Recently in Hip Hops Category

The most pious among us believe that if you pray long enough for something, you're bound to get it. Well, if that's the case, some sour-tongued beer geek in our neck of the woods has been prostrating up a storm, because last week we got word of three cases of Russian River's 'Supplication' hitting a couple select L.A. stores. The limited release, 14-month barrel-aged, self-described "American wild ale" has churned up impressive praise from the webby scrutinizers. It helps that its name references the nondenominational past-time of groveling before God. Not being huge fans of Russian River, but also not wanting to miss tasting the hype, we grabbed two bottles: one to slurp now, and one to save for later.

To be frank, the tasting scenario was less seriously critical than normal. The bottle got popped around 4 pm on a 90-degree Friday afternoon -- when just about any drivel will taste like the nectar of a bejeweled duke. But discerning or not, this beer has a pair of wine legs.

Russian River's Supplication

Poured haphazardly into a glimmering German pilsner glass, the stuff came out amber and hazy with a huge, watery head of the kind of froth you wanna flick on someone's nose like bubble bath suds. The glassware choice ruled, because all of the crazy carbonation traveled from the base of the glass to the surface in little unpredictable patterns, like shooting stars. That bubbly turbulence is thanks to a refermentation process allowed in the bottle, champagne styles. Despite being a brown ale, the nose was all watermelon Sour Patch kids, puckery smelling. The first hit to the tongue is sour cherries, not sweet like some, but dry -- drier than fossilized wood. Then comes an even woodsier forest taste, like biting into oak bark, followed by what we can only describe as what would happen if you madly shook Angostura cocktail bitters into a lambic. Right at the end, the sour brew actually smooths out into a buttery, vanilla tannin-sy, roll-around-on-your-tongue sensation. Consider us converted, just don't expect us to talk to a god about it.

Dairy Pairy: Petite Basque, bloomy sheep's milk
Soundtrack: Comet's On Fire's "Pussy Foot the Duke"

When Hot Knives first began reviewing beers, we bought new bottles quickly and often, mostly bombers on pocket change. The closest thing to “aging” those beers was the sloshing around they did on the bike ride home from the liquor store.

Then the small, but reliable, checks started coming in from the weekly beer column we call “Hip Hops,” which gets reprinted occasionally here and there. Beer money! As a result, the reviews have matured a bit — we splurge on less frequent shopping sprees and tote around geeky bound diaries to take notes — and with it, our holding policy has changed too. Nearly a year ago, we decided we wanted to try cellaring our beers, by saving certain bottles for a set period of time at (mostly) friendly temperatures. We got another push to do the project when our Internet friends at 1000 Beers embarked on their own ambitious mission of burning through unfamiliar craft brews one at a time. Now we’re upping the ante.

Thanks partly to those checks we have been able to amass a small but respectable collection, around 75 bottles that run the gamut from oily 13 percent ABV malt sludge to wild yeast Belgians. And few in the collection have been popped. Instead we have buried them dutifully in our basements and living room cabinets. The goal: Gather 99 bottles for aging and only begin popping them one at a time as we replace ‘em with something else.

Once we hit that 99-bottle mark, the next mission is to build, or buy, a proper 50-degree beer chamber. Until then, we have plans to house them in a wooden chest the size of a casket inside a walk-in fridge. To get ready for that we recently unearthed the bottles we’ve been storing. We took inventory and began drooling. Wanna see what we have aging? Take a peek at the video.

At the premier performance of the cataclysmically cool collaboration of Bodycity and Glasser, we happened upon the perfect accompaniment to outdoor fire-cooking: Norwegian Wood. Not to be confused with blond Viking fuel for fire, this ale is mahogany colored gas for the grill master.

Like many of the boutique ales coming out of the Nordic lands, Norwegian wood is steeped in tradition that stands in stark comparison to the brews of its countrymen. Over 90% of the beers brewed in Denmark and Norway are bland pilsners, but as Black Metal is to NorPop, so are breweries like Haand Bryygeriet to Carlsberg. According to the importer, the Hand Brewery consists of four old timers who brew in their spare time.

Norwood is based on traditional Norwegian farmhouse ales; kilned over open flames and spiced with juniper twigs and berries. As we learned when researching Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier, many ales were once quite smoky on account of wood fire cooking of wort, but the tradition has died off significantly in deference to the mild and chuggable.

These smoked suds are a solid match for grill side swilling, especially in the not yet sweltering afternoons of spring. Norwood is solid indoors and out; as an evening workday ender, or over lighter fluid soaked mesquite coals. The smokiness lingers in your mouth and the malts leave a lasting sweetness that finishes with a slight bitter tinge from hand-harvested juniper. Don’t look to hard for the mediciny Christmas flavors of wreaths; the berries and twigs are used exactly as coriander and orange are in Belgian ales: they contribute to the roundness of the beer's flavor without standing out. Serve at just colder than room temp-a fifteen-minute ice down in your cooler if you’re in a park-and all the flavors of woods and fires will really sing.

Soundtrack: Woods “Family Creeps”
Dairy Pairy: Montcabrer: an Ash Ripened Goats milk cheese from outside Barcelona.

Happy Green Day! We celebrated last St. Patrick’s Day with a bang, it was a Sunday after all, so rolling out of bed into a glass of Harp lager and frying off an Irish breakfast special was a lot easier. Still, we feel so guilty having nothing quirkier to recommend to peeps than Arthur Guinness’ tried but true frothy extra stout and a tumbler of piss-warm Jameson. It’s tradition, and great, but we’re hardly traditionalists.

So, when we stumbled upon a couple Bay Area attempts at widening the ‘Green Day’ beer options, we nabbed them: an Irish Red Ale from Marin County, and a Dry Irish Stout from Moylan’s. Both seemed perfectly timed to the holiday without screaming “gimmick.” Ironically the same brew master presides over both too. And considering it’s the same ruffian who is responsible for a couple of the best West Coast-Irish hybrids —the iconic “Kilt Lifter” and a lucky charm of an Imperial Stout — we hoped we could suggest a couple new St. Patty’s Day beers to y’all!

The results were thirst quenching and mildly inebriating, but not quite a success.

St. Brendan's Irish Red and Dragoon's Dry Stout

On first pop, the Red Ale is a nice orange beard hue. Its bubbsies hang a few seconds longer than normal, and the aroma is hoppy and a little lager-esque. A slight sour-kick at first taste quickly retreats to a more bland, general mouth slickness. Emotions conjured up include: warmth and security, boredom, and a general aura of calmness. We decided this was more of an all-day chugger to accompany a ploughman sandwich spread or something. We popped the other one.

As for the Dry Irish Stout, which we paired with grainy biscuit crackers a small, piping hot plate of French-Moroccan tagine, we were similarly non-plused but satisfied (see video above). In the end, both of these were noble replacements for the holy trio of Guinness, Harp and Jameson. But certainly not for the serious red-faced celebrant.

At its inception, Imperial Stout was a savage concoction. The Russian Czars’ thirst for stouts could not be quenched and English and Irish producers couldn’t produce beer that would survive the brutal cold of a month long trip to St. Petersburg. Their answer was a beer that could withstand any voyage; a brew so high in alcohol that it would not spoil, and so flavorful from roasted malts that it would still taste amazing in the event that it did. Imagine bulging barrels of viscous beer the color of crude oil hefted deftly one after another by British maritime brutes. Cargo hulls full of alcoholic ballast destined for the dead city of the Eastern Lords…

Black Flag Imperial Stout evokes the evil spirit of its English ancestor. The head churns in your glass like the dark version of the foam from which Aphrodite emerged; it’s fluffy and thick, but has a caramel tint that precludes something less than loving. Your tongue, relieved of saliva, almost ventures down your gullet with the black torrent leaving a long finish that starts by coating your uvula with hooch molasses. The generous hops quickly segue way into lasting coffee notes that are more fruity than chocolaty, almost behaving like a lighter roasted coffee with the viscosity and kick of a super short shot of espresso The boozy flavors linger in-between your teeth so vividly that chewing seems more than reasonable. Don’t bite your tongue.

Yeah, all Imperial stouts exhibit these flavors and feelings, but whereas Stone’s or Avery’s (both of which we revere) are like a charged Black Metal Ballad brutalizing your mouth in quick jolting blows, Black Flag inverts the temporal field of your palate. The sound of steeling a knife goes from a quick Shikkk to a long lulling sine wave of metal on metal. The Brewers of Black flag emerge from the New Mexican desert like skeletal Bedouin, hauling earthen kegs northwest to an undead sock hop at some brew-court in Portland where zombie hipsters wink sunken eyes and sip frothy mugs of fuckyeah.

Black Flag is the session stout for stout fiends. This bottle could easily find a permanent place in your fridge or in your burgeoning beer cellar for beginners. You might find yourself drinking way too much, turning your teeth black and making you talk like some kind of scurvy ridden ex-member of Christian death. But would that really be so bad?

Dairy Pairy: Ditcheat Cheddar
Soundtrack: Danzig III
Find it: Red Carpet

“Pop, phisss… utter vacuumed silence.” That is, essentially, the sound a bottle of Older Viscosity makes when you (finally) open it for a drinking. We like to think we could place it a line-up of recorded bottle-openings — much the same way those grating, accented halfwits from “Car Talk” would have you imitate the sound your engine is making it so they can diagnose it. In this case, the utter silence is not a symptom of something being wrong with your $20 bottle of premium, aged dark beer, however. It’s the sound of something horribly right.

This slim, beaker-shaped bottle from Port Brewing is their super-aged version of Old Viscosity — a champion all its own. The San Marcos brewers take different batches of the stuff and blend them in oak bourbon barrels, where it’s aged for a year, according to the brewery. The limited edition brew, released late last year, will likely disappear soon and (with luck) reappear later again this year. We recommend popping one of these bottles every 3,000 miles rather than servicing your car.

The pour comes out a velvety, black desert liquid, more like fossil fuel with a bubbly film than any dark beer we’ve seen. There’s almost no carbonation, few bubbles, negligible head: hence the utter silence. The sight kinda put fear in us, expecting a diesel-strength cask beer. But we were pleasantly surprised by how gentle and refined the 12% ABV beer tasted. Sipping it post-dinner, out of wine goblets in a sepia-toned living room, gave the concoction even more of a digestive vibe. Smelling, we imagined caramel apples, vanilla beans — real dangly ones, not a flavoring — and sweet tawny port. On our tongues, there was a milky, creamy, toffee taste that spread slowly, like dulce de leche spiked with whisky. And when we say milky, we mean like lactic acid, that comforting sticky build-up feel that makes milk and cookies good. Expecting motor oil, we got the chamomile tea of beers.

Dairy Pairy: Quenby Hall Stilton
Soundtrack: Nine Inch Nails’ Further Down the Spiral

There have been days when we’ve cursed the Rocky Mountains for keeping the Colorado beers we love (and those we think we could love, if that love were only given a chance) from reaching our beer dealers in Los Angeles — silver bullet indeed. We’re used to getting pretty much whichever beer we want, when we want it. So knowing that Avery withholds some of its seasonals and six-packs from reaching us in Los Angeles, well, it stings. And staring at pictures of Great Divide beers online and not being able to find them anywhere? Quite simply it’s torture. Of course, we know it’s not Great Divide or Avery or any other brewery’s fault we can’t drink their beer. It’s just economics and geography. Still, it makes us sad.

So, when on a recent trip to Albuquerque, New Mexico, we ran headfirst into the Great Divide section of a local liquor emporium, it was like a screechy “Oh my god, look at you!” family reunion. We introduced ourselves first to Old Ruffian, their barleywine-style ale. We got to know each other in a garage on a snowy Christmas morning. Filled to the brim from New Mexico veggie breakfast burritos, feeling awesome about wearing motorcycle gloves, we popped the top of this bad boy, literally, inside the engine of a 1957 Chevy. Albuquerque is hardcore.

And this beer is hardcore. Poured like a handshake into a frosty pint glass, Old Ruffian froths with a wavy head of hop-scented foam — like a mane of skunky hair on a Hells Angels biker. The rest of the glass shimmers like a molasses soda. Old Ruffian is the kind of badass brew that balances sugar, sweet and sour notes diplomatically without wussing out on any of them. There’s the piney hop sting at first taste, and a maple syrup throat itch while gulping. It’s a little juicy, a little boozy, and totally thirst quenching despite it’s dangerous ABV. If you’re east of the Rockies, and you can get it, don’t be afraid of this beer, deep down it’s not so rough: like a biker with a mom tattoo.

Dairy Pairy: Barbeillon
Soundtrack: George Thorogood’s “I Drink Alone”

It is Christmas Eve, heathens. Time to make a chestnut fire, a batch of fresh bread and don wool socks. Of course, that can be a tall order if you have to, oh, say, work around the clock or spend Christmas apart from dudes and family. Our fallback many a winter — the only thing we’ve found that can replace the holiday cheer of mom attempting vegan cookies or skipping church to make snow angels in your parent’s yard — has been seasonal ales, big bombers of winter beer and frothy Christmas specials. At the risk of sounding like depressed alkies who lean on a bottle for Christmas spirit, consider that the perfect winter beer will offer the triumvirate mentioned above: chestnuts and fresh bread in the palate, and enough booze to keep your feet (and soul) warm. So, here’s a first stab at some of the better winter beers we’ve had this December, with more to come. More importantly, it’s not too late to run out and grab a couple as stocking stuffers…

St. Bernardus Christmas Ale

A light molasses pour, fluff bubbles with waft of carbo-buzz, subtle roasted chestnuts and malt sugar undertones — this is a safe-bet table-pleaser. Whereas some of the St. Bernardus brews are the idyllic frothy beverage emitted from the barrel around the neck of a life-saving St. Bernard, this Christmas ale is like the candy cane mead swigged by a naughty, Belgian shopping mall Santa.

Dairy Pairy: Saenkanter Gouda
Soundtrack: Dandy Warhol’s “Little Drummer Boy”

Avery’s Old Jubilation Ale

You know the old Budweiser ads with steeds pumping their sinewy leg muscles through snow and ice with a Bud sleigh behind ‘em? Now get ready for the real thing. This Colorado brewery’s winter ale is a standout for one reason: they don’t go sprinkling spices in their kegs like they’re baking holiday ho-hos — just a strong mahogany syrup made of five malts, no added herbs, and lots of nutty mellowness. One of the better meal pints this year; it won’t mess with your perfectly spiced vegan pig loin.

Dairy Pairy: Ossau-Iraty
Soundtrack: Spiritualized’s “Oh Happy Day”

Deschutes’ Jubel

Oregon flagship brewers went all ‘Peace On Earth’ with this year’s holiday brew. It’s a rare attempt at even-handed hopping and malting. Flowery juniper pine-sol hits first, crystal clear sipping upfront, then rounded out by a robust, if jumbled, baker’s chocolate and oven-scented malts after-taste. Good, not great, but still plenty worth serving to weaker-budded buddies.

Dairy Pairy: Fig cake
Soundtrack: Bright Eye’s “Road to Joy”

Alesmith’s Yulesmith Holiday Ale

It feels like just yesterday that we were scarfing blistered peanuts, diving for cover from the neighborhood kids’ firecracker wars and glugging on the red-and-blue tinted Alesmith Hoilday ale for Fourth of July. Now we’re decking the halls with their other holiday seasonal and ‘tis the mother f-ing season. This bomber pours red-copper brown like a rusty faucet and tastes like a malt wreath fell in your double IPA. Style-wise, Yulesmith is actually a bit like Jubel: malty and hoppy at once, but they pull it off with flying colors.

Dairy Pairy: Tuxford And Tebbet's Mature Black Wax Cheddar
Soundtrack: Belle and Sebastian’s “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”

N’Ice Chouffe

How do goblins celebrate Christ’s birth, you might ask? Well the ones behind the Belgian Brewerie d’Anchouffe throw a bunch of orange peel and fresh thyme in their batches of brown ale and let it get spicy. At a recent house party we stuck a bottle of this elfin nectar in the freezer and pulled it out just as ice was starting to congregate around the bottle. Corked and poured, this beer came out a muddy, herby slurpy. The thyme coulda been stronger for us garden geeks, but the citrus was perfectly balanced against medicinal malt notes. A good 750 ml for late-night Christmas shopping runs or Home Alone-style holiday heists, perhaps, or of course outdoor fire parties with gnomes.

Dairy Pairy: Boulette d'Avesnes, washed with beer and spices
Soundtrack: Grandaddy’s “Alan Parsons in a Winter Wonderland”

There will always be central aspects of the holiday season that are total bummers. For some its traveling long distances crammed up against smelly strangers in a metal box impossibly cruising tens of thousands of feet above the surface of the planet: screaming children placed at all corners like mentally mutilating motion sensors. Others sweat the savagery of the shopping days with names that smack of biblical plagues, or chug horrendous herbal-speed-sodie-pops to shakingly click on once in a year low prices at ungoldy hours.

Our horror for the holidays is a hydra with one head: Pumpkin Ale. While we like to consider ourselves non-haters, we believe there is a special circle of hell for the makers of oft ubiquitous after October bottles that bear cutesy pictures of harvest squash, jack-o-lanterns, and other autumnal ephemera. When another pie tasting beer pops up in the stead of a truly wonderful winter ale we cry a little…we die a little.

Usually, this blatantly biased and unfair critique is leveled against the most deserving of bummer-breweries. This year the emperor’s unsightly ass was exposed with a suggestion from Alex, the beer buyer and expert-extraordinaire of Red Carpet in Glendale. While staring at the cases, arms filling with brews, we set upon the slightly campy looking bottle to the untrue North. Ichabod Ale will undoubtedly be the only pumpkin ale to grace this blog, graceful commentary in tow. The brew is a very rare seasonal selection from the Alpine Beer Company, when we bought ours a few weeks back there were a rumored three cases in Los Angeles, two of them in front of us.

Why did Ichabod avoid the Axe? Firstly this is no “special release” from Sam Adams. Alpine is a tiny brewery and you can taste the small batch vibe before the beer is in your mouth. The flavors immediately turn towards Flanders, or at least Michigan, where sour and crisp flavors set the stage for what few sugar and spice notes play in the finish. The beer tastes like it’s spent some quality time in beautiful wood barrels nestled in snowdrifts atop pointy hills. The addition of pumpkin in this case is in reverence to the age-old equation of fruit+time=booze. No dribbling of an extract from New Jersey over sterile brew towers for Alpine; which means none of that nonsense for you. You taste the room where this beer was made before you taste the time of the year, and for us that’s the real merry maker.

Dairy Pairy: Senne-flada, an unpasteurised washed rind cows milk cheese from the Swiss Alps.
Soundtrack: Dawn Penn's “No, No, No”

If the Good Doctor — upon burning through Baker and Barstow and pulling to the side of the desert highway to take a gibbering inventory of the drugs and booze — had not counted two quarts of Wild Turkey bourbon, but rather two bottles of this Wild Dog porter, rest assured the infamous burn through Vegas casinos and the post-Nixon American Dream would have been considerably… well, sloooowwwer.

This black froth is heavy stuff. Not to be touched if you value quick inertia. Yet this is exactly why it belongs among the cadre of preferred strong winter brews, perfect for slugging fireside or near the end of a holiday meal — even out of a thermos on a hiking expedition. As we babbled about in the recent Hot Knives Thanksgiving podcast, you’ll remember that the Flying Dog brewers, to make Wild Dog, literally took their Hunter S. Thompson tribute beer (Gonzo Porter) and pumped it into the nearby whiskey distillery, where the brown bread-like stout was left to age in oak bourbon barrels. The result is fitting: bombastic and indulgent and proud.

Slipping this into a glass isn’t easy, it erupts in a violent way, lashing out with a high head of millions of little caviar-sized mocha colored bubbles. This would be annoying if not for the perfect froth proportion it creates for the rest of the drinking experience. Wait two or three minutes and it has subsided to an idyllic level, which helps bring the brew up to a slightly warmer temperature too, so you can get all the sweet and sour notes. You can even pour this crew into extra-wide Scotch glasses and swirl it in hoop motions as if you were savoring 20-year-old whiskey. There’s less of the soy sauce notes you usually find in a porter or stout of its consistency; more balance of dark, hard grains against an after note of apple bacony sugar. The last note is like stinging nettles and American sour mash.

Dairy Pairy: Hook’s 10 year Cheddar
Soundtrack: Silver Apple’s “A Pox on You”