In November, I turned fifty years old.
It was a nice birthday, all told. My wife threw me a party; my kids promised me some new golf clubs. I had a checkup and everything seemed to be working okay.
I wasn't terribly introspective about celebrating my birthday because there had been very little to be introspective about. I had (and still have) a happy, loving family, many good friends, a good job, a nice house, and some money in the bank. Sooner than later, I will be able to retire, and in the remaining years of my life, my family history of Durfee men dying in our sixties is going to compete against the twenty-first century medical advances that might keep me going for longer than I had originally expected.
My dad died at 63, too soon. I want to live longer than that. Life and this world have so much to offer, and it would be a terrible thing for the play of one's life to be just one act.
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Two weeks ago, I had lunch with my friends Lisa H. and Jay A. at the original Ninfa's on Navigation. They treated me to carnitas and tres leches, and then, in the parking lot, they revealed a surprise: in the back of Lisa's SUV were fifty different beers from Spec's that they had chosen to commemorate my fifty years.
This was a really inspired and kind gift. Surveying the beers, it was clear that they had chosen the brews more for their unusual names and unusual designs than for likely taste. As you will see in due course, there were some real outliers in the mix.
Driving back downtown with Jay and Lisa, a question occurred to me: How was I going to drink fifty different beers? For some people I know, fifty beers was just a good start to the weekend. For me, however, fifty beers could take months to clear from my garage refrigerator unless my beer-drinking friends and family cleared them out while watching television.
This had happened to three bottles of my six-pack of Saint Arnold's Divine Reserve 13, which I had been saving in the back of the fridge for a special occasion. I had come home from work and found my sister and stepfather tasting the Divine after the Corona they had brought was all gone. I think they liked it, but I also viewed it as a lost opportunity to compare notes with them about what they thought, how it had tasted.
In recalling the lost Divines, it occurred to me that what I really wanted to do was drink these fifty beers with intent. Over fifty beers, I would apply my own standards for tasting beer and try to figure out what I really liked. I would expose you, my Swilling Reader, to beers you may never have considered drinking and I would tell some stories about my fifty years in the process.
In short, I would do appropriate justice to Lisa and Jay's extraordinarily kind gift.
So here goes . . .
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I told my friend Brock W., who I play basketball with on the weekend and who knows something about beer, about my project. I asked him how I should evaluate the beer. He snorted.
"You mean like, 'I detect saddlewood with traces of raspberry, oak, and leather, with a creamy finish'? That kind of thing?"
"Yeah."
"You can't, and most people can't either. What you want to look for is balance, how the bitterness of the hops is balanced by the other flavors in the beer." He told me some other things about how he tastes beer that I don't remember now (I am fifty, after all), but I do remember that he said that he was interested in seeing how someone like me - a true tabula rasa - would formulate my own tasting notes.
I decided that I was going to start this process on a PASS/FAIL scale. I would take a picture of the can or bottle, a picture of the beer in a pint glass, and then taste it. First impressions, later impressions, and then whether I liked it or not and why. I would also apply the boxing/wrestling championship rules and compare it to my favorite beer, with the winner taking the belt.
For some reason, Brock suggested that I start with the IPAs and work my way up to the stouts. That sounded good to me, so I dispatched my daughter Sarah to choose, at random, the first beer of the blog. Here's what she brought me:
Cuicado
He lurks in the shadows, waiting in bold anticipation. He's surprisingly bitter. Bitter about something. Legend has it that he feasts on those with fresh hops coursing through their veins. This dry hopped, Texas IPA has a flavor as defiant as the Hopadillo itself. It's packed with the bracing bitterness of hops from around the world that this creature craves. He's comin' to get ya. You've been warned.
The description wasn't kidding. This was bitter beer, but strangely not unpleasant. As I wrote this on a cool January afternoon, it was a little too hoppy for my taste, but later in the year (say July), I could see this beer having the strength to stand up to being served ice-cold. Putting my nose in the pint glass, it smelled slightly lemony, and it also had a metallic edge (probably the can). The aftertaste was pretty strong -- one of those back of the throat, my-wife-is-going-to-know-I've-been-drinking-from-my-breath tastes.I'm not sure I'd want to drink three or four of these in a row, but I enjoyed this one. It PASSED and is the new champ going into the next entry.
By the way, in learning about hops, I ran across a pretty good article from May of last year in Slate about the prevalance of hoppiness in craft beers. Time will tell if I agree with the article's argument, but so far, I don't have a problem with strong hoppy flavors.
Thanks for reading.
