of the six-pack for a holiday/pumpkin/Oktoberfest blow out sample post but I’ll include it here since it’s a Utah beer. This is an unfiltered ale and a “brewmaster seasonal’ according to the label. It has a distinct spice smell that is sweet and pleasant. It pours an orange bronze color and has more taste of spice than pumpkin with a medium thick mouth feel. This pumpkin ale isn’t too bad for a beer with low alcohol by volume.

Wasatch Polygamy Porter
Polygamy Porter is the Pumpkin Ale’s irreverent cousin, I guess. I wonder why the brewer didn’t see fit to hang a similarly off-color handle on the pumpkin product? Anyway, Polygamy Porter has a grainy bread smell with a mild alcohol bite. It pours a dark tea color – but not opaque – and has a medium thin mouth feel. There’s a vague coffee taste and a bit of soot there, too. Medium to heavy lacing if poured aggressively. The finish is slightly dry and nutty. Frankly a bit thin and not really representative of the style in my opinion, but certainly worth a shot if only for the novelty. Will I have it again if I’m in Utah? Certainly. Here’s the Beer Advocate feedback for Polygamy Porter. (For those of you keeping score, the porter scored slightly lower than the pumpkin.)

Oh my heck, what is this?

On our last day in Salt Lake City we paid a visit to the downtown area and spent an hour or so mindlessly wandering around Trolley Square. Those of you with a gruesome bent will remember that this mall was the scene of a mass shooting in early 2007. You can get the scoop on the tragedy at Wikipedia. The whole experience was somewhat surreal and only later, while watching a show on the History Channel did I find that many of the stores we went into during our visit were locations that played prominently in the shooting and the shoot out between the gunman and police. But I digress…badly.

I knew from some earlier internet noodling that Trolley Square was home to at least one brewpub and eventually we wound our way upstairs where I found the Desert Edge Brewpub. I’m not able to find a website for them, so here, once again, is a Beer Advocate page, this time for Desert Edge.

I briefly contemplated trying one of two seasonal beers on the menu but opted for their Latter Day Stout instead. I reasoned that the weather was unseasonably cold – it had snowed the day before – and a dark, thick beer would be just the thing to tide me over before our flight home. The stout turned out to be a huge disappointment, really. It arrived looking coffee black with a tan head – not bad. First taste was a grain taste with a hint of chocolate, but then a sooty, burnt taste intruded into the mix. A thin mouth feel only added to the disappointment. The kindest thing I can add is there was a faint Guinness-like taste at the finish. I finished the glass and we beat a hasty exit. I won’t likely make a special effort to return to Desert Edge, but I’ll try to get back to Trolley Square because I particularly like the Cabin Fever store where I purchased a neat book on Christmas beers. (Stay tuned for a review of that book.)

Now back at BeerRant headquarters, I’m trying to make sense of a plethora of pumpkin and spice beers and hoping I’ll be nimble-minded enough to keep everything straight in my head long enough to get the experience posted. My heck, beer blogging is tough.

Beer Moment: A Fall Ritual

I did something this week that I have never, ever done before. I burned leaves in my backyard. Yeah, big deal.

I think its something of a legend from the eastern states. I imagine parts of New England where they figure everyone in Phoenix carries a six-shooter and I’ve always harbored this mental picture of folks raking leaves in the fall and burning same. Environmentally I suppose this old annual chore is probably frowned upon these days – if anyone ever actually burned piles of leaves outside of a Rockwell painting. This past weekend I mustered up some gumption and tried it myself.

The ash tree in the yard doesn’t usually drop its leaves until December or January, but this year the leaves fell early for some reason. So, even with the daytime temperature hovering in the mid-90s, I raked and burned the leaves, all the while expecting a nosy neighbor to call the police or fire department.

Whether it’s actually done in the eastern United States or not, I’ve learned that there may very well be a therapeutic aspect to an annual leaf-burning ritual. The leaves crackle as they light, the fire roars up only to die slowly into black ash, greenish-white smoke billows up as a new handful of leaves are dumped onto the smoldering pile and there’s a brief lull, a pause, while the heat builds and then the fire flares up again. It strikes at something primitive in a person. I think it might be a sort of antidote to the impending cabin fever that a person must know is coming as a result of winter’s months cooped up inside.

For me, the beer of choice was just something I had leftover from a day or two earlier: a glass of Deschutes Pale Ale. It seems I think that I’ve had more beer from Deschutes than any other brewer this year. They are my new found favorite, I think. I also like burning leaves in the fall, but since my neighbors, the police and fire department will probably put a stop to the whole leaf burning ritual; I think I’ll just get accustomed to enjoying my Deschutes in a lawn chair on the porch. Ah, therapy.

Yes, I've got a post in the works for Utah. Sampled a couple of beers from Wasatch Beer. Bear with me.