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.