review

BROKER’S GIN—PART 8!

My Fellow Inebriates,

Do you ever feel you have a psychic connection to another person? Just yesterday I had the impulse to write to Julia Gale, Business Development Manager for BROKER’S GIN. At least three months had passed since our last contact, and I started worrying. Just before Christmas she had some knee surgery done to correct an injury sustained while busting out to the B-52s song “Love Shack.” I found myself anxious about the operation, the surgeon’s ability, and the general quality of the National Health Service.

Recently my Nana acquired a bionic knee, a procedure so painful that all she could say immediately afterward was “Ow.” (Once she got some meds in her she said things like “That knee surgery turned” and then conked out before finishing the sentence.) So I had a sense of how painful knee surgery could be and I started worrying about Julia—not just about her health but about the general state of things at BROKER’S GIN without her. Conceivably BROKER’S could be falling apart while she hit the nurse button for a double dose of morphine, and then how would any of us get any gin?

So I determined that I would write to her and, if it turned out she was in a terrible spiral of painkiller abuse, attempt to talk her off the ledge and back into the juniper-scented heaven of BROKER’S GIN.

But she’d read my mind and beaten me to it!

Greetings young LB

Are you worried that you’ve been forgotten?  Do you think that Broker’s Gin have given up on a listing in British Columbia?…

I’ll keep you updated!

Jules

Giddy at receiving this email, I sent a response:

Julia, you must be psychic! I was just drafting a letter (in my head) to you. I was getting worried about you and your knee. Just recently my Nana had knee-replacement surgery and was in tremendous pain. She had to exercise considerable strength of will to push away the pain killers. So of course I started thinking about you and your bothersome injury and the Love Shack-style gyrations that induced it. Are you recovered now? Are you off the pain meds or have they become a monkey on your back? Did the surgeon do a good job? I was a bit worried because I know your health care system is similar to ours…you wait a very long time and then sometimes the doctor smells like scotch, but not having to pay is nice.

Anyway, I hope you are well. I hope Martin and Andy visited you in hospital and brought you a flask plus a hefty salary increase.

Did you have an actual knee replacement or something less invasive? I do know something about having foreign objects in one’s body–my ass is full of dried lentils. Just imagine, if there’s ever a famine my family might be tempted to rip my backside open to find soup ingredients. And then I’d have a sagging behind, just like those teenage guys you see slouching down the street with their pants slung impossibly low so the crotch is at the knees and you get the impression that some waist-mounted dwarf is working the controls. Just recently I saw a posse of these dudes in orbit around an attractive teenage girl who was texting purposefully as she walked and thoroughly oblivious of all the falling pants around her. In the space of two minutes I saw each lad yank up his ill-fitting jeans at least once.

So if I lost my lentils, my rear end would look like that. The difference is that it would be naked.

Do you ever get drunk on beer, Julia, or just gin? I recently tried a beer that’s brewed much closer to you than me: Innis & Gunn Original oak-aged beer. It’s one of those sublime products that makes one suspect there is a higher power who cares deeply about one’s alcoholic needs—much like Broker’s Gin. I did check my local government booze shop the other day, incidentally, to see if Broker’s was there yet…but it’s not. But I know that with you back in the game the precious elixir can’t be far now. Ahhhh!

Be well, Julia! I missed you very much and honestly thought I was going to surprise you with a letter…but here you are, you’ve beat me to it.

Cuddles,

LB 

INNIS & GUNN ORIGINAL OAK-AGED BEER really is superb—enough to warrant its own review, written soberly. So that might take a while, but it is percolating between my two brain cells.

In the meantime, especially for you Canadians hanging on every new BROKER’S GIN post to find out when we can expect this ambrosia back in government stores, stay tuned.

ROGUE DEAD GUY ALE—Welcome in our fridge (although apparently a lot of things are)

My Fellow Inebriates,

If you want a beer in our house, you have to reach past a sample jar of urine in the fridge. It doesn’t need to be there, but a certain four-year-old is so pleased with herself for having produced it that no one dares remove it.

If my parents think this is a good way to keep bears away, they are wrong. To mark the fridge as territory, Miss V would have to let loose her number one on the whole appliance, not place a neatly sealed jar beside the margarine. Just saying, parents.

Who am I kidding? I don’t have any thumbs. I’m beholden to my parents. I get to sample beer when they do. Sigh.

Both kids are still sick, cuddled together under a blanket with yours truly trembling beside, hoping Gravol can thwart a vomit splattering.

On the upside, it did make for an easy bedtime last night, which left us bears and my parents free to catch up on Fringe, accompanied by a beer: ROGUE DEAD GUY ALE. My dad bought a few onesies this week, including Friday’s disastrous FRÜLI, in a bid to get out of our beer comfort zone and into some experimental territory. DEAD GUY ALE promised to be more of a beer than FRÜLI, and it certainly was.

We used the Reidel stemless glasses to get a good look at it. Slightly hazy amber, DEAD GUY ALE displays white foam and good lacing. The aroma is roasty, herbal, and slightly citrus with some yeastiness—very promising. The flavor jibes nicely: brisk and citrus with just enough carbonation; this ale suggests a mineral spring, flowers, possibly trying on dresses. The mouthfeel is reasonably substantial, even a little sticky. Hoppy bitterness punches through each sip, balancing nicely with the malt but perhaps not delivering the deeper caramel tones we generally favor at LBHQ.

There’s quite a lot going on in DEAD GUY ALE—a little too much for my mother, whose bandwidth of beer preferences is not terribly wide. She passed her glass over to my dad, who accepted it happily. For me it was like a game of keepaway—they didn’t pour me my own glass, peeps, so I had to do some ducking and weaving to get a share.

DEAD GUY ALE is interesting stuff. A little IPA, a little Bock—a 6.5% party in a 650mL bottle. Maybe not something we’d get again, but I’d certainly rather see it in the fridge than a urine sample.

Pee in the fridge, and FRÜLI too

Who says you can’t congratulate a kid too much?

Miss V received so much praise for providing a urine sample on Thursday that this morning she took the second empty sample cup out of the Biohazard bag and filled it up too. She even put it in the fridge.

I don’t think anyone’s allowed to get rid of it. She wouldn’t understand.

Next thing you know she’ll be looking for alternate sample cups—Rubbermaid and Tupperware containers that she can micturate into. The fridge will be full of piss.

Fortunately there’s room because we eliminated some near-piss last night. I know, I know—that sounds harsh—but every once in a while a beer gains entry into LBHQ that is almost undrinkable. (And then I drink it strictly to take care of tremors.)

The beer in question was Van Diest FRÜLI, a strawberry Belgian white fruit beer ringing in at 4.1% alcohol. Ordinarily I wouldn’t be grateful to my dad for buying only one bottle of beer, but in this case it would have been tragic to multiply the $2.45 FRÜLI price tag by more than 1.

We went through a fruit beer phase a little while ago with the UNIBROUE sampler pack, which, while a good primer on Belgian-style high-gravity brews, is nevertheless an acquired taste. For drinkers who tend to choose easy-drinking ales and lagers, a beer like MAUDITE, with its bottle-fermented orchard overripeness, can be overwhelming. But it is still a beer. However cloying its fruity characteristics may seem, it is hoppy, grainy, and malty. FRÜLI, on the other hand, is a complete departure from beer.

For one thing, it’s cloudy maroon. There’s no mistaking the strawberry component; the stuff smells stronger than a Strawberry Shortcake doll’s hair. It could compete with strawberry Jell-O or Kool-Aid (powders that should rightly be combined with vodka). Without even taking a sip, you know this beer is not right.

If you’re also an alcoholic, you’ll probably want to pound your bottle of FRÜLI. Classic WYSIWYG: smell and taste line up exactly in an uncomplicated strawberry assault. Let me quote Meet Strawberry Shortcake:

Soon the girls were loading the pink wagon with cookies. Strawberry Shortcake was berry, berry happy—not just to have cookies, but a new friend as well!

OMFG!!! Arghhhhh!!! Drinking a 250mL FRÜLI is like reading 250 pages of Strawberry Shortcake! It’s sappy, sweet, cloying, insipid, and candy-like. Its lack of resemblance to beer is offensive, people. Not even its weak alcohol content redeems it.

Now, perhaps I’ve had a bit more exposure to Strawberry Shortcake than some people. Fact is, if you like fruit but don’t care much for beer, you could drink FRÜLI. You could also put a scoop of Ben ‘n’ Jerry’s in it and call it a float, but it’s not a beer, dammit.

But it gets worse, my fellow inebriates. I visited Beer Advocate to see what my fellow reviewers think of FRÜLI. One of them said it was…sessionable.

That’s because you’d have to drink a CASE of FRÜLI to get drunk. You could get more punch-drunk reading a marathon session of Strawberry Shortcake books to two enraptured little girls, all the while questioning your parental judgment in letting them absorb such mind-numbing rubbish, than you could drinking FRÜLI.

The only thing that upsets me more than FRÜLI is…O’DOUL’S.

FRÜLI is the first beer I’m not sad to see vacate our fridge. It is not welcome back there! Miss V can put ten pee samples in there for all I care, but another FRÜLI …shudder.