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Beer and Wine
Feb. 12th, 2007 06:34 pmFriday went to the Extreme Beer Fest with Tegin and Julishka, an evening of intense and funky-ass freakshow beers. They had Sam Adams Utopias! Never thought I'd have the opportunity to try this $100/bottle absurdity, so that was the first line we jumped into. It's a crazy crazy beer, 25% alcohol, thick and malty, tastes like a combination of port and bourbon and scotch, very distinctive and very good. No way I'd pay $100 for it, my god the scotch or cognac or tequila you can get for that money is a much more satisfying experience. But if you get a chance to try it on someone else's dime – by all means don't miss it. Most all the other beers at the show were similar weird concoctions, rich and flavorful and often barely identifiable as beer. Sunset Grille laid out a decent buffet, and three hours just flew by. And I bored Tegin and Julishka with my rant about the whole oak-aging trend - For the past year or so all these mircobreweries have been coming out with their barrel-aged beers, making themselves out to be all daring and creative and taking the opportunity to charge $15 a bottle for their experiments. Whatever, dude; you know who started flavoring their beer in wood, like, 100 years ago? Anheuser-Busch. What the fuck you think "Beech Wood Aged" is? Idiots.
And another thing – me and Couplingchaos took a tour of the Nashoba winery a while ago and in the barrel room they were going on about their new French oak barrels that cost $1000 each, and I ask the guy well if they cost so much, wouldn't it be more efficient to put the wine in big stainless steel tanks with French oak wood chips inside, it's more cost effective: you don't need so much wood because the entire surface of the chip is in contact with the wine, and you don't have to pay a cooper to make barrels for you at a grand apiece. The tour guide blew me off with some joke about beechwood-aging and it was SO annoying. Fuck you, man, tradition is nothing, marketing is nothing, all that matters is taste. Whatever it takes to make consistently good product at the best price for your customers; at the end of the day whatever lets the most people most enjoy whats in their glass, that's what you go for, everything else is bullshit. Like, one of my favorite scotch blending companies, Compass Box, did this thing where they took barrels of scotch and put wood slats in during the aging, to amp up the wood flavor more than when the scotch just contacts the inside surface of the barrel. By all accounts the end result was interesting and tasty, but the Scottish government ordered them to stop because it went against tradition. Fuckin morons.
Whew. Ok I'll stop, because you're probably getting the same glazed look Tegin and Juliska had. Lets just drink some more.
Sunday me and Couplingchaos went to the Wine Expo. It is a Total. Fucking. Blast. So many wineries, so many tasty wines. And around 4:00pm is what one of the distributers called "The Witching Hour", the last hour of the last day of the show, everyone's well sauced cuz they've been there since 1:00 and instead of pouring you a two-sip taste of wine they start giving you quarter- or third of a glass, and the reps are pouring full glasses for themselves, and the people handing out freebie samples of chocolate and bread and cheese just lay all their stuff out on the tables cuz they don't wanna cart the stuff home so everyone descends like locusts on the schwag, it's an awesome madhouse.
I think my liver is sore.
And another thing – me and Couplingchaos took a tour of the Nashoba winery a while ago and in the barrel room they were going on about their new French oak barrels that cost $1000 each, and I ask the guy well if they cost so much, wouldn't it be more efficient to put the wine in big stainless steel tanks with French oak wood chips inside, it's more cost effective: you don't need so much wood because the entire surface of the chip is in contact with the wine, and you don't have to pay a cooper to make barrels for you at a grand apiece. The tour guide blew me off with some joke about beechwood-aging and it was SO annoying. Fuck you, man, tradition is nothing, marketing is nothing, all that matters is taste. Whatever it takes to make consistently good product at the best price for your customers; at the end of the day whatever lets the most people most enjoy whats in their glass, that's what you go for, everything else is bullshit. Like, one of my favorite scotch blending companies, Compass Box, did this thing where they took barrels of scotch and put wood slats in during the aging, to amp up the wood flavor more than when the scotch just contacts the inside surface of the barrel. By all accounts the end result was interesting and tasty, but the Scottish government ordered them to stop because it went against tradition. Fuckin morons.
Whew. Ok I'll stop, because you're probably getting the same glazed look Tegin and Juliska had. Lets just drink some more.
Sunday me and Couplingchaos went to the Wine Expo. It is a Total. Fucking. Blast. So many wineries, so many tasty wines. And around 4:00pm is what one of the distributers called "The Witching Hour", the last hour of the last day of the show, everyone's well sauced cuz they've been there since 1:00 and instead of pouring you a two-sip taste of wine they start giving you quarter- or third of a glass, and the reps are pouring full glasses for themselves, and the people handing out freebie samples of chocolate and bread and cheese just lay all their stuff out on the tables cuz they don't wanna cart the stuff home so everyone descends like locusts on the schwag, it's an awesome madhouse.
I think my liver is sore.
