Hola, loyal readers. I must apologize for neglecting my site for the last month or so. I've been busy with projects behind the scenes, as well as more visible things, such as covering the local beer and restaurant scenes for the recently launched AnnArbor.com. For anyone who hasn't already seen them: here is my intro post on beer and here's my intro post on restaurants. And this page has everything I've written to date.On another note, for anyone following me on Twitter, I've had to create a new account, owing to Twitter inexplicably locking me out of my old one and having no customer service to speak of. For anyone re-following me (and I hope that will be everyone!), I apologize for the inconvenience.
Update: My original Twitter account is back. Sorry again for the inconvenience.
A Couple Programming Notes
The First German Park of 2009
This past Saturday was the summer's first German Park. Plenty of people in and around Ann Arbor know about this awesome event. Plenty don't. I lived here for a few years before I ever learned about it, and it was from word of mouth, not from the trusty Interwebs.
Now, unlike when I first heard of it, there's a web site telling you where and when it is... but not what it is.
So what is it?
Some say it's the best thing about summer in Ann Arbor. On the last weekend of June, July, and August, the German Park Recreation Club – composed of real Germans! – opens up its grounds to the public, charging $5 a person for the opportunity to drink from buckets of German beer; nibble on landjaeger (dried sausage); mow down on bratwurst, knackwurst, pretzels, spaetzle, and German potato salad; listen to an "oom-pah" band; and otherwise kick back and enjoy a festive picnic atmosphere with family and friends.
The first German Park was held in 1938, and its location well northeast of town was deliberately chosen to avoid anti-German sentiment that was rife during the war years. Those crafty Germans must have cut a deal with the cops or something, too, because I've never seen the expected lineup of police cars lurking just beyond the grounds to bust people leaving an all-day beer picnic. Thank the Lord.
I've been going for the last three or four years, and while I freely admit I may be hallucinating, it almost seemed to me there was a greater variety of German beers this year, from a plain lager to a hefeweizen to a marzen to a dunkel to... wait, was there a pilsner? How many buckets did I have, anyway? OK, I was probably hallucinating. Fans of German beer will recognize names like Spaten, Franziskaner, and Dinkel Acker. Or, if you suck, they also serve Coors Light.
Whatever the case, if you missed out, lucky you! There are still two more chances to go, July 25 and August 29. Come early for a table and bring a blanket and a deck of cards or other game to enhance your experience.
'Tis the Zaison
You never know who you'll meet when you're out for a pint. Last evening I was hanging with friends at Ashley's, and I bumbled across Jason Spaulding, co-founder of New Holland Brewing and now out on his own starting another small brewing operation. The new operation is called "One Beer" and, fittingly enough, it produces a single beer, the "Zaison" saison ale. It's available (for now, anyway) only at Ashley's and Zingerman's Roadhouse. At 9% ABV, it's not one to suck down with abandon, but it's a slightly peppery take on the classic style, designed to pair with a wide variety of victuals. Jason's looking for a home for his new brewery, and of course I selfishly hope he'll decide to make it in or around Ann Arbor. (Side note: He also hand-carved the tap handle himself.)
RatFest '09 at Corner Brewery
Yesterday was the first-ever "RatFest" at the Corner Brewery in Ypsilanti, featuring 24 different beers all brewed up by homebrewers on May 1. Eighteen of them were brewed within 24 hours on Corner's so-called "Rat Pad," a 10-gallon brewing system used by homebrewers, visiting brewing professionals, and others to create special small-batch beers that the Corner releases and serves to the public, typically every Wednesday. (A video of this insanity is on YouTube.)
Many of the Rat Pad beers featured were poured by the people who brewed them, although several brewers were not present because this weekend also happens to be the National Homebrewers Conference in Oakland, California. I and a few others selflessly volunteered to step in for them.
As a volunteer, I was assigned to pour beer #22, Crispy's Nearly Nirvana Pale Ale, a recipe that brewer Chris Frey of the Ann Arbor Brewers Guild has been honing for years. It's modeled closely on the ever-popular Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, a great go-to beer from California that has become ubiquitous over the years, often saving me from having to order a Heineken at various restaurants just to avoid the BudMillerCoors options.
As luck would have it, Nearly Nirvana was probably my favorite out of the other beers I sampled (although I didn't get to try them all). Other standouts included Bridget's Saison Du Mont, which was named "best beer" by an informal vote of those present; Rick's Imperial Breakfast Stout (at 9% ABV, that's some breakfast!); and Matt's BBQ Red Snapper, which, though I do not generally like "smoky" beer had just enough smokiness to make it interesting but not enough to make me gag.
The weirdest beer by far was Logan and Hollis's Ants on a Lager, which featured such adjuncts as raisins, celery, and peanut butter. Tony's Raspberry Coconut Porter combined two flavors I don't much care for, and though it didn't do much for me as a beer, when added to melted ice cream (a pitcher of which was also available), it tasted like a mutant version of Neapolitan &ndash dee-licious!
Breaking down 24 draft beers and storing the leftovers wasn't a large amount of fun, but I was at least buoyed by lots of good beer and too much meatballs and gravy. The usual batch of uninspiring, amateurish photos of all the action is up on Facebook.
The Day I Officially Became a Business
Things have been moving and shaking here at headquarters this week. I set up a new computer desk at the home office. For my birthday, my parents bought me a comfortable "executive chair" to sit on when I work or type my blog missives. And today I filed a "doing-business-as" with Washtenaw County, making me officially (in the eyes of the local gummint, anyway) a businessman. In roughly six years of freelancing on the side, I never thought of myself in this way, though now that this is my main gig the grabby taxman certainly does.
Naturally, I celebrated my official businessdom with a mug or two of IPA at Arbor Brewing. OK, maybe it was four – there were some interesting people to talk to there today.
Late Spring Crawfish Boil
Unfortunately, I missed out on Saturday's big crawfish boil at Dark Horse Brewing in Marshall. So on Sunday I decided to do my own out on the deck. Dark Horse had live crawfish sent up from Louisiana, while I used mudbugs from the frozen section of Meijer. I can't imagine my boil was as good as the fresh critters, but it was still quite delicious – corn, sausage, potatoes, and all. And while I also lacked the Belgian style goodness of Dark Horse Sapient Trip Ale, I made do with a sixpack of "Simpler Times" pilsner from Trader Joe's for $5. Hey, times are hard.
Add a pretty girl and a friend visiting from New Orleans and you have the makings of a nice afternoon.
Fruit Beer Tasting at Arbor Brewing
Fruity beers are generally not my thing, but there were several decent brews at last night's tasting at Arbor Brewing. As usual, I volunteered to pour and ended up stationed at what turned out to be the strawberry table, featuring ABC's new-for-summer Strawberry Blonde and Melbourne Bros. (AKA Samuel Smith's) Strawberry Ale.
Owner Matt Greff (pictured right, with volunteer coordinator Joanna Hollyday and an apparent will-o-the-wisp on his shoulder) worked for three years on the recipe for the Strawberry Blonde. The result is a well balanced, medium-bodied brew with a strong strawberry nose but no sweet, cloying taste that is often a hallmark of fruit beers. The addition of so much malt to offset the fruitiness of the strawberry also means this is a deceptively boozy concoction at 7.75% ABV. Great choice for frat boys looking for a chick beer that will also get their dates hammered. The Strawberry Blonde is on draft at the Corner Brewery in Ypsi, but not yet available at ABC.
The Melbourne Strawberry Ale was a much different animal, with more of a "real" strawberry taste (Greff used "essence of strawberry" for the flavor of his brew) and a really tart character. It was all right in small doses, but too much of something like this means a tummyache for your correspondent. Maybe the most notable thing about this beer is that it's spontaneously fermented, meaning during the brewing process it's left out in the open to be fermented by wild yeastie beasties in the air.
(Melbourne also had an apricot beer at another table, also spontaneously fermented, which had much more of a gueuze-like character to it.)
Others that caught my attention: Dark Horse Tres Blueberry (described in the program as "a fruit beer for manly men, not little girls"); Grozet Gooseberry Wheat Ale and Ebulum Elderberry Black Ale (from Craigmill, the Scottish brewer famous for Heather Ale, mmmm); and Cerise from Founders, a cherry beer with an interesting, oh-so-slight cinnamon finish.
Next month: wheats, wits, and lambics!
Memorial Day Brewin' and Grillin'
My brother the master homebrewer threw a Memorial Day weekend party in honor of his 300th batch of homebrewed beer. With my lovely sister-in-law (head chef), he worked tirelessly to offer guests 11 different homebrews and many awesome delicacies, including seafood gumbo, grilled salmon, smoked turkey legs (pictured right), and some big old slabs of lamb, among many other things. There were no survivors.
My small photo gallery of the event is on the Book of Faces.
My brother's account of the festivities is on his blog.
Eating at the Ann Arbor Book Festival
Saturday was the annual Ann Arbor Book Festival writers' conference and street fair. I didn't attend the writers' conference this year, but it sounds like it was as jam-packed with great guests, lecturers, and practical advice as was last year's.
This year's highlight for me actually had more to do with food than books: a cooking presentation moderated by Zingerman's co-founder Ari Weinzweig and featuring delicious (and generous) samples. (Pictured at right: Laura Stec.)
Unfortunately, beyond a few ingredients like kale, nuts, chives, baby asparagus, and corn, I can't say what exactly I ate. (I'm sure if I had purchased the cookbooks on sale there, I would know!)
What really stood out, over all that nice healthy stuff, however, was Ari's fat-soaked bread topped with pimento cheese and a strip of bacon. Some version of this is served at Zingerman's Roadhouse, and man is it good, again confirming one of my main Rules of Life: "There is nothing that can't be made better by adding bacon to it."
Following our freebie meal, my fellow adventurer and I headed to Ashley's for something to wash it down with. Sometimes when I go into Ashley's, it can be hard to decide what to order, so we decided on a "beer flight" of Brooklyn Savoir Faire, Arcadia imperial stout, Dogfish Head's Aprihop ale, and Arcadia Big Dick's Bourbon Barrel Olde Ale.
There's nothing really wrong with Arcadia's stout, but it wasn't what I was in the mood for. The Big Dick was most decidedly bourbon-flavored, which pleased my not-really-into-beer lady friend, and Aprihop and the Savoir Faire (a "French farmhouse" style ale) were a lighter, refreshing counterpoint to the stout and old ale.
To wrap up the perfect afternoon, at Ashley's I ran into two more friends who I haven't seen since they left town, one for the UP and the other for Howell, where she lives, and Battle Creek, where she happens to brew for Arcadia.
All in all, it was another great Ann Arbor-centric day.
Bad Ass Beer or Just Plain Bad Idea?
First, I'm not a fan of Kid Rock. I think he's unappealingly crass and I'm not fond of his idea of music. Part of me is appreciative that he uses his puzzlingly huge celebrity status in part to help boost Detroit, but another part of me usually just feels embarrassed that he's the face of Michigan for so many people. (Still, I admit the fogeys of the 1970s probably said the same thing about Ted Nugent and Alice Cooper.)
Well, as originally reported in February on my deceased blog, the Kid is working with Michigan Brewing in Webberville to create his own brand of what I am guessing can be described only as craft swill. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, he describes it this way:It just tastes like good American light beer, a regular beer and a light beer, an everyday beer ... we'd like to pair a shot of Jim Beam and one of my beers. Get off work, get a 22-ouncer and a shot, you’ll be all right.
He goes on to say it "actually tastes good, it has no aftertaste," which suggests to me he really does mean for this beer to compete with the watery, bland product of the megabrewers. (The obvious question of why America needs another one of those comes immediately to mind.)
Eyebrows are further raised when he discusses the marketing for his "Bad Ass Beer," which is typically Kid Rockean in its white trashy awfulness:There's one where it looks like the Budweiser horses, and they're all up in the air, just freaked out, like they went haywire, and whatever they ride on is smashed up, and it just has my beer sitting in the front, it says "Bad Ass." ... We've got another one with the Bad Ass beer simulating like it's fucking the St. Pauli's girl.
Depressingly, he attributes these ideas to a creative agency he's working with (although it's apparently a guy who lives next to him). Yikes.
The big Bad Ass Beer rollout is targeted for Labor Day, according to the head Bad Ass. I may have to pick up a sixpack myself and stow it away as a collector's item, because I can't imagine this will be much more successful than was, say, Billy Beer. On the other hand, Kid Rock understands his audience way better than I do, so who the heck really knows?
Give Me Liberty...
Finally made it out to Liberty Street Brewing Company (warning: poorly designed web site) in Plymouth, something like nine months after it opened.
I had time for only one beer, their IPA, though I did also have a taste of their pilsener. I liked both of them, though to be honest I can tell I'm starting to get a little tired of IPAs and their even more bitter cousins, the XPAs (that's X-TREME IPAs that mostly seem like a waste of a lot of good hops).
The pilsener was pretty darn good; just because the likes of Anheuser-Busch and Miller have corrupted the style doesn't mean it isn't possible to enjoy a fresh, crisp pint of the craft-brew version. Sometimes this classic style is just what the doctor ordered. Now if only Liberty, or anyone, really, would produce a nice English mild, a truly neglected and out-of-favor style...
Verdict: I will go back. The historic-building setting is a major plus, the staff were friendly (I recognized one bartender from her days working at Arbor Brewing, though I did wonder why she turned off the end of the Tigers game to put on Two and a Half Men), and the beers I tried were tasty and well priced. Maybe next time I'll have a little extra coin to try their food, too, although it's pretty basic, apparently.
An additional note: The whole place, upstairs and down, is smoke-free. (See, you don't need Big Brother to force business owners to ban smoking, some will do it voluntarily if they perceive a high demand for such a ban.)
Next on the day-trip-from-Ann-Arbor brewery tour will have to be Original Gravity (much better web site) in Milan. I'll keep y'all posted.
The Boy from IPAnema
Once again I volunteered to pour at Arbor Brewing Company's monthly beer tasting, the first I've been to since I gave up alcohol for Lent. Last night was a sold-out affair, as India pale ales (IPAs) are popular, and many thirsty beer lovers were on hand.
I was stationed at Arbor's own table, pouring out tastes of "Batch 2000," which, as the name implies, is the 2000th batch of beer brewed by ABC. I'm actually not sure what style to classify it as, but it was much more well balanced that many of the other XPAs (X-TREME IPAS!) there.
What else to say? A great time was had by all. Looking forward to next month's bock and Trappist ale tasting!
