Hip Hops: April 2008 Archives

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.