Friday Froth: The Ground Beneath Our Feet

The swings in temperature lately set me back thinking about the equally wild temperamental capriciousness of the Greek gods. Just as it's not too difficult to convince me to go out for a beer, it only takes a slight hint for my mind to go in a Hellenistic direction, and springtime seems to always provide the nudge. It's a happy accident, then, that I've recently had a few beers fit to tell a tale. 

The Greeks made their gods powerful, but they didn't need them to be infallible. The Olympians were more like people; they had pride which could be swelled or injured, love, hatred, jealousy, sexual appetites, creative instincts and, every once in a while, they'd strike a deal.

One of the most famous of these deals (well, if you're a classical mythology geek) is the story of Hades falling in love with Persephone and opening the Earth to swallow her so she could be his queen in the underworld.

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Friday Froth: Bouncing 'Round The Room

A while back, I was reading about the defenses ostensibly neutral Switzerland has constructed around its countryside. Mountainsides rigged for landslides, underground fortresses capable of protecting most of the population, alpine meadows, dotted with cows, under rocky peaks which would rotate away and send forth squadrons of attack aircraft from interior runways - the punctual, predicable Swiss were capable of some pretty heavy surprises. There's a part of the Jura mountains with a nickname I like: "Franches Montagnes": the Free Mountains, which holds another surprise, beer from Brasserie des Franches-Montagnes. 

An import this exotic is, of course, the work of Oxford, Connecticut's own B. United, which is how I had several pints of BFM's La Douze. "Douze" is French for "twelve" - from the Latin "duodecim" and giving us our word "dozen" - and was brewed for the BFM's twelfth anniversary. The best categorization I can offer for this one is a Belgian Pale Ale. Douze is an unassuming golden color and had a light head as it was poured when I encountered my first pint. There is a light floral aroma, but it's very subdued. Richness - that's what comes through on the first taste. The ethereal essence of Belgian yeast floats its bouquet above a surprisingly toasty body. 

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Friday Froth: March Madness...Beer News & Reviews

March Madness has once again taken hold of America's mind, and I do not give a damn. I care about the tournament for exactly as long as the Huskies are still in it and, since they're out of the dance completely this year, I've been looking elsewhere for marginally productive entertainment. People like bracket-based tournaments, it seems, because there are a ton to be found on the intertron this month. Beer brackets, news and reviews follow in this week's Froth. 

Paste magazine, which is a pretty good source for new music and movie info, has the superbly named Top Of The Hops IPA Challenge, in which their editors purport to whittle down a national selection of brews in the quest to find America's best IPA. The bracket falls utterly flat, though, having taken cues from every other "national" review in history and leaving Connecticut beers completely off the list, despite having a Northeast region to the tournament. NEB's Gandhi-Bot remains the best IPA I've had in my entire life, and should have been the '99 UConn in this particular madness, but this is what you get when people from Atlanta grasp at a college sport not named football.

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Friday Froth: Different Shades Of Green

Welly, well, well, my drinking droogies - what's it going to be then, eh? Me? I'm going hybrid for the holiday, and downing a few pints of Black Velvet (I like to make it equal parts Guinness and champagne). It certainly does chase the grey away. But we can't rush into things, oh no. The sight of the crowds, of too much Kelly green, too fast - especially when contrasted with tanning bed orange - presents a shock to the system few mortals can bear. Thus it was that I decided to ease up and down and through a palette of greens in the Costa Rican jungle. To prepare myself for St. Patrick's Day, you see. 

It's a strange feeling, while sipping a cold beer in a palm hut, to find you somehow have wifi. The distraction provided by the ability to check the score of the UConn game is occasionally a welcome one, though, since Costa Rican beers are nearly as indistinguishable from one another as they are terrible. They don't merit much expatiation, so on to the bullet points:

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Friday Froth: Beers to Sample While Waiting for Spring

Between typing, I'm looking at surging whitecaps. The water glints with the stray sparkle of sunshine, but mostly it's the blue color of anodized chrome, evening off to a shallow green. It's cold, and the wind knifes into any exposed skin wherever it can, but there's that sunshine. Random patterns run across my chest and face, and I hold up a palm like a screen to see the fluid waves of light move on its surface. The Sun is starting to burn stronger - it's holding off the darkness for longer each night. I smile, sip a Whale's Tale, and try to remember where the hell I put my notes.

Spring beers are already starting to hit the market, it seems, like Magic Hat's Pistil, which has replaced the Vermont brewer's previous spring seasonal, Vinyl. 

Victory looks ready to release several new beers this spring, including the K-Bomb and Ranch double IPAs, NATO IPA (made with American, English and German ingredients), and Swing Session Saison.

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Friday Froth: Here and There

Holding my eyeball in my head at an altitude of 36,000 feet was a new experience. I was excited to get out to Utah during ski and Sundance season, yes, but the best part was having finally kicked the cold that had been holding me down like the Hand of the Man since before baby new year started crowning. I was enjoying the novel luxury of breathing through my nose when the plane ascended through 20,000 feet or so and the sea level air pressure trapped in the bone behind my eyebrow went all slumlord and attempted to evict my right eye for the next five hours. I didn't know an ex-cold could turn me into Popeye, but upon landing I did know this: I needed a drink. 

Red Rock Brewery in Salt Lake City is a sort of brewpub which is in many ways along the lines of Southport Brewing Company on our shores. I had never seen one of their beers in a bottle, much less a double IPA, so I ordered one straight away.

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Friday Froth: Winter Update

"You shouldn't be scared of spiders," I remember my mother telling me. "You're much bigger than they are." At the time this line of reasoning seemed like neither a straight line, nor particularly reasonable, but I had no adequate retort at eight years old. Spiders were little, misshapen beasts from hell's own imagination then, and they remain so now. Doubly so, since now I know about things like the Brown Recluse, but that's not important. A spider I can hit with a magazine before turning on my heel and shrieking away. I am millions of times larger than a cold virus, and that hasn't stopped it from kicking my ass. So take that, 1987 Mom. All this is to say I haven't been drinking a lot of beer lately, but here are a few tidbits from the scattershot days in which I've been both awake and able to breathe over the past month.

Sixpoint in Brooklyn literally turns out (at least one) new beer every month. See their single-hopped Spice of Life series for just one example. In that vein, I finally had the Pacifica version which came out in November, and can still be found on tap here and there.

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Friday Froth: What's New?

Every day is like waking up in a new place when you're a beer fan. The craft beer scene continues to hit higher plateaus. Brewers and beer artisans no longer seem content to simply produce a great beer in a recognizable style, they're reaching out into the realms of winemaking, distillation and cooking just to see what they can offer, what they can contribute to zymurgy. I've mentioned the experimental barrel-aging going on with B. United's Zymatore Project, but every stumbling step seems to put me mouth to mouth with a pint of inspired brewing. It's like the Seattle music scene in 1990, or Parisian cafes in 1870: artists are communicating with artists, experiencing each others' product, and reconsidering what they can produce. 

Yesterday I had a Rogue Chipotle ale. Yes, yes, I know: chipotle has been done, done to death, buried, reanimated in a unholy ceremony using two parts voodoo and one part Guy Fieri's wrist band, and been put down and buried again, but there I was, having to recalibrate what I thought about beer.

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Friday Froth: Outside and Inside

It can all seem so simple, these twenty two moving parts. Eleven on eleven, they violently mesh, or they fly apart. Some people look at this whole and perceive only a lumpen, tangled jumble. From orbit, the Amazon rainforest is reduced to a green carpet. A glance at the watch's face shows only two hands. A second's worth of recognition, then on to something else, the actual time already forgotten. On the watch's face is the hour. Behind that: gears, escapments, jewels. Under the green, jungle canopy: rivers, streams, lives, civilizations. Guttural cries, naked violence, and the necessary imbalance of the scoreboard are the most apparent facets of American football. Tribal, atavistic pleasures, occasionally waved off as simple things by and for simple minds. Motivating and informing it all, though, this. Twenty two individual goals made systemic by design; the moving parts of a machine imbued with a will and given a target. Put the parts together and see if the result is harmonic precision, or an expensive spray of ragged metal and oh dear, I seem to have a hairspring lodged in my cornea. That beer in your hand is more than just "a beer."

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Friday Froth: Lesson Learned

Your average lemur makes a terrible manservant. Don't ever waste a summer trying. It takes them forever to drag a beer from one room to the next, and you'd think they have dexterous little hands, but I found their laundry folding skills to be incredibly sub-par. Exotic animal friends can be both time consuming and delicious, but a Cornish game hen provides the latter with no need of training or a wee tuxedo. Unless well-dressed poultry is your thing, you monster. But let's put aside whatever predilections you have for Capon in chapeau and return to our subject, shall we? 

In the upper midwest (where the men are men and the women are frozen to something) sits Grand Rapids, Michigan. It has an area of 45.3 sq. mi., is home to the Frederick Meijer Gardens, the DeVos Place Convention Center and many other places you've read about both here and on Wikipedia if you've never been to the place and need something to write about it in your beer column. TRANSITION It is also home to Founders Brewing Company, one of the more significant craft breweries in the United States, at the northeast side of which you can spy Connecticut, where Founders beers can now be, um... found. 

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