Tasting notes - Judgment Day

In 1988, the year that Basquiat died, the year that the last state in the US succumbed to the pressure of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, near the end of a decade thrust through time via the unforeseen propulsion of forced-air induction, a new chapter in what we can now look back at fondly as the re-birth of America's current craft beer movement had begun. As a development within the West Coast craft brewing movement that could be traced back to a pint of steam beer that Fritz Maytag enjoyed with his lunch back in 1965, the brewpub boom was a huge shift in the culture of craft beer. Sitting down with a list of the iconic breweries of the genre, one quickly finds the vast majority of them had their roots not as bottlers or draught distributors, but as public houses, taverns, and saloons that offered a community gathering place, served food, and brewed their own beer on the premises: think Hopland's Mendocino Brewing Company, Ashland's Rogue Ales pub, and the Buckhorn Saloon of the Anderson Valley Brewing Company. At that time, a simple business plan would show that the profit margins on the beer sold on the premises paid off the cost of the customers' food, even, a profit margin that - while it likely doesn't exist anymore - offered these companies the resources to expand into bottling, kegging, and distributing their wares off premises.

And the flagship wares brewed by these fine folks are an exemplary reflection of what most people today would identify with as the trademark distinctions of American craft beer: ales with a British pedgiree, brewed with a certain frontier, buckaroo styling. Pale ales, stouts, IPAs, porters, amber ales, mostly, ramped up in both the bitterness and alcohol departments, and watermarked with the unique traits of the locally grown, citrusy, piney hops. Wonderful tipples, for the most part, these beers are, especially when admired within the context of their creation, in a pub with some locals, enjoying a burger with a game on the toob, brushing the workday dust off your shoulder.

Fast forward to the present. The Hopland, Ashland, and Anderson Valley brewpubs have all been outgrown by their previous inhabitants, but their presence as "regulars" in retail and restaurants would seem pretty solid. Likewise all over the country, beer makers that had initially been tied to brewpubs as the anchor of their identity have spread their wings, flexed their marketing muscle, and grown beyond anyone's expectations.

Those that weathered the microbrewery boom of the 90's ("micro" being the "turbo" of the nineties) formed the old guard of the current revolution, making solid West Coast ales that pair damned well with hot wings and a Raiders game. But anon, lucky us, we appear to be potential witnesses to the birth of a new chapter, a chapter which is underway right now and could quite possibly be summed up by the bottle you see pictured at the head of this post. For if you were to head south to sunny Solana Beach, you'd come across a pretty great little pizza joint called Pizza Port that happens to serve some darned fine beers on tap (mostly like the ones I've described above, in fact) but look in the cooler case by the front door, and you'll see something wholly different - a set of nice 750 mL bottles with not the Port Brewing logo on them, but Lost Abbey.

Lost Abbey is a page turn in this craft beer story we're all enjoying, in that it's more a name and a logo for a branded, thematic collection of cork-finished, wire-caged bottles - a "vision" of sorts concocted by Tomme Arthur - than it is a "brewery" in the traditional sense. It's only one step ahead of a shift we've all seen in Russian River over the years. More on that later (since I did say this was a tasting notes column, after all).

If you've ever had the pleasure of enjoying a Ritter Sport Rum Raisin & Hazelnut bar, you've pretty much had the solid, non-alcoholic version of Judgment Day (and around here, that's a huge compliment). Pouring a stark, shiny black, looking like perfectly tempered dark chocolate, it delivers a likewise bittersweet note when it first hits the tongue. The raisins make their appearance through the aroma coming off the glass, but the remains in the taste have been converted to a rummy, boozy finish that lingers for ages once you get through the immense nutty, chocolaty body. It's devoid of that cloying, caramel stickiness that's so pervasive in Belgian quads, but with a dense viscosity that makes Gulden Draak seem like a total lightweight.

How does the fortuitous arrival of this wonderous bottle of ale translate to a new chapter in the craft beer Renaissance, though? Certainly, brewpubs have long had specialty ales that veered from their regular spectrum of styles, perhaps to allow the brewer to have a little fun, perhaps as an experiment, perhaps in honor of a special occasion. Certainly, I didn't even blush when Rogue teamed up with Morimoto to start producing specialty beers intended to pair uniquely with foods. Nor did I blink when Anderson Valley decided to plop a cowl on David Keene's noggin and start bottling the most dastardly childproof, molten glue gun sealed (it's supposed to look like wax, see?) Belgian specialty ales under the Brother David subtitle. Simply put, once these brewers had the resources and the green light, they started to branch out, which hardly constitutes a shift worth noting.

When the oddly-shaped "-tion" beers from Russian River started making appearances, however, there was cause to perk up and pay attention. For here we had not just one or two bottled oddities, but an entire range, within a specifically American-Belgo tradition, branded together by images of sadistic looking farming implements, that had seemingly nothing to do with the delightful little taproom/pizza joint where those brett-y barrels were doing their thang in downtown Santa Rosa. Visiting the pub shortly after I'd discovered Temptation and Supplication, I found myself the only one in the place looking for these sour beauties, the tables adorned almost exclusively by the likes of (the incredible, yet pronouncedly "West Coast") Pliny the Elder and Blind Pig. It was as if there were two separate breweries working out of the same space, with the same name, almost...*

The fact is, it's arguable that these specialty beers are, unlike all the beers hereto produced by the same brewers within their brewpub confines, not intended to be enjoyed at their respective establishments, but out in the world, nudging wine bottles off the table when nobody's looking, taking up precious cellar space in restaurants and basements and trying just a little to distance themselves from the pubs from whence they came. The brewpub culture that founded our current enviable position of enjoying quality, locally made, handcrafted beers appears to be shifting gears as the pressures of the brewing-restaurant business only get more intense: the rising cost of restaurant labor, rising costs of food and brewing ingredients, effects of a recession on the frequency on which folks eat out, the increasing distance between homes and pubs with a general lack of quality public transportation combined with increasingly stringent and heavily enforced drinking & driving laws, just to name a few.

Could it be that a generation of experimental brewers, flush with innovation and access to good distribution, are going to tap into America's current war and recession-fueled nesting phase by extroverting their efforts even more? When I go to my local bottled beer heaven, I have access to more brewpub-derived options than ever before, from all over the country - Dogfish Head, most recently - and am curious to see where this is going to take off to next. Will the brewpubs all end up like the one in Hopland, more of a historical remnant kept open by the company for image's sake than anything else, like the wine tasting rooms of the valley that surrounds it?

One thing's certain: As these brewers are allowed to expand their craft beyond what's expected in your local alehouse, the next phase of our brewing Renaissance is bound to be loaded with trophies like Port Brewing/Lost Abbey's singularly phenomenal Judgment Day. And that's just such a pleasant conclusion to come to, I won't even end with a tastelessly punny Biblical aside about how rapturous it all is.

Oh, who am I kidding?


* And when pressed to choose a beer that goes well with a spicy pizza, I'm not likely to grab a bottle of Supplication off the shelf. Nor would I anticipate that next time I visit Santa Rosa, will I be met with a Belgian-style cuisine à la bière restaurant in place of RRBC.

Dada's bouncy house

Usually, I'm not one to simply repost something I've found elsewhere on the web (this time courtesy of Pete Brown), but this link resonates just too deeply with a guy in my situation. Behold! The bouncy house for my next birthday party has finally arrived!

As a relative newcomer to this whole parenting thing, and a shy entrant into the "making nice with other folks simply because they managed to produce their own offspring at a similar point in time" game, one of the things that's really rattled me is the sheer ubiquity of the noisy, stinky, hair-dryer driven backyard monstrosity known colloquially by its disarming nickname: the bouncy house. In some social circles - ones I drift wildly around - they're the de facto keystone in any respectable birthday party. This beauty above (the Hogshead!) has completely changed my mind on the matter, however.

That's right, kids. It's an inflatable pub. And it's awesome.

See you in September.

Thanks again to Pete for sharing this beauty. And happy almost birthday!

The Session #15 - A gradual descent into the must

As writing assignments go, composing this month's Session piece (as hosted by Boak & Bailey) has been nothing less than a challenge, as I find myself walking against the winds of common sense, along with the clichéd maxim of the craft, "Write what you can reasonably fabricate via Wikipedia searches," for as I'm proud to say I'm modestly insightful on a trivial variety of clever topics, including beer, am I a "beer geek"? A "beer enthusiast"? While there's no chance I'd shy away from a Session theme that may be somewhat alien to me, not now that I've found this fun little monthly exercise, a disclaimer needs to be made up front: I'm just not sure I qualify.

Others may, however, disagree.

Sure, I like me a nice pint of the stuff on occasion. Lots of people do. I'd like to think of myself as sitting cozily in the middle of the spectrum between complete cavemen and brewfest tickers. I don't have BeerAdvocate or Rate Beer accounts, don't have any sort of list of beers I've had the luxury of tasting, and I've so far abstained from naming any pets or family members anything like "Biscuit" or "Lupulus" or "Trubs".

[Disclaimer #1: I should admit, however, that I have an embarrassing number of German bierdeckels. Not to mention we've had to designate an entire cabinet in our distinctly compact kitchen to my beer glassware collection. And yes, the other day, I actually yelled out loud, "Hey, where's my Hoegaarden glass?"]

But doesn't there need to be a tipping point [I just typed "pint" again] if one's going to go about having graduated from the casual beer drinker to the rarified echelon of "enthusiast"? What if I can't point to a moment of conversion, that trucker's gear change moment henceforth a crown of beer evangelism was thrust upon me, rakishly tilted in a slighty snobby, enlightened way? For example, one of the aspects B&B are looking to gather from this carnival is the single, revelatory beverage that made all the lights start blinking and spark up all the fireworks, but there's a disappointment in my story there, too, as this is the sort of reverse tale wherein I didn't even taste Budweiser until late in my high school career, long after having been introduced to fine German lagers, local craft icons, and heck, even homebrew. By the time I was paying any attention to my surroundings, at college in Oregon, it was too late: I couldn't fight through the massive craft beer crowd to get my hands on crap macro-beer, even if I'd tried [Disclaimer #2: I didn't try]. There are moments, though, in the time between then and now, that could arguably be seen as signposts, changes in the weather, what have you, that signified that something more seriously beery was afoot.

A tipping point, maybe, when I forced our entire wedding party to drink homebrew?

But there's just no Gregor Samsa moment in this story. Maybe the point when I realized I was scanning wine merchants' inside distribution lists for the odd rare beer of which they might have a case or two, but who hasn't been curious? Or the point at which I realized I was the proud owner of not one, but two Moose Drool t-shirts [Disclaimer #3and this was before Big Sky was even distributing in Northern California], perhaps? I'm still not sold.

Shall I continue? Choose your own point at which I awoke to find myself transformed into a gigantic bug:

- When my then girlfriend (now wife, obviously) gave me draught equipment for my birthday?

- When cork-finished bottles of homebrew became our holiday gifts, complete with wax seals embossed with the family name and the visage of a mash paddle in the center, like some crazy, shamanistic wand of healing and unification?

- When I realized I was stockpiling a list of "wedding beer" recipes to help simplify our friends' requests?

Some might argue that the attention I warrant to photographing my hop plants would constitute an excessive amount of enthusiasm for beer-related items. But geekdom?

It's arguable, though, that my alleged metamorphosis from regular joe to a regular joe who's really into beer is that it hinges on other people's expectations: Did I ask if I wanted to chip in on that case of Black Ghost? Did I ask for draught equipment for my birthday? Sure, the fact that my young daughter calls anything I've got poured in a glass "beer" (anything I carry in a mug is "coffee", naturally) may be an indication that I might not be able to argue much further.

Like I mentioned before, there are some other fascinations in my life that I can bend an ear about, concepts and ideas and people and passions and arts that I've been known to expound on. But going through the details of the current situation, and the question posed above, there's only one detail that gives me pause:

- When, of all topics that I'm passionate and quasi-literate about, I've choosen beer as the thing that I set time aside to write about.

That's got to be it, right? If you had asked me 4 years ago what I'd write about if I found myself to share regular insights on a topic on a web log, I would not, certainly not, have said beer. And then I did. Like 99% of you reading this (you cute buncha beer bloggers out there, you), I think it could be argued that the moment when we all became "beer enthusiasts" was the moment we stopped being merely on the receiving end of the information pipeline, but decided to chime in and join the discussion ourselves, whether it's merely posting about an exciting new bottle you found on the shelf at the store down the street, or about visiting a brewpub by chance and finding something you wanted to share, or about the inside industry, or about homebrewing - that's the point of graduation. The point when we all became vocal - the point at which, for me, Pfiff! was born - is quite possibly the step at which our admiration and enjoyment of beer becomes enthusiasm and advocacy of beer.

Time of the saison for loving

A few years ago, it seemed poised to become a permanent fixture within the standard brewpub repertoire. And while that hasn't quite happened (although I never thought I'd see the day when one would win a "best beer in the world" competition), it's certainly established itself among the seasonal varieties that even the most cookie-cutter of craft breweries have on the back side of their menus, alongside the summer hefewiezen, the autumn Oktoberfest, and the winter doppelbock. And that's all and good, because you know what? It's spring now. And I'm pretty amenable to the idea of taking these three months to give homage to that salt-of-the-earth, farmhouse funky, rustic piece of folk brewing art: the saison*.

An excellent guide for saison appreciation, Phil Markowski's Farmhouse Ales, distinguishes saison as one of the two major subsets of of north European rustic ales, the other being the French bière de garde, a distinction that oenophiles would appreciate as it's based almost primarily on terroir, being a style that's inherently married to the land. The big downer though, for those of us who have a romantic penchant for seasonal, hand-crafted, mutable and airily shifting farmhouse creations that bend to the will of the harvest and to the experimental nature of the brewer, is that what used to be a truly rustic, wild-as-you-want style has been all but pigeonholed into a very specific set of guidelines. Granted, those guidelines are awfully fun to explore within - the archetype of the modern style, Saison Dupont is quite extraordinary - but isn't it fun to color outside the lines once in a while? What were those pre-WWII saisons of the Wallonian countryside like when the "market" for these recipes were the families, friends and odd visitors to the farms on which they were brewed?

Enter wild nonconformist Dany Prignon and his equally wild and nonconforming Fantôme brewery from Soy, Belgium. With recipes that change like the wind blows and a smirkingly secretive approach to unorthodox brewing ingredients, there aren't too many brewers out there whose work captures the "seasonal-ness" of saison like Fantôme (even were you to exclude the series of beers they actually name after the four seasons). A good way to gauge the inconsistency between batches of his beers, you have only to try to read through the reviews posted on a ratings site like BeerAdvocate or Rate Beer, wherein you'll find out that the particular beer pictured above, La Dalmatienne (labeled a "blonde" on the bottle) is overtly malty and sweet, yet really dry, funky and tart, deep brown and simultaneously light golden, tasting like an orange, or a lemon, or like apples, or maybe even like dirt. And those tasting notes are probably all right on the nose, as over the years, I'm sure it's been all of these things. [This bottle, in case you were wondering, was just right! Seriously, though...] What would be seen as a terminal flaw at any major brewery is here considered a charming personality trait - it's Mr. Prignon's unpredictability and ceaseless creativity that's earned him his enviable reputation.

Within the somewhat more straight-laced vein of saison brewing, though, there are many quite nice and far more available options. But maybe as springtime is a time of change, revelation and splendor, maybe it is the season in which to experience something virtually unanticipatable:

A little madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown,
Who ponders this tremendous scene—
This whole experiment of green,
As if it were his own!

- Emily Dickenson

*Bruce Paton has a nice piece about saison as the beer for summer, so rather than split hairs, why don't we just call it the beer from March to September?

Weizen-wit wonderwort

Anyone who knows even the slightest bit about me could have guessed how this was going to end up. In the tail end of my post on a brewing technique by which we sometimes strive to create two completely different beers out of a single brewing session, I wrote:

Or! I'll give in to my slothful nature because it's in the 80's out and I've had a hard week, and I'll just toss all the grains together, boil the whole stinkin' lot in one batch and let the fates sort it out in the carboys (and try to make amends later with dry hop and spice tincture additions) while I work on my tan and soak my feet in the kiddie pool.

The ultra-observant amongst you will note there are what appear to be oats and flaked barley mashed in with the rest of the grains in the above image. It was 89 degrees yesterday. There was only one brewpot. All the ingredients went into it. And my tan looks fantastic.

For those of you keeping score at home, here's the lowdown:

The following grain bill was tossed together and mashed in some good old-fashioned Marin County tap water:

9.00 lbs. Wheat Malt
5.00 lbs. Belgian Pale Malt(2-row)
5.00 lbs. German Pilsener
1.00 lbs. Cara-Pils
1.00 lbs. Flaked Oats
1.00 lbs. Flaked Soft White Wheat

After dough-in, we mashed at 148 for about 50 minutes before starting a continuous sparge (I still can't comfortable with the waste of batch sparging), running the lot into a single (lazy!) kettle. The kettle was hopped with (organic!) Hallertauer Mittelfruh. After boil, the remaining 10 gallons were split into two fermenters. One had a an ounce of East Kent Goldings in it, and the other some more Mittelfruh, the former receiving a dose of Belgian witbier yeast and the latter some Bavarian hefeweizen yeast (to be followed by a hit of German lager yeast before it goes in the fridge). The carboy with the witbier yeast will be getting a nice dose of coriander, lemon peel and grains of paradise when we rack it over to the secondary. It's already exploded nicely all over the basement in what can only be construed as a good omen.

But will either of them taste any good? Most likely, they'll be okay. More interesting to see will be how different from each other they'll really taste, considering the only true difference between them is the yeast. We shall see...

Weekend update - "spring hops eternal"

Granted, Adam's kicking my ass, but that can't stem my urge to continue the traditional of annual posts shamelessly flauting near-pornographic images of my ne'er-to-bloom hop plants (coincidentally always around the last weekend of April). This time around, a pair of shots of our poor, weedy-looking, neglected Santiam shoots and quixotically determined Willamette:

The ever-vigilant early riser, our Willamette.

The spindly and decidedly less robust Santiam.

Don't worry, I have loads more photos I could share. Believe you me. But it's getting late, so y'all will have to wait to see just how far the East Kent Goldings have gotten...

7-10 split brewing

Some homebrewers have, for whatever reason, a lot of time available to devote to their hobby, while others, like myself, have to carve into the 4th dimension in order to extract enough of the highly prized space-time material needed to construct a fully functional (yet still entirely abstract) mechanism known in these parts as a "free afternoon." But oh, the fun we have when February 30th rolls around! One of the amusing experiments I've concocted in the quest for maximizing the efficient use of such a precious resource is a little thing I call 7-10 split brewing, whereby we save some time by trying to brew separate, distinct batches simultaneously out of the same brewpot, a name derived from the perceived impossibility of hitting two discrete targets with a single trajectory. Anyone who's brewed in batches 10 gallons or larger who still ferments in 5-gallon carboys can relate to the allure of tinkering with the wort a little when it's broken into several smaller containers, especially considering that even if you tried your hardest, two identically fermented but separate batches of homebrew are likely going to taste a little different from each other, anyway.

In some ways, it's sort of a sister concept to partigyle brewing, a historically-minded technique where a brewer breaks a large mash into different runnings, each weaker than the next, in order to make strong ales and small beers from the same tun of grains. But the way we do it is a little more Dr. Moreau than Dr. Villa in the unorthodoxy of its approach.

The victims of this month's experiment: a singly mashed wheat beer which will be cruelly divorced into a Bavarian hefeweizen and a Belgian witbier. Here's the plan:

We're gonna stuff our Rubbermaid bucket with 8 lbs of wheat malt, 4 lbs of pale malt, 4 lbs of pilsner malt, 1 lb of Carapils, and some rice hulls, do a dough-in and strike the mash at 148° F. Meanwhile! I'll be conducting a little mini-mash on the side consisting of 1 lb wheat malt, 1 lb pale malt, 1 lb pilsner malt, 1 lb flaked wheat, and 1 lb flaked oats. When we mash out, I'll do some fancypants arithmetic to ensure that the gravity of wort A (mostly the early runnings from the lauter tun) will be similar to the gravity of wort B (later runnings blended with the mini-mash). Then I can do two side-by-side boils with separate hop and spice additions.

Or! I'll give in to my slothful nature because it's in the 80's out and I've had a hard week, and I'll just toss all the grains together, boil the whole stinkin' lot in one batch and let the fates sort it out in the carboys (and try to make amends later with dry hop and spice tincture additions) while I work on my tan and soak my feet in the kiddie pool.

Regardless of how we do it, it'll be fun, right? After the (explosive!) dust has settled, I'll try to post some details in a more recipe-friendly presentation. Enjoy your weekends, all!

Can the circle be unbroken?

It was bound to happen at some point: A photo by a beer blogger of another beer blogger who happens to be taking a photo (of beer!) while sitting next to yet another drink blogger, only to be published on (you guessed it!) another beer blog.

From Bill Brand's What's On Tap site, I give you the following ghostly image:

It's an uncanny apparition in reference to the piece I wrote about that stellar evening, and how it spawned a discussion regarding beer writing in the context of the direction of this particular blog. (Also note Des' sneaky move on the cheese plate while I was distracted by the panoply of beer glasses in front of me.) If there isn't a better portrayal of the little conundrum I find tickling away in the back of my mind about the increasingly crowded field of beer writing, Pfiff!'s role within that community, and the "inside baseball" nature of this chosen hobby, I haven't yet seen it.

Dogfish Head to Toronado

There will doubtless be a dozen-odd posts over the next week about the day Sam Calagione showed up in San Francisco to deliver buckets upon buckets of his truly divine elixirs down the throats of a previously Dogfish Head-less town. And while I failed yet again to catch the attention of either Jay or Bill to ask, "Hey, is there anything about tonight that you're not going to talk about, or any photos from this event that you're not going to post?", the fact that I even had the urge to approach them like that (yes, Jay, that was me tapping you on the back while you were trying to scoot out; yes, Bill, that was me trying to introduce myself while you were taking my picture) speaks to the inner conversation I've been having lately, pretty much ever since I relit all the burners on this blog earlier this year after a bit of a hiatus, a conversation that could be summed up thusly: "What exactly am I writing about, again?"

The online beer writing scene has never felt as crowded as it does now, reminiscent in some ways to the sweaty wall of bodies three-deep at the bar last night*, of and while I recently posited that I'd lost my touch, I'm now prepared to consider that there was never much of a touch to misplace. What scared me was when I noticed that a blog I started under the pretense of having a place to post quick thoughts on beer and brewing and links to fun articles in the interest of reducing the amount of spammy instant messages I was sending to my friends was veering dangerously into the beerblog infested waters of an ocean of news-ish sites, trigger-happy with the ctrl+c ctrl+v , press releases at the ready, daily updates on current events, etc. etc. - stuff you can literally read on a million or so websites at this point - and that's only if you're too lazy to subscribe to the email announcement lists that generate all the content in the first place. It's time to pull this ship starboard and head for less crowded waters, methinks...

But first, a diversion of sorts:

Before anything else, I want to say a quick something about this guy, a man who I've sort of pseudo-idolized, teased, and made the subject of a faux brewer-man-crush over the past couple of years: Dude's for real. Not only would the brewer who's almost single-handedly responsible for the current level of respect this country's culinary critics have levied on craft brewing pose with a crazed, multi-grinned weirdo like myself for a photo (Des nudged me, "Tell him you have a beer blog so he doesn't think you're a complete lunatic," likely noticing I was reeking of eau de crazy stalker guy) - amidst his biggest debutante ball on the West Coast nonetheless - but never even flinched when I kept returning to tap him on the shoulder to ask the *stupidest* questions ("What the hell is in this?") throughout the evening like a preschooler needing to go to the bathroom, each time graciously replying with a smile and complete attention, regardless. So thanks, Sam, for being such a gracious host, even on the tail end of a whirlwind of a week. (David even had him running around the bar serving the cheeses, for chrissakes.)

While I'm at it, releasing myself from the dirty job of responsible beer blogging, I'll let Alex over at Drink A Week handle the mouth-watering poetic details, and simply list the initial reactions to last night's draft list by memory (mostly thanks to Des and her golden sniffer):

2006 Chateau Jiahu - A truly exciting historical recreation that makes you reflect on just how narrow our currently defined expectations of beer really are. Fruity, grape-y, with hints of sweet sake and wheat, it was again surprisingly balanced and easily drinkable, a trait that seems to be high on the list of Sam's philosophical priorities. These are "extreme" beers in a sense that doesn't allude to them being punishing to the senses, but in that they stretch all the boundaries of the brewing lexicon. Truly eye-opening.

2007 Olde School Barleywine - Again, they've pulled off a real high-wire act and a feat in balance - a balance that doesn't just line up equal amounts of malt and hops side-by-side, but a balance that's fully three-dimensional in the marriage of the sweetness and bitterness. I would've guessed this to be a well-aged example purely based off it's mellowness, but alas. Built on elements of bourbon and cognac, cherries, white sugar, and with a slightly boozy aroma, Alex and I compared it to a nice old fashioned.

2007 Immort Ale -This one was a challenge, a complex barleywine-style ale skeleton clothed in the most elusive taste components and with a uniquely resinous mouthfeel. Des pegged it right off the bat: moldy cheese. Gorgonzola. It was as if they put together one of my favorite pairings together in a glass.

Midas Touch Golden Elixir - Just barely effervescent, the archetype of the historical recreation brewing movement was very sweet and fruity, with a beguiling aroma with hints of both jasmine and marzipan. Not nearly as funky as I was expecting (not funky at all, actually), but very wine-y and pleasant.

90 Minute IPA - The fabled "continuously hopped" India pale ale, one for which I'd prepared my palate by warning it ahead of time about its IBU level hovering near the human threshold for bitterness. The real shock to the palate, though, was how stunningly balanced it actually was, with a malt backbone that perfectly meshed with the hops so that the end result was nothing shy of ambrosial, the floral quality of the hops blending with the sweetness of the grain to create the effect of warm, fragrant honeysuckle.

Palo Santo Marron - Their newest release was the least uniquely individual and stand-out of the bunch, surprisingly, this dark brown ale aged on palo santo wood was more one-dimensional than the others - big roasted barley taste, smooth and surprisingly light in character and body. In any other line-up, it would surely shine, I'm sure, but its older siblings here raised the stakes just a *little* too high.

Put those beers together with some nice cheeses, a hugely enthusiastic crowd, and - of course - sausages, and you've pretty much put Rob in heaven. There are details of the event that I imagine will be left out by all the other writers in their haste to pound out the definitive wrap-up piece, but rather than sniff out those crumbs, I'll just end transmission here.

Back on Earth, the nagging beer-blogging question remains. Whither Pfiff!? If you want the local inside scoop with great photo galleries, you've got Brookston's bulletin, if you want stomach-growl-inducing event write-ups, head over to Jessica's Thirsty Hopster site, and if you want the best tap list and store shelf updates, subscribe to Bill's blog over at Inside Bay Area**.

But, perhaps, just maybe, if you're looking for vignettes like this -

"God, we're only halfway down the street and I can already smell the Toronado vomit smell."

"I know! Isn't it great!"

- you might consider adding Pfiff! to your newsfeed. I share because I care. I expect the tone of the site will probably be changing over the next few weeks while searching out that niche to which this little Pfiff! of mine is best suited to attend. Thanks to all the great beer writers out there who continue to raise the bar and make all this readin', writin' and imbibin' so very much fun to do.

* A sweaty wall of bodies three-deep who could also all speak intelligently on the topic of craft beer, which is something out of a mind-bending alternate universe I never thought could exist.

**There are plentiful others (see that blogroll on the right?) that I'm probably going to regret not name-checking in this post.

Gold, platinum and Iron Springs

Here's starting the post-Craft Brewers Conference week with two news niblets regarding our hometown public house, one yippie-yay goodgood happyhappy, and one not so much:

The Gold: A product of Fairfax's lone brewpub (not to mention our only "place to just hang out"*), Iron Springs' Sless' Stimulating Stout took home a gold medal in the Oatmeal Stout category at this past week's World Beer Cup. Named for local hotshot steel player Barry Sless, it's deserved of its win, as a truly well-crafted iteration of the style. To see the 94930 representin' down in San Diego this year for what could very well have been the first time ever is quite the treat, too. Described as a "symphony of grains creating a deep rich stout infused with a tincture of passionate herbs" from a town that's quite well associated with being "passionate" about "herb", it's certainly a beer that reflects the character and philosophy of its brewer, the inimitable Mike Altman. I'm sure he's having quite the happy 4/20 in celebration.

The Platinum: What better precious metal to represent the incredibly dear cost of doing business in our lovely town, in a story that's still dragging out in arbitration, than the king of credit cards? As mentioned in previous posts, Iron Springs is embroiled in a little bit of a rent tussle with their landlords, a tussle that could see us ramping up the homebrew production to cover our beer consumption quotas as early as this August. The story linked above in our local fireplace-friendly Ross Valley Reporter (which I embarrassingly read cover-to-cover on a weekly basis) is typical local journalism in that it mainly quotes a third party in no way involved with the story at hand, in this case a gentleman most recently noted for ramming some kids in his truck. I do love this town...

* Yup, that's an actual quote, from our very own mayor, nonetheless.

[photo courtesy Raw Energy Biofuel Systems, creators of the Iron Springs Ambrewlance]