The Thirsty Hopster

I’m always looking for new restaurants to add to my list of ‘places with great beer in San Francisco’.  And though I’m a lapsed vegetarian, I never thought I’d be adding a vegan place to the list.  Vegan food is half the reason for my lapse: I wasn’t ready to make that commitment yet, but in college a lot of the food for us herbivores was vegan food that they figured the vegetarians could also eat.  I missed my eggs and cheese in this dining hall-provided food and found myself subsisting on self-made grilled cheeses several nights a week.  It was only halfway through freshman year when I decided enough was enough.  

So… though I knew I wanted to try Millennium after hearing about it from Erica & Eric at the Five Guys and a Barrel dinner, I was also approaching it with a bit of trepidation. 

First sign I had no reason to worry: the awesome drinks list.  I’ll skip a discussion of the wine since I didn’t even look at it and don’t know much about it, but both the beer and cocktails were some of the best lists I’ve seen. 

Though there are no beers on draft, but they have 15 - 20 bottles, all craft-brews, including some real stand-outs.  A couple points about the beer list:

• They have 4 or 5 larger size bottles for sharing, which is nice because some of these beers aren’t available in 12 oz sizes and a restaurant is the perfect place to try these, since bars can be too hectic for sharing sometimes. 
• They definitely seem to feature local beers as much as possible since 11 of the 17 beers when I was there were Northern California beers from North Coast, Butte Creek, Mad River, Russian River, Bear Republic, Bison, and Eel River Brewing Companies.
• They also seem to make an effort to feature organic beers.  There aren’t a whole mess of these out there yet, but they had the Pinkus Hefeweizen, the North Coast Cru D’or Belgian, and the Eel River Porter.
• They had some really unique and hard to find beers.  I’m sure it won’t last long because it will get drunk up, but while I was there they had Russian River Supplication and a buckwheat ale from Brasserie Silenrieux in Belgium. I haven’t even heard of a buckwheat ale before, aside from Rogue’s soba beers.  And then, you can’t go wrong with an Ommegang Three Philosophers.

I got the Pranqster, a Belgian-style strong pale ale from North Coast.  I’ve had this beer before and knew I wanted something Belgian-style (what can I say, I’m on a kick, this happens sometimes), and not too alcoholic or malty (this wasn’t a quadrupel night, I had beer work left to do that evening…ah, when administering your hobby starts getting in the way of participating in your hobby, that’s when you know you hobby needs to be your job).  I love the spices and esters on this one and haven’t had it in a while. 

I didn’t order a cocktail, but this was one place where I wouldn’t even have been disappointed if there had been no beer list.  They had some really cool drinks, such as:

• Prosecco with elderflower syrup, garnished with an edible flowers
• House-infused kumquat-star anise gin, lemon and lime juices, and agave, served up
• Maker’s Mark bourbon with sweet vermouth, chai spiced tea, ginger-chamomile syrup, and bitters, served up

Ok, but I know you’re all thinking, “Yeah, yeah, but I could have these drinks at a non-vegan restaurant…what did you eat?” Well, I’m not really sure, but I know I liked it.

We were lucky in that we got to try a lot of stuff because Erica sent out a couple extra plates (thank you!).   I think the best part for us non-vegans was that many of the plates seemed to just happen to be vegan, and could hold their own on other upscale restaurants’ menus.

I’ve only just come around to liking olives relatively recently, so I picked most of the green olives out of the marinated olives plate, leaving the darker ones behind.  I guess this makes me an olive racist.  Then there was also a black bean torte (”whole wheat tortilla, caramelized plantains, smoky black bean puree, pumpkin-habanero salsa verde, cashew sour cream, strawberry-jicama salsa”) that was sweet and not too spicy.  I thought it was going to be my favorite until we got a trio of things that included who knows what all, but my favorite on that plate was the pickled radishes.  It was much simpler than black bean tortes, but I am a sucker for pickled vegetables, and they hold a special place in my heart for being a traditional German beer accompaniment.

The one problem with my write-up here is that not all the dishes we ate are available online for me to reference and so many of the ingredients were new or exotic to me that I’m not even sure I knew what they were I was eating then, much less able to remember it correctly now.  We joked as we sat down we probably understood maybe every other word on the entrees page.  I picked edamame cakes that came with a couple of sauces (tangy and creamy?).  It was crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, comparable to a crab cake. Most of all, everything was filling in addition to tasty and interesting.  This was something I had worried about quite a bit, but by the end I couldn’t even finish my entrée, much less fit dessert.  

I will definitely come back.  I hope one time I have a vegetarian or vegan friend with me because they’ll be in paradise.  But even if you’re a committed omnivore, as I am and my two friends that night are, the food is exciting, fresh, filling, and a great complement to the impressive beer list.

My one question for the restaurant: have they looked into how the beers they serve are clarified?  I’m not sure all vegans diners know that gelatin (made from animal bones) or isinglass (made from fish bladders) are often added to beers in small amounts to reduce haze.  I’ve done a little poking around and it seems like most beers from most commercial craft brewers are vegan friendly, including that North Coast Pranqster I sipped.  I guess their initial note on the website homepage stating that all of their dishes are completely animal free should cover it, but if I were a vegan I’d have a little more reassurance if there were a note on the beverage menu as well. 

Little does Amazon know that I totally scooped them on the beer + books idea and that once The Monkeyhouse is open (give it a few years…) this will be completely de rigueur. 

In the meantime, I’m psyched about this article from Amazon on pairing books with the appropriate beer.  The intent of the article was to suggest beers to drink with contemporary books.  I took a bit of a backwards approach to the article, using it as a tool to find books I might like, to go with beers I already know I like. 

Warning: there is not actually any science whatsoever in most of the pairings since their methodology was to ask the authors what beer would go well with his/her book and several of them so clearly aren’t beer fans.  Evidence? First three suggestions: Bud, Bud, & Busch.  Boo.  Though Part II of the article is coming out tomorrow, so maybe they’ll redeem themselves.

It starts to pick up a little steam with Sierra Nevada & Boddingtons, until… Jackpot!  Ommegang Three Philosophers. This is an awesome beer that I had for the first time a couple months ago when I received it as a birthday gift (I knew there was a reason you’re my favorite co-worker, Jay!).  I guess this means I’ll have to check out Lauren Groff’s The Monsters of Templeton.

The best writing about beer and books is unfortunately about books I’ll probably never read:

Soft Skull Press’s Richard Nash also suggests a cherry lambic for another “monster” book, Martin Millar’s Lonely Werewolf Girl: “There’s an earthiness to the role of the werewolf, a carnality, that’s the lambic for me, and then the cherry is the fruity feminine, but not so purely feminine as a raspberry lambic…[Besides,] it looks gorgeous, and I think our book does too, if I do say so myself.”

Peaches and badgers, not cherries and monsters, enter the beer discussion for Tim Lebbon’s gritty heroic fantasy novel Fallen. Lebbon rates highly Badger’s Golden Glory, a Hall & Woodhouse ale: “It’s a bitter but subtly flavoured beer with a hint–some would say a forbidden breath–of peach. It’s long been said that a gift of peach blossom bring good fortune and happiness to the recipient, and such a gift would be well-received by the two yoyagers in Fallen….Golden Glory would light their [forbidden journeys] with its eager freshness, but it’s definitely an ale with a hint of danger … and it’s not afraid of a fight.”

This got me thinking, if we all flip the tables on Amazon, can we come up with the opposite list, a list of books that would pair well with each of our favorite beers?

Here are two of my recent faves, both beer-wise and book-wise, paired:

Dogfish Head 90 Minute: Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris.  I loved this book for its sense of humor and irreverence, and I think that’s something that comes through in the Dogfish Head brand, and that the owner, Sam Calagione, completely lived up to at the last two beer events I went to.  At the same time though, the book got down to serious business: layoffs, cancer, an abducted daughter.  And I think we all know that if Dogfish Head were all laughs and no substance they wouldn’t be the powerhouse craft brewery they are today.  So, with this pairing you get deep thoughts and a rich beer in oddball packages.  

Brouwerij Van Steenberge’s Gulden Draak: Like You’d Understand Anyway by Jim Shepard.  This is a book of short stories with incredibly well developed characters, so I thought it would be a good pairing with the Gulden Draak.  This is a deep, rich, beer with new flavors that emerge across the course of a single sip, and across each new sip that you take.  And of course since it is 10.5% ABV, you can’t have too much without getting bowled over, so a little but powerful story seems appropriate to go with a little but powerful bit of beer.

I’d love to see posts with other people’s suggestions, so post your own if you have one!

For those who want more info on Mirror Pond, featured in my last review, see this post from a couple weeks ago on the Beervana blog.  It’s got some interesting (firsthand!) information on the evolution of the Mirror Pond recipe.