Tasting Some Amazing Craft Beers With Friends

About a week ago I got to taste a lineup of craft beers with some friends of mine who are definite hop-heads. One of them, my buddy Walker, has cool beer blog where he's chronicling his quest to taste the top 100 beers in the world, as rated by the users of BeerAdvocate.com. Check out Walker's site here, and follow along. Lucky for me, I get to help him out every once in a while when he tastes. My friend Blayne and Lauren also came by to taste and sample some beers with us. They brought the Lagunitas and Great Divide beers, I contributed all three Trader Joe's Vintage Ales, and Walker had the Listermann, KBS, and Iron Fist.

Listermann Wild Mild Ale - 4% abv.
Lots of carbonation is present, but you can't feel it on the palate. Smells like hot metal, hint of MSG (savory), very basic aromas. Tastes of burnt oats/malts, more of the metallic sensation too. Very fat through the mid palate but falls utterly flat on the finish. Bitter notes add a pleasant note but mainly because it's just something additional to the party. Mildly unimpressed. Not a lot going on. C+.

Iron Fist Brewing Velvet Glove - 9% abv.
Nice mix of fruit and florals on the nose. Can't tease out any malts, bittersweet chocolate or other identifiers of a dark beer. Incredible mouthfeel! I can see where the name Velvet Glove comes from. Huge, thick through the mid-palate. Supremely balanced beer, the flavors all match each other in intensity. The progression of each flavor through my palate is superb. Loads of dark fruit and spice. Nice charred oak or malt too. One of the best dark beers I've ever tasted. A-

Trader Joe's Vintage Ale 2008 - 9% abv.
Smells like apple cider and baking spices. I get faint hints of baking yeast too. Lots of sediment. Also hints of wood glue. On the palate...Astounding. Complexity for days. Notes of caramel, wood glue, apple peel. The acidity and carbonation make this stuff amazing. I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the delicate flavors and the way they're all integrated. A

Trader Joe's Vintage Ale 2009 - 9% abv.
Smells like lemon ginger tea to me. Lovely bouquet that has really mellowed since the last time I had this. Great spicy flavors but it's too thin still, not enough structure for me. The 2008 had more of a firm presence on my palate. The 2009 by contrast does more with its bubbles to create a sensation of body. I got cinnamon, nutmeg, and brown sugar in the scent, some of those carried through to the mouthfeel. Also present were hints of malt and perhaps some orange peel. B

Trader Joe's Vintage Ale 2010 - 9% abv.
Smells like lots of baking spices and pumpkin pie too. The pumpkin in my tasting notes contributes a sense of sweetness, richness. Very dark color especially compared to the 2008. Tons of spice on the palate dominate everything. Some hints of a dark chocolate and bitter roasted malts but the alcohol does sweep a lot of it away. Immature at this point, needs a few years. C+

Kentucky Breakfast Stout - 11.2% abv
Flat out amazing. Complex bouquet of all dark flavors including beef jerky, bakers chocolate, absolutely amazing. Still amazingly diverse on the palate. Hershey's chocolate syrup, beef jerky, sweet flavors..The way each flavor integrates and progresses is impressive and speaks to the power of stouts. This is perhaps one of the toughest beers to find anywhere and now I understand why. One of the best beers I've ever tasted, period. A+

Great Divide Chocolate Oak Aged Yeti - 9.5%
Crazy opaque. Cannot see through it at all, but I love that aspect. Great flavors of charcoal, burned malts, wonderful. The cayenne is nice, but it hits real quick and is done. Overall I really enjoy how complex the flavors are. Well made beer, the dark flavors of chocolate and bitter malts really restrain the sweeter flavors. A-

Lagunitas Undercover Investigation Shut-Down Ale - 9.87% abv.
Slightly overripe mango on the nose, great mouthfeel though. The acidity and dry hoppy flavors keep the ripe fruit in check. Good sweetness is tempered by the acidity and hops. A nicely balanced beer with a great component. Well worth the price. B

Lagunitas Wilco Tango Foxtrot - 7.8% abv.
Typical hoppy IPA nose, lots of ripe fruit and floral character. Very much like other IPA's but with some additional character. Vibrant acid that keeps all various flavor elements in check. Clean, crisp entry and a nice burst of hoppy green keeps the ripeness in check. A little bit disjointed for me, seems that it might be better if more of the floral and hops showed up instead of the little core of sweet fruits I was getting.  B-



So of these beers, many are not available and that kind of sucks. The Lagunitas beers are readily available at places like Whole Foods and Bristol Farms. The Oak Aged Yeti is available at good liquor stores and I've heard people say they can find it at Beverages & More. Luckily for us San Diegans, Iron Fist is a local brewery and their beers can be found here in town. The Trader Joe's Vintage Ales are gone, those are snapped up quickly right after their release date, usually between November and December. Good luck with the Kentucky Breakfast Stout...

Beau Carufel

Trader Joe's Petit Reserve Pinot Noir Central Coast 2009

 (img src http://lashahull.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/pinot-noir-grapes.jpg)

Another wine from Trader Joe's. This is one of their private label wines, of which there are multiple designations (and price points). The Petit Reserve is one of the cheapest of the "Trader Joe's" labels, usually somewhere between $5.99 and $8.99 per bottle. At the upper end are the "Grand Reserve" wines, around $12-14 a bottle. One can find gems hidden in each segment, but most of the wines are for me, pretty boring. There's nothing necessarily wrong (from a technical standpoint) with these wines, they are just not that interesting for a wine geek to taste.

The usual story given out is that somewhere in the world, a famous, well known producer needed to sell some of his wine and heroically of course, Trader Joe was there with a briefcase of cash and a custom labeling facility. Joe promised not to disclose who the producer was, but did promise to take all xx,xxx cases off said producer's hands and re-brand it as Trader Joe's wine. In trying to track down who does produce a lot of these private label wines, I've often come across shell companies, fake wineries, and even good old Fred Franzia's Bronco Wine Company. As for the 2009 Petit Reserve Pinot, I didn't do a lot of digging but was assured the wine was from a top Pinot Noir producer making "big labels" up in San Luis Obispo.

Interestingly, and perhaps telling, was the fact that 4.8% of the wine is actually Souzão. Grown primarily in Portugal, Souzão is used in the production of Port wines, often to add color and flavor. Makes sense to add such a big, dark, heavy grape to Pinot Noir, right? No, it doesn't. But I'm not the big name producer or Trader Joe's so I don't make the rules here.

Poured into my glass, this is a somewhat pale Pinot, especially for California and even San Luis Obispo. The cooler climate keeps acidity a bit high and allows more fruit nuances of raspberry and sour cherry to manifest. In the Petit Reserve Pinot, the nose gives hints of those fruits along with oak (presumably this is barrel aged) and some alcoholic heat. At 13.7% the alcohol is smack in the middle of the Pinot Noir I've been tasting for the past few years.

I think I could taste added structure the Souzão gave this wine, in the form of a firm tannic backbone that interacted with the acidity. More of the soft vanilla, sour cherry and bits of raspberry were playing on my palate too. More of the alcoholic heat too, which disappointed me to some extent. No strong flavors and nothing that jumped out, this is a weak wine structurally.

The finish was straightforward and brief, nothing lingered as if trying to draw out the experience. As I sat and thought about this wine, I was left with the singular notion that it didn't have much soul. I couldn't detect much terroir influence, rather this seemed to be a cobbled together wine. In essence, it was there to be sold and consumed without much thought. I graded it a C and Do Not recommend you try it, despite the very consumer-friendly $5.99 price tag.

If you must try this, pair it with a pizza or something equally simple. Even then, I'd rather open a Chianti or Merlot.

I'll keep my eyes open for more low-priced wines from Trader Joe's.

Beau Carufel

Another Cooking Blog! Sans Smoke and Fire even!

Here we go again. That's what went through my head when, after a lot of urging from my friends, I decided to document another culinary (mis)adventure. I love cooking and creating food but I have no formal training, so with that serving as a disclaimer, we can proceed.

I suppose I should begin with the wine, a bottle of 2007 Parducci Cabernet Sauvignon that I had written about the night before. The wine tasted and smelled a bit tired on this night, but it was still completely fine for cooking. I firmly believe in cooking with good quality wines, the kind you'd drink. I feel if you cook with cheap crap like Charles Shaw, you're doing yourself and the food a disservice. That's my rant for tonight.

Inspiration tonight comes from a good friend of mine and I thank her for that. If I'd burned the kitchen down, I'd have blamed her though!

The ingredients here are pretty self-explanatory, I was going for a flavor profile of herbs, tomato with a spicy finish.
That large steel can in the picture above held some diced tomatoes and those were first into the pot. Obviously a pretty straightforward base for a pasta sauce. I like to get all the ingredients simmering together for as long as possible so I added a tiny bit of chili flakes and cayenne pepper, crushed garlic, the wine, salt, and fresh ground pepper.

If you look closely at these two pictures,
you can see something rising from the pot. I assure you, gentle reader, it's merely steam and not the beginnings of a Stage IV Kitchen Apocalypse. Capturing the rising steam (which happened to smell delicious) was not without it's own bit of peril though. Steam, as it turns out, is hot.

Also I will take a moment to remind you all that knives are sharp and should be handled with care. Getting cut with one does hurt but can leave a neat scar.
Sharp-eyed readers might wonder what the hell "Peri-Peri Peppadrops" are. My first experience was seeing them on the shelf at Trader Joe's. Since I'm a sucker for spicy foods, a jar soon found it's way into my fridge. From the front of the jar: "Pickled Piquante Peppers"and "Not too sweet and not too spicy". Good summation, there's a nice balance of heat and flavor here, perfect for adding another dimension to food. Texturally these are very soft and if you use them, be aware that it's somewhat difficult to get the skins to brown evenly, or it was for me. Perhaps that's just my lack of skill.

Since I'm not cooking in the kitchens of the French Laundry, dicing food doesn't need to be a precise exercise, the stuff just needs to be cut up into small bits.

In the picture to the right, you can see I've added in my diced sun-dried tomatoes and the Peri Peri Peppadrops. "Where is that steam?" you may ask, at this point I had turned the burner down a bit so that I would have more time to prepare the other parts of the meal. I know there are those who enjoy cooking at a fast pace, I don't enjoy being rushed in the kitchen though. Part of my philosophy on cooking at home is that when you make a dish, you should tweak it constantly, attempting to better some element here or there.

I've learned much by my (often disastrous) "experiments" with flavorings and the slow pace at which I cook lends itself to a trial and error methodology.

To the left you can see the sauce after two hours of simmering merrily away. Can sauce simmer merrily? Yes, or else I wouldn't have said it. About 20 minutes after the previous ingredients were added, I browned and seasoned some ground beef then added it to pot. Beef has wonderful flavor to begin with, but if you allow the meat some time to soak in the sauce and take on those flavors, the result is wonderful. I partially browned the beef then let it finish cooking in the sauce pot. At no point was I worried about raw beef, since the sauce itself was so hot and the stove was on low.
Ground turkey, venison, pork, and chicken are also choices. Continuing a theme, this is what I had on hand so it went into the pot. 

I chose penne because I had the pasta sitting in my cupboard and had not used it in a while. I wish I had a better explanation but there you have it. A guerrilla-cook can often just go with what he (or she) has on hand.
Next time, I will use spaghetti or linguine, or just go with something I've never used before. Penne for me always seems to take longer to cook than the aforementioned shapes, so it was a simple matter to cook this batch part of the way then transfer it into the pot to absorb and finish cooking within the sauce. Did I mention that in my last cooking blog? I think so, since I recall someone telling me of the technique earlier this year.

To the right is the outcome of all the words above. I'm not very good at using Parmesan cheese out of a tube, and since I lacked a chunk of cheese to shave over the pasta, it's all I had to go with. The results are right there for you to see. Way too much cheese, I even attempted to pick some off but that didn't work. Still, the sauce was tasty and the pasta did as I asked, absorbing a lot of flavors while it finished cooking in the sauce pot.

You can choose to add some more salt and pepper, maybe some more chili flakes if you desire. I never have used a lot of salt in my cooking but that's merely personal preference. I seek balance and based on the ingredients in this dish, more than just a touch of salt could have overwhelmed what I was seeking.

Home cooked, full of flavors, a bit of spice and very filling. That's how I'd describe this meal in a tweet or in a one-sentence blurb.

Another culinary adventure, keeping with the theme of pasta and red sauces. Yes, I can and do cook other things quite often, it's just that I rarely have my camera in the kitchen. Some of my San Diego Wine Mafia friends have suggested I buy a Flip video camera and record my cooking (and wine tasting) then post those videos. Maybe 2011 will see that happen.

Do I remember the wine I had with this meal? Nope. I know I had some wine and I think it may have in fact been the Parducci Cabernet Sauvignon, but somehow I doubt that. Too bad, because as I type this I can think of a couple of wines that would pair well. Obviously, something from Tuscany but beyond that, a Chateauneuf du Pape would also be fun to. From Austria, a St. Laurent also would have been a neat wine to try. Next time I'll do a better job of documenting the wine and food interaction. Thank you for reading and commenting!

Beau Carufel