Deschutes River Ale

Without much fanfare, Deschutes has added a wonderful session ale to its roster of year-round six-packs:  Deschutes River Ale.   Its strength of 4% ABV means it is actually what some states call "3-2 beers" -- 3.2% alcohol by weight.  I wonder if that means they can sell it in grocery stores in 3.2 states like Utah, Colorado, and Oklahoma, and if that was part of the brewery's strategy or just a happy accident.

Although it's a 3-2 beer and the brewery describes it as "golden or blonde", it's a little darker than that, and you won't have any trouble distinguishing it from fizzy yellow swill.  It's got a satisfying, slightly sweet malt body, with a nice dose of flowery hops but very little bitterness.  Jeff Alworth has more flavor analysis over at Beervana.

I first tried River Ale last fall when the Portland pub had an absolutely delicious fresh-hop version of it on tap.  Luckily, the regular version out now is nearly as good, and given its pedigree as an English-style bitter, it's really nice if you happen to catch it on the cask engine at one of the Deschutes pubs.  Meanwhile, six-packs are starting to appear on shelves around town.  Give it a try when you need a beer that you can have a few of without making a fool of yourself.  Well, not a complete fool.

Some Oklahoma Beers

A couple of years ago on a family visit to Tulsa, I finally discovered the glories of Choc Beer, a brewery with a colorful history dating back 90 years located in the small town of Krebs, Oklahoma.  I'm in Tulsa right now, and I decided to branch out a little further while I'm here and check out a few more local beers.

My favorite so far is the Washita Wheat -- pretty bold to insert a four-letter word into the name of your beer -- from Mustang Brewing.  It successfully walks the line between lighter American wheat beers and German hefeweizens, with some of the yeasty banana notes you'd expect in the latter, but with a lighter touch and not as carbonated.  A very refreshing summertime beer.  Oops, turns out it's contract-brewed in Wisconsin by Stevens Point, but the label makes a point of saying it's brewed with Oklahoma red wheat.

Another wheat beer I tried is Choc's Waving Wheat -- more in the witbier category.  Another good choice for summer, though I think I'd just as soon go for Choc's cloudier, yeastier flagship 1919.

On the stronger side, I thought the Native Amber from Oklahoma City's COOP Aleworks was a pretty good stab at a Northwest Red.  Malty and bitter, over 6% ABV, it reminded me a little of Ninkasi Believer, though I would have liked to had a little more aroma from the hops, and dial the astringency back a little. Extra credit awarded for selling this in tall boy cans (4-packs).  The brewery has been around for 2 or 3 years, but they only started canning beer in the fall of 2010.  I'll be interested to see how they're doing next time I'm in the area.

The Marshall Brewing Company in Tulsa bottles several of their beers: the one I tried was McNellie's Pub Amber, which they bill as a Best Bitter "with a New World twist".  I guess the twist is extra hops; it struck me as more of an American Pale Ale than a bitter, but let's not get hung up on styles too much.  This was pretty good, a pretty orange-brown ale, malty and fruity with some hop bite at the end.

Everyone enjoys complaining about the liquor laws in their state, but Oklahomans have more right to complain than we do in Oregon.  Of course they have the much-detested three-tier distribution -- I think they actually have a fourth tier, at least for out-of-state products, since a "broker" must import the beverage and then sell it to the wholesalers -- but the restrictions on beer and wine are particularly silly.  Beer up to 3.2% ABW (that's about 4% ABV) can be sold in grocery stores, but all other beer and wine is only sold in liquor stores.  Worse, the liquor stores are not allowed to sell strong beer cold, which is not just inconvenient, but can be a quality control issue for slow-moving products that sit on the shelf for a while, like the surprise six-pack of Bridgeport ESB I found on my first day in town.

I did a backflip in the liquor store when I saw that Bridgeport ESB on the shelf.  By the time it finally dawned on me earlier this year that Bridgeport had discontinued their ESB, it was too late, it was all off the shelves around Portland.  Six months later, here I was in Tulsa looking at an unopened case of ESB, two unopened cases of Bridgeport Blackstrap Stout, a few loose six-packs of each, and even a six-pack of Haymaker, also retired.  There were no date markings I could decipher on the bottles, but the front of the ESB case was sun-faded, and I found a sticker on the Stout case indicating it was shipped in December 2009.  Those are bottle-conditioned beers, so they could be all right, but the lack of refrigeration for 18 months in such a warm climate did not inspire confidence.  I did buy a six of the ESB -- which I always thought was far better on tap than in the bottle anyway -- and it had clearly suffered but was not entirely undrinkable.

Over the years I've been accustomed to thinking of Oklahoma as a beer wasteland, but things are definitely changing for the better here.  Like the license plates used to say, Oklahoma is OK!

Double Blue Moon

At last year's OBF, I was having a friendly conversation with a stranger who sat near me to eat his lunch. As I do with everyone, I asked him what he liked so far. He said, "I loved that Red Hook Tripel. It was like Double Blue Moon!"

Pretty funny thing for a beer geek to hear, but hopefully it means one guy will step up from Coors to Red Hook, and maybe keep going up the ladder. Ironically, Coors has now brewed a stronger version of Blue Moon, the -- let me compose my straight face -- Blue Moon Grand Cru.

I was trying to work up the courage to buy a bottle of this from Belmont Station, but at $11 for 750 ml -- SPE $31.23 -- all I could do was take a picture of the bottle on the shelf. I'm proud to say that, despite growing up in Oklahoma, my lifetime expenditure on Coors beer is less than $11. There's no way I'm going to triple or quadruple it in one shot. The Beer Advocate consensus is B-. Have any of you tried BMGC?

Oklahoma's Choc Beer

Somehow the Choc Beer Company in my former home state of Oklahoma escaped my notice until this year, even though they've been selling beer in Oklahoma liquor stores since 2004. It's an embarrassing lapse on my part, because the family-owned business has been brewing legally in the small town of Krebs since 1995, and has a history of black-market brewing dating back 90 years. If I had known of all that, I would never have called Oklahoma "zymurgically challenged".

Last weekend I was visiting my family in Tulsa, so I checked out a couple of Choc beers: the "original family recipe", marketed under the name 1919; and a new Kolsch called Spahnie 363, named after Milwaukee Braves pitcher Warren Spahn, who retired to Oklahoma.

The 1919 is made with part barley and part wheat, and might not be the exact recipe handed down from Grandpa, seeing as how its ingredients include Hefeweizen yeast and Cascade hops. Nevertheless, it is a nice, refreshing brew, very satisfyingly full-bodied for its 4% ABV. Naturally it calls to mind Widmer Hef, but it's perhaps slightly more esthery than Widmer, and a little darker in color. Kind of a grainy finish, not in a bad way.

The Kolsch was also nice, right on the money for the style: light and crisp, slightly citrusy. If I had had my wits about me, I would have tried some of the other Choc offerings. For such a small concern, they bottle a lot of styles: a pale ale, a schwarzbier, a Belgian dubbel, a German hefeweizen, and a few others.

Choc's history is ready-made for a National Public Radio feature. It all started in a 1920's Italian restaurant called Pete's Place. Krebs was a coal-mining town, and after Italian immigrant Pete Prichard -- he anglicized his name from its original Pietro Piegari -- was injured in a mining accident, he opened a restaurant. Even though Prohibition was in effect, Pete served homebrewed beer made with a Choctaw Indian recipe.

Homemade, untaxed Choc beer continued to be served at Pete's Place -- with a nod and a wink from the local authorities -- until 1981, though Pete apparently did serve some time for his brewing activities. In 1995, his grandson Joe restarted the brewing operation -- legally, now that brewpubs had been legalized in the Sooner State. The brewmaster is a longtime employee of the restaurant who got interested in the modern style of homebrewing and even took some classes at Siebel.

Today's Choc is a really interesting endeavor. They're marketing their historical roots, but making serious beer in a variety of interesting styles. The beers are bottle-conditioned -- or can-conditioned in the case of the canned 1919 -- something that seems very advanced for a small brewery in a small town in a state that isn't a great microbrew market. They also sell in Kansas and Arkansas, and they're marketing the Kolsch in Wisconsin (Spahnie for the Sconnies). I can't help but think they're trying to pull a Shiner: use a small-town historical angle to get attention and sell lighter, more accessible beers, but keep the brewmaster happy with a line of more interesting styles.

If you're in that part of the country, pick up some Choc. It's good beer with a great story.

Blast from the Past

When I was 7 years old, the big excitement was to bike over to the Quik Trip or the Git-N-Go to buy a pack of Topps Wacky Packages -- stickers that lampooned various national brands of consumer products. The baseball-card company sold these hilarious stickers with pink rectangles of their brittle, tasteless chewing gum. The bad attitude was right on the money for television-addled kids our age.

A couple months ago I found a picture book at Counter Media showing all seven series of Wacky Packages stickers published in 1973 and 1974. Turns out that the instigator of the Wacky Package project at Topps was Art Spiegelman, who went on to more intellectual glory as the author of the graphic novel Maus. In the preface to the Wacky Packages book, Spiegelman reveals that he recruited other comics authors to make up gags for the stickers, including Bill Griffith, the author of Zippy the Pinhead.

The only beer Wacky Package that came out in the 70s was the Blast Blew Ribbon sticker pictured here. Today it would be surprising if collectors cards for kids had even one joke about alcohol, but the reason I'm surprised there is only one is that there were no fewer than nineteen stickers mocking brands of cigarettes or cigars -- not to mention a breakfast cereal called Super Cigar Crisp, with a cartoon bear puffing away on the box. It looks like Topps has been selling Wacky Packages again the last few years, but I'll bet the alcohol and tobacco references are now taboo. The book does come with a Schmutz Beer sticker from back in the day that was never released, as well as a variant of the Blast Blew Ribbon one shown here.

It's one of the ironies of Portland that Pabst is so popular here. Do you suppose the sticker is correct, that the original flavor used to taste different?

Oklahoma Christmas Beers

Pub Night took a hiatus last week while we visited family in the zymurgically-challenged state of Oklahoma. The title of this post is a joke, by the way. My holiday beer was Shiner Bock -- more specifically, Shiner Bock that had been dumbed-down to 3.2% ABW for supermarket sale in the Sooner State.

Most Americans are privileged to be able to complain about the bizarre contortions of their state's liquor laws. Maybe not you Louisianans -- do you even have liquor laws? But you can't beat Oklahoma, where beer above 3.2% alcohol content by weight can only be sold at liquor stores. Bars with a full liquor license can serve stronger beer, but -- get this -- not brewpubs.

Now, 3.2% isn't the complete disaster it sounds like, because it translates to about 4% by volume, which is the way alcohol content is reported by most people. But it's no wonder that there's not much of a local brewing industry, with an extremely low limit like that. It seems like the Indian tribes could get into the brewpub business and avoid the 3.2 limit -- they've got casinos right in the city limits of Tulsa now -- but maybe it's kind of taboo given the history of alcohol and Native Americans.