beer tasting

RUSSELL CREAM ALE—Won’t start a fight, or at least stays in the middle

My Fellow Inebriates,

Miss P never had a kindergarten nemesis, but of course Miss V has found hers. If you met V, you’d understand how natural this is. You’d know, after having a meal at the LBHQ table or witnessing bedtime, that V cannot operate without adversaries. She has to live with the ones at home, which means everybody gets along most of the time—but her school nemesis is another story.

PaperCamera Veronica 2012-05-13-11-47-16Take V at the end of a long row of monkey bars. From across the span she sees “H” starting to swing across, bar by bar. This is a logical prompt for V to start from her own side, monkeying her way with characteristic aggression, surely anticipating a clash in the middle and prepared to hang there until Saturday or her nemesis gives up and drops.

In fairness to V, H has been pretty mean to her this year.

In fairness to H, V’s reports are not terribly objective.

According to their teacher, they have a real thing going, and that’s why they sit at opposite sides of the classroom. The teacher does her best to prevent matter meeting antimatter, but she can only do so much, especially when the two seek each other out.

“That’s got to be stressful for the teacher. You should pack a beer for her with V’s homework,” I told my parents, generously thinking of our small stock of RUSSELL CREAM ALE.

What? You think other parents don’t send beer to school with their kids?

russell cream aleYou knew this already, but my parents aren’t that kind of progressive thinker. Oh well—more for us.

RUSSELL CREAM ALE is pretty quintessential—can you say “pretty quintessential”?—for the brew. It pours a clear, deep amber with a soapy-hued head that takes a few minutes to dissipate. Inhale and you get sweet malt and nuts and pronounced breadiness with some floral hops chiming in. The flavor is mild, with the hops pulling their punches until the aftertaste, where they linger with hints of fruit and weeds, providing an effective balance to the initial malty sweetness. The beer sits on your palate politely—kind of a Goldilocks mouthfeel, which obviously passes muster with bears, particularly this one.

Overall, RUSSELL CREAM ALE is nicely balanced although not especially memorable. Just a solid, good-tasting, perfectly standard exemplar of the kind of cream ale your barkeeper might pour you from the tap. In other words—totally non-provoking and non-confrontational—the sort of thing I bet V’s teacher could have used this morning.

COORS LIGHT—Best enjoyed when it’s free

My Fellow Inebriates,

Our next-door neighbor has a sign on his lawn that reads:

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along with some gardening implements and…a chainsaw.

Amazingly, since yesterday the free hoe and spade have disappeared, but the free chainsaw remains.

This is astonishing given how many tween- and teenaged boys walk this road to and from school. What one of them wouldn’t want his own chainsaw? Especially without having to undergo the red tape involved in requesting such a tool from one’s parents.

That the chainsaw is a hedge trimmer shouldn’t limit its appeal. Are potential miscreants concerned, perhaps, that it’s broken and not worth the hassle? Or is our neighborhood gentler than I thought?

MayJune2011-001-free-rocksI don’t want a chainsaw—OMG, can you imagine?—but when one is lying at the foot of a grass-mounted sign that says “FREE,” the urge to take it is strong. Researchers have demonstrated that people will avail themselves of free things even if they have absolutely no use for them. In a famous study, people were invited to take “free rocks” from a sidewalk stall, and many of them did just that. Because they were free.

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This is exactly why I had a COORS LIGHT the other day. It was free. Somebody said, “Hey, do you want a beer? Sorry, it’s COORS LIGHT.” And of course I said yes.

Straw-yellow and blandly corn-flavored with frothy foam, its aroma wafted a veritable periodic table of unwanted metals. Cold temperatures are indeed a friend to COORS LIGHT; while cold it is mercifully flavorless, but as its temperature increases, so does its ability to deposit lingering, unwelcome aftertastes.

But I’m being a douchebag here. COORS LIGHT has no pretensions of “sessionability” or even quaffability. It’s a straight hockey beer and fully capable of delivering refreshment after you’ve, say, trimmed the hedge, cursed your crappy hedge trimmer and resolved to buy a new one, then left it on your lawn with an open invitation for anyone, including neighborhood children, to take it home.

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GUINNESS BLACK LAGER—I’ll have another, and so will my dad

My Fellow Inebriates,

Thank goodness my dad had the sense to ignore Mum’s would-be dry weekdays edict. Seriously, we boys need to stick together against this sort of mini-temperance move. If my dad hadn’t felt the pull of the liquor store and gone in for some GUINNESS BLACK LAGER I would have worried about him.

Mum says I deserve hate mail for implying she can simply be ignored on financial matters. She said it was anti-feminist of me to suggest that Dad and I need to paint her anti-alcohol (at least on weekdays) campaign as irrational and militant, and that if I wasn’t careful she’d encourage the kids to put me in a dress ASAP and engage me in playtime well past Guinness-drinking hour, thank you very much, you nasty little bear.

DSCN2040I’m not making up the fact that my dad and I are overwhelmed here at LBHQ. The bathroom is full of ponies. Everything has glitter on it. We stockpile Purex’s pink breast cancer awareness toilet paper, which is so pink that it prevents you from seeing whether your ass is bleeding, if in fact it is. Yes, Dad and I are outnumbered. All we have is beer.

Moreover, I won’t get any hate mail because I don’t get any mail. Either my readers are completely nonplussed by the blog and left speechless or they simply aren’t reading it (my money’s on the latter). Ergo, I told Mum, I can say whatever I want.

She conceded the point but argued that Dad and I share more than beer. The stereo, the car, and probably the porn, she itemized.

“We watch gobs of porn,” I said—a small joust at her insecurities.

“That’s fine,” she said. “Lucky you’re nearby—you’re nice and absorbent.”

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OMG!! Maybe my allegiance is all wrong, my fellow inebriates. In the spirit of reconciliation, I suggested we try some of that GUINNESS BLACK LAGER my dad bought so disobediently. She’s probably the smart one after all—for surely it’s better to save up one’s drinking for the weekend and then get ripped to kingdom come.

This wasn’t what she had in mind when she first proposed dry weekdays; it was financially motivated—i.e., doubling up on booze to make up for Monday to Friday would defeat the purpose.

I made one last appeal: “But haven’t you read The Secret? If we act like we’re poor by cutting back on alcohol, we’ll create an impoverished vibe and perpetuate our poverty. We have to throw money around and behave like it doesn’t matter.”

After that she just stopped talking to me. We drank our GUINNESS BLACK LAGER in silence.

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Black and tan like a Guinness

As you’d expect, it’s the color of my friend Blackie Bear with tan foam (Blackie isn’t frothing at the mouth currently but he has some tan bits). An abiding affection for GUINNESS DRAUGHT must have programmed me to expect a deep, malty flavor—dark, boomy notes rather than the high notes you get off the top with the BLACK LAGER. While it does give off a malty smell, this proves deceptive upon the first sharp sip. True enough, I should be expecting lager-like characteristics, but it’s still a shock to taste watery barley and sourdough. It does settle down as it warms, but it continues to rail against all the sensory suggestions that attend the GUINNESS name, not to mention its warm, dark color.

The mouthfeel is inadequate but the carbonation is compensatory: forceful and emphatic. Coffee and malt hit the nose and the palate like a sloppy drunk trying to throw a punch. This beer is all over the map and yet it comes together in a fighting Irish sort of way. It’s pretty good if not memorable for anything other than some minor weird incongruities, and I would have another. And another. And another.