June 2007

If nothing else, this gets the pretty bottle award. If I get drunk enough I might make it into a lamp or something.

This Belgian style golden ale by Avery Brewing features this inscription on the label: “Salvation is discovering your passion, purpose, meaning in life. We brew. What about you?”

That makes me smile. I like these people.

So here comes the moment of truth. I apply the opener to the cap and carefully pop it off. I take a long reverent sniff. It smells of yeast, strong hops, and a low sweet undertone of cereal.

Putting the bottle to my lips, I let the golden brew slide into my mouth. The bubbling liquid cascades and swirls around my tongue, crashing waves of flavor. This first sip is so good that my eyes go wide.

I think the technical term is “Wow!”

There’s strong fruit overtones with a clear flash of peach. The hops sing a loud and crystalline church chorus of Hallelujah, fading into the rich warm baritone harmonics of the malts. It’s all Gregorian chants from here, with overtones of an angelic woman’s choir. The fruitiness fades to the point where, a third the way through the bottle, it’s nothing but an echo.

I’m only early into it, but I’m almost tempted to out and out declare this the Beer of God right now.

It just goes to show that you don’t have to go to church to find salvation. I found it in a bottle at my local Beer Heaven. This is the key contention of the fantasy novel I’m working on — it was beer, not wine, served at the last supper.

Jesus didn’t turn water into wine. That’s an error in translation. He, like most of the priests at the time, turned water into beer. Brewing was considered a holy art.

As far as I’m concerned it still is.

As holy this beer might be, however, the long term satisfaction has slid a bit. It’s a big bottle and when sipping it takes a long time to finish. By the end it leaves you with a toasty, almost woody bitterness that is quite warm and pleasant, but not anywhere near as spectacular as the beginning.

Still, it made it easily as a Holy Beer contender, weighing in at a highly respectable 7.9 on the Holy Grail scale.

I’m babysitting a floppy eared rabbit for my daughter, and so the rabbit joined me on the veranda while I sampled this beer.

It’s Tommyknocker‘s Jack Whacker Wheat Ale, brewed in Colorado.

I kicked back, put my feet up, and popped the cap. Took a sniff. There’s a definite citrus note riding high over that normal malt and hops aroma.

Hmm, I thought. Different!

The rabbit hopped up to me and sat up on its hind legs. “No,” I told it, “you can’t have any. You’re way under legal age.” Indignant, the rabbit hopped away.

Bemused, I tipped the bottle up and took that first swig. It’s light, a bit weak, but after a moment the ale delivered a pleasant earthy taste, blooming with the standard hoppy notes over a low malt base. Gliding through this is the tangy signature of lemon grass, flying like a little yellow flag on end of a beer truck’s CB antenna.

It’s not bad. In fact, this wheat ale would make an excellent poolside thirst-quencher. Yes, actually, that’s perfect. While not being outstanding, it is satisfying, and fits right into a back yard summer scenario. A beer to have with a barbecue, or to relax with after mowing the lawn.

Or, as in my case, sitting on the veranda while babysitting your daughter’s rabbit.

So, I was at an anime festival with my daughters, and was surrounded by people with wings, horns, cat ears, tails, and swords of all shapes and sizes. Girls were dressed as boys, and boys were dressed as girls. Some girls were barely dressed at all, and me, being a bit advanced in age, felt ill at ease with all the young sexuality around me.

There was this one pair of girls, though, looking in their mid twenties … one was dressed up as a light angel, the other a dark angel. The dark angel had the most stunningly beautiful eyes and a perfectly feminine face. She was gorgeous.

Well, it turns out my older daughter knows them, and so I remarked about how pretty the dark angel was.

My daughter bursts out laughing. She tells me, “Uh, that’s the light angel’s boyfriend.”

“Excuse me?!”

“Yeah, dad. That’s a boy.”

“No way!”

Well, he was in fact a boy. And I was freaked out. So I did what any normal freaked-out gender-confused dad would do — I headed for the bar.

They had several beers on tap, but the one that caught my eye and set me craving was the Fat Tire Amber Ale. I had four in a row.

Yes, that picture up there is an actual cell phone photo of the first of the four. And since I didn’t have anything to keep notes on, I used my phone to call in a review to my own voice mail:

“It’s a beautiful amber color,” my voice mail says, “with a nice frothy head. Decent lacing. First sip is very smooth, with not much in the way of hops but a very dominant and satisfying caramel malt flavor. It’s really good. I’m going to keep them coming.” Of course I mention nothing in the voice mail about why I’m in such a hurry to drink the beer.

Sitting to my right, looking at me like I were nuts for talking about beer into my cell phone, sat Frank the Rabbit. I don’t exactly know what Frank was doing there, as he’s not an anime character. He’s the time travelling portent of doom from the movie Donnie Darko.

“So how do you drink your beer with that mask on?” I asked him.

“With a straw,” he answered, and produced one. But he was not a he … he was a she. Or at least, her voice sounded feminine. She inserted the straw and sucked on her beer like some giant mutant mosquito.

Well … that’s just weird, I thought to myself.

Nobody drinks beer through a straw.

It’s rumored that there’s pomegranate juice in this beer. At least, that’s what my friends over at K&B told me. I don’t doubt it but I can’t confirm it.

I can confirm that this brew is fruity, at least at first.

Popping the top, I could barely smell anything. There’s a beer scent, albeit a weak one. It smells much like Michelob.

I take that first adventurous swig — that’s when I discover the fruitiness. It’s wild and chaotic, like confused singers on stage who’ve all forgotten where they’re supposed to be standing, and they keep bumping into each other as they all sing lines from different songs.

It’s fizzy and light bodied, and goes down with no resistance. After the initial fruit chaos, a warm upwelling of malt takes center stage. “Bar-la-la-la la-ley!” they sing in a pleasant baritone, all in perfect harmony. Then, over the malt comes a high chorus of hops singing from an upper balcony.

It’s sweet music, it is. Brings a smile to the face.

Alas, things change. Halfway through the bottle, the hops get over exuberant and ignore the director, and begin swarming down off the balcony and onto the stage, shoving the other flavors one by one out of the limelight.

The baritone malts are having none of this, though, and they shove right back.

For a bit I wonder if a fist fight is about to break out, but eventually the hops and the malt come to an understanding (which they usually do) and begin to sing the same song.

But that gets boring, and I begin to nod off.