My Fifth Entry - Avery Brewing Company's White Rascal

As I write these entries, I frequently think about my dad, who would have been 74 next week.

My dad was a farm boy who left the countryside in upstate New York to see the world. After a stint in the Navy, he returned home, married my mom, and went to night school while working as a janitor for General Electric, and later as an engineer for Xerox. He graduated with a BS from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and later got an MBA from Southern Methodist University, all while raising three children (with my mother, no slouch herself in night school).

He was the kind of guy with whom people liked doing things, always a joiner and good company.  He played basketball, loved to run, and had a gift for card games.  He was an active member of his church, helping manage the church's fiscal accounts, and was always volunteering for community work, including, in his retirement years, the Kiwanis Terrific Kid program and the CASA child advocates program.  He also traveled the world, seeing much of Europe, Canada and Mexico, some of the Caribbean Islands, and Japan.

I tell you all of this for two reasons.  First, because I am proud of how loved he was (and is) and how much he accomplished in his life.  Second, because I want you to have the right picture in your mind of this man when I also tell you that he loved beer.

Had I just said, "My dad loved beer," you would have instantly had a mind's-eye image of a man in a spaghetti-strap undershirt sitting in his Archie Bunker easy chair, gut hanging over his belt, meaty fist wrapped around a cold one.  Wouldn't you have?

He wasn't that guy.  He was a guy living in Texas with a world-class ability to sweat through a shirt, and after a long run or after mowing the lawn, what he wanted was an icy Coors (or three).

There were well-defined stages to his post-workout beers.  He would drink the first one in about three gulps, resting the cool can against his face between swigs.  The second one was more contemplative as he walked around the yard, talking a little bit.  The third would put him down in a folding lawn chair in our backyard patio, the picture of relaxation in suburban Texas in the 1970s.

It's a good memory: my dad sitting in the shade of his patio on a hot day, damp shirt sticking to his chest, shreds of newly-mown grass clinging to his calves, and the scent of freshly opened beers wafting through the still air as I brushed and vacuumed our pool (no automatic devices in those days) and we good-naturedly argued about what to listen to on the radio.  (I was a Van Halen kid in those years, and for some inexplicable reason, he liked easy listening elevator music.)

At the time, I didn't think much of moments like that.  It was just part of another day in my life.  Now, it's a memory framed in gilt-edged wood, a picture saturated with small details of a time long past.  Thornton Wilder got it right in "Our Town": no one really appreciates such moments when they're living them, except maybe the poets and the saints. I was neither, but maybe it's not too late for me to appreciate them now.

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Here's a picture of Dad with me and my brother immediately after running the New York Marathon in 1994.  It's one of my favorite pictures because it says so much about the three of us and that day in November in New York City.  I'll tell you the whole story of that day another time.

Dad was 54 years old in this picture and in a lot better shape then than I am now.  It was his twelfth marathon, my second.

Twenty years later, it would be nice to run one more marathon, then sit in the backyard and drink a cool one for him.  I ran three miles this morning at 5:30 with my friend Danica, may try four miles later this week.  Anything's possible.  (Isn't it?)

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This week's beer is Avery Brewing Co.'s White Rascal, a Belgian style white (actually wheat or hefeweizen) ale brewed with spices in Boulder, Colorado.

For fun, I'll try to guess the spices before going to the website. Here goes: definite clove, allspice, maybe some nutmeg. For a beer with a creepy demon illustrating the can, it definitely has a Christmasy vibe.

Results: Man, was I way off.  According to the website, this was

A truly authentic Belgian style wheat or “white” ale, this Rascal is unfiltered (yup, that’s yeast on the bottom) and cleverly spiced with coriander and Curaçao orange peel producing a refreshingly zesty classic ale.

I know what orange peel smells like (albeit not Curaçao orange peel, but who does?), but I had no idea what coriander smelled like, so I went into our spice pantry to check it out. We had a bottle of ground coriander seeds and I took a mighty snort of the brown powder, then tasted the beer again.  The coriander flavor was more apparent, now that my nose had primed my palate.

To be double-sure, I then stuck the open spice bottle under my wife's nose as she sat in our sun room reading.

"What do you smell?"

She frowned.  "What is this?"

"Coriander," I said. "Does it smell like citrus?"

She rolled her eyes, and sniffed again.  "Yeah.  Slightly smoky spicy citrus.  Hmm."  She glanced thoughtfully at the bottle, then made a go-away-now wave at me.  I resisted the urge to repeat the experiment with my children.

After two IPAs, one stout, and one pale ale, this beer was definitely the least hoppy of the bunch.  Despite my grousing in the last installments, it turned out that I missed the bitterness, wanting a little more snap in the beer to offset the sweetness of what I guessed was the malt.

I liked this beer - not sure if my dad would have - but it wasn't a challenging brew.  I see it as more of something you drink as a change-of-pace after going through two or three hoppier beers.

Better than the Buried Hatchet Stout?  Nope - to be the champ, you gotta beat the champ, and this was not a knockout.  Nice, but that's about it.

Next week . . . my beer can collection!

See you then.  (And get well, John.  We miss you on the loop.)

My Fourth Entry - Ska Brewing Euphoria Pale Ale

Last week, with three entries under my belt, I started telling more people about this blog.

Rolling out the blog onto a more public footing was a fraught endeavor for me for a lot of good reasons.

First, I value my privacy, and looking back at the first three entries, I noticed that I was giving up way more detail than I thought I was.  It would not have taken a careful reader to learn that I am married (to my lovely and patient wife, Lisa) and that I have two children, Sarah and Josh.  The second entry told people that I graduated from Lewisville High School in 1981, and, of course, the world now knows that I am fifty years old.  I'm pretty sure this stuff is already well-known to my friends, but now it's out there for the world to know.

Second, I held myself out a few years ago as an "expert" on the dangers of social media by writing an article about the legal ethics of friending judges.  At the time, my kids found it hilarious that I was presuming to tell anyone about how to behave on the Net, given that I have few friends on Facebook (I am selective on who I let in), and I seldom post anything on it or my Twitter account.  Despite their disdain, my article was well-received and led to a series of continuing legal education speeches on, well, how to behave on the Net.  So you would think I know better, but evidently I don't.  A lot of what I'm doing in this blog runs counter to what I have been teaching people about oversharing on the Blawgosphere.

Third, writing a blog that no one reads is easy.  When you write only for yourself, your reader forgives all of your grammar lapses, your reader gets all of your jokes, and your reader understands ab initio that the whole point of this blog is that you are utterly unqualified to judge beers (and yet you're still presuming to do it).

Writing posts that you know other people will read is much harder, especially when you're writing with little or no editing.  You are much more exposed.  At my regular weekend basketball game, for example, I decided to bring my iPad in and share the blog with the guys.  I trust them, I know them, and I knew that if they hated it, they wouldn't tell me.

Or so I thought.

Our League Commissioner read the blog and, between games, said: "500 words on a guy spilling beer on your head at a game?  I think you need a life."

"It was a lot of beer!"

"Feh," he said.  "I've been spilled on, and I've spilled beer.  It happens."

I was understandably defensive.  "What would you have done if you'd been that guy?"

"Bought you and your friend a beer.  If I had been spilled on, I would have let it go."

"Which I did!"

"And I wouldn't have cried about it later, especially in a blog."  He had me there.

Another friend in the game, Joe G., read my first entry about turning 50 and looked concerned.

"Are you going through some kind of existential crisis?" he asked, not unkindly.  I waved him off before he could refer me to a hospice counselor for grief therapy and a discussion of why it was not time to start selling off my comic book collection yet.

Brock W., who's about my height and who regularly guards me in the game, read my blog too.  If you remember from the first entry, he's in the beer business and I had quoted him about his thoughts on judging beer.

I asked him if I had gotten the discussion right, and he corrected me: "I didn't say that people who talk about beer that way are full of BS.  I said that you wouldn't want to hang around with people who taste beer that way."

I wasn't sure at first what he meant.  He could have been saying that beer snobs are no fun, or he could have been saying that people with advanced beer palates would eat my lunch.

I then asked him what he thought about my tasting note on detecting Yankee pot roast in the Buried Hatchet stout.  He grimaced and then said cautiously, "I suppose you might have tasted the roast notes in the malt, and I suppose it might have made you think of pot roast."  He stopped, and I waited for him to continue.  Instead, he turned away to shoot a basket.

I think I now know what Brock meant about my hanging around with beer aficionados.

Other people have been supportive of the idea of the blog, without having yet read it. When my friend Lillian  H. asked me about my writing during a State Bar committee meeting - Lillian, who is a real wordsmith, has been encouraging me on my writing ever since reading a short story I submitted to the Bar Journal for its short story contest - I told her that I was writing this blog.  This caught the attention of everyone else in the conference room, and when I told them about the fifty beers and the beer spilling incident, they wanted to see this blog.  A lively discussion ensued and I was struck by how many of the committee members had strong feelings about beer and its qualities (or lack thereof).

So, TDRPC Committee members: if you're reading this, I am truly touched and pleased. That said, if it's not what you expected, please let me down gently.  The blog will get better over time . . . I hope.

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I learned this week that there is a beer equivalent of sommeliers: they are called cicerones. Here's a pretty good article on the process from 2010, which makes obtaining cicerone status sound like a daunting ordeal.  My favorite quote from the story: "It's not just sitting around drinking beer."  That's disappointing.  Sitting around drinking beer is kind of the point, isn't it?

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This week's beer is the Euphoria Pale Ale from the Ska Brewery in Durango, Colorado.

© JDurfee99

The can design was very cool.  I understood immediately why Jay and Lisa picked it out.  A dancing skeleton in a suit with a scarf and knit cap (with pom-pom) appears underneath the logo, and the can is ringed with directions to recycle and engage in other useful activities:

Daffy-Hibernate-Curl-Recycle-Skin Up Fatty-Lutz-Skeleton-Recycle-Ice Fish-Check-Recycle

© JDurfee99

There's also a picture of a mountain and, although there are no tasting notes, it identifies itself as being "Hand-Crafted in the Mighty San Juans."  There may have been an inside joke in the selection of this beer because Jay, Lisa and I once took a business trip to the Seattle area to take a former prosecutor's deposition, and he lived in the - wait for it - San Juan Islands, and we also could see the mighty Mount Olympus in the distance.  And we drank beer on that trip, so that's another synchronicity.

The Euphoria is a nice smooth drinkable beer.  The funny thing about the beer was that it smelled and tasted much sharper when it was first poured - the hops gave it a strong citrusy attack at the outset, but then the beer almost immediately mellowed into something I could drink all day.  The beer also let go of its carbonation quickly, which allowed me to quaff it quickly.  (I'm going to try to pay attention to that in the future, because I'm not sure whether all beers go flat at the same rate, or if some beers get flatter quicker.  This one seemed to get flat fast.)

Placing my nose in the pint gave me an apricot scent and it finished nicely, leaving me with the promised sense of euphoria (6.2% alcohol by volume (ABV) will do that for you).

I also tried something new this week by pairing the beer with other food.  I made an whole-wheat apple galette from a recipe in last week's USA Today Weekend supplement, and it definitely seemed to pair well with the Euphoria.

(By the way, this was a pretty good recipe.  Whole wheat flour with flax seeds and butter in the crust; apricot jam, Granny Smith apples, butter and cinnamon sugar in the filling.  I think the rustic crust was what made it coordinate well with the beer.)

Overall, this was a really nice beer.  Was it better than last week's Buried Hatchet Stout?  Nope.  The championship belt stays with the Southern Star Brewery for at least one more week.

Next week, I'm going to try pairing the next beer with Yankee pot roast.  As far as I'm concerned, that's a perfect match.

See you next week.

My Third Entry - Southern Star Buried Hatchet Stout

Before discussing this week's beer, let's talk about something that happened to me last week at the Rockets game.

It was a Wednesday night game, Rockets against the Phoenix Suns. My wife and I were at the game with our friends, Sean and Danica M. We were not able to get four seats next to each other, so Sean and I were in one set of two seats, while Lisa and Danica were about ten seats away on the same row. I'm ashamed to say that Sean and I took the better seats, closer to center court, but you will soon see that our hubris was punished by the Beer Gods.

I had met my wife and friends at China Garden before the game, coming there directly from work. I was wearing a nice navy blue pinstripe and my favorite red tie. I like attending the games in my work uniform - it gives me a feeling of confidence to look dapper and sleek, or at least as dapper and sleek as a kinda fat guy can look at age 50.

After a nice, quick dinner (and I can't say enough about how much I enjoy eating at China Garden), we went to Toyota Center and took our respective seats. Sean and I are old friends and we chatted in the way that old friends do.

"How's work?"

"Fine.  You?"

"Yep.  Fine.  Did you empty your sprinkler before the freeze?"

"Uh-huh."

We settled into a comfortable silence, the sounds of the crowd in Toyota Center a low hum in the background.

Then . . . I don't know when I first became aware of the commotion behind us, but I think the reptilian part of my brain - that part that senses danger before the conscious brain can process it - heard the approach of predators from behind.  I don't mean that I thought I was going to be killed and eaten at the Toyota Center, but there was definitely a current of alpha male testosterone flowing towards us.  

I didn't look back because when predators approach, you don't want to show weakness, but I could hear them coming - loud, drunk, affluent, frat guy semi-executive or sales types, doing well enough to be sitting in the lower bowl, displaying high-grade douchery in the firm belief from a lifetime's experience that making a loud entrance would make them noticeable and attractive to the low-cut dress types in the nearby club section.  

I tried to ignore these guys and get back into my cool sitting-quietly-with-my-friend vibe.  It wasn't to be.

The beer hit my head pretty much all at once.  Some of it ran down the back of my neck and on to my suit jacket, and the rest of it hit my tie and pants.  I figure it was about six ounces, which doesn't sound like a lot unless it is poured on your head.

At this point, I stood up and, well, squeaked, "What the hell?"  I say "squeaked" because the pitch of my voice went one octave higher as I complained, indicating that my testicles were withdrawing defensively into my body instead of flooding me with adrenaline and good ol' High-Test.  I think this was not impressive to anyone - the guy who had spilled the beer, my friend Sean, or any of the low-cut types in the nearby club section.  Thus:

RULE ONE FOR WHEN BEER IS POURED ON YOU AT A GAME:  Don't squeak. If you want to be the alpha, lower the pitch of your voice or don't say anything at all.  It probably would have been way more intimidating for me - at 6-4 and 250 - to slowly stand up without speaking and turn to the guy with beer dripping down my face, than for me to squeak, "What the hell?"

But I had to live with that first reaction.  

I half-turned to the guy behind me and continued to sputter.  At first glance, he looked pretty much like what I thought he would look - doughy face with an expensive haircut, dress shirt hanging out of his dress slacks, boots, mouth slightly hanging open and on the edge of laughing at me, but not quite there yet.

I complained again.  The guy kind of apologized in a douchey way.

"Hey, sorry, but it fell out of my tray.  See?"  He gestured with his tray, as if it was something animate and independent, like a small dog that he was holding but not controlling.  Don't blame me, he was implying, because this tray was badly designed, dumb-ass.

RULE TWO FOR WHEN BEER IS POURED ON YOU AT A GAME:  If you're going to get aggressively pissed-off, your window to act is very short, so seize the moment.  Or not.

I said again, still sounding like someone was gripping my nether regions, "What the hell?"  I turned away from him and waved to one of the ushers for some towels.  As I mopped myself semi-dry, the douche offered me a beer, or dinner, or whatever I wanted, but not sincerely, more because it was expected.  I waved him off.

RULE THREE FOR WHEN BEER IS POURED ON YOU AT A GAME:  When the pourer offers you compensation and you haven't already decided to kick his ass, but you're still pissed, turn to his friend and say, "The only thing I want from your friend is to get away from me.  He can leave, he can trade seats down the row, but I don't want this f-up sitting behind me."  Or not.

I sat back down, stewing.  Sean was cool, even though he had gotten some of the beer shrapnel on him, and we waited for things to settle down.

The guy proceeded to jokingly complain about having lost his beer.  And about the beer having spilled into his popcorn.  And about having to get his boots reshined because they had gotten beer on them.  He also acted like an ass for the next quarter-and-a-half, clearly drunk, making racist comments about the number of white guys playing for the Rockets.  He and his entourage then left to get some more to drink, returning midway through the third quarter and then leaving early in the fourth.

RULE FOUR FOR WHEN BEER IS POURED ON YOU AT A GAME:  You have everyone's sympathy in the section, especially after the pourer leaves.  Assume the role of the Victim Shaking His Head and the Nice Guy Wronged by an Idiot, and people will go out of their way to take your side.  You cannot, however, appear disproportionately angry. It's just beer, after all.

Also, I was actually glad it was me catching the beer. Had it been my wife and my friend Danica in those seats, the whole night would have been ruined.  And that guy would have had to deal with the wrath of two beer-soaked middle-aged women who are past the age of caring about what the people around them think.  There's nothing scarier than that.

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This week's beer is the Southern Star Buried Hatchet Stout.  Southern Star is a craft brewery located in nearby Conroe, and will be celebrating their sixth anniversary in March.

This is one of the canned beers that Lisa and Jay got, and I think Josh picked it because of the cool can design.

© jdurfee99

Like the Karbach Hopadillo, there is a nifty description on the side of the can that reads:

You hold in your hand a stout for stout lovers.  Buried Hatchet is brewed with a large quantity of brown malt reminiscent of a traditional Pre-Industrial Revolution malt profile.  The stout is full of robust, roasted flavors which intermingle with a bittersweet creaminess that concludes to a perfect, warming finish.

(By the way, I am a sucker for these descriptions.  It's like the owner is there explaining things to you during a brewery tour.  I don't know why more beers don't come with their own tasting notes.)

I liked this beer.  It opened up in the glass with a molasses scent, plus what tasted like chocolate and raspberry, all of which I have been told is fairly usual for stouts.  Nose-deep into the pint glass, I could definitely smell the roast notes, but not like roasted coffee beans.  More like (and I am sure this is just wish-fulfillment) Yankee pot roast, which I love.  Towards the end, the taste was predominantly fruity and finishes with a coffee note.  Here's what it looks like in the glass:

© jdurfee99

It's a Sunday night as I sit here finishing the last of this drink.  In the championship match, does it beat the Breckinridge 471?  As I said last week, I wanted something different from the two IPAs I started this blog with.  I got it with this beer.  

Accordingly, it PASSES and it also beats the Breckinridge IPA just because I am really enjoying it, because it comes from a local brewery, and because, in light of this week's developments, no one poured it on my head.

This particular beer is for drinking, not wearing.

See you next week.

My Second Entry - Breckenridge Brewery 471 Small Batch IPA

I'm back.

This is actually kind of surprising.  With two entries now, I have written more about myself in a single forum than I have since senior English in high school (Lewisville 1981).

Although I write for a living - and by most objective measures, I have been really good at writing - I have never considered myself a "writer."

This was not for lack of desire for the title.  I always wanted to be a writer, but there was always something missing.  It was simply that I did not have the need to write.

In my twenties, I was at a book reading (I think it was John Irving, but I can't be sure), and someone asked the author the question I had been asking myself: what makes someone a writer? In two words, this author punctured all of my pretensions about being a writer.  He said, "Writers write."

I didn't write, so I wasn't a writer.  Q.E.D.

This was a heavy realization for me at a young age.  Although I thought I had the stuff to be a good writer, I knew I was missing that X factor that makes it a vocation.

I'm not saying that I completely turned my back on the craft, however.  Over the years, I have written pieces for fun or scratch money.  I wrote a couple of humor pieces for the Houston Lawyer, including the before-its-time classic "Objection! and Other Legal Classics."  My friend Ed P. sent me assignments for a magazine he worked on called Private Clubs (sounds sexy, but it was a glossy house magazine for ClubCorp), which paid a dollar a word, pretty good work.  I entered the State Bar's short story contest a couple of times, but didn't win.

As my retirement nears, I have begun to entertain idea of writing professionally as one of my second-career options.  I'm not sure, however, if that train hasn't already sailed (nice mixed metaphor!)  I guess that's why I'm working this blog -- to see if this is the kind of thing that I would want to do in my dotage.

So far, it's been fun.  We'll see where it goes.

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A quick note in my own defense.  When I started this blog, I assumed that this idea was entirely original.  Fifty beers for fifty years - who would have thought of writing a blog about drinking fifty different beers in my fiftieth year?

Someone else, it turns out.

Here's how I found out.  A few days after my first entry, I checked the page hits on my blog and discovered that I had several page views.  This was before I started telling select friends about the blog, so I was a little shocked.  Was I going to acquire a following so quickly, especially with so little to say about beer?

The next day, I tested the hypothetical.  I ran "Fifty Beers for Fifty Years" on Google to see where my blog scored.  And there it was: Fifty Beers for Fifty Years, except it wasn't my Fifty Beers for Fifty Years.  The premise was the same: guy gets fifty beers from friends for his fiftieth birthday, and decides to write about it.  He even captioned each entry more or less the same as I did.

You may reasonably think I lifted the idea of this blog wholesale from that guy.  But I didn't - it was a total coincidence, and proof that in this wide world of ours, original ideas are rarer than you could imagine.

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This week's brew is the Breckenridge Brewery 471 Small Batch IPA.  Hand-selected from the refrigerator by my son, Josh, who was home alone with me tonight while Lisa and Sarah were at work. I asked him why he picked this one, and he told me that he was attracted by the "small batch" aspect and thought I'd enjoy it.

This should tell you something about my son.  He has a good heart (he could have tortured me with the jalapeño beer) and he is a designer-label kind of kid.  He also took this picture.

 

© jdurfee99

First thoughts: Here's another hoppy drink.  To be honest, I am having second thoughts about the idea of drinking all of the IPAs first.  They're flavor-forward, aggressive ales, but not what I would call relaxing.

As I drink, the hops dominate as you would expect, but there is less of a back-of-the-throat aftertaste than the Karbach Hoppadillo, and less of a metallic finish.  In the glass, I smell stone fruit, something like apricot, which is interesting because the color of the IPA is similar, making me wonder if I'm being influenced to some small degree by the appearance of the drink.  Into my second and third sips, I'm now weirdly catching a very light black pepper flavor.

Better than last week's Hopadillo?  Yep, and I would hope so, given its pedigree, according to the website:

471 is a small batch, limited edition ale that was created by our Brewmaster to separate the weak from the strong. 471 is a double IPA, that combines Pale, Munich, Caramel-30, Carapils and Torrified Wheat malts, with Chinook, Centennial, Simcoe and Fuggles hops. It has a big sweet mouthfeel, followed by more hoppiness than you've ever had at one time. 

Accordingly, we have a new champion, albeit by decision, not knockout.  I liked the 471, but I am already getting tired of the IPAs.  Next week, let's try something a little lighter.

See you then.