Category: midas touch

san francisco

while i was in s.f. i didn’t have time to get to all the lovely beer places i had dreamed of
but i did get some lovely beers to go
which i enjoyed at various events i went to
i mean if there’s a budweiser beer garden
why wouldn’t i bring my own alternative beer to it???

on friday i imbibed the stone double bastard
which may have been a little too much for me after the excesses of thursday
i shall have to revisit this one another time
overwhelmingly hoppy, quite boozey
it kicked my ass and my taste buds!

then on satuday i enjoyed my four-pack of hop crisis from 21st amendment
hoppy, surprisingly refreshing
and so conveniently sized in a four pack
as six would have knocked me on my ass again!

sunday we actually had to purchase a budweiser in the beer garden in order to get a cup
good thing it was hot and anything beerish was refreshing!

once i had choked down the budweiser, i poured me a dogfish head midas touch
i had been wanting to try this one for a while
i am not obsessed with history, but i do like ancient mysteries enough to make me geeky on yet another front
so this was a marriage of my geekinesses, history with beer
and i found it interesting
i’m very glad i tried it
not sure i’ll do so again
there was nothing wrong with it, not at all
i’m just not sure i’m down with honey and grapes in my beer
saffron sure
but too much sweet just isn’t me
did i mention how happy i was to try it though?!?

and then i pulled a russian river pliny the elder out of my bag
which was appreciated not just by me
but by my s.f. friend stacy who just emailed me to say that she went out and bought herself a bottle and has fallen in love with it
and she didn’t like the hoppy beers before last weekend!
and by jeshua, the guy in the back ground who happened to be sitting next to us when i cracked it
i offered him some beer and he accepted
when i showed him what he would be drinking he got all excited because he loves the pliny
serendipity!
and oh, what a brew!

it was a really great weekend!

ancient brew

stolen from npr:

Aged 9,000 Years, Ancient Beer Finally Hits Stores
by Brad Horn

July 17, 2010:   “Dogfish Head brewery is known for making exotic beer with ingredients like crystallized ginger or water from Antarctica, so it might not sound surprising that one of its recent creations is a brew flavored simply by grapes and flowers. It’s not the recipe that makes this beer so special; it’s where that recipe was found: a Neolithic burial site in China.

Chateau Jiahu is a time capsule from 7,000 B.C., but to hear Dogfish Head owner Sam Calagione talk about what beer was actually like back then, it’s not the kind of thing that makes you say “Hey, pass me another ice-cold ancient ale!”

“Probably, all beer thousands of years ago — to our modern palates — would have tasted spoiled,” Calagione says. “In fact, in a lot of hieroglyphics, people are shown drinking beer using straws because they were trying to avoid the chunks of solids and wild yeast.”

So how do you go from “chunks of wild yeast” to a beer that you can get at your local store? You don’t start with a brewery. You start with Dr. Patrick McGovern.

The ancient recipe for Chateau Jiahu was decoded from molecular data found in pots from a Neolithic burial site in the Henan province of northern China.

The ancient recipe for Chateau Jiahu was decoded from molecular data found in pots from a Neolithic burial site in the Henan province of northern China.

McGovern is a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. He studies fermented beverages — otherwise known as booze — by analyzing the ancient pots that once held them.

“We use techniques like infrared spectrometry, gas chromatography and so forth,” he explains. McGovern helps Dogfish Head revive long-dead brews by figuring out what used to be inside the ancient pottery he comes across.

About 10 years ago, he set out to find some of this primordial crockery on a trip to China. In one town, he found pottery from an early Neolithic burial site. The pieces were about 9,000 years old — as were the skeletons they were found with.

The Neolithic period, which began about 12,000 years ago, is thought to be about the time when humans started settling down, raising crops — and apparently getting a little tipsy. McGovern suspects that once humans stayed put, it didn’t take them long to discover the fermentation process that led to the world’s first alcohol.

The molecular evidence told McGovern the vessels from China once contained an alcoholic beverage made of rice, grapes, hawthorn berries and honey.

“What we found is something that was turning up all over the world from these early periods,” he says. “We don’t have just a wine or a beer or a mead, but we have like a combination of all three.”

That’s where Dogfish Head comes in. The Delaware-based brewery owns a tiny but respected sliver of the U.S. beer market, which Calagione says it earned by being a risk-taker. Dogfish and McGovern have produced other ancient beverages, including their Midas Touch brew, teased from pottery found in King Midas’ 2,700-year-old tomb.

But, like Calagione says, Jiahu is different. It’s “the oldest-known fermented recipe in the history of mankind.”

This year, Dogfish Head will brew about 3,000 cases of Jiahu — a small batch by commercial brewing standards. At $13 for a wine-size bottle, Jiahu is about six times the cost of Budweiser. Luckily, Calagione says, his sales of Jiahu and other specialty brews have actually increased during the recession.

“What we do see in this economy is that people probably can’t afford a new SUV or a new vacation home, but they can surely afford to trade up to a world class beer,” he says.

And while Jiahu may not be cheap, it’s a lot easier to get than a plane ticket to Neolithic China.”