Mission: Refrigerator Cleaning (…out of beer)

It takes a night like last night (Saturday night) to remind me that for all the pomp and circumstance of fancy beer dinners, for all the effort I put into the events I host, and for all of the frantic excitement of festivals, there’s still nothing like having a few friends over and cracking open a great bottle of beer, or two, or… fifty.

I got to join a lucky group of twelve beer enthusiasts at Jay Brooks’ house to ‘clean out his refrigerator(s)’.  Nope, we weren’t scouring the crisper with Formula 409 or scrubbing the ice cube trays – we were charged with depleting his overflowing stock of beer.  It’s a tough job, but hey, somebody’s got to do it. 

In all seriousness though, it was tough.  It was almost heartbreaking to devote just a few minutes to sipping a one-ounce pour of a ten-year old anniversary ale and then gamely keep moving on through dozens more beers.  And then there was the journalistic instinct that cropped up a couple times as I kept my list of the brews we tried.  I’d want to take notes, but found it near impossible to (A) keep differentiating between one I-could-die-happily-after-tasting-this beer and another, and (B) keep up with the pace of the bottles being passed round the table.  So many of the beers were once-in-a-lifetime beers, either because they were special one-time releases, the products of now-defunct brewers, carried into the US from halfway around the world, or the handiwork of the exceedingly stubborn Westvleteren monks (someone needs to feed them a little more of their own craftsmanship and then while they’re tipsy, trick them into agreeing to increase production volumes).

When I showed up, the group was milling around the kitchen eat some cheese & crackers (including the incredible Red Hawk from Cowgirl Creamery) and some chocolates that Pete had made by hand.  We waited a few minutes for the last few of the enlisted beer disposalists to show up, and then got down to work.

The Mission: Eliminate Jay’s excess stock of beers (and have a little fun and good beer talk along the way)

The Team:

• Captain – Jay Brooks, writer of The Brookston Beer Bulletin
• Brent Ainsworth, writer of the Brent on Beer column and weekend editor for the Marin Independent Journal
• Rob DeNunzio, writer of Pfiff!
• Peter Hoey, brewmaster at Sacramento Brewing Company
• Arrne Johnson, brewmaster at Marin Brewing Company
• Jessica Jones, that’s me!
• Sean Paxton, the Homebrew Chef
• Rick & Tracy Sellers, Rick writes and records podcasts for Pacific Brew News and is the beer director for Draft Magazine
• Pete & Amy Slosberg, Pete is one of the pioneers of the entire craft brewing renaissance – he’s the founder of Pete’s Wicked Ale (now owned by Gambrinus) and a chocolate company called Cocoa Pete’s

The Rules:

• When it’s your turn, roll the die. The color that comes up determines which kind of beer you can pick:
  • Red = lager or hybri
  • Blue = ale (except Belgians
  • White = anything Belgia
  • Yellow with a white star = Jay picks from the secret stash in a cooler bag at his side
• We’d pass the bottle, which could be any size from a 12oz to a 750mL around the table and everyone takes a small pour. At the rate we were tasting, 1oz of each seemed like plenty.
• Comment or take notes all you want, just don’t hold up the tasting by failing to notice when it’s your turn to roll or when the current bottle has stopped at you (I was a frequent violator of this last rule – there was just too much going on to keep track of it all!)

The beers we tasted are listed below, with minimal notes, due to my own desire to just kick back and enjoy:

1. Westvleteren 8 (Westvleteren, Belgium): Amy kicked us off to a fast start with a white star
2. Deschutes 19^th Anniversary Ale (2007, Bend, OR)
3. Eisenbahn Escura (Blumenau, Brazil)
4. Antares Porter (La Plata, Argentina)
5. Hair of the Dog Doggie Claws (2004, Portland, OR): my first favorite of the afternoon
6. Brasserie de la Senne Owa (Sint-Pieters-Leeuw, Belgium)
7. Fuller’s Anniversary Ale 2005 (London, UK)
8. New Glarus Organic Revolution (New Glarus, WI)
9. Ithaca Beer Co. Old Habit Strong Rye (Ithaca, NY): another early favorite
10. Rogue Batch #2 Skull Splitter Ale (Newport, OR)
11. Cantillon Organic Gueuze (Brussels, Belgium)
12. Waheke Brewery Wharf Road Wheat (Waiheke Island, New Zealand)
13. Stone 7^th Anniversary Strong Ale (2003, Escondido, CA)
14. Epic Lager (Manukau, New Zealand)
15. J.W. Lees Harvest Ale (2002, Manchester, UK): my absolute #1 favorite of the night, very maple-y
16. Croucher 2008 Commemorative Brewni (Rotorua, New Zealand)
17. Dogfish Head Red & White (Milton, DE)
18. Brasserie Des Franches-Montagnes Cuvee du 8ieme (Jura, Switzerland)
19. Castelain Blonde Biere de Garde (Benifontaine, France)
20. Sierra Nevada Bigfoot (1998, Chico, CA)
21. Harviestoun Ola Dubh 30 (Alva, Scotland)
22. Iron City Brewing Premium Lager (Pittsburgh, PA)
23. Fuller’s Vintage 1999 (London, UK)
24. Maui Coconut Porter (Lahaina, HI, in a can)
25. De Proef Zoetzuur (Lochristi-Hijfte, Belgium)
26. Brouweij Huyghe Floris Apple (Melle, Belgium): tasted like it should have been neon green
27. Green Flash Symposium (2008, Vista, CA)
28. Stone Symposium (2004, Escondido, CA
29. AleSmith Golden Strong (1999, San Diego, CA)
30. Mystery Beer no label

 At this point, it had been about two hours (3:00pm – 5:00pm) and we took a break for (what else?) sausages.  Then it was back to the grind…

1. Birra del Borgo Te (Borgorose, Italy)
2. Augustiner Weissbier (Munchen, Germany)
3. Ballast Point Double IPA (San Diego, CA)
4. Lost Abbey Veritas (San Marcos CA)
5. Cantillon Grand Cru Organic 2003 (Brussels, Belgium)
6. Drake’s Imperial Stout (San lLandro, CA)
7. Heavyweight Imperial Porter (Ocean Township, NJ)
8. Avery Fourteen (Boulder CO)
9. New Glarus Unplugged  Cherry Stout (New Glarus, WI): Loved it, up there in my tops of the night list
10. Sam Adams Ginger Honey Ale (Boston, MA)
11. De Graal  Tripel (Brakel Belgium)
12. Haines Captain Cook Spruce Beer (Haines, AK)
13. Siletz Spruce (Siletz, OR)
14. George Gale Prize Old Ale (1996, Hordean, UK)
15. Brasserie de Silenrieux Joseph Spelt Ale (Verfontaine-Silenrieux, Belgium)
16. Lagunitas Mehapouret Brau Bietzaro (Petaluma, CA)
17. Cloister Andechs Doppelbock (Andechs, Germany)
18. North Coast 10^th Anniversary (1998, Fort Bragg, CA)
19. Deschutes 20^th Anniversary Witbier (2008, Bend, OR)
20. Deschutes Black Butte XX (Bend, OR)
21. Sam Adams Millennium (1999 or earlier, Boston, MA) Jay had first opened this bottle of beer in 1999, drunk all but the last inch of it with friends, re-corked it and saved it over the last nine years, finally re-opening it for the first (and last) time with us.

Somewhere in the second half of this tasting, Sean brought out his culinary creation of the night: beer caviar.  He had made blinis topped with sour cream and little IPA tapioca balls.  They were light, subtle, and delicious.  The hop flavor didn’t hit you at first, but as the tapioca balls melted away in my mouth, all of a sudden the IPA bitterness swelled up in their place.  These were tasty and fun.

Mission completed? Well, fortunately/unfortunately (depending on how you look at it) we failed in our mission.  Of the four coolers full of beer when we began, each was probably still about half full when we left.  I smell a ‘Mission Refrigerator Cleaning II’ in the future… but, given the age of some of these beers we drank, the next one may not be for another eight years or so.