Yesterday, Saturday night, October 17 was the time to be in Belfast, Maine. On offer was the second annual Marshall Wharf Beer and Pemaquid Mussel Festival. They served Mussels prepared four different ways, Morse’s of Maine’s sausage and sauerkraut, and 22 Marshall Wharf beers on tap. It might get different, but it can’t get better.

Of special interest were the three bourbon barrel aged beers…  MacFindlay Scotch, Old #55, and Cant Dog IPA. In my opinion these beers saw too much whisky barrel, and the beer characteristics faded from the picture. This was a first try, and I have no doubt the next will be well worth considering.

The regular range of Marshall Wharf beers was superb as always. It’s very special, but also very dangerous, to be able to enjoy all of them in the same night. It was fun to taste 40 Cream Ale again, but the old favorites were spectacular as always.

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Marshall Wharf Mussel Fest

The Great Lost Bear featured Marshall Wharf in the weekly Microbrew Showcase.  On offer were the Cant Dog IPA, the Brown Ale, Illegal Ale-ien, and the Hefeweizen, all at the usual bargain prices. This was a wonderful line-up of beers – on this evening I thought the Hefeweizen got the special nod.  Kudos to The Great Lost Bear… after all these years The Bear remains the place to be on Thursday night.

At the close of festivities a small party adjourned to Novare Res where Eric Michaud tapped a keg of the Marshall Wharf Barley Wine, T2R9. The beer is named after a territory near Belfast…  There is a reason for that, but after drinking Marshall Wharf beers all night, who remembers?

The T2R9 is a very special beer. At 11.5% one expects a monster; it is anything but that. Like all of the Marshall Wharf beers this one is beautifully balanced, and drinks well below the alcohol level. The malt and hops are present for sure, but there is no aggressive flavor attack, no awkwardness at all.The impact is huge, smooth mouth feel and soft, luscious flavors. There are no elbows to this beer, it’s all curved and rounded.

There won’t be much of this beer around, so try it any chance you get. I doubt there is any left at Novare Res, but it’s worth inquiring after. This beer alone would justify a trip to Three Tides Inn in Belfast.

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Marshall Wharf T2R9!

Mead is somewhere between beer and wine on the drinks spectrum. It’s made by fermenting honey. Mead is an ancient drink, perhaps the oldest alcoholic beverage.

Maine Mead Works is producing a product that is clean, crisp and delicious. The taste experience is perhaps more wine than beer, but it’s neither and well worth a try. Be aware, they make two styles: semi-sweet and dry. Both are very good, just different drinks for different occasions.

Sal and I toured the production facility today.  This is a start-up operation, small scale. They’ve been in production for a little less than a year. Two thoughts struck me.  This is American Capitalism at the most storybook level, a real start-up. It also may be one of the more fascinating breweries/wineries I’ve ever seen. Their continuous fermentation process will surprise and delight you. If you get invited, don’t miss the chance to visit.

Look for this stuff in the stores. Try it and make up your own mind. It’s darned good, and a new adventure!

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Mead In Maine

As one of the people who help run the NERAX cask ale festival in Boston, I enjoy the opportunity to learn at the Manchester festival. Manchester seems to attract experienced festival managers from across the UK. Most of the volunteers I met either run a local festival or have a significant position running the Great British Beer Festival in London in August. The opportunity to talk about running festivals is unique, and I inevitably return with new ideas and insights.

There’s far more benefit than just the intricacies of festival management. In my experience volunteering at a festival offers an intensity and breadth of interaction with beer culture that is unavailable in any other way. Just attending a festival offers a unique chance to sample an incredible variety of beers side by side. A volunteer however has a much richer experience.

I particularly like working at the trade session of the festival, wherein brewers and industry people gather. Nowhere else do I get to chat with so many industry people at one time. Putting my NERAX hat on, it’s a great place to recruit speakers and source beer for our festival.

Interacting with fellow volunteers is equally enjoyable. Taken as a group these people know beer as well as any collection of individuals in the world. This is a terrific place to talk about beer! Add in the experience of setting up the beer, caring for it, maintaining cooling systems, and organizing service at the bar, and you begin to see the attractions for a beer lover.

There is another compelling reason for volunteering: without volunteers these beer festivals simply would not exist.

If any of this sounds attractive, we always are looking for new volunteers at NERAX. The festival runs 25 March through 28 March, and we set up Mon and Tues, the 23rd and 24th. You can volunteer for setup, one session, or multiple sessions. We have jobs of every description and skills level; all are welcome. For every session you work you get free admission to another session, a couple of pints of beer, and a Redbones sandwich.

You can sign up at our website, www.NERAX.org

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Why Volunteer at a Beer Festival?

Phyzgig is a celebration of physical comedy, old style vaudeville, wonderful acts including comedy, juggling, magic. A wonderful afternoon for kids or adults. Watch for it next year, it’s terrific.

Novare Res is featuring a tasting of Franconian (German) beers…  There are over 20 beers, all from bottle, available at $2.00 per 2 ounce tasting. We particularly enjoyed the Drummer dunkels vollbier and the Rehbrau dunkel, but the fourteen beers we tasted were truly a parade of wonderful flavors.

Living in Portland ain’t bad at all…

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Frohes Neue Jahr – Novare Res

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Merry Christmas!

The Brugge (Closed) Bear

Brugge is another of the great Belgian beer cities, well worth a visit for reasons other than beer. One of the great 17th century merchant cities, it retains an incredible amount of vernacular architecture. It’s one of my favorite cities for just walking around…

A great beer city should entertain even when some of the strongest attractions are closed, and De Garre certainly made that point. I had never been to De Garre, mostly because it was too crowded the times I tried. De Garre is down a tiny alley, very close to the market square. When we arrived the downstairs room was filled with locals, but the upstairs room was empty. This is a very small building, almost an afterthought, featuring exposed brick and beams, low ceilings, lots of atmosphere. It’s very much a classy operation.

Feeling Better Now

For lunch we ordered sandwiches (ham or cheese, but both is not possible…) and hoped for the best. What we got were delightful: big slices of bread in an open faced format, with fabulous ham or cheese, artfully presented on a large plate surrounded by condiments. Just right…

Beers tried included the house Triple Von De Garre (from Von Steenburg) (Delicious, soft, yeasty, a warm mouth feel); a Celis White (Couldn’t resist); a Drei Fonteneyn Oud Guerze (Penance for the Celis); and a Gulden Draak (at 7.5%, brown, smooth lovely with a fine head, mouth filling, not a corner anywhere).

Soon enough we were off to the station, where we arrived late for our train, found it too was tardy, and we jumped aboard. The late train was the source of a small adventure and a cautionary tale. Berchem is a suburban Antwerp stop, a few minutes from Antwerpen Centraal, at which almost all trains stop. As our train was standing in Berchem I was dozing, heard something in Flemish about Ghent, thought nothing of it. Fortunately Sal and Briony were chatting about going to Kulminatur. A fellow across the aisle commented in English “If you’re going to Antwerp you need to get off… This train is going back to Ghent”. When trains are running late the Belgians often turn them in Berchem to get back on schedule.  We did our best Three Stooges imitation in exiting that train asap…

After a quick dinner we were off to Kulminatur for another homecoming. This place is one of the World Temples of beer. Kulminatur has a fine lineup of draft beer and current bottles, but what makes them special is their massive list of aged bottle beer. There’s nothing quite like it anywhere, Dirk and Leen operate a living history of Belgian beer.

The place is small, cluttered, and never seems to change. Well, except for Dirk’s hair style… I’ve been through three distinctly different eras, and each is more startling than the last.

The sad news is that because of huge volume and the labor involved they have closed the Birthday Book to new entries. One of my favorite little things in life is the annual birthday letter from Kulminatur, enclosing a coupon for a free draft beer. With a year to forget about it, the brightly colored envelope always manages to be a pleasant surprise. The program will continue, but only for those already registered.

Kulminatur is a very difficult place to absorb in a single visit. In a way it emulates a visit to Belgium in general: there is so much from which to choose, it demands an organized approach. We of course rejected that and gleefully cherry-picked. We started with draft Karmaliet (8%) and Kasteel Blonde (7%). They were the lightest on tap.

We then dipped a toe into the cellar, for a guerze DeTroch Kriek Chapeau (ten year old) and a Hanssens Guerze Kriek from 2004. DeTroch takes a lot of heat for producing commercial lambics, but this was OK, accessible and quaffable.The Hanssens was beautiful: challenging, tart, complex.

For the final round we enjoyed a draft Gordon’s Christmas Ale from 2003, and a Bush Noel. Lovely.

If one goes to Kulminatur one inevitably collects stories. I remember going in years ago as a callow fellow (at least as regards Belgian beer). I sat at the bar and confidently ordered two different draft beers in succession. I then realized I had done two 12% beers. Fortunately, I asked Leen “I’ve climbed out on a branch and don’t know how to get down. What beers should I have in order to work back to a reasonable session?” Sometimes Dirk and Leen take pity on fools. The first thing she said was “You’re right, we were only going to serve you one more”. Then she threw it over to the locals at the bar, a broad discussion ensued, and a program of beers was agreed to get me firmly grounded for a more reasonable session. That was a memorable evening.

I’ve seen comments about the rudeness of the locals at Kulminatur, and that got me thinking, because my experience has been quite different. I envision a group of foreigners coming into The Great Lost Bear or Novare Res, taking the best tables, speaking loudly in Flemish, and demanding to order drinks in their own language. Some of the welcoming smiles might be a bit forced…

What works for me is take a seat at the bar, be quiet and listen, enjoy your beer, and act like a guest. Sooner or later there is an opening to start a conversation; just make it about them, not you. If that doesn’t work (it often does), what the heck, there’s still a) the beer, and b) a room full of beer tourists behind you.

Walking back to our hotel, I realized that this visit was ending like all my visits to Belgium, with me thinking “How soon can we do this again?”

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Brugge: De Garre & Antwerp: Kulminatur

Having met Sam at Novare Res’s event this past summer, I can tell you first hand that the cargo pants and flip-flops are not an act put on for Bilger. Sam is a good guy who makes some great beers and some really great beers (the Palo Santo Marron is excellent, as is the World Wide Stout). Oliver serves as a good counter-point for Caligione. His comments on the need to ennoble the craft beer movement and the fact that truly extreme beers might, in fact, shrink craft brewing’s audience rather than grow it are insightful and good food (err…drink?) for thought. The difference of opinions is embodied perfectly in a single paragraph in the middle of the piece:

“We are trying to explore the outer edges of what beer can be,” Calagione says. But the idea makes even some craft brewers nervous. “I find the term ‘extreme beer’ irredeemably pejorative,” Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery, told me recently. “When a brewer says, ‘This has more hops in it than anything you’ve had in your life—are you man enough to drink it?,’ it’s sort of like a chef saying, ‘This stew has more salt in it than anything you’ve ever had—are you man enough to eat it?’ ”

As a big fan of the craft beer scene (I know, I try so hard to hide it), any piece that gets more exposure for some of the brewers doing such great work out there is a good one in my mind. Burkhard Bilger goes above and beyond the call here and has written a truly excellent article. For those who still think that beer choices stop at the Bud vs. Coors dilemma (choose water), The New Yorker may help to open their eyes to the wonderful realm of possibilities that exist once you move past industrial lagers. I’ll drink to that!

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The New Yorker Feature on Extreme Beer

We’ll have one evening in Amsterdam (De Wildemann, here we come) and three nights in Antwerp (meeting co-blogger Marcus; we expect to visit a lot of old favorites).

We plan to report on our adventures, perhaps take some pics as well.

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Headed For Antwerp!

My feelings on proper glassware are well-documented. I insist on drinking beer from a glass whenever possible. But, we all know glassware can get expensive. There are almost as many varieties of glasses as there are styles of beer. I remember when the Boston Beer Company released their specialty beer glasses, and many drinkers, myself included, balked at the price. Now, the Spiegelau glass makers of Germany have released their ‘Beer Classics’ line, in a sense taking things up a notch:

Throughout the world, there is a fast growing range of different beers just waiting to be discovered. In order to get most out of the characteristics of beer (appearance, aroma, taste, finish) it is essential to choose the right glass. To cover all these aspects, we at Spiegelau used our expertise and 500 years experience in making crystal to develop three elegant, especially thin blown beer glasses matching the world‘s most common beer styles.

I certainly agree with those first two sentences. The new glass designs include a 14 oz. stemmed glass recommended for Belgian-style beers and pilsners, a 16 oz. footed glass for general lagers and ales, and a 17.5 oz glass for wheat beers. These glasses come in sets of two in a unique tube package. And, they sell for about $15.00 per glass. That’s a lot of beer that could be had for the money one would spend to acquire a set of two in each style. How much is too much? Fine glassware for wines is not uncommon, and we often lament that beer doesn’t seem to merit same respect that wine receives. I am sure this is very nice glassware and I certainly wouldn’t mind adding these to my assemblage. Though I wonder if the apparent trend towards pricey beer glasses is the sort of equality we hoped for. However, if high-end glassware causes folks to sit up and take notice, then I’m all for it.

A color brochure for the new glass line can be found here.

(Via Musings Over a Pint.)

My own thoughts tend to follow David here. While no one would like to choose between paying for glassware and paying for the beer to put in it (since the former is pointless without the latter), drinking a beer from “the right glass” can and does impact the taste. A chalice or tulip full of murky amber Belgian trippel is almost a totally different beer than a tumbler or—gasp—a bottle of the same brew.

Local (and not so local) places like Novare Res, Great Lost Bear, and Ebenezer’s recognize this fact. That is why you will see rows and rows of barware hanging at each, and rows and rows of customers waiting to order. The beer at these three, and others like them, is generally better (and more expensive) than some other Friday night haunts, and so is the tasting experience. It’s not the whole equation, but it’s an important part.

So, what is a budding beer connoisseur on a budget to do? $15/glass crystal is not really practical, but there are cheaper alternatives to be had. First and foremost, realize that you only need a few different types of glasses to enhance your home sampling. Start with a good web beer guide, such as the one offered by BeerAdvocate.com. Find your favorite two or three types of beer, and pick up a few appropriate glasses. A pair of tulips or chalices if you like Belgian ales (the tulips are generally more versatile), a couple proper tumblers for you hopheads out there, or a set of nice tall Weizen glasses for wheat beer fans, and you’re on your way.

After acquiring your glasses, do a side-by-side comparison of your favorite beer in its new glass, in a straight-sided American pint glass, and out of the bottle. Invite some friends over and get their thoughts, too. A nice glass won’t turn a Bud Light into a great lager, but it can open your senses to some of the nuances of your latest trappist gem which you may have been missing. Cheers!

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The Expensive Glassware Conundrum