Donnie the Elder Muskmelon Gose Withdrawn

You're used to seeing announcements on social media about new beers, or this year's release of an old favorite.  Here's a new one, a beer cancellation.  Usually breweries don't need to specifically note that they will no longer make a certain beer, they just stop making it.  So I was surprised to see a local brewery — you can figure out which one — announce on Facebook that they will no longer be brewing their love-it-or-hate-it Donnie the Elder double gose flavored with muskmelon.

Muskmelon — another word for cantaloupe — gave the beer its distinctive orange color, but the taste wasn't for everyone.  The double gose (sometimes abbreviated "doge" on the blackboard) had a small but vocal minority who liked it, but wasn't popular enough to keep in the rotation.  The brewers had briefly experimented with a lighter-bodied version that wasn't as sharp, and not as pungent or orange-colored, that was called Donnie the Younger.  But it turned out no one liked that one, not even fans of Donnie the Elder.

The first time I saw Donnie the Elder on tap at the brewery, I asked where the name came from.  I mean, obviously it is an homage to Russian River Pliny the Elder, but I wondered who Donnie was.  The head brewer happened to be standing behind the bar, and he laughed when he heard the question.  "That's a good story!" he said.  Here's a paraphrase of what he told me:

Donnie was this scruffy orange cat that used to hang around the brewery parking lot.  The first time we saw how orange the cantaloupe made our gose, we knew we would name the beer after the cat.  Come to think of it, almost no one liked Donnie the cat either — terrible personality, fur sticking up in bizarre ways, peeing on everything.  There was this one weird and unpleasant assistant brewer named Leon that was here for a while, and one of the weird things about him was, he actually liked the cat.  He's the one who named it.  I think he named it after Donnie Darko, but maybe it was Donnie from the Big Lebowski.  Anyway, Leon got Donnie neutered and deflead, but he was still a terrible cat.  We weren't too sad when Leon left with Donnie.  I wonder where Leon is now?

The Old Tavern Rat

Lompoc is having a party at the Sidebar on North Williams today (November 29, 2011) at 4 PM to show off 9 of the 10 holiday beers they've brewed this year.  There has been plenty of bloggage about the beers -- I'll provide links to everything I know about below -- so I'm going to talk mostly about three Don Younger-inspired beers:  two variants of Old Tavern Rat that Lompoc is releasing, and Russian River's cleverly named Don the Younger, on tap right now at the Horse Brass.

Lompoc has been brewing a barleywine called Old Tavern Rat for well over ten years -- at the 2008 Lucky Lab Barleywine Festival they rolled out a keg of it from 1998 -- and in my experience it has its ups and downs.  This year's batch is fantastic:  a very classic West Coast take on the style, bitter and boozy yet balanced, with notes of maple, orange, and brown sugar.  It was news to me that Old Tavern Rat was named after the late, lamented Horse Brass owner Don Younger, who according to Lompoc owner Jerry Fechter used that nickname as his email address.

But in talking about the bourbon barrel aged version of Tavern Rat, Jerry said Don "would f***in' hate this beer".  Aged for 10 months in Heaven Hill barrels and cellared for a year after that, it definitely is not as balanced and approachable as the "normal" Tavern Rat (which is itself aged for nearly a year, just not in wooden barrels).  If you like lots of bourbon, vanilla, and oak in your barleywine, give it a whirl.  It's better as it warms towards room temperature, but given the choice I would still take the un-barreled version.  The bourbon-aged Old Tavern Rat is available in 22-ounce bottles this year, with John Foyston's oil painting of Don as the label art.

A far different tribute to Don is Russian River's Don the Younger, which is described as a hoppy session ale.  At 5.5%, I think it's a little out of the session range, but it is a lovely beer.  Lots of hop bitterness, on top of a bready malt base, it's both satisfying and drinkable.  Reviews on Beer Advocate tend to call out the floral hops, but I didn't find it to be especially floral.  Despite the name, it's certainly not in the same floral-hop category as Pliny the Younger, or even Pliny the Elder, and that's just fine.  The Horse Brass laid in 24 kegs of it last month on the occasion of the bar's 35th anniversary -- in fact the beer was commissioned by Don before his untimely death last year -- and as far as I know it is only available there and at Russian River's Santa Rosa pub.  If you haven't tried it yet, make a pilgrimage to the Brass and enjoy a pint or two.

Back to the Lompoc holiday beers.  Certainly the Tavern Rats are my favorites of the Lompoc holiday brews, but many of the others are also worthy.  The only two that I would avoid are the Brewdolph -- the yeast gave it overpowering clove and camphor notes that I don't care for at all -- and the Jolly Bock which tastes to me like it was not lagered long enough (it's a little gamey).  It's a shame about the Brewdolph -- the version last year that was partially aged in Cabernet Franc barrels was very charming.

For further reading, here are a bunch of reviews of the Lompoc lineup by local bloggers:

• Portland Beer and Music
• Brewpublic
• The New School
• Not So Professional Beer Blog
• Brewmance NW
• beerdrinker.org
• #pdxbeergeeks (Warning: Courier font!)
• Beervana Buzz
• Beer Musings from Portland
• A Pint for Dionysus

Russian River and Bear Republic Pubs

Last week I wrote up a visit to the Lagunitas Taproom, the first stop on a day trip out of the city on a recent trip to San Francisco.  With Andy at the wheel and Dave and I drinking at pubs and snoring in the car, we headed north from Lagunitas to Russian River's pub in Santa Rosa, and then Bear Republic's pub in Healdsburg.

Russian River was fun:  it wasn't wine-country fancy as I had feared, rather it was a spacious, kid-friendly place that would fit right in if it were suddenly dropped into Portland.  The food was pretty standard pub grub, and not surprisingly there was a fabulous selection of RR beers -- 15 on tap the day we were there.  The beers were very reasonably priced -- especially for California -- West Coast ales were $4.50 a pint, and the Belgian "-tion" beers ranged from $3.75 to $6.75 a snifter.  Whether you're going for the hop monsters like Pliny the Elder or Blind Pig, or for the sours like Consecration and Sanctification, you'll be pleased.  Go visit if you're anywhere nearby.

About a half hour north of Santa Rosa is the little resort town of Healdsburg.  Tucked behind the tourist-shopping main drag is a Bear Republic pub, which we thought we'd try, since we like quite a few of their beers, like Red Rocket and Racers 5 and X.  As near as we could tell, no actual brewing happens at the pub, but they plunked a bunch of big tanks down here and there to give it a brewy feel.  The place was a little bit of a letdown, partly because the Bear Republic meet-the-brewer at Apex in Portland a couple weeks ago had a much more amazing selection of their beers than the pub did, and partly because Russian River and Lagunitas were much more our style.  The thing that made the biggest impression on me was that a lot of people at the Healdsburg pub were drinking from German-style 1-liter mugs.  If for some reason you are being punished with an overnight stay in Healdsburg, those would be just the ticket for drowning your sorrows.  But I wouldn't recommend going out of your way for a visit.  Neither the town nor the Bear Republic pub offers much to get excited about.

Russian River Objectification

Last month there was a fair amount of chatter on Beervana, the New School, and even here about Ezra's racy label for Upright's cherry-infused Four Play.  A good number of people saw the label as objectifying women, which seemed to them to be a bad thing, and best left to macro brewers.  A quality small-batch brewer like Upright should stick to more elevating imagery.

In California -- where sexual mores have always been rather more expansive than elsewhere in the country -- I doubt the Four Play labels would have caused much of a stir, despite the sizable feminist population of that state.  As if to illustrate that point, the vaunted Russian River Brewing Co. has decided to make fun of macro lager advertising by giving the name "Objectification" to a new wood-aged session beer they will release this month.  The branding for RR's "-tion" beers doesn't allow the label art to go with the photographic realism of the Upright labels, but it does playfully highlight some parts of a woman's physique which male lager drinkers tend to value more highly than her elbows, her face, or intangibles like her personality or intelligence.

Here's the commercial description of the beer:

Objectification: Aged for 15 days on beechwood chips from the beech forests of Chico, California, this light, approachable beer brewed with rice adjuncts goes down like a power window on a hot day.  Whether you're mowing the lawn, fishing, water skiing -- or just sitting on the couch watching sports -- this is the Russian River lager that you've been waiting for.  Pairs well with hot dogs, potato chips, or hamburgers.
3.75%ABV / 1.001 O.G / 3 IBUs / 36-24-36

Before hitting upon Objectification, Vinnie and crew rejected some other possible "-tion" names for this beer:  Titillation, Fornication, Salivation, and a few others I won't mention.  Keep your eyes open, some of those names might come up on future releases.