I finally tasted Caravans & Shifting Sands from Vintage Brewing.
Made with, amongst other ingredients, West African fonio grain, long pepper (a.k.a. - cubeb), grains of paradise, and allspice, it tasted like no other beer I've ever had. There's honey in there as well and so it had this honeyed malt sweetness with the allspice rather prominent. The cubeb and grains of paradise added a faint spiciness to it.
Tasty stuff from Scotty!
Later this month Karben4 will introduce a new beer - Wisconsin Kernza® Pub Ale. Kernza is a perennial wheatgrass that is more environmentally friendly than traditional grains used in beer such as barley and wheat. Madison Magazine has a piece on the brew.
The line that caught my eye was "To celebrate Wisconsin’s first barrel of sustainable beer..." I did a double take as I had some tasty beer brewed with Kernza over two years ago courtesy of Scott Manning at Vintage Brewing.
Robin Shepard published an informative piece at Isthmus in December 2022 on Kernza featuring Scottie as well as Bloom Bake Shop. It seems that Scottie and Vintage were responsible for "Wisconsin’s first barrel of sustainable beer".
Having said that, I am keen on trying Karben4's brew.
{Watch the lovely prelude.}
(late January 2024)
The new year did not start well. My Frau did not make Hoppin’ John.
It was a mix of her ongoing health issues and just feeling depressed which is obviously intimately tied into those aforementioned health problems. I hoped that this was not a portent for 2024 and that she would find relief, if not being cured outright, soon. It has been heartbreaking to witness her struggles over the last year and I really didn't want a repeat.
Although I knew it was going to happen, I was still saddened at the news that Valkyrie Brewing had closed. You may recall that this was my stop of choice for some muscle relaxant after my hikes at the Chippewa Moraine State Recreation Area. I shall miss their Whispering Embers dearly.
Their last call was on the 6th and the intrepid editor of the Barron News-Shield, Ryan Urban, was there. You may recall him from earlier entries as we met on Twitter and have gotten together for a few beers on a couple of occasions.
Saturday’s farewell event featured many of the elements of a Saturday at the brewery. Games of cribbage were going on at nearly every table, game after game was played at the vintage pinball machine, friends and strangers alike conversed with enthusiasm and laughter, and there was music—for this occasion, by Kaptain Karl and the Dirty White Boy Band. Many people brought flowers and gifts for the Lees, and there was a cake, which they cut together with a sword, of course.
In addition to lamenting the loss of their amber restorative, I will miss the Viking theme of their taproom. Despite being in a former creamery, it eschewed the sadly fashionable industrial chic of so many taprooms and instead owners Randy and Ann Lee created one with a cozy, Nordic ambience. A real third space vibe where one could comfortably practice drawing runes and contemplate raiding monasteries.
Speaking of beer, now that it’s winter, one of my all-time favorites is once again available: Tippy Toboggan from Vintage Brewing here in Madison.
It’s a Roggenbock, I guess you’d say. That is, a German-style hefeweizen brewed to bock strength and with the healthy addition of rye to the customary grain bill of wheat and barley. And so it has the banana/clove flavors of a hefeweizen along with the earthy-spicy taste of rye. As someone with a lot of Central and Eastern European blood, I love rye. And with an A.B.V. of 6.9%, it keeps the chill at bay on cold winter days.
********
We had a few good snowstorms the first half of this month which made for some pretty scenery as well as great walks at my beloved Acewood Conservation Park. Temperatures got rather chilly too which made those walks a bit shorter than they would have been otherwise. It’s all-too easy to just stay inside on winter days and watch the TV, browse the internet, or do chores that you put off all summer and autumn. But it’s important for me to get outside regardless of both the temperature and the fact that the dryer vent needs cleaning.
Just after the first storm of the new year, I headed out to Acewood. The arch was bare.
While some folks and dogs too had come through already as evidenced by their tracks, the path was empty during my time there.
While the bare trees gave off a feeling of emptiness and death, there were critters aplenty out and about. This squirrel seemed to be taking a breather from scurrying around. I hoped that it was relaxing after a hearty meal. It looks well-fed.
I heard a woodpecker and somehow managed to track it down and, believe it or not, get a decent photograph of it. I think it was a hairy woodpecker.
A few days later we got several more inches of snow and the backyard was a veritable winter wonderland so I wandered around the house to check out the scene.
The house sparrows were ravenous!
It wasn’t long before we got yet another big storm and even more of the white stuff. This necessitated another trip to Acewood.
I found that the entrance to the path was snowbound as the wind had whipped up after the blizzard had ended and now my way was barred by drifts.
Although cold and windy, the sun made it, if not exactly pleasant, then much more bearable.
They hop atop the snow and you can see the marks its tail left here.
All in all, a wonderful walk, cold be damned.
********
Despite being the bowels of winter, I found a portent of spring at Farm & Fleet. They were taking orders for chicks and honey bees for pickup when the winter is over or nearly so, at least.
Speaking of animals, one of the movies I saw this month was Gunda.
Gunda is a documentary but an unconventional one. The title is the name of the sow on the poster above and we follow her and her piglets along with other farm animals including a one-legged chicken who despite its disability, gets along rather well.
Shot entirely in gorgeous black and white, it is pure cinéma verité as it features no narration nor any music and the camera is a fly on the wall, so to speak. I gotta tell ya, Gunda’s piglets are cute as all get out. We viewers just watch as the pigs, the chicken, and some cows simply get on with life. They eat and sleep and wander around the barnyards they call home.
I got lost in watching some creatures with whom we share this planet go about their lives. We hear them grunt, snort, moo, etc. They eat and poo. And did I mention that the piglets are as cute as the dickens? It was difficult not to ponder what was going through the animals’ heads and to not anthropomorphize them. I mean, piglets like to run and play just like human children do. Watching that chicken was inspiring as it didn't let a little thing like missing a leg stop it from roaming the barnyard with determination.
The cinematography is amazing with the camera normally low to ground putting us on the same level as the subjects, inviting us to view them as equals instead of we humans smugly looking down upon the animals from on high. And somehow director Victor Kossakovsky and cinematographer Egil Håskjold Larsen managed to get a camera in Gunda’s home to give us some intimate scenes as the piglets suckle, sleep, and spend quality time with their mother. In addition to being low to the ground, the camera was also able to get us up close to the animals. They never seem to feel like distant subjects and instead are more like pets.
I have read that Kossakovsky and producer Joaquin Phoenix are both vegans and the message here is basically “be kind to animals and don’t eat them”. By and large, though, the movie doesn’t preach this and instead tries to endear the animals to you by just letting them be themselves. The ending, however, was heart breaking and had me in tears.
Gunda and her piglets are out and about in the farmyard. An enclosure is set down with a small entry and the piglets scurry inside. The camera pulls back and we see the enclosure lifted up and hauled away by what I think was a tractor with a forklift implement attached.
Tears ran down my face as Gunda zipped around looking for her children but it was all in vain. Her grunts seem to grow ever more desperate as she darts this way and then that scouring every inch of the yard. Alas, she was never to see her piglets again. (Or so we are led to believe.) This scene is several minutes long and really tugs on your heart strings.
Piper watched the movie with me and I gave her a big hug afterwards. She came away with wet fur, I can tell you.
********
Bonus photo. Back in 2019 a transformer at the Madison Gas & Electric power plant on the isthmus had a little problem and exploded. A friend had this harrowing sight on his drive into work on that day. That jogger seems rather nonplussed.
Lake Louie (nee Wisconsin Brewing Company) has a couple new brews:
It isn't clear to me if these are autumn seasonals or winter or who. I have a Dark Side of the Loon and am looking forward to sampling it.
Also, I want to say thanks to Lake Louie for making a change so that they now actually list their brews on tap at their website instead of lamely linking to a blatantly unhelpful Untappd.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Winter brews are trickling in. Capital's Winter Skål is available and Scottie at Vintage now has 30 Point Bock available over on the west side. Tiggy Toboggan cannot be far behind. I am not sure if Sprecher will release their Winter Brew or not. I wish New Glarus brewed Uff-Da bock every year. Regular bocks are a bit rare as it seems brewers prefer doppelbocks. Though New Glarus will have Cabin Fever out next month. I like it but prefer Back 40, if Uff-Da is unavailable.
I rather like Sam Adams' winter seasonals - I've had Winter Lager and Cold Snap. Ooh! Hofbräu has Winterzwickl and that sounds delicious. Not sure if any of it makes its way to these shores.
Too bad Lakefront no longer brews their Holiday Spice Lager. Well, they have a barrel-aged version but not your regular one.
Well, there will be plenty of good winter brews, I am sure. A Baltic porter here, a bock there.
I shoveled 6-8 times during and after the last snowstorm. Roughly every 3 hours during the day I bundled up, grabbed my shovel, and proceeded to scrape the sidewalk. Then, when the storm was done, it took a couple rounds to clean up and dig out the driveway after the plows had come through.
All of the shoveling used muscles this desk jockey doesn't normally use. When I need some muscle relaxant after a hard day of shoveling snow, I turn to Tippy Tobbogan from Vintage.
It seems that caraway is having a moment with brewers in southern Wisconsin. First it was MobCraft's Fish Fry Rye, a rye lager with the venerable seed and then a few days ago I discovered Pumpernickel Porter over at Vintage.
It had your expected dark malt flavors of coffee and bitter chocolate, a bit of stone fruit sweetness, spicy rye, a little sour like sourdough bread (or perhaps 19th century porters), and caraway. Liquid bread indeed! Will a caraway IPA be next?
It's been a while since I started eating these Heritage Flakes from Nature's Path but I do believe that it was the rather uncommon grains on the label that initially caught my attention. I think everyone is familiar with barley and oats but what's spelt? Millet? Quinoa? Kamut Khorasan wheat?
Like Kamut Khorasan, spelt is also a wheat. Common wheat, the stuff we are all familiar with, has the taxonomic name of Triticum aestivum. Spelt is Triticum spelta and Khorasan wheat Triticum turgidum. So they're all seeds of related grasses. It sounds like spelt used to be the most common variety in the European and American diets until about 100 years or so ago when, as Wikipedia puts it, "spelt was replaced by bread wheat in almost all areas where it was still grown." It doesn't say exactly why, though. Other sites posit various theories but it seems that a general difficulty in growing the stuff mixed with the need to rid the seeds of their pesky hulls led to the widespread adoption of common wheat.
This breakfast cereal has 6 grains in it and I am not sure how or how much spelt contributes to its taste. I don't recall ever having eaten something like spelt bread where its flavor would stand out. Tangentially, Vintage Brewing here in Madison offers a beer called Jinja Ninja which is brewed with spelt and described as a "spelt-based, ginger-laced amber double witbier".
Khorasan wheat - "Kamut" is a brand name - is about twice the size of common wheat and, Wikipedia says, is rather rare, as in not many acres are devoted to growing the stuff worldwide. This surely explains why I've seen the odd spelt beer here or spelt bread there but Heritage Flakes are the only product I've ever seen made with Khorasan wheat. Legend has it that its seeds were brought from Egypt to Montana after World War II and that is why we have the stuff here today. It is described as having a "rich, nutty flavor."
Unlike all of these varieties of wheat, quinoa is not a grass. It's called a "pseudocereal" because its seeds are processed like those from grasses, such as wheat. South America is home for quinoa, having been domesticated in the area around Lake Titcaca 7,000+ years ago.
Titicaca. (hee hee)
The Incas loved only potatoes more. Quinoa is easily found in grocery stores here and some restaurants serve it as part of a salad or in place of rice. I haven't eaten it untainted by something else in a while but seem to recall it having a mellow, kind of green vegetal taste.
We're back to grasses with millet, though it's unrelated to wheat. I tend to associate millet with Africa though it's also grown in parts of Asia. It doesn't require a lot of water so it's a popular crop in more arid spots. It seems to be as common as spelt around these parts. Perhaps a little less. Or just found in different foods. There are some millet products at the grocery store but not so much in restaurants, it seems to me.
I'm going to take another tangent into beer here and note that Sprecher Brewing in Milwaukee was way ahead of the curve with gluten-free beers. In 2006-2007 they introduced a couple African-style ales called Shakparo and Mbege both of which used millet. (And sorghum, I believe.) I recall enjoying both of them. Too bad Sprecher is now a soda company that makes beer on the side instead of being a brewery.
So how are these Heritage Flakes?
They are thicker than your average flakes from Kellogg's, General Mills, or any other major breakfast cereal maker. I am not sure what the white dots are. Specs of oats?
The Khorasan wheat seems to be the big daddy here as these flakes are rich and have a very pronounced nutty flavor. Lots of crunch to them as well, even after soaking in milk for a time that would wilt the heartiest of corn flakes. Just enough sugar and salt to accent the grains but not overwhelm them.
It's not clear to me just how ancient the grains and the pseudocereal here are. I mean, the grains in other cereals date back a long time too. Common wheat and corn weren't invented yesterday. So, is the spelt here more or less the same stuff my German ancestors were eating in 1200? Is the quinoa more or less equivalent to that which the denizens of Machu Picchu ate to break their fasts?
I don't know. Regardless, Heritage Flakes are tasty and offer a good flavor that just isn't found elsewhere.
(early-January 2023) (Watch the prelude.)
My first nature walk of the winter took place just a few blocks from home so it was a short, if chilly, stroll to meet up with the guide and my fellow walkers. Our guide was a young woman who announced that our venture for the day would be about trees.
She knew her stuff and lectured us on how to identify trees by the bark and leaves. What is the texture of the bark? Did the leaves grow directly across from one another or were they staggered? I need to write this stuff down because I can only recall a few of the many types of trees she pointed out to us as we ambled around the east side of the Schenk-Atwood neighborhood.
Here is a conifer with flat leaves and I cannot recall anything our guide told us about this tree except that "conifer" means cone-bearing. Or something to do with cones, anyway.
She noted that conifer trees are cone shaped because this helps keep the branches intact under heavy snow loads.
Here’s a box elder which is a type of maple, if I remember what she said correctly. There was agreement all around that the proper term for those pods is "helicopters", arborists be damned.
The pods come in pairs like other maples but aren’t spread so far apart and have a droopy appearance. This is now lodged in my brain as the identifying trait of the box elder.
Nearby was a river birch with its tell tale peeling bark.
As our allotted time neared an end, we took a path which went along the shore of Starkweather Creek. I was happy because there is a giant tree at the end and I had no idea what kind it was. When we got there, I saw that a branch had been cut off and that there were mushrooms growing on it.
For a little scale, here’s a photo of it that I took in the summer with my bicycle leaning against it.
Our guide identified it as an eastern cottonwood, the biggest one she’s ever seen, in fact. May it be around for a few more decades, at least.
********
I recently rented an Austrian movie called Die Wand or The Wall.
It’s been on my to-watch list for some time now and so I stopped by my local video rental store, Four Star, and got the DVD.
It concerns a woman who goes to a secluded Alpine hunting lodge with a couple of her friends. The friends decide to hoof it to the local village tavern while our protagonist, whom I don’t think is ever named, decides to stay at the lodge with the dog, Lynx.
Strangely, her friends don’t return that night and she goes to bed thinking they’ll turn up the next day. Waking up the following morning, the woman discovers that they still have not returned. And so she decides to walk to town only to find that there's an invisible wall blocking the road and, as she soon learns, surrounding the lodge compound.
She wanders the area trying to figure out if the wall has her totally enclosed or not. In one unsettling scene, she comes across an older couple at a cabin. The wife sits motionless on the porch while the husband stands frozen at the well. Confusingly, while the people don't move, the water from the well does. This is the only time the movie even hints at the nature of the wall beyond it being impenetrable. Did time stop out on the other side? Or was the temporal anomaly inside of it?
The movie features extended readings from the woman's diary and we get to see the scenes that she describes enacted as well. She deals with the enforced solitude and having to hunt and grow her own food. She is no mere city slicker, helpless when confronted with the absence of modern conveniences like electricity. With no other company, she becomes attached to the loyal Lynx and begins to notice the rhythms of nature in detail as she wanders the woods and around the nearby tarn.
It's a lovely, meditative film with nature being alternatively giving and harsh. The woman tries to comes to grips with her predicament by writing. I found her observations of the white crow and its rejection by its fellow corvids to be particularly moving.
Now to read the book it's based on.
********
I took my oldest stepson and his ladyfriend out to dinner recenty(ish) at Vintage Brewing and I got to try an interesting new beer. It was called Z-Quester, an ale made with a grain called Kernza.
It was neat to see something new in the beer world that didn’t involve a novel strain of hops that tastes, yet again, like some combination of tropical fruits, and promises to turn another brew into a variation of Hawaiian Punch. Kernza is a wheatgrass that is being investigated as an alternative to wheat and barley. It’s a perennial so you don’t replant it and it’s got deep roots which helps keep soil erosion at bay. Plus, it apparently sequesters carbon very well, hence the beer’s name.
I liked it quite a bit. Kernza tastes nuttier than wheat or barley but still provides a fine grainy flavor. Farmers and brewers are preparing for global climate change by looking at ingredients better suited to a warmer, wetter world, including new strains of hops as well as grains and we're off to a good start here.
********
I spent Christmas Eve down in the exurbs of Chicago at an uncle's house. I had planned to see my mother that day as well but she informed me that she was quarantining as she had been exposed to Covid. We ate, drank, and chatted the day away.
Christmas Day involved a lot of eating. My Frau and I had breakfast at a fancy lakeside hotel. Although the hotel dates back to 1948, we dined at the new tower. Well, it is several years old but new in contrast to the rest of the place. One of our former mayors, Dave Cieslewicz, used every drop of blood, sweat, tears, and political capital he had to get it built despite it not conforming to the recommended building codes for the historic neighborhood that it resides in.
Cieslewicz wasn’t a terrible mayor but he drank the Richard Florida kool aid by the 55 gallon barrel and, rather than championing, for example, efforts to tackle increasing poverty in the city or trying to improve public transit, he proposed a downtown trolley and got a luxury hotel tower built for Madison's burgeoning “creative class”. I guess he adhered to a Reaganite theory of trickle down economics: if we get enough tech companies and their well-paid employees living on the isthmus, then their prosperity will trickle down to the poor people on the south side.
Just as Chicago’s Mayor Bilandic lost his bid for re-election over the city’s handling of a blizzard, Cieslewicz’s efforts to have a playground for the rich built cost him a third term.
Walking by a glass-walled room lined with wine racks, I knew I was out of my element. I am just the hoi polloi. On the other hand, one wall was lined with photos of local luminaries, including Aldo Leopold.
At least wealthy out of towners can get a feel for the city’s history as they head towards some haute cuisine.
The food was fine but I didn’t get anything fancy, no omelet made with quail eggs collected by virgins on a full moon served on a gold plate or any such thing. I also didn’t eat too much as the gluttony was scheduled to happen that night.
Although my youngest stepson was in town that weekend, he and his ladyfriend were elsewhere so Christmas night was just my Frau, a friend of hers, me, and enough food to feed an army.
The first course was a Québécois meat pie called a tourtiere. While the Frau had explained the concept to me, I got worried when she asked me to grab the springform pan instead of using a pie pan.
This thing was massive!
And it looked simply wonderful.
Our first course was tourtiere with roasted Brussels sprouts and roasted yellow squash & grapes.
It was some serious rib sticking food. Second course was some vegetarian lasagna that the Frau's friend had made. Delicious!
I was quite full but had just enough room for a slice of chocolate bundt cake from a bakery here called Nothing Bundt Cakes. And, yes, they make bundt cakes and nothing else. But they do come in 4 sizes and even more flavors.
********
A few days after Christmas we had a snow storm which made things very pretty once again.
And a few days after that was New Year’s Eve. We took it easy but the Frau cooked a wonderful dinner consisting of pasta tossed with chick peas and kale and these little patties of ricotta cheese and other ingredients that shall remain secret.
It was all quite delicious, I can assure.
While I went to bed with no resolutions to keep starting the next day, I was determined to figure out what do with all of this.
I came into work one day back in the fall and discovered that my boss had left me a million pounds of rhubarb. While I managed to give a lot of it away to one of my Frau’s friends who is a prolific baker, I still had a freezer full of the stuff. What do to with it all?
********
Bonus photo. I didn’t mention it a few entries ago but the city replaced the dead sapling out on the front terrace back in November. I am hoping this one lives. I watered it well for a couple days before it started freezing at night and have been told to water it again come the spring.
I cannot recall what species it is but I think it’s a new variety of elm that is resistant to Dutch elm disease. Welcome!
You know winter is here when Tippy Toboggan is on tap. I had dinner at Vintage the other day and had my first Tippy of the season.
I also sampled Z-Quester, a toasted kernza amber ale. Kernza is a new grain and its use in Madison garnered an article by Robin Shepard in Isthmus recently. It was a very tasty beer and the grain nouveau lent a very nutty flavor, to my taste.
When Jack Frost hits the scene, then 'tis the season for one of my favorite beers, Tippy Toboggan from Vintage Brewing here in Madison. Tippy Toboggan is a Roggenbock, a Roggenbier amped up to bock-like proportions. When we’re in the bowels of winter and my bones are chilled to their very marrow by the coldest of winter nights, I am warmed and rendered mirthful by a glass of this heady brew with its bracing rye spiciness and pleasant mix of banana and clove flavors.
So, I’ve got winter covered but what about the rest of the year? Can’t I enjoy some rye-laced cheer during the warmer months too?
Sadly, Madison-area brewers don’t make a Roggenbier beyond Tippy Toboggan – that I’ve seen, anyway.
On a recent trip down south, however, I discovered that at least one Chicagoland brewery does brew a Roggenbier. Not only is it not a bock but it was available outside of winter.
Ooh la la!
That beer is Last Stand by Short Fuse Brewing Company.
I encountered them for my first and only time (until now) last fall when I grabbed some of their Dark Gourd, a coffee-pumpkin ale that was quite tasty. As with that beer, the Short Fuse website doesn’t so much as mention Last Stand so details are scarce. It looks like it has been brewed in years past and that this year’s batch came out in late summer. So maybe it’s a seasonal…?
Whatever the case, I was pleased as punch to see a Roggerbier on the shelf and quickly snagged a 4-pack of it.
Vigorous my pour was not because I was left with but a small tan head and it dissipated rather quickly. A subsequent pour, however, yielded a much more generous helping of foam which made for a pretty sight. The beer is a deep, dark chestnut that was basically opaque. If there were any bubbles inside doing their thing, I didn’t see them. When decanted properly, this is a fine looking beer. Roggenbiers are brewed with the same kind of yeast as Weissbiers and my preference for those is to have a stronger banana presence than clove. Here banana was all up in my nose when I took a sniff, although there was a little clove as well. A bit of black pepper was in there too which was probably a combination of hops and rye.
On my first sip, I caught a nice, solid fizziness cutting through the beer’s medium body. This was followed by the yeasty flavors starting with banana. Clove was less prominent while there was just a hint of bubble gum. Rye and wheat were layered underneath and some spicy hops brought up the rear. While I found the beer to be somewhat sweet, I suspect all of that banana flavor from the yeast added a little ersatz sweetness.
At the finish, the banana and clove faded, giving way to the spicy hops which did their best to add balance earlier. They only added a moderate bitterness here but I think they teamed up with all the fizz for a rather solid dryness to wipe away any fruity memories.
Last Stand was just great with all of the flavors I expected for a Roggenbier – spicy rye, banana, and some balancing hops – and it comes in at a more weather appropriate 4.5% A.B.V. A nice prelude to Tippy Toboggan season.
Junk food pairing: The subtle yet complex flavors of a Roggenbier cry out to be paired with a food of equal complexity and tastiness. So grab a bag of Slide's Curry Garlic potato chips to go with your Last Stand.
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The humble cream ale is really quite popular here in
Wisconsin despite the style not having an "I" or the word "India" in it. The taxonomic experts of the internet tell me that New Glarus' Spotted
Cow falls into the cream ale category and they sell a shit ton of that stuff. (I suppose this means that the cream ale is also popular in Illinois.) Having
read a bit about the style, I now realize just how apropos it is to describe Spotted Cow, as many do, as a kind of introductory craft beer for folks accustomed to American macro
lagers like Bud, Miller, and Coors. From what I've read, American brewers
developed the cream ale in the mid-19th century in reaction to the burgeoning
popularity of pilsners brewed by an increasing number of German immigrants and their kin.
Honestly, I had no idea that the cream ale is indigenous to
the United States although the thought would have occurred to me sooner or later had I bothered
to cogitate upon the matter for a while. Had I done so, I don't think it would
have taken too long for me to realize there isn't a Samuel Smith's Cream Ale nor a Bitburger
Sahne Obergäriges Lagerbier. The cream ale is a light beer generally brewed
with some corn or perhaps rice to help give the beer a light body just like American lagers. Being top fermented, it's an ale but cream ales are often lagered
so it's an ale because that's American brewing for you. Aging makes the fruity
flavors go away and you're left with a nice malt-hop balance.
On a recent trip to the liquor store, I opted for Bee's
Knees, a honey cream ale from Vintage Brewing here in Madison (and Sauk too). It is available
in cans as well as on tap at its various locations.
In addition to honey, there's also oats in Bee's Knees to further
the beer's retreat from the style's conventions as brewmaster Scott Manning
likes to mess with things because it is in his nature to do so.
I wish I knew more about honey to be able to give you some
more info like its variety, terroir, and whatnot but that is beyond me. This is
a shame because honey is in my blood. Back in the Middle Ages, Germans and Slavs led
the world in honey production and German and Slavic make up most of my ethnic
heritage.
Some interesting honey trivia: I am used to talking about and
eating foods that are native to the Americas and there are lots of tasty things
out there that I am privileged to eat only because Columbus got lost. E.g. –
maize, tomatoes, chilies, potatoes, etc. Rarely am I cognizant of the opposite situation but we have one right here. While there were honey bees in the
Americas when our intrepid explorer made landfall in the Bahamas, they did not
live in North America. The honey bees found to the south have, shall we say, more catholic
tastes in nectar than their European cousins. These bees are happy to collect
"nectar", so to speak, from sources most bees dare not tread such as corpses and poop. Their honey must be
quite extraordinary and has surely been eagerly gobbled up at one of those legendary
Explorers Club dinners, perhaps as part of a glaze to a wooly mammoth roast.
No doubt Vintage acquired their honey from a more mundane
source.
Honey was also the first thing that my tongue noticed – that
earthy vanilla kind of flavor. There was some malt along with a little corn but
it wasn't particularly sweet. All of this was complemented by a really nice herbal
hoppiness. There's a was a firm fizz to be had and I tasted a smoothness
underneath it which was likely from the oats. The hops took a turn towards the
peppery for the finish and left a little bitterness to go with some lingering
corn taste.
Despite Bee's Knees, as Neil Peart would have said,
deviating from the norm with oats and honey, it still had a medium-light
body with the oats adding a little something more to it. The barley, oats, corn, and hops were all in their proper places to create a balanced
flavor. 16 I.B.U.'s of hops and a nice fizz helped give Bee's Knees a pleasant crispness.
But what really endeared me to this beer, besides its Flapper era name, was
the honey and the herbal hop flavor. I really enjoy honey in beer because it
provides a flavor that is mainly earthy and savory but has just a hint of the
sweetness it used to have before the sugars were eaten by the yeast. And the herbal hop flavor is something of a rarity
these days and I just find it to be ever so tasty.
Junk food pairing: pair Bee's Knees with a bag of Thai Sweet
Chili potato chips. Both the sweetness and the spicy chili will provide a delicious contrast to the
mellow, easy going cream ale.
The Frau and I started eating shrimp fairly regularly at
some point during the pandemic. We soon fell into a routine of cooking them with a Mexican
verde sauce – lime and something something. Then we added a scampi-like
variation with lots of garlic. (She loves the garlic.) It eventually made its way into a stir fry. The best
of these meals involved good shrimp purchased down the road at the Lake Edge Seafood Company but most of the time we were dealing with the skrimps you find
at your supermarket.
Out of the blue one day I felt crustacean ennui. I was bored
with all the well-worn shrimp recipes and desired something novel. I'd been
listening to an album by a Noura Mint Seymali, a singer and musician from Mauritania
which brought back memories of a former co-worker who hailed from nearby
Morocco and I ended up cooking Moroccan-style shrimp. Well, sort of.
Firstly, I completely forgot to add the ginger. I still don't
know how I managed that. Secondly, my coriander was positively antediluvian and
it smelled and tasted like dust. This was not a good pairing for grocery store
shrimp which often times tastes not totally unlike cardboard.
The next day was Bloody Wednesday because my spice shelf
suffered a massacre. That ancient coriander? Gone. That $0.99 jar of turmeric
that pre-dates meeting my Frau? Down the drain. Those cardamom pods from c.
2002? Meet the disposal. Juniper berries from the last millennium? 86'd.
All were replaced with fresh jars from Penzey's.
Perhaps because I was reading a book about the Russian
invasion of Finland in November 1939, I started in on the juniper berries.
First came a beef pot roast made with them. This was followed by chocolate hazelnut
cookies seasoned with toasted juniper and then a pork tenderloin covered in mustard
infused with crushed juniper berries. It only seemed natural, then, when my
mind turned to sahti.
Sahti is a Finnish style of beer. I went back through my
extensive (ahem) archives and found that I drank one actually brewed in Finland
back in 2007. My suspicion – and I'd love to be proven wrong – is that you'd be
hard-pressed to find a genuine Finnish sahti in Madison today. I base my
hypothesis on my failed attempts to find English-brewed porters and milds and
bitters here. There seems to be little enthusiasm for these beers because American
brewers are brewing those styles and so why bother.
A craft brewed sahti seems to be an ale brewed with barley
and rye, a dose of juniper spicing, and a yeast like that for hefeweizen that
will produce those banana and clove flavors. And I don't doubt for a second
that there are Finnish breweries brewing it exactly this way. However, now that
I've read more about the style from genuine Finns, it's clear that there's more
to the sahti than meets the craft brewer eye.
The style seems to go back to the 16th century and
traditional sahti today hews to those brewing methods, more or less. The
highlights of traditional sahti brewing are, as near as I can tell, foregoing a
period of boiling the wort that other beers undergo, the use of baking yeast,
and time the beer spends in a vat with juniper branches lining the bottom. I
certainly don’t expect any Americans beyond the most adventurous homebrewers to
adhere strictly to the sahti brewing from the days of yore. Still, Scott Manning of Vintage Brewing here in Madison brews a contemporary take on the beer and I was happy
to see that he still had some on tap when I was in the grip of my juniper mania.
At first, I thought it was from last summer because I was
used to seeing "Summer Sahti" on their beer menu. But I was
corrected. There was no Summer Sahti anymore because their winter sahti, Joulupukki,
was also no more. So it was just "Sahti". And it was brewed back in the fall. No
matter. It did not stop me from pursuit of juniper beer and supporting a local brewery.
So, keep in mind this was finely aged sahti.
My nose caught some caramel sweetness first which was
followed by that familiar banana scent from esters. A little resiny pine
lingered in the background.
The first thing I noted about the taste was that it had creaminess to it and I
suspect that's because of proteins that make up the haze. This used to be the
summer brew so it's not big and full tasting like the winter version was but retains
a bit of that taste. That delicious rye spiciness was joined by sweetness that
reminded me of apricots and a smidgeon of banana. Rather prominent was a
whiskey-like taste. Unexpected but not bad and something I'd guess to be the
result of age. Fizz was medium and there was a mild juniper taste as well.
The finish (ha!) had a nice spiciness that tasted like hops
as well as a little more of that juniper resin.
While this beer tasted its age, I think the core sahti
essence remained intact. It had a bit of that rustic rye flavor along with the
fruity esters from the yeast. I think that some of the juniper had worn off but
it wasn't totally absent. Rye and juniper are two flavors I really enjoy and so
I do adore this beer. I gather that sahti is normally 8-10% A.B.V. while
this comes in at 5.4%. So, if you want a traditional Finnish boozy blue gleam on
your face, you'll need to drink a few extra.
I was happy to further indulge my taste for juniper.
Junk food pairing: Grab a large bag of rye chips such as Gordetto's for your snacking needs while enjoying Sahti.
