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.)