Bill .My brother-in-law Mark’s one and only Law of Barbecue is that if you are barbecuing you have to have a beer in your hand. Usually when I’m not feeling very well Currently I have a mild cold, but I was barbecuing some lambkabobs so in order not to violate Mark’s law I poured myself a Stone XI anniversary IPA.

IPA. It stands for India PALE Ale. Pale, but this beer is black. How much more black could it be? A black IPA. Illogical. Illogical.

But just so. It is true. This beer is very different from the Xth Anniversary IPA which was a full bodied bang you over the head double IPA with tons of grapefruit overtones. This beer, although it appears darker, is lighter in body and very smooth. I can’t comment on the subtleties of the aroma as I have a cold, but I did smell hops.

And this beer has hops aplenty. They don’t even list the international bitterness units (IBU). They just say “Lots.” It’s a very dry, very bitter beer–in the ilk of English bitters I’ve had but more. More of what? If you know Stone, it’s just “more.”

Although even though it’s black you can still totally tell that this is an IPA base. But the blackness adds subtle dry roasted malt flavors and it is terrific. But only get it if you are a serious IPA fan. If you are a sweet beer or light lager fan–skip this one. 4 stars. — Stuart.

Thanks for the review, Stu. It came out in September, it’s 8.7 percent and the brainchild, apparently, of Stone’s headbrewer Mitch Steele, who came to Stone from Anheuser-Busch where he headed their craft brewing section.

THE QUEST FOR CASK BEER…

Bill,alt=’stone-anniversary-xi.jpg’ /> I read your column in the Oakland Tribune regularly and enjoy it. The New York Times on Wednesday had an article on cask-conditioned beers. Do you know of any bars in the east bay that serve them? Thanks, Tom K

Sure Tom. Triple Rock in Berkeley taps one, I believe, every Thursday. Barclay’s in Oakland often has one; so does the Bistro in Hayward and Jupiter in Berkeley.
The Toronado in San Francisco does. Magnolia’s on Haight in San Francisco usually has a whole array from a British-style mile to IPAs and even stronger. Emil Caluori at Steelhead at Burlingame Station on the Peninsula regularly has a beer on cask. By the way, this is a nice place to visit and you can get there via BART/CalTrain. It’s literally across the street from the Burlingame CalTrain station.

Lots of these places are accessible by BART. Check out www.beerbybart.com for more info.

THE NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE…

The Times piece last Wednesday by Eric Asimov was an excellent review of cask beer. You can find it here.

Photo: Lucy Saunders, and her editor Ray Daniels at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver. She’s holding her cookbook
Credit: William Brand

Are you a foodie? I am. That is, I love good food and when it’s paired with or made with beer, that’s plus.

Well, here’s an email newsletter you can subscribe to without charge that features the best of both world: food and beer. It’s the Grilling With Beer Newsletter, written monthly by cookbook author Lucy Saunders. Her latest book is: The Best of American Food & Beer: Pairing & Cooking With Craft Beer, 2007, Brewers Publications. It’s a wide-ranging look at craft beer across America with an emphasis on pairing beer with food and cheese.

Last year, she wrote Grilling With Beer: Bastes, BBQ Sauces, Mops, Marinates, & More Made With Craft Beer, F&B Communications. This is the best book on the subject of barbecue and beer today. I’ve tried numerous recipes; they all work beautifully.
You can find a couple of her recipes here on my blog.

To subscribe to her newsletter, email: lucy@beercook.com. You can find lots of recipes and more at her website: GrillingWithBeer.com.

Here’s a recipe from her October newsletter:

Pike’s XXXXX Chocolate Sauce

Rose Ann Finkel, an extraordinary chef and partner in the Pike Brewery, cautions not to substitute chocolate chips for the chopped chocolate in this recipe “because chips are too waxy” and the sauce won’t be as smooth.
Note: You can find Madagascar Bourbon vanilla extract in the baking section of specialty food stores and online by mail order.

1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup dry stout
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate (60% to 72% cocoa), finely chopped
1 teaspoon Madagascar Bourbon vanilla extract

1. Combine the cream and stout in a saucepan and bring it to a simmer over medium-high heat.

2. Pour it over the chopped chocolate and gently whisk until the chocolate is melted and the sauce is smooth.

3. Whisk in the vanilla and serve warm, or cool completely and store in airtight container in refrigerator.

Keeps for up to 1 week.
Makes 1 2/3 cups

Suggested pairing: Dry stout

About Pike Brewing Co

Beer glass Half Moon Bay Brewing

Caption:

This is a glass of India Pale Ale from Half Moon Bay Brewing in Half Moon Bay, CA. No doubt the beer used to enter the race Saturday morning won’t be as good as this.

Forget trophies for the first annual Old Tunnel Road Race that begins at noon today. The prize will be beer, potentially a mind-boggling amount of beer.

“Our entry fee is simple,” says the race creator, Brian Rutherford, of Berkeley. “It’s 12 bottles of beer and the winner gets all the beer.”

“I didn’t want to make it a money thing, but I wanted an entry fee so people would be committed,” he said. “Everybody likes to drink beer, so why not?”

The potential, Rutherford admits, is rather stunning. “If we get 20 people to run, that’s 500 beers; if we get 40, that’s a thousand.”

Also, Rutherford plans to hand out free t-shirts to everyone from his fledgling clothing design company, Elevation 42. Rutherford a longtime runner as well as a bicycle racer with the Montano Velo team in Oakland, decided that the East Bay needs an unusual race and what better place than Old Tunnel Road.

“Old Tunnel Road is one of the most well-known roads in the East Bay. It’s used by all sorts of athletes, all the local bike riders use it, tons of runners, rollerblades and skaters use that road all the time. I thought it would be perfect,” he said,

The race begins beside the 1991 Firestorm Memorial on Hiller Drive at the junction with Tunnel Road. It ends a steeply sloping 3.2 miles later at the junction of Old Tunnel Road and Grizzly Peak Boulevard near the top of the East Bay hills.
“We’ve got a number serious runners committed,” Rutherford said. “But everybody’s welcome.”

He admits there’s no restriction on what kind of beer to bring to enter the race. That’s up to the runners, he said. For more information, contact Rutherford at brianirutherford@yahoo.com.

The Toronado in San Francisco is having its wet hop festival this Saturday and if you like the idea of beers made with just-harvested hops, here’s an occasion to try some of the best.

One interesting note. Proprietor David Keene says five wet hop beers from San Diego County won’t be available because the fires down there have made it too chaotic to ship beer.

Toronado LogoOne note from me. Be sure to try Sierra Nevada’s Harvest Ale. It’s dynamite. This is the first time they’ve bottled this fresh hop beer. I tried it and loved it at the Bistro’s Wet Hop Fest two weeks ago in Hayward. Tried it again the other night, it’s mellowed a bit and the malt and hops are beginning to blend. Can’t wait to try some others to see if the same thing’s happened to the others.

Another one to check is Moylan’s Wet Hopsickle. The regular Hopsickle won a gold medal in the double IPA category at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver earlier this month.

Anyway, the fest starts at 11:30 a.m. There’s no admission charge, just buy your beer. Hint: Go for small glasses, many of these beers are high octane.

Here are the beers lined up now, although I’m sure there will be more by Saturday:
Deschutes Hop Trip, Drakes Harvest Ale, Bear Republic Confiscation, Beach Chalet Hop Patootie, 21 st Amendment Harvest Moon, Half Moon Bay Green Gold, Blue Frog Last Hop Standing, Moonlight Brewing Co Sublimminal, Moonlight Brewing Greenbud Chinnook, Moonlight Brewing Greenbud Cascade, Sierra Nevada 20th Street Ale, Sierra Nevada Harvest Ale, Marin Wet Hop Cask IPA, Moylans Wet Hopsickle.

noonans-brendan-moylan-jose-flores.jpgmarin-brewing-arne-johnson.jpgmarin-brewing-blonde-pt.jpgFood to Pair With Uber Hops

I love White Knuckle, the high octane Double India Pale Ale from Marin Brewing in Larkspur. But I have no idea what kind of food I would would pair with this splendid beer, created by head brewer Arne Johnson.

I found out last Thursday night at beer diner at Noonan’s, the fine wine restaurant in Larkspur Landing, Larkspur, CA., launched a few years ago by Marin Brewing proprietor Brendan Moylan. The answer is simple: An 80 IBU beer like White Knuckle is a perfect match for spicy food. It can take the heat.

Noonan’s chef Jesse Flores paired White Knuckle with Petaluma

Duck Breast, Pale Ale braised beet greens, sage and queso fesco polenta served in an ancho chile orange sauce. The key was the anchos. These are the dried version of those triangular shaped poblano chiles used stuffed in chile rellenos, omnipresent in Tex-Mex restaurants.

Compared to some chiles, anchos are mild, but they do bring a deep, but subtly burning heat to a dish and they certainly did in this one.

What a wonderful match. Like the much more famous Russian River’s Pliny the Elder, White Knuckle has a substantial malt component. It’s 8.2 percent ABV, not as big as some double IPAs these days, but plenty big enough for me.

I was fairly shocked how well the combination worked. The sweetness of the duck, the orange in the sauce and the malt in the beer blended perfectly and the hops melted the heat of the anchos like a warm knife in butter. Made the sauce quite tolerable, made the aromatics hop pop out.

Wish I could run out tonight and order the same thing again, same duck breast in ancho orange sauce and of course, a flagon of Eldridge Grade White Knuckle IPA. (It’s named for a very tough Marin County bicycle trail.)

I know this, everytime I duck into Marin Brewing, I have my fingers crossed, and if I’m lucky, White Knuckle’s on. Arne says the next batch of White Knuckle’s about 11 weeks away. He’ll bottle it for sale at the pub; Morris Distributing, which handles accounts in San Francisco, Marin and Sonoma County will have some for select customers and a bit will creep over here to the East Bay.

Best bet, pay a visit to Marin Brewing.

The dinner was planned long before Arne and his assistant brewer, Shane Aldrich won four gold medals at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver earlier this month.

So the dinner became a fete for the brewers and the menu displayed their gold medal winners, Tiburon Blonde in the Belgian and French-Style Ale category, Star Brew Triple Wheat in the American Style Wheat Wine Ale category, Point Reyes Porter annd Triple Dipsea Belgian-Style Ale in Belgian-Style Abbey Ales.

Tiburon Blonde, made with a Belgian yeast and a melange of European hops and malts, was served with an Avocado-Cabbage Salad with margarita marinated prawns and a citrus vinaigrette.

This is a big, maltybeer with a towering, creamy head. Taste is very soft and malty , but not sweet, with a dry hoppy follow. The meaty prawns and the fruity vinaigrette accented the malt as well as the fruit in the yeast. Very nice.

Pt. Reyes Porter’s the kind of dark, roast malt porter that homebrewers eternally try to make: roast malt nose and a delicious, dry follow. It was served with Pork Mole Empanadas with fresh cotija cheese, that dry, crumbly kind much used in Mexico. The unsweetened chocolate in the mole accented the dark roast notes in the porter and the cheese acted like a punctuation mark, intensifying the effect.

Desert was Oaxaca Molten Chocolate Cake with coconut ice cream, paried with Marin Brewing’s Barrel Aged Quad. Arne explained that the beer was brewed two years ago, then placed in a Maker’s Mark bourbon whiskey barrel and fermented for five months with wild yeast, a cultured version of the little yeast beasties that float in the air around us. The finished beer is 12 percent ABV and poured like still wine with a bourbon nose.

“This is what craft brewing’s all about,” Arne said. Always pushing the envelope

The cake, really a thick rind of baked hard chocolate cake, filled with a rich chocolate pudding, brought out the winey, wild yeast taste of the beer; the sweet coconut ice cream intensified the bourbon . Another fairly stunning combo.

After desert, Arne brought out a number of his barrel-aged beers and spice beers including the gold medal winning Star Brew Triple Wheat a pale, 9 percent beer, fermented since last January with wild yeast, brettanomyces. Sweet wheat nose, complex taste and a cidery finish. Very, interesting beer.

Interested in these beers. Call Marin Brewing, or better, stop by. If you live in the East Bay or San Francisco, it’s a great ferry ride away. Catch the Larkspur Ferry in San Francisco; the ferry landing in Larkspur is a short trip across an elevated walkway to Larkspur Landing and Marin Brewing.

And, if you like wine, Noonan’s is just across the plaza from the pub.

We’ve just posted our first slide show on the Great American Beer Festival that ended this past Saturday.

Here’s the link.

This is a learning experience. To read the entire caption for many of the photos you’ll have to slow the slide show down, but dragging your mouse on the photo.

Many thanks to two excellent freelance photographers who took most of the photos: Gregory Daurer of Denver, Colo., a novelist, and Greg Wiggins of Arlington, VA., a reporter for Mid-Atlantic Brewing News.

Orval glassOk this is incredibly short notice, but…the Toronado, 547 Haight St. in San Francisco, is hosting Orval’s Director of Operations Francois Breanne tonight at 7 p.m. at the pub. There will, of course, be scrumptious (can a beer be scrumptious? If it’s Orval, the Trappsit beer, yes indeed) be on tap. No charge, buy your beer.

If you can’t make the Toronado tonight, there’s a second chance. Craig Wathen, proprietor of City Beer, 1168 Folsom St. in San Francisco, will host Msgr. Breanne Wednesday from 6 - 8 p.m. Again, buy your beer, but there’s no charge otherwise. City Beer has a unique license _ you can sample beer, then buy bottles to take home, if you’ve never visited, I highly recommend it.

FYI Orval. I’ve posted a column I wrote just below this post.

Beer of the Week

Our beer of the week is unusual in many ways. It’s Orval *****, the world classic ale from the ancient CistercianOrval Bottle Trappist monastery, Abbaye Orval, in Belgium near the French border.

Brewing began here in the 12th Century, but stopped in 1793, when Napoleon sacked and burned the monastery. Brewing did not resume until 1931.

The beer - formulated by a German brewmaster with help from a Belgian - is quite different than beers from the other six Trappist breweries. They all make strong, dark, sweet ales. Orval does not.

This is a 6.2 percent alcohol by volume beer, packaged in a unique .33 cl (11.15 oz.) bottle. It’s a brilliant, dusky gold beer with a towering, lively head of foam that lasts and lasts. The nose is spicy with an aroma of ripe pears and hints of apples.

The beer’s dominant taste is hoppy and dry with exquisite undertones, maybe even a touch of old leather.

It’s brewed with an ale yeast using pale barley malt and a touch of caramel malt. Hops are aromatic Bavarian Hallertau. It’s always been dry hopped in the English style: mildly spicy, Serbian Styrian Golding hops are added during fermentation.

When the beer is bottled, a bit of white candy sugar and a wild yeast - Brettanomyces is added to each bottle, so fermentation continues. The brett gives the beer its characteristic leathery, dryness. The sugar insures the beer will be lively when poured. Tim Webb, author of the “Good Beer Guide to Belgium” recommends letting the beer age for a year before drinking to allow the beer to mature.

An abbey this old is steeped in history, and of course, legends. According to the original legend, a noble lady, Mathilda of Tuscany who was a widow, lost her wedding ring in a fountain. “She prayed to the Lord and at once a trout rose to the surface with the precious ring in its mouth.

“Mathilda exclaimed, `Truly this place is a Val d’Or.’ In gratitude she established a monastery on the site. The Orval label shows a trout with the ring. Proceeds from the beer support the monks and their many charitable works.

For more information on this unusual beer go here. Can’t find this beer? Call (510) 915-1180 or email us for a copy of our Bay Area Retail Beer List.

I’ve still got more Great American Beer Festival reporting to post, including a bunch of photos of some of the wilder costumes at the fest. But the story below ran in the Sunday Observer in London, a friend in Brussels sent me the link. It’s an interesting view from the UK. One note though, Coors Blue Moon’s no drop in the bucket. They sold nearly 700,000 barrels of Blue Moon Belgian-Style White Ale last year. Read on:

It’s ale the rage over the pond

Forget the big-name, watery lagers: more and more Americans are knocking back speciality ‘craft beers’ and wine, writes James Doran in New York

Sunday October 14, 2007
The Observer

A giant image of Michael Jackson last night hung over more than 40,000 beer aficionados, gathered in Denver for the Great American Beer Festival. Not the self-styled and somewhat tarnished King of Pop, you understand, but the revered and, sadly, recently deceased British writer and champion of real ale.
‘It shows you how much attitude towards beer has changed in America when this many people gather to remember someone like Michael. He was a lovely man and a great friend,’ says Steve Hindy, the chairman of the American Brewers Association, host of the annual beerfest, and chief executive of the Brooklyn Brewery, one of America’s leading small beer makers. Read more…

DENVER – Rushing to catch a plane at Denver’s gigantic airport, I made a 22 oz. mistake. Didn’t get it until I was in the middle of the security gate.The G.D. Yeti. Yes! I’d hurridly stuffed a bottle of Great Divide Aged Yeti in my carryon bag. Oops. Don’t try that.

The security officers smiled. Another great beer for lunch, huh. Well, now I have a good reason to return to Denver. Aloha and yah–hoo pardnuh.

In truth, I’ve got some more GABF stuff to post including a tasting of some very interesting beers from Anheuser-Busch, including an 8 percent cherry beer for the holidays. Stay tuned.