Hagen Dost seemed combinedly possessed by all the waters from heaven: Pilsner by Dovetail Brewery

Tortelvis, the greatest singer of his generation, once confessed, "I've read this damn book 22 times, Charlie, and I still don't understand the thing." This admission, in the classic Dread Zeppelin song, "Moby Dick", is something I can sympathize with. I've never read Moby Dick, truth be told, so it's the sentiment of the statement that hits close to home, not the content. Just wanted to be clear on that point.

I've consumed various types of pilsners and I still don't understand all of the differences. There's Bohemian pilsners, German ones, American, Italian, CBD, French, Keller - who knows what other kinds. India Pale Pilsners are no doubt a thing somewhere. So, Czech pilsners are maltier than German ones, correct? And they are hoppier too with a bold Saaz bite, right? It's unclear to me what French pilsners are exactly. You'd think the French are too busy with wine, baguettes, and Jerry Lewis to brew beer. Are they a distinct style? Or just a German pils brewed with French hops? I drank one recently at Working Draft here in Madison called "Le Pils". I am clueless as to what made it French but I'd bet it's the hops. It had a delectable taste featuring lemon and spicy pepper flavors. Aramis hops, perhaps?

Yes, I just found those on a search.

Now that I think about it, I doubt that I've ever had an Italian pilsner. Certainly not one from Italy but there is an outside chance that an American one has passed my lips. I'm not sure what is particularly Italian about them. One moment...

Jeff Alworth says that there are a few elements that go into an Italian pilsner that give it a distinct Italian quality but that American brewers have basically reduced its uniqueness down to dry hopping. I am shocked - SHOCKED! - that American brewers would do such a thing.

Oh well.

This brings me to Dovetail's Pilsner which, to the best of my knowledge, made its way to Madison for the very first time recently. The can's label says only "PILSNER" and I was forced to go the brewery's website to find more info. There it is described as "a showcase for Czech hops" and the brewery's marketing team go on to boast that it was brewed with "heaven's water", which sounds like Chicago tap water that has had some chemistry voodoo worked upon it so that it was akin to the soft water of the pilsner's hometown, Plzeň, in the Czech Republic.

Man, water chemistry is not my thing and I am thinking I might have to summon the ghost of Robert Boyle to explain this to me.

Let's see if I can get this right. Plzeň's water is soft, i.e. - lacking in bicarbonates and pretty low in calcium too. This makes for water more on the acidic side which favors paler malts and brings out bready flavors. Now, why this should be is yet unknown to me but that sounds like the Bohemian pilsners I've quaffed. My searches yield lots of articles that merely say, "Want to brew a pilsner and have naturally soft water? You're golden." They are short on the details, though, about how x number of moles of some compound dissolved in the water yields a beer that is high in I.B.U.s - International Breadiness Units. As best I can piece it together, acidity levels are key to enzymes being happy and happy enzymes means tasty beer.

The water in Plzeň apparently also lacks sulfates which enhance hop bitterness so I guess Czech brewers have traditionally added more hops, hence the more intense spiciness of their pilsners, perhaps?

Ha! I probably have that all wrong but I am going with it anyway.

If Dovetail is going to go through all the trouble of mimicking the water of a city thousands of miles away, the beer is going to be good, right?

WRONG!

I kid! I kid!

Dovetail's beers are always so pretty. I feel badly because I don't have a good camera that can really capture their alluring beauty. Long before this glass got anywhere near my mouth, I was entranced by the beer that could launch a thousand sips. At least I managed to find a pilsner glass for the occasion. Dovetail's Pilsner is a lovely light gold with a slight haze to it. I poured for the head and got a big one. Lots of firm, white foam was mine, all mine. It smelled as good as it looked with a delicate cracker aroma joined by grass and peppery hops.

The malt tasted like biscuit as a firm fizz made its way to the back of my mouth. That toasty, melanoidiny, bready flavor was here in spades. Yum! As expected, it had a light body. Oh, and the hops tasted spicy to me, just as advertised. (Or was that because I had read the description beforehand?) Upon swallowing, I found that the biscuit taste lingered a while but was eventually overwhelmed by some herbal-peppery hop flavors that were a bit dank and resinous. They were not wanting in bitterness and left things on a fairly dry note. My glass was decorated with some wonderful lacing.

Oh mama! This was an extremely tasty brew. I don't know what kind of hydromancy they performed to get that heavenly water but it paid off. The soft biscuit flavor was simply divine and it melded perfectly with those spicy hops.

Junk food pairing: just as Dovetail used some diablerie to transform ordinary tap water into heaven's water, Utz performed some kind of alchemical chicanery with fried dill pickles so pair your Pilsner with a bag of Utz's Fried Dill Pickle potato chips.

Moby Dick

OK, I have "Moby Dick" playing again and I'm laughing out loud to myself. Someone asked about it and, since I play it repeatedly, I shall make some remarks.

The song was originally by Led Zeppelin on their second album from 1969. And, in my best nerdy tradition, I'll let you know that it evolved from a song called "The Girl I Love, She Got Long, Black Wavy Hair" which went unreleased until a few years back on Zep's BBC collection. So, in 1990, Dread Zeppelin did the song in question on their first album, which is comprised entirely of Led Zeppelin songs done in a reggae style. The singer is named "Tortelvis" and he is, unsurprisingly, an Elvis impersonator. On their version of "Heartbreaker", he throws in some lines from Elvis' "Heartbreak Hotel". And on "Black Dog", you'll find stray bits from "Hound Dog". (Elvis may have made the song famous, his version pales in comparison to that of its originator, Big Mama Thornton.) So back to "Moby Dick". As Zeppelin performed it, a rockin' guitar-led part bookended a drum solo. Dread Zeppelin kept the format but, during the drum solo, Tortelvis recites passages from Moby Dick. First he reads from Chapter 135:

"'Give way!' cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven."

Now, it's funny enough to hear Elvis reading Melville, but after this part, Tortelvis says,

"Hot damn tamale, Ahab! I swear..."

He continues,"'The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates' boasts, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar.'"

Notice how he says "boasts" instead of "boats".

"Mates boasts. You know, I'm tired of this thing - I think he should have worded the damn thing differently. Right here, look: 'from the two mates' boasts'. Boasts? Huh..."

He repeats a line:

"'and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar.' I, I, I'd just like, I'd just like to say that I admire this Ahab character."

Then he goes to chapter 9:

"First of all, then he said to 'em, 'I saw the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there; (the way he says "there", the way he lengthens the "air" bit is just hilarious) Which none but they that feel can tell--Oh, I was plunging to despair. In black distress, I called my God...'"

Back to chapter 135:

"'Moby Dick was now again steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship,- which thus'...I've read this damn book 22 times, Charlie, and I still don't understand the damn thing."

Go find this song and listen to it as my description doesn't do it justice. I guarantee it'll put a smile on your face. I've seen Dread Zeppelin twice and they are great. The first time was in a small club which sadly burned to the ground shortly afterwards (Club DeWash). A friend and I went. He drove and, after we parked, he pulled out a pipe which he densely packed with some ganj. I was offered the first toke and it was big. I held it in for as long as I could before I started coughing my lungs out. He started laughing at me and extending his hand, said, "Here - gimme that, you amateur."

In my defense, I replied, "You don't cough, you don't get off." Then he took a massive pull. At first he calmly held the smoke in. Then his cheeks puffed. Then his eyes bulged and gave off one of those "Oh shit, oh fuck" looks of impending doom. He exhaled and launched into a coughing fit of biblical proportions.

We sat in a corner of the bar after having found a friend of my friend. This guy would go on to become my insurance agent. We drank Point lager as it was the special that night and smoked more grass. My friend and I were working together at that time and we met a co-worker of ours before the show. He said that he was gonna work his way down front so he could dance. I then predicted what their opening tune was gonna be - "Immigrant Song" - and, as the band started, I was proven right.

Tortelvis Has Left the Building

I don't care what anyone says - Dread Zeppelin are fucking awesome! Back in 1991when I lived in a dorm, a few of us sat on the lawn playing cribbage with my roommate's stereo pointed out the window blaring DZ's first album. Someone shouted, "What the hell is this reggae/Led Zeppelin crap?!?" I thought the whole point of college was to explore new things, learn esoteric knowledge, drink, and fuck. Well, we were doing half of those on that fine spring day. (The exploration and the drinking.) Close-minded fucks.

So I've got Dread Zeppelin's version of "Moby Dick" playing. Fucking classic. Over the drum solo, Tortelvis reads from Melville:

"'Give way!' cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates' boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar."

Come on! How can you not like Dread Zeppelin? While I liked Jane's Addiction, some guy from Marinette played them and (seemingly) only them constantly. It would be a year or so before I discovered Nirvana and I wasn't interested in the alternative scence. Most of the people who listened to Jane's Addiction, Sonic Youth, and that ilk did so just to get out of listening to other music. They reveled in and proclaimed their alternativeness at every given moment.

"Yeah, yeah - you're cool."

Personally, I got along with the rednecks listening to The Replacements better. And Husker Du. (Where does the umlaut go?) This is probably because they listened to such bands for the music and not for any scene. They had no pretensions that they were somehow hipper than the rest of us. This is why it took me so long to get into Nirvana: I dispised all the hype surrounding "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and the media making blanket statements about me and my peers. Finally, some months after grunge broke, I saw Nirvana doing "Territorial Pissings" live on MTV and that got me interested. After all was said and done, I had fallen in love with Nirvana's music, Bleach becoming my probable favorite. Nevermind was too slick-sounding and most of the songs lacked the raw power of their first album. I was sorrowed by the news of Kurt Cobain's death but I shed no tears and had no need to call an MTV-sponsored suicide hotline. Cobain wrote a bunch of great songs but I never really felt like his lyrics somehow chronicled the inner workings of my mind. Some of his lyrics were fun while others were meaningful in generic kind of way. In the end, he was a great songwriter but also a fucked-up person who was so troubled that he turned his back on his daughter, his wife, his friends, and his life.

Back in 1990, alternative music still had a modicum of alternative to it. But, ya know, I've always like music that was alternative. That is, music that most of the world's population hated. Going around telling people that you listen to old Genesis, King Crimson, and Gentle Giant is not a good way to be popular in high school, especially when there are only 200 students in toto. And everyone hated Marillion.