Winter is not done with us yet so we have beer

Last night I had the pleasure of taking dinner with my father-in-law. We dined at Vintage out on the west side once again. I indulged myself and had a pint of Ionic Bond as I am all over rye beers**.

It was very tasty. 

It had a body that was fairly light for the style, i.e. - it wasn't very viscous as if it were motor oil like takes on the style by Baltika or Żywiec. However, it was delicious. Full of coffee, roasty goodness undergirded by a rye earthiness. Plus a stiff dose of hops to balance all those malts. A fine way to chase away the late winter chills.

**As long as they're not IPA's. 

Altbier aber keine Gose

Very tasty stuff!

I really enjoyed the herbal-floral character of the hops. Methinks this one is more than deserving of a review.

When I was at Steve's Liquor, which is where I bought this bier, there was a Delta Beer Lab marketer pouring samples. I asked that he ask the brewmaster to brew their Gose again.

"The plain Gose?" he asked.

"Yes," I replied eagerly. "I want to taste coriander, not fruit." 

He proceeded to explain that the delicious elixir didn't sell well enough to warrant another batch. Sad. Maybe if they marketed it as an India Pale Gose - IPG - it would gain a following beyond me.

One word for craft brewers

CORIANDER

Leipziger Gose is such a tasty beer. Let it warm a bit and the coriander really shines.

Locally, outside of Delta Beer Lab, it's nigh on impossible to find a non-fruited gose. Skip the lime and let the spice flow!

The maples want more Citra and the oaks ignore their pleas: Oaked Smoked Helles Lager by Pipeworks Brewing Co.

I recently found myself trapped in the indecision of the massive beer selection at a Binny's outpost in western Chicagoland. I really didn't need to bring home a lot of beer as I would be the only one drinking the stuff and I was clutching a couple of packs already. But I just couldn't let the prospect of more Rauchbier pass me by. On the shelf before me was Pipeworks' Smoked Helles as well as their Oaked Smoked Helles. Which to choose?

If memory serves, I checked each for dates on the bottom of a can but I cannot recall what I found. The date on the Oaked Smoked cans were smudged but they were dated this year and the month appeared to be August. They cost the same or very nearly so thusly price was not at issue. In the end, as you can see above, I went with the latter. Oak smoked Rauchbiers are just less common and I don't think I've encountered one of the Helles variety before so I fell on the side of rarity. But look at that poor oak! Talk about trouble with the trees. No doubt it was the work of a malicious maple.

I generally hold Pipeworks in high regard. They brew more than IPAs and I am surprised that I never reviewed their Pastrami on Rye: Manny's Deli Edition beer which was very tasty.** (Indeed, it appears I haven't reviewed any of their beers since 2013. How odd.) To my mind, that they brew zwei types of smoked Helles speaks to their eclectic/good tastes and makes them a cause worth supporting, even if only one 4-pack at a time.

A cap of loose, white foam sat atop the aureate elixir. Unfortunately, the head was off like a prom dress leaving a glass of lightly golden goodness that was perfectly clear. A stray bubble was to be seen inside here and there. Upon sniffing, smoke came first followed by a bit of honeyed sweetness. There was just a hint of grassy hops to be had underneath it all.

My first sip revealed a medium-light body with only a modicum of fizz. The promised oaked smoke took pride of place but there was also a little breadiness and a hint of sweetness, just like the aroma. Similarly, a mild grassy hoppiness was to be had as well. The luscious smokiness lingered on the finish as the hops took on a herbal tinge to allow for a bit of bitterness and dryness.

Sweetness was minimal allowing me to drown in oaked smoke gluttony. Although I would have liked a tad more fizziness, this stuff went down easily. And at 5% A.B.V., this wasn't a problem. I am not sure if the restrained hop flavor was intentional or if my 4-pack was reaching senescence. (The 4-pack was not refrigerated.)

While part of me notes that this brew lacks the full-breaded flavor of Schlenkerla's smoked Helles, in truth, this is a very fine beer regardless. The smokey taste is excellent and there's just enough of everything else to round out the overall flavor. A wonderful smokey midsummer brew became a true autumnal treat.

Junk food pairing: Oaked Smoked Helles Lager will pair well with just about any potato chip but I recommend either All Dressed or Cheese & Onion varieties.

**Madisonians should note that Delta Beer Lab has a rye beer called Make Rye Not War that is a "collaboration" with Stalzy's Deli. Or has the name on it, anyway. This brew is once again available.

The Lager With the Rye: Make Rye Not War by Delta Beer Lab

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.

The Spice Must Flow: Gose by Delta Beer Lab

Previously on this very blog I chronicled how a botched batch of Moroccan shrimp prompted a purge of my spice rack that would have made Joe Stalin himself envious. The difference is that I didn't replace the spices that met their fate that Bloody Wednesday with a bunch of aromatic apparatchiks. Instead, the replacements were of, at least, good quality. I have now cooked with juniper berries more in the past few weeks than the past many years.

That shrimp recipe called for coriander and so it's a good time to return to the seeds of the Coriandrum sativum plant which were the genesis of this mess in the first place. It also allows me to make good on actually making a trip to Delta Beer Lab, something I figured was a swell idea back in December when I reviewed a cranberry gose and lamented the paucity of the unfruited variety of the beer. While Delta's beer is on store shelves, I've only seen their mango gose and not their gose gose at my local bottle shop. Granted, it took four months but I finally lost my Delta Beer Lab virginity.

The gose is a sour wheat beer that originated in the German town of Goslar at some point in the Middle Ages. Water sources apparently gave the beer a bit of salinity and it was flavored with coriander. What I think of as less reliable sources say the High Middle Ages but ones I trust more dates it to the Late Middle Ages. For a long while it was a local delicacy until the first half of the 18^th century when it made its way to neighboring Leipzig where the inhabitants took to the beer style like a junkie to the needle. While popular for a good, long while, drinkers would turn away from it more and more as the years progressed with World War II and the Cold War doing it no favors. Eventually it died out in 1966. But 20 years later it was revived in Germany and seems to be hanging on to dear life in its homeland with a handful of German breweries making it.

Gose became something of a trend for American craft brewers around 2013 or so. I don't have numbers but it seems that it is less popular today. Even if true, there are still examples of the beer that are easily available such as Otra Vez (which has been reformulated, I see) from Sierra Nevada, Kirsch Gose by Victory, and a variety of gose iterations from Anderson Valley with their Blood Orange probably being the most well-known of them. I suppose it's arguable whether a gose remains a gose if you add citrus fruit, cactus, or agave to it in lieu of coriander. The addition of salt to a kettle soured beer is pretty much all it takes to be a gose in the States today, it seems. But the fact remains that Sierra Nevada has a beer on shelves year-round that says "Gose" on the packaging which is a lot of visibility for a beer style that was all but dead not long ago.

I have nothing against the fruited gose per se and have enjoyed those beers listed above, but in the rush to make everything that isn't an imperial stout taste fruity (the stouts get laced with lactose, coffee, vanilla, and so on), American brewers have made the ordinary non-fruited variety something of a rare bird. This is a shame because I am rather partial to coriander.

Thankfully the folks at Delta Beer Lab offer a more traditional take on the style in addition to one that's in the cult of tropicality.

The beer is a lovely light gold color with a slight haze to it. My pour produced a big, white head that made quite a racket as the bubbles burst. It was like listening to Rice Krispies. But louder.

It smelled first and foremost of that lemony sour from the lactic acid which gives the beer its sour taste. I also caught a little coriander and just a wee bit of sweetness – like honey.

While I have had beers that were more sour, Delta did not skimp on it here. It was very sour but fell short of a xenomorph blood level of acidity, thankfully. As you can imagine, it was good 'n fizzy with the salinity having an almost spectral presence. It didn't taste salty but I could tell it was there enhancing the other flavors. It adds a certain overall fullness. The coriander wasn't prominent but was there playing its role in generating tastiness. Some wheat and a slight grainy sweetness rounded things out. With all that sourness, some lingered on the finish and made it rather dry but I was also left with a wheaty taste and I could just discern some salinity too.

As Darth Vader once remarked to his son, impressive.

I really enjoyed this beer. It was good and sour, it had just the right amount of salt to enhance flavor, and a goodly amount of coriander. That is, I would have been happy with just a smidgeon more of the spice but it complemented the wheat very well and was still quite tasty.

Junk food pairing: I recommend pairing your Gose with some Carada rice ball cuttlefish flavored snacks. The beer's citrus sour complements the cuttlefish flavoring while also acting as foil to the snack's sweetness.

I get home at 5 o'clock and I take myself out a cellar temp porter: English Porter by Delta Beer Lab

Delta Beer Lab is one of Madison's newest breweries, if not its newest, having opened in February 2019. (Union Corners Brewery is about the same age, now that I think about it.) Located in a rather suburban area on Madison's south side, it's something of an underdog in the Madison beer scene. The area is not particularly walkable nor is there much in the way of stores nearby to bring in thirsty shoppers. If you're not making a dedicated trip to their establishment, it's unlikely you'll wander past it by chance. Plus, there is just so much beer out there and Delta doesn't seem to have found its break out beer, the beer that it's known for. It doesn't have its Spotted Cow, Hopalicious, or Fantasy Factory.

Honestly, I haven't delved into their offerings much until rather recently. I'd look at their menu and see a whole lot of beers that were IPAs, fruited, or loaded with additives, none of which appealed to me. It's not that there were never any beers that I wanted to try, but few enough to put Delta down the list of places to visit and sample. Then last autumn I was camping with a friend who is thoroughly enamored of their Coffee-infused Brown Ale. She gave me a can and I thought it was quite tasty. I gave more thought to making a trek down to Badger Road. But Old Man Winter arrived and with it some of my favorite beers such as Tippy Toboggan by Vintage, Sprecher's Winter Lager, and WinterSkål from Capital. Ergo Delta became something of an afterthought once more.

Recently I spied their English Style Porter at a grocery store and took the plunge because it was additive free and how often do you come across an English porter these days?

After tasting Delta's brew, I went to a local bottle shop with a good reputation for fine beers and a large variety seeking an English English porter. This place (Steve's Liquor on Junction Road) is the kind of establishment that carries the Schlenkerla flown to the States and canned out in New England for maximum freshness. When I asked about it, I kind of felt like I had farted in church for a fraction of second. I guess even Fuller's London Porter hasn't been seen in these parts in a while. The gentleman said that, even if some were available, he doubted it'd be fresh. Bummer.

(I also inquired about German maibocks and will be getting a call if/when any arrive.)

The term "porter" to describe a style of beer dates back to 18^th century London. It seems that the name was used to describe the brown beers found around the city. My search for a more exact date of when the term was first used on these beers has proven fruitless but they were apparently quite popular with porters, people who lugged things around the city, presumably to/from trains, barges, warehouses, shops and the like. It's kind of ironic then, that a 4-pack of a beer named after a working class vocation of people of modest means is now a low-level luxury good that costs $12.

Porters, of course, changed over time. They got hoppier, they got darker and roastier, and so on. New Glarus took a shot at an 1870s porter called Old English Porter back in 2009. Ten years later Goose Island brewed Obadiah Poundage with beer historian Ron Pattinson, an attempt to recreate an 1840s porter. Both blended fresh and aged beers with the later being soured. Today in Craftbeerland, the porter is a very dark, almost Stygian, beer, not simply brown, that has a lot of roasted flavors, even some bitter, fuliginous tastes from black patent malts and is decidedly not sour. Nor is it particularly hoppy.

Since I failed to procure an English porter from England, I am not sure what passes for a porter over in its homeland these days.

Delta Beer Lab's take on the style poured a nice, loose tan head. It disappeared fairly quickly as one second I was inspecting the beer's color and the next I looked up to see the head largely gone. That color was very dark – a deep reddish brown that appeared black when staring at it head on – and the beer was clear. Not particularly different from American porters thus far.

I took notes while tasting two pints of this stuff and each had some nice milk chocolate or carob scents. One sample had a metallic smell to it while the other added a bit of plum fruitiness and some grass to the chocolate. Definitely different from American porters here.

Each tasted more or less the same. There was milk chocolate with moderate sweetness. A little stonefruit and just a touch of fizz. Not much bitterness in the herbal hoppiness but fairly smooth. After swallowing, I tasted some bitterness from grassy hops along with some lingering chocolate.

Although it looked like your typical crafty porter, it tasted very different. Instead of the dark chocolate, coffee, and slight smokiness of what I think of as an American porter, this take on its English cousin is sweeter, a little fruity, and mellower.

And, as with Mikey, I liked it. I think of this as being like an amber ale made dark. It's 5.2% A.B.V., has a medium body, and wasn't overly sweet so I didn't find it filling. I can imagine that a beer akin to this would slake a working man's thirst and provide a little sustenance as well.

Junk food pairing: You've gotta get a packet of cheese & onion potato chips, er, crisps to go with your English porter.