If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where this beer was born, and what my lousy drive to the store was like, and how the brewers and Stalzy's came up with this beer, and all that Chris Drosner kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
Stalzy's Deli & Bakery is about a mile from my house as the crow flies. They cure their own meats, ferment their own cabbage, and bake their own bread. It's one of the great comfort food joints of Madison for me, especially since Ella's closed, as their menu with corned beef sandwiches and matzo ball soup brings back warm childhood memories of restaurants in Chicago. Stalzy's has never advertised itself as a Jewish deli but they certainly make overtures to it with the aforementioned matzo ball soup, challah bread, and lox.
But instead of knish, kreplach, or kugel, we get the ubiquitous Wisconsin fish fry. Ooh! I do believe they make their own Russian dressing too. Good stuff and essential when you bring home some of their corned beef or pastrami to make your reubens at home.
Delta Beer Lab is a bit further afield. It reminds me of Stalzy's in that it doesn't seem to be a hip and trendy place. More stalwarty. There's no cachet in being seen eating a corned beef sandwich. Similarly, Delta is ensconced on the south side of Madison and the far side of the Beltline, a long way from all of those thirsty Epic employees on the isthmus. I've never heard anything bad about them but I've also never heard of their beers really making a big splash.
A friend brought some of their coffee brown ale on a camping trip a few years back and it was wonderful to sip it next to the fire. I've reviewed a couple of their brews here and give them a lot of credit for making an unfruited gose. They're no phonies, just not downtown trend makers either.
So these two joints got together somehow and someone came up with the brilliant idea of making a rye lager. I miss heading to Chicago in the fall and grabbing some Hoss from Great Divide, a rye Oktoberfest. Perhaps it's available again but I haven't seen it in years. I love rye and I love lagers. I love how they tend to emphasize the grain tastes instead of the Hawaiian Punch ones likes IPAs do these days.
I bought a 4-pack of Make Rye Not War on the same trip as the one I bought Donna's Pickle Beer which brought me perilously close to being able to mix up my own Pastrami on Rye beer that Pipeworks does. Or did.
My pour of Stalzy's Rye produced a nice head of off-white, loose foam. It lasted only a little while. The beer was clear and of a deep copper/amber color. There was a smattering of bubbles inside. Taking a whiff, I smelled the titular grain along with a faint bit of caramel. Also faint was a stone fruit smell. There was something like black pepper in there too.
My tongue was greeted by a very nice fizziness, comfortably nested midway between the extreme effervescence of a Berliner Weisse and the meek carbonation of an English Mild. The body was medium-lightish and had a distinct bready taste, which I would have been disappointed to not find considering this is a "collaboration" with a bakery. I put collaboration in quotation marks because I simply disbelieve the notion that anyone from Stalzy's did anything more on brewday beyond drink beer and watch the brewer ply his or her trade. The taste was rounded out with a prominent rye spiciness, a touch of that caramel, and black pepper.
On the finish, my tongue was left with a lingering rye taste that was joined by black pepper notes as the hops came in to clear the palate of grain flavors and make way for an ending of medium dryness and bitterness.
I'll admit going in that I was a bit anxious about this beer because I don't know that I've ever had a lager from Delta Beer Lab. Breweries that do 99% ales and then turn around and do a lager usually make something rather bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know pilsners are trendy but they take more skill than just hopping the living fuck out them.
But Make Rye Not War turned out to be absolutely fantastic. The rye flavor was given pride of place and I simply loved loved loved! the sharp spicy grain taste. And the beer wasn't very sweet. A bit of caramel, yes, but more like bread. I just wanted to bust out in a Saint John's dance, I was so happy. The grainy goodness was complemented perfectly by that black pepper taste. It's a flavor that's present in one of my favorite brews, Eliot Ness from Great Lakes Brewing. I have always wondered how that flavor is brought about and just assume it's the hops and the way they're cooked. Perhaps you can get hops with a Noble taste to go from something herbal towards black pepper by putting it in the brew kettle at a specific time or some such thing.
Unlike more recent rye brews I've tried (see here and here), there doesn't appear to be any caraway in Make Rye Not War which I don't mind as I am an unseeded rye kind of guy. Sadly, I highly suspect this is a one-off and it'll never be brewed again. A real shame as it's a great brew. I'd kill (figuratively) for a smoked version of this. Throw in a little smoked malt and I think you'd have something very close to the Platonic ideal of beer.
Junk food pairing: I say keep the deli theme going with your Make Rye Not War by pairing it with a bag of dill pickle potato chips.
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