Top Shelf thursday, November 2014: Horn of Plenty

If the recent weather is any indicator, fall is definitely on its way out.  The food-growing season is done, & anything that hadn’t been harvested by the beginning of last week would’ve been killed by single degree temperatures.  So time to eat, right?  Time to buckle down & start storing up fat for the winter.  That might not be such a big priority for us civilized, mobile bipeds, but try telling that to our reptile brains.  Cold air plus more dark equals “build those reserves”, gobble up calories while you can.  Thanksgiving is a great symbol of this transition from the salad days of summer to the lean, survivalist nights of winter.  It made sense for this month’s tasting to reflect that, featuring beers that used food stuffs not included in “traditional” (read: “Reinheitsgebot-compliant”) recipes. 

We started light, with a beer representative of the working season: Saison Rustica, from Virginia’s Hardywood Park Craft Brewery.  This easy, dry farmhouse-style ale would hit the spot on a hot day, with a little twist from peppercorns & star anise in the finish.

The hemispheres met with Wells Banana Bread Beer, from the UK’s Wells & Young’s Ltd.  The toffee notes of an English-style dark ale blended naturally into a sweet banana flavor, a logical extrapolation that saved this from being a gimmick.

Terrapin in-sourced Pineapple Express, the result of an employee homebrew competition.  This Munich-style helles lager was given a euphoric dose of pineapple & smoked malt, creating a sweet, slightly acidic flavor that singed around the edges.  Puff-puff!

Plenty of fruit found its way into tonight’s line-up, & fruit can often mean sour & funky beers (yum!).  ShawneeCraft brought it with their Frambozenbier, a blend of two vintages of their Raspberry Blanche, one of which had been aged in oak.  It was surprising that such a light, subtle source beer created such a tart & intensely flavorful offspring, with big raspberry, big oak, & a puckering sour character.  Free Will Brewing (out of southeastern PA, like ShawneeCraft) presented Alexander, a saison with sour cherries, oak, & brettanomyces.  Sour beers tend to be divisive, & this was no exception – even among fans of sour beers – with its mildly tart body & deeply funky & downright strange aftertaste.

Evil Twin’s collaboration with Sante Adairius Rustic Ales, Joey Pepper, continued with the wild yeast.  This cousin-of-Orval, brewed with white peppercorns, brought a kind of savory twist to the earthy farmhouse notes of the bretted Belgian-style pale.

Our sour departure alit with Rodenbach’s Caractere Rouge, a Flanders red with cranberries, cherries, & raspberries.  This hit hard with the fruit, but showed some restraint with the sour, delivering a sweet beer that veered more toward strawberry than the actual berries it contained.

We stayed in Belgian-esque territory with Too Much Coffee Man from Oregon’s Gigantic Brewing.  This coffee beer took the unusual approach of using an imperial black farmhouse ale as its base, blending the coffee with the spicy phenols & roast of the dark saison – very interesting!

Rather unceremoniously, we passed a Top Shelf Thursday milestone – our 25^th tasting!  I chose to mark this occasion by going a little “off script” & sharing a Stone Vertical Epic 11.11.11 from my cellar.  This Belgian-style amber was brewed with Anaheim peppers & cinnamon which stood out more when fresh, but after aging a few years, melded into a tasty kind of dark fruit pudding with just a hint of pepper flavor, without heat.

It would be a little ostentatious to include a “foodie” flight & not include Dogfish Head, so we invited their Scandinavian ancient ale, Kvasir, to the party.  Brewed with cranberries, lingonberries, birch syrup, honey, yarrow, & myrica gale, you could smell the juniper-like aroma from the table, complimented well by the sweet-tart berries.  Always a mouthful with Dogfish Head!

And for the second month in a row, Avery Brewing lent its muscle to the final course, this time with The Beast Grand Cru.  Avery packed a lot of sugar into this Belgian-style dark ale, with dates, raisins, turbinado, blackstrap molasses, honey, & dark candy sugar, bringing the ABV up to 16.1% & leaving plenty of residuals for a sweet, full-bodied ale. 

It was a fun & interesting exercise to pick out the food components in these beers – after all, beer itself is an agricultural product.  It’s a relatively recent development that things like spice, fruit, & other culinary substances are the exception rather than the norm.  Just another small excursion across the vast continent of beer.  Thanks to all who came out tonight – those who’ve become regulars at our little monthly get-togethers (especially Matt, who hasn’t missed one yet!), as well as those who joined us for the first time.  It was an intimate group; all were, & are, welcome.  Top Shelf Thursday takes off for the month of December – see you in 2015!