Awkwardness and respect

So, I went to the local liquor store earlier this evening to pick up a couple brews. While it usually is a bit exciting, it all got a bit crazy when I posted this picture on the Twitters.





On the left is the absolutely stunning Renaissance Craftsman - a chocolate oatmeal stout smoother than Bobby Womack. It had its release quite recently at The Malthouse in Wellington and it sounds like it is as good as ever.

The beer on the right, however, is a bit different. It is Yeastie Boys' 2012 incarnation of Her Majesty. Only problem is, it isn't supposed to be out yet...

OH SNAAAAAAAAAAAP!!!

The bottle store had just put it on the shelf this evening, so I had to get it. The plan was to have it as my "huzzah I've graduated" beer. But that may have changed after brewer Stu McKinlay told me it shouldn't be on shelves yet.

I'm thinking of it like a movie or album that's been leaked online before the official release date: while fair game if you want it, it goes against the spirit of what the artist/s wanted if you consume said art before it's intended release.

So, in my cupboard it shall stay until such time as Stu and fellow Yeastie Boy Sam Possenniskie actually want it to be drunk. I just think that's fair enough really.

But what can I tell you about it? Well, sweet sod all really. The bottle is somewhat vague in its description, probably on purpose.





For those that can't read that, here's the synopsis:

"Her Majesty is a warming strong ale, now in its third incarnation, that we release each winter as the days shorten. This year's model is a dark ale that brings together a mixture of rich British and German malts, a pinch of fruit and earthiness from its East Kent hops, a little secret something for complexity, and a slow cool fermentation to highlight the purity of the ingredients."

Apart from that, I can tell you it's 7% and comes in a 750ml bottle.

And I'm looking forward to drinking it.

Ain't it pretty!!!

 I was going to finish a post about Yeastie Boys, but I got an awesome email today with these images attached
 

HLT, mash tun and kettle :D

Yes, Chris Banks (the man behind Bank's Brewing Hardware) has been a busy man indeed. Aside from helping ParrotDog out with their brewery, he's also been putting together my three-tier gravity system. I would explain how good his work is, but I'll let the pictures do the talking...

The same, but from the other side

Sweet steel goodness

Sexy false bottom on the mash tun

Inside of the HLT

The poser shot

He said things should be ready in a few weeks. This means two things - a trip to Wellington, and a need to decide what I'm going to brew first. I'm thinking a pilsner will be an easy place to start, but the weather here in The Swamp is telling me a brown ale would be a winner.

I never really got into brown ale until I had 8 Wired Brewing's Rewired brown ale. Imagine getting a can of Double Brown, throwing it in the bin and getting a rich, light chocolate beer with some great fruity hop characters. So delicious! Went down a treat with this deboned chicken stuffed with curried rice (omnomnom for sure).

I also got my hands on a bottle of Søren's latest offering - the C4 Double Coffee Brown Ale. This tasted less like beer and more like coffee, as you would expect when it's brewed with some delicious coffee from C4 coffee roasters in Christchurch. I swear if you gave me this and a carbonated coffee side-by-side, I would not be able to tell the difference. The man really is a brewing wizard and I really hope I get to tell him so to his face during Beervana.


Speaking of which, I'm volunteering at the festival this year! So make sure you pay me a visit during Session One on Friday. I'll also be floating around at Session Two, and probably Session Three. It should be a great, beery weekend and I hope to meet heaps of great beery people.

The problem with being super

Those older than I will be able to remember a time when you couldn't buy liquor at the same shop which sold your vegetables, meat and nappies. You either had to head to a bottle store to take something home, or spend your imbibement time at a pub.

Part of me is glad you can put meat, veges and beer in your shopping trolley; there's something just so easy about ticking off the entire list, all under the same roof.

But at the same time, shopping for beer in a supermarket is a risky business. Sure, if you're lucky enough to have New World Thordon nearby you have no reason to worry. In fact, most Wellington supermarkets are well stocked and the stock is well rotated. However, I am not so lucky here in The Swamp.

For example - I once headed into New World Pioneer here in The Swamp. Apart from the usual bland crap, they had an island of great-looking brews, including Fuller's ESB, Kriek Boon, Epic Pale Ale.... and Emerson's Organic Pilsner.

There's just one problem - Emerson's un-organiced their pilsner in November 2010. That's more than a year since this beer was last brewed with organic hops.

Now, time for some beer nerdery....

Most beers fall into two camps - "drink fresh" or "drink aged". Pilsners, IPAs and lagers are usually best when had as close to the day they were brewed as possible. Other beers - imperial stouts, porters and Scotch ales t name but a few - can sometimes need a bit of time to open up and release all their best flavours.

So, for a pilsner to sit on the shelf for more than a year is not a good thing at all. No doubt if I had drank one, it would have lost its hoppy hit and been bland, boring and bad beyond any place the brewer imagined. It may also have had that chalky texture hoppy beers get when they lose that fresh bite. If the supermarket wasn't driven by profit and actually cared about its product, it would pull it. It hasn't and that annoys me to no end.

But New World Pioneer isn't the only criminal in this regard. There's a cafe right across from my work with a fridge full of "expired" beer, as well as multiple other supermarkets in the same boat. While it sucks for me to not get fresh product, I feel most for the brewers and the customers who do not know any better.

Think about it - you pour your time, money, energy and love into creating something. You send it out the door, flush with pride, only for some retailer to handle it badly and sell it when it shouldn't be. A customer wanting to try something new takes it home and thinks it's crap and vows never to try anything with your name on it ever again.

Does that make you feel stink? Angry? Frustrated? I wonder how Richard Emerson would feel if he knew how his product was treated by some up here.
 So while supermarkets are handy and can sometimes be pretty cool, I'm a big fan of bypassing them when doing beer shopping. Because sometimes, they're not so super after all.

Maybe the wrong time of year, but still delicious

And for the record - Emerson's Pilsner is absolutely delicious, bursting with that new world pilsner characteristic: fruit salad in a glass. A lot of people talk about a beer they would marry. Well, if I could have a summer wife and a winter wife (no offence hun), E-Pils would without a doubt be my relax-on-a-beach-in-a-swimsuit wife.

I have fond memories of spending two weeks off work doing nothing more than eating sandwiches, reading books, bathing in what had to be a record string of good Wellington days and drinking plenty of this beer. It really is one of those beers I just can't get enough of and can always depend upon to hit the spot. So, head somewhere where you can get a fresh batch of it and give it a hoon - it really shouldn't let you down.

I should also note that Pioneer NW has pulled all their Emerson's, but only recently. It was still there far longer than it should have been.

A tipple for any time

Phil Cook - friend, former co-worker and owner of one of the best-kept beards I have seen - managed to impart many nuggets of wisdom, both spoken and demonstrated, when I worked with him at Wellington bar The Malthouse, such as:

- Don't take crap from people just because they wear suits. They're insecure, have more money than brains and, when they ask for the most expensive beer, tell them it is $660. It's just more fun that way.
- Beer nerds are usually identifiable by being bearded, working in IT, or both.
- Conventional grammar is over-rated.

But the one thing that sticks the most is his love of "occasion beer". The guy loves to do things only a real beer nerd would do, like source Canadian beer on Canada Day, be stubborn to (almost) the point of silliness in arranging American beer taps for the 4th of July, or simply buying beers to share with people just because they like them.

I think most people have some sort of understanding of this. People go to fancy restaurants when they have a special occasion. People buy stuff they don't need with their first paycheck from a new job. I'm sure plenty of people crack open a nice bottle of wine to celebrate birthdays/New Year/graduations/etc. We all know how to occasion, but we all occasion in different ways.

I, however, have taken the Phil Cook method to occasioning. If you haven't figured it out yet, I like beer. So, what better thing to occasion with?

I've had a fair few occasion beers in my time.....

I'm also a bit of a collector of things. These (he says from his keyboard, pointing at the picture on the screen), are some of the bottles of beer which I've had as occasion beers over the last few years. Keeping them is a bit of a mixture of things - some of it to remember occasions, others because they just look cool.

One of them I had with my Dad after a driving lesson during our traditional debriefs, another was the first beer I had at Hashigo Zake. One of them is a beer I celebrated/commiserated/occasioned my last day as a hospitality worker with. There's even a beer I split with Phil for no real reason at all (you can read about that exact bottle of beer here).

The coolest one up there - in my opinion - is the now-empty bottle of Hallertau Beastwars IPA. I keep it for a few reasons: that stupidly awesome artwork on the label, it's a limited edition beer, and because it is probably the one beer I looked forward to the most before it was launched.

You gotta admit, it's a great beard. Photo: The Rock

For those that don't know, Beastwars are a band. They're from Wellington, their frontman has a great beard and they play metal. They also happen to love craft brews. In this clip, I'm pretty sure their drummer is set to swig away on some Epic Flying Nun straight from the bottle. That's what you call a classy bogan.

Anywho, the story goes that Hallertau brewer Steve Ploughman thought up the recipe for an IPA while listening to Beastwars. Discussions no doubt occurred and the rest, as they too often say, is history.

When I caught wind of this, I was very excited. You know, the kind that gives you a joy-induced near-manic grin on your face. I love music - if anything, it was my first obsession - and I'm a big fan of beer. So, I hassled both Hallertau and Beastwars via Twitter to ensure I knew when and where the drop would land in Wellington first.

One lovely day, I was told it was in stock at Glengarry Thorndon. Cue frantic dash across Wellington and more frantic search of bottle store. What would have been much easier would be to ask the person behind the counter about the situation. Turned out it wasn't in for a while, but he took my number and txt me when it showed up a week later. That cued another frantic dash across the city to get said beer and get it home.

Call me a douche, fanboy or old-fashioned geek, but as soon as I got home I cracked out a glass and bottle opener, cranked the speakers on the sound system to max and chucked on Beastwars' album. And I sat there, drank it and let the sludgy metal wash over me and the rest of the nearby residents of Mt Cook, Wellington.

As for the beer - well, it tasted exactly like the album. It was big, in your face, and particularly angry while still being approachable.

I've got that bottle because it reminds me of a time when I was excited, exhilarated and just plain happy. Which is what occasion beer is all about really. It shouldn't be the only thing to make you happy and shouldn't be the only thing to give you joy (not that there's anything wrong with that), but occasion beer should be part of an occasion which makes you happy.

And that, to me, can only ever be a good thing.

Things just ain't what they used to be

Photo: KFC Denmark (I think. Me no speak Danish)

Just like KFC when you're not hungover, kebabs when you aren't on your way home from the pub and my fitness levels, time has a weird way of telling your memory that things were AMAZING "that time then", which leads to far too much disappointment at a later date. And this always seems to only happen to the good things in life. After all, who is going to hate bad things from a year or so ago actually getting good? But I digress.

Beer is what this all about, specifically in relation to Renaissance Craftsman. A seasonal offering from the Blenheim brewer, I had my first taste of it last year. I still remember that first sniff - I swear it was like putting my nose in a bag of freshly made, ultra-savory Milo powder. It all got a bit Tony Montana for a few seconds before I actually drank some.

It was like the best hot chocolate I had ever had, but gone cold. I was hooked. I wanted more. I was ready to run cocoa across the Gulf of Mexico if it meant more of this beer.

Fast-forward about a year and I have a glass of the 2012 edition in front of me as what was the dessert to a good night's dinner of chicken, mushroom, olive and caper risotto.

Photo: Me (yup, I need better backgrounds)

On the nose there is a huge difference already. Instead of snorting cocoa powder, I get more soy sauce/umami with a rich warm chocolate note. Upon drinking, it's far less sweet and much more balanced. It's all a bit underwhelming after last year really. It even manages to get pretty bad when my girlfriend says she gets a cigarette butt note, which nearly kills this beer for me in the same way Yeastie Boy Stu McKinlay killed my love of Three Boys Wheat when he compared it to dish-washing liquid.

 All in all, it was a bit of a let down. BUT - and a big but at that, we're talking Texas big - I'll still give it another few tries before I'm convinced it's not as good.

Because while nostalgia is a bitch, no one likes a hater.

In other news, Little Beer Quarter in Wellington is playing host to a pre-launch of the 2012 edition of Her Majesty tomorrow night. I'm going to try get there for it, but I also have to catch up with the old man. Hopefully I can squeeze in both, but the magnum of wine I need to crack as a celebration of me graduating may prevent me from making it to LBQ. But do head down if you can! It's a cracker of a bar which just oozes charm from every inch.

If you want to check out the place before you go, this interactive interior tour is the way to go.