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.

Block 15 Restaurant and Brewery

Last week we spent a few days at the southern Oregon coast, one part of the state we had yet to explore. Our family trip gave me the chance to visit a well-regarded brewpub that I hadn't yet been to, Block 15 Restaurant and Brewery in Corvallis.  It's not completely unusual to see one of their beers on tap in Portland, but I was really looking forward to checking out Block 15 in person, to be able to sample from their full range of offerings.

My visit to the pub did not disappoint in that regard.  There were 13 house taps to sample from, plus a guest tap from Oakshire, a guest cask from Brewers Union, and a collaboration beer brewed with fermentation science students at Oregon State.  Given all that bounty, and the fact that we were on the highway (I wasn't driving), I went through a couple of five-sample taster trays with our lunch, with a little help from Carla.  Here are the beers we tried:

• Pappy's Dark bourbon-aged strong ale: boozy yet smooth, delicious bourbon and vanilla notes
• Super Nebula bourbon-aged imperial stout: well-rounded big stout, on the sweet side, with hints of cocoa and coffee
• Alpha IPA: clean, tasty IPA with lots of floral/piney hops
• Up in Smoke rauchbier (the OSU student collaboration): dark and smooth, with the perfect amount of smoke
• Anniversary Trippel: lots of banana flavor, nice bubbles and hops on the tongue, pleasantly sweet
• Cherry Quad: lovely Belgian flowery aroma/taste, later the banana kicks in, very light cherry flavor
• Nebula Naked Oat Stout: licorice nose, charred malt and licorice taste, nice bitter finish
• Aboriginale strong ale: nice balance between grainy malts and piney hops
• Ridgeback Red Ale: firm body, fruity malty flavor, decent hops.

All the beers we tasted were really well done, there was nothing we turned our nose up at, and in fact we got seconds of the IPA.  Brewer/owner Nick Arzner told me that they recently installed a brite tank for serving the IPA, and he thinks not jostling the beer into and out of a keg helps keep the hop aromas at their peak.  I was hoping for a little more cherry flavor in the Cherry Quad, but it was a dandy Belgian.  Pappy's Dark is a gem: drink it whenever you find it.

There's so much to say about Block 15 as a brewery that I hardly know where to start.  The place seems to be going several directions at once, and surprisingly, doing them all very well.  For example, a lot of their best-known beers are giant, barrel-aged sippers like Pappy's Dark or Figgy Pudding, but on the other hand their cask ale setup meets the orthodoxy requirements of Ted Sobel at Brewers Union, so that Block 15 is -- as far as I know -- the only establishment where Ted will let another human being serve his wares.  Meanwhile, in the basement of the brewery, a few different rooms hold various wine and whisky barrels for aging beer, while in another corner sits a custom koelschip for open-fermentation projects.  Nick's brewing partner Steve van Rossem admits to a certain amount of nervousness about all the different critters they're using to ferment their beers, but he also keeps a tight handle on sanitation, which must be a big part of Block 15's success in producing such a varied lineup.

The collaboration with OSU -- called Brewed by Beavers --  makes good sense for a brewpub in a college town where the local university has a fermentation science program.  And in another kind of community outreach, Nick's Brewer's Brain blog is updated with pretty decent regularity, and has some really interesting content.

This was a lunch visit, so I better say something about the food in the restaurant.  It's not revolutionary -- a pretty straightforward Northwestern locavore menu -- but the whole family was happy with our burgers, fries, soups and salads.  I certainly recommend it.  If you are in Corvallis, you're going to hit Block 15 for the beer anyway, so you might as well go with an appetite.

Finally, I should mention that Block 15 won last year's Cheers to Belgian Beers with their Ferme de Demons.  Don't worry, we don't have to go to Corvallis for this year's festival, the surrogate site for it is Metalcraft Fabrication, 723 N. Tillamook, just off Interstate near Widmer and not far from a Yellow Line MAX stop. I hear that the big warehouse should be an excellent venue for the festival.  Mark your calendars:  April 30th, noon to 9 PM, with 42 (!) Oregon breweries lined up.

Further reading:

• Patrick Emerson recently put up a nice report on a visit to Block 15 a few months ago
• Angelo's interview of Nick is a couple years old now, but still interesting

Website Recommendations

Here are a few websites that I've been geeking out on recently, and that I think you should check out:

• White Beer Travels
• Silly Wine Tasting Notes Generator
• A pint for Dionysus

Let me explain:

White Beer Travels: We are hoping to take a family vacation to Europe this summer, and as I googled around for information on the Cantillon tour in Brussels, I landed upon the charmingly 90s-flavored webpage of White's Beer Travels.  The content hasn't been updated since Mr. White's unfortunate demise in 2007, but there is a ton of good beer information there, mostly focused on Europe.  There is absolutely no rational organization to the website, and the narratives and photo credits are innocently homespun in the manner of George Herter's cookbooks, or your oldest male relative's holiday videotapes.  If you must have some structure to your web activities, start on the beer hunts page, or the "pub of the month" entries for Bamberg, Bruges, Uerige, or Denver.

Silly Tasting Notes Generator: I'm very proud of my Beer Review Generator, and every now and then someone StumbleUpon's or Reddit's it, bringing an extra thousand visitors to the blog for a brief time.  Along the lines of the BRG, but for wine, is Greg's Silly Tasting Notes Generator.  It recently caught New York Times critic Eric Asimov's attention, who tweeted it to the rest of us.  Good stuff.  Try it out on your wine friends.  And don't forget the BRG when you need a silly beer review.

A pint for Dionysus: There are many excellent beer blogs in Portland. Man, that's a weird thing to say -- why would any town need more than a couple of good beer blogs?  There's only a certain amount of gossip and current events to report upon.  It's true, and yet the varying interests of the different bloggers still makes for a pretty interesting ecosystem.  Then there is A pint for Dionysus.  I don't want to ghettoize Dan by putting his blog outside that ecosystem, but there is something so refreshingly different about his writing style that it sits outside the mundane concerns of the rest of us.  Or -- I'm confused -- are Dan's concerns so timelessly mundane that they make good reading whether they're about beer or not?  You'll have to decide for yourself, but if you're not already following Portland's Studs Terkel of beer, I recommend you start with some of his bar reviews:  The Agenda, The Nest, Angelo's; or peruse his year-long project of checking out The Local.