Beer at Joe’s

Due to Joe being completely absorbed by working on the release of one of the biggest video games of all time, we both completely forgot about the session last month. Hosted by Boak and Bailey, they asked bloggers to talk about how they first got into good beer. I happen to have just posted about that in my “Gateway Beer” post.

I’m not quite sure how Joe would describe how he got into it. I’d guess it was a gradual thing, moving from Brooklyn Lager to an appreciation of Guinness to trying Dogfish Head and so on and so forth. Perhaps when he emerges from his office, he’ll tell us more.

The roundup for Sesssion 15 is here, for anyone who’s interested.

I didn’t intend to buy any cheese at all at the farmer’s market last weekend. But then I saw that Cowgirl Creamery had SF Drake, one of my new favorite cheeses since we profiled it in our organic garden tasting, and I had to get some before they ran out again.

While I was paying, a man come up next to me and expressed his excitement about another kind of cheese sitting out on the counter. “I can’t believe you actually have it!” he said to the woman behind the counter. That got me curious. I looked at the description of the cheese they were talking about and read “rubbed with espresso grounds.” NOW I was interested. I started listening to their conversation and heard her say, “As soon as I tasted it, I just wanted a big glass of Guinness.”

Suddenly there was half a pound of cheese in my purse and I was waving money at them to let me take it.

Barely Buzzed from Beehive Cheese is pale on the inside, black with grounds on the outside. The cheese itself is very mild and nutty. The rind tastes like, well, coffee grounds. If you don’t take a bite with just the perfect amount of rind on it, you can wind up with nothing but a mouthful of grounds. Even if you do it perfectly, I felt like the coffee flavor bowled right over the subtleness of the cheese. I’m a coffee fiend, and even I didn’t really get the point.

I tried it with DogfishHead’s new brown ale Palo Santo Marron, an especially dark, malty ale. They went well together, and the malt actually brought out more of the cheese’s nuttiness, though I still felt like most of the flavor was buried under these two very strong flavors.

Joe liked it a bit more than I did, though he’s generally willing to give anything the benefit of the doubt more than I am. He went wild over the beer, though. It’s pretty light for a 12% alchohol beer, and I actually managed to finish my whole glass, despite the strong malts, and enjoy it to the last drop.

I just came upon a new site out of nyc that for me is not a “I should of thought of that” idea but instead a “oh crap i thought about that but never did it” kind of idea. BeerMenus.com has launched and it looks pretty nifty. Search for a beer that you like and find out what bar serves it. The interface is real simple and clean. They have a place to add beers as a beer drinker in that city would want to do. I bet they try to manually verify those additions. They also have a section for owners to update their own bar. I bet they use a email validation for that to make sure that really is the owner. I love this kind of mashup and think more and more of these types of sites will come up. So check it out and see what you think.

Remember a few days ago when I mentioned how the only things I like more than beer are books and chocolate? But how books didn’t seem to fit in with the other two? Friends and drinkers, someone else has brought books into the beer world for me. Jeff VanDerMeer has been doing posts about pairing books with beer, and not just any books, but science fiction books. He is a man after my heart.

His first post on Omnivoracious about book and beer pairings was so popular, a second appeared later after checking in with a few authors. My favorite is in the second post, where Margo Lanagan, one of the strangest and most brilliant short story writers today, explains what beer she would pair with her newest book. And she’s Australian, so you’d better believe it’s cool.

My own pairing would be Carol Emshwiller’s The Mount with a saison farmhouse ale. That funky blue-cheese taste will prepare you for the funkiness to follow, in a book where humans become the mode of transportation for our creepy little alien overlords.

It’s a no beer week for me (see the last post) and so my brain has turned to remembering some other fond drinks. One that I don’t think of much but was probably the finest cocktail I have ever had, was the gin and tonic from Per Se restaurant in New York City. We had already dined there once before. It was a magical meal that I will remember for the rest of my life. On this occasion though, we just stopped in for a drink before having dinner. It was wonderful. A elegant yet accessible start to the evening. The gin and tonic at Per Se was created by Brian Van Flandern. It was around $17 and not a drink I usually like. But I went for it in a kind of “ok try and make me like gin and tonics” way. And boy was I surprised. It was a revelation. I do not remember all the components of the drink unfortunately but overall it was a standard gin and tonic. The secret was house made tonic water made at Per Se using raw quinine powder. I might be embellishing on the memory but I remember the bartender (potentially Brian himself) telling us he sources the powder from a small village somewhere in South America. The drink was everything I have ever wanted out of a gin and tonic. Not brassing or too sweet - subtle and classy even. It even came with a very snazzy silver stirrer. Check out an interview with Brian where he talks a little about the decision to make the drink.