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.