Stouting Off with Founders: Breakfast, Imperial, KBS, + Co.

Image credit to downtownbarandgrill.com

Imperial Stouts are like Ivy Leaguers in at least one way - they're over-represented at the top. For their part, Imperial Stouts make up 6 out of the top 10 and 27 out of the top 50 on RateBeer's 2013 Best Beers list and 8 out of the top 20 on that of Beer Advocate. The corresponding figures for Ivy Leaguers, by the way, are 6 out the 10 schools with the highest number of super-wealthy alumni (>$200 million net worth) and 14 out of 43 US Presidents.

Of the many great breweries in the world, one from Grand Rapids, Michigan is particular well-represented in the Imperial Stout category - Founders Brewing Company. This post draws on both single and comparative tastings of several of their brews in this style, including Founders' Breakfast Stout (8.3% ABV), Founders' Imperial Stout (10.5% ABV), and Founders' Kentucky Breakfast Stout (11.2% ABV). Read on to hear the Founders story and the verdict on which brews of theirs takes the crown.

Pliny

One of the most sobering experiences for a critic is to re-evaluate those works of art that were his first loves. Memory airbrushes flaws and exaggerates excellence, but in the clear, cold light of the present, these illusions fall away. Impressions of all but the most exemplary of subjects weather with the passage of time.

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Not counting the cheap, watery lager that fueled many long nights of “studying” abroad in Madrid, Russian River's Pliny the Elder (8% ABV) was the first beer that I ever had on-tap. I know, I know – it’s a hell of a one to start on, what with being universally regarded as one of the top 3 best beers of all time. Incredibly, Pliny was fairly standard fare at The Rose and Crown, the local pub in Palo Alto where three of my college friends and I would go every Tuesday of Senior spring for their trivia night. We would roll in and have a 50/50 shot of scoring a few pints of Pliny to ready us for a grueling six rounds of competitive esoterica against teams stacked with Stanford students, teachers’ assistants, and researchers. To this day, I can hardly believe how casually we enjoyed our Pliny. Sure we loved it – it was delicious – but there was nary a thought on how special each glass would one day seem.

After graduation, I moved out to NYC. I found trivia nights, sure, and even got the whole trivia team reunited for a weekend of incredible beer-tasting (here’s the lineup in panorama), but there was no Pliny in sight. Only in this relative privation did I begin to appreciate my previous fortune.

My birthday swung around last summer. I was sick as a dog, and it had been a long day at work. When I arrived back at my apartment, my girlfriend greeted me with a package. I unwrapped it to find six bottles of fresh Pliny, shipped all the way across the country for the explicit purpose of making my birthday awesome. Mission accomplished. The picture above shows how we enjoyed those beauties - in tall pint glasses on a balcony together looking out at the Lower Manhattan skyline at sunset. Many ensuing beer adventures have been all about replicating the perfect "something" of that late afternoon in July - the holy trinity of hard-won, great beer, top-notch company, and beautiful scenery.

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It was to be nine more months before Pliny and I would once again cross paths. My lovely girlfriend introduced me to the "on-the-down-low" beer newsletter from the kindly storeowner in California that had sourced her the Pliny back in July. My conduit in place, I put in a order for two bottles of that sweet magic from Sonoma County.

They arrived in a chunky, well-packed box just after Easter. Pliny sported its usual, unassuming label, somewhat resembling Bangladesh's flag. Inscribed on the borders were a series of amusing admonitions that I had come to know and love:

Respect your elder: keep cold, drink fresh, do not age! Pliny the Elder is a historical figure, don't make the beer inside this bottle one! Not barley wine, do not age! Age your cheese, not your Pliny! Respect hops, consume fresh! Consume Pliny fresh, or not at all! Pliny is for savoring, not for saving! Do not save for a rainy day! If you must, sit on eggs, not on Pliny! Does not improve with age! Hoppy beers are not meant to be aged! Keep away from heat!

In case it wasn't immediately clear, the folks at Russian River hold sacred the dictum that hoppy beers should be consumed ASAP - while their deliciously interesting aromas and flavors are at their peak. My bottles had received their blessing on March 14, two and a half weeks before. This was still within my acceptable ballpark for freshness time: 1 day is optimal, 2-3 is still perfect, 4 days - 1 week is excellent, 1-3 weeks still has an appreciable amount of all the relevant highlights, 3-5 weeks is borderline fine, and anything past that tends to have passed from this hoppy coil. Practically stumbling over myself, I set about pouring a glass.

A Pilgrimage to Monk's Cafe

On the East Coast, bibliophiles have Strand; art-lovers The Met; baseball aficionados Fenway. Beer nerds? Beer nerds have Monk's Cafe. For decades, owners Tom Peters and Fergus Carey have operated what is widely considered one of the single finest beer-drinking destinations in the country.

Monk's impeccably curated and extraordinarily deep Belgian-centric bottle list complements two bars' worth of rotating taps that feature a fantastic cross section of American, Dutch, British, and even more Belgian brews. Of particular note is that Monk's routinely features Russian River's beer on tap, something that no other bar outside of parts of California and Denver can boast of. When I queried the staff on how this was possible, one of them informed me that Tom had first met Russian River's founder and master brewer, Vinnie Cilurzo, "back when he owned the Blind Pig in Temecula [ie early 90s]." They had bonded over a shared affection for the storied brewing culture of Belgium, something both drew upon as inspiration for their work. Apparently, the friendship has not only survived, but thrived - ergo, the regularly occurring Pliny the Elder, Blind Pig, and Damnation on tap. 

Posts to Come: Monk's Cafe, Founders' Stouts, Toronado, and More

It's been quite the last few weeks of beer exploration all around the US! As a result, I've racked up several very interesting beer bar visits with friends, worked through some delicious tastings, and learned a whole lot more about the magic of beer.

Over the next couple weeks, you can expect posts on:

• My visits to two of beer-doms most famous temples: Monk's Cafe in Philly and Toronado in SF
• A series of comparative tastings, both within styles and breweries
• An exploration of the various beneficial bacteria behind some of the tastiest beers on earth - sours!

Be sure to check back soon!

Summer 2013 Beer Preview: Looking Ahead to the Perfect Brews for the Season

New Glarus Raspberry Tart on Labor Day Weekend 2012 on Lake Waramaug, CT

With just one day left in April and the weather finally on a positive mend, we're already well on our way to summer. In anticipation of many hot sunny days spent BBQing in the back yard, rocking on the front porch, and reading on the beach, this beer preview looks ahead to some of the most seasonally appropriate brews for summer - namely, those that are highly refreshing and sessionable (low alcohol content), as well as those that feature sour, fruit, or wheat tastes.

My first summer beer-love (see above) was New Glarus Raspberry Tart (4% ABV). Way back before I was even interested in beer, I came across a highly descriptive suite of reviews on The Beverage Tasting Institute's website. One of the foremost there was Raspberry Tart, which their staff described accordingly: "Deep scarlet mahogany color. Aromas of toasted raspberry pastry and oily roasted nuts with a tangy, fruity-yet-dry medium-full body and a suede, Meyer lemon, and grassy earth accented finish. Fantastically flavorful." As a less-savvy beer consumer at the time, I was amazed that anything that qualified as beer could also be so clearly fruit-flavor-driven. I enthusiastically began a search to obtain a bottle, but quickly found that Raspberry Tart, like all of the brews from the world-class New Glarus Brewery, were only available for purchase in their home state of Wisconsin. This might have proved a challenge, were it not for the fact that I luckily lived in Chicago at the time. On the way up to a friend's house on Lake Geneva that summer, I dropped into Bruno's Liquors (524 Broad Street, Lake Geneva, WI - 262 248 6407) and picked up two bottles of Raspberry Tart and two of New Glarus' Belgian Red (4% ABV), their famed cherry beer (both $10/25 oz bottle). Over the course of that summer, and for every summer since, I've cut the colored wax seal on a couple of these lovely bottles - mauve for Raspberry Tart and fire-engine red for Belgian Red.

Gone Home to Chicago (Part 2): A Visit to Hopleaf, Chicago's Legendary Beer Bar

Part 1 can be found here.

While home in Chicago earlier this month, I had the chance to drop into Michael and Louise's Hopleaf Bar, the legendary Chicago beer spot located in the Uptown neighborhood of the city. Why legendary? Well:

1. Informal conversations with friends knowledgeable about the Chicago beer scene have repeatedly resulted in the proffering of voluminous praise for Hopleaf's always excellent tap list.
2. Google search after Google search turned up Hopleaf in list after list of the best beer places in the city (and even the country). Chicago Magazine went so far as to call it "The Archetype" for all of Chicago beer-dom.
3. Everyone loves it - Hopleaf has managed to maintain a 4+ star Yelp average with a staggering 1,300 reviews on the books - more than double the number of the next closest beer bar with a similar score.

I walked in excited; I saw my all-time-favorite beer Zombie Dust on tap and nearly fainted:

After my gamely-accompanying friends shook me out of dazed reverie, I ordered a pint of Zombie Dust (my first time having it on tap), a B. Nektar Meadery Zombie Killer (to continue the theme), and a Stillwater Cellar Door (sorry, there just wasn't a third sonambulist-themed beverage). 

Gone Home to Chicago (Part 1): Three Floyds, Pipeworks, Half Acre, and Revolution

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I recently had the good fortune to return home for a long weekend to Chicago. Past the normal (and excellent) aspects about visiting - spending quality with family and friends, walking down old familiar streets, eating myself silly - there came another, more hop-and-malt centric benefit: Chicago beer distribution.

Though I love New York City and its beer scene, there are certain breweries whose product you just can't get here. This is one of the eternal challenges of being a beer nerd: your home base limits the brews that you can readily access. Vermont is blessed with Hill Farmstead, Minnesota with Surly, Wisconsin with New Glarus. Barring clever trading, inside connections, or rare events, it can be difficult to get ahold of a desired beer.

Ergo, traveling to another part of the country always carries with it the added bonus excitement of exposure to a whole new suite of available breweries. In the case of coming home to Chicago, this meant having access to beer from world-class operations such as Three Floyds, Pipeworks, Half Acre, and Revolution. Even that subset merely limits the available bounty to a handful of Chicago area breweries that only have local distribution - other non-Chicago breweries such as Lost Abbey, New Belgium, and Boulevard distribute outside of their home states, including to Illinois, but don't ship to New York.

Put simply, I stepped into Binny's Beverage Depot in Lakeview (3000 N. Clark, Chicago, IL - 773 935 9400) and my jaw hit the floor at the staggering array of new choices on the shelves. I took a languorous half-hour rolling up and down the aisles appraising the incredible variety. The first thing I asked one of the staffers about was Three Floyds, my favorite brewery. As fate would have it, the shipment had come in three hours earlier, and the eager public had already beating me in scooping it up.  Given the fortune that I've had in the past with tasting Three Floyds beer, I had no reason to be upset, but I nevertheless vowed to keep my eyes open and ears perked on the odd chance that somewhere else in town got some in.