Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Beer In Ads #7: National Premium & Turkey

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Today’s ad is more modern, because it’s Thanksgiving Day and I wanted to use one that was done for the holiday. This juicy turkey ad was for National Premium Beer, subtitled a “Pale Dry Beer,” and brewed by National Brewing of Baltimore, Maryland from 1936-1995. While accounts of the brewery’s origin vary from around 1850, 1855 or 1872 (and under several different names), after Prohibition ended, it returned as National Brewing with its most famous beer being National Bohemian, or “Natty Boh,” which today is owned by Pabst and brewed by Miller. This ad is for their premium beer, and is from the 1950s. Hoppy Thanksgiving.

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Hoppy Thanksgiving a.k.a. Beer & Turkey Day

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Hoppy Thanksgiving everybody. “May your joys be as countless as the golden grains.”

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For quite some time now — personally at least — Thanksgiving is really “Beer & Turkey Day.” I love turkey. I could eat it several times a week and not get tired of it. But unlike most people, I like it dry — no gravy. It stems from my Great Aunt Helen, who couldn’t make a turkey juicy to save her life, even though her heart was in the right place. And I never liked gravy all that much; weird, I know. As a kid, it just meant developing a taste for dry turkey. As an adult, it means finding the right beer to counteract the dryness I now love so much. Of course, making it wok with not just the turkey but also cranberry sauce, stuffing, potatoes and the rest of the feast is also a challenge.

For me, I’ve found that spicy beers work best for the Thanksgiving meal, the spicier the better for my purposes. Not everybody likes their beer spiced, I know, but my feeling is there are 364 other days when you can drink those.

My two favorites for Thanksgiving are Anchor’s Christmas Ale and Pike’s Auld Acquaintance.

Though Anchor’s “Our Special Ale” began in 1975 as essentially a brown ale, over the years since it became more holiday-oriented as spices were increasingly added. In my opinion, it’s best years were the later half of the 90’s decade when it was very spicy indeed. Though most people thought they were too spicy during that period of time, I reveled in the complex spiciness and found them to be the perfect complement to dry turkey and the other Thanksgiving fixings.

When Pike began making their Auld Acquaintance, they loaded it with spices and it quickly became my new favorite, especially when Anchor started backing off the spiciness of the Christmas Ale as the new millennium dawned. But early in the 2000s, it was discontinued in the bottle and I was unable to get it, returning instead to Anchor’s Christmas Ale, even though I wish it was spicier.

Happily, Pike under the new/old owners is bottling it Auld Acquaintance again, though it doesn’t appear to be exactly the same. It used to be around 6.5% abv, if memory serves, whereas the new bottle is a more modest 5%. It does contain orange peel, coriander, cinnamon and nutmeg. I also remember it being hoppy, while the 2008/9 version is only 32 IBUs.

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So this year, happily I got to try both beers with dinner. I started with the Anchor, and it delivered almost everything I wanted, though I still pine for it to be even more spicy. But it certainly worked with my meal. The Auld Acquaintance, on the other hand, was slightly disappointing. It was thinner-bodied than I remember it and the spiciness was likewise more restrained. There was a lot there, but I wanted to be hit over the head, rather than be spoon fed. Still, I can’t complain. They both worked well and as I sit here writing this the rest of the family cleans up — and shoots me dirty looks — but I am completely satisfied. Ah, beer and turkey — a match made in heaven.

In past years, there were quite a few suggestions for beer and turkey pairings. Really, they’re almost all good suggestions. The important thing is family and friends. But the beer is the icing on the cake that makes the meal divine.

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Anchor’s Christmas Ale Artwork

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The Monday before Thanksgiving is the traditional date that Anchor Brewery used to release their Christmas Ale (a.k.a. Our Special Ale), undoubtedly the first annual holiday beer in the silver age of brewing. For the last few years, it’s been released earlier, usually the first week of November. Last year I lamented that loss of seasonality and I continue to celebrate what I call Anchor Christmas Ale Day on that Monday before Thanksgiving. This year is the 35th annual release of the beer, which except for the first few years has been a different recipe every year.

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For the past few years, Anchor’s Christmas Ale has been fairly similar each year, unlike the roller coast years of the mid-1990s, which, I confess, I remember with a special fondness. (Plus I also have several magnums of each year stretching back a decade and 12 oz. bottles a little farther.) I had an opportunity to try some last weekend and it’s about how I remember it last year, still tasting quite good and will undoubtedly be the beer I enjoy with my Thanksgiving dinner.

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The reason I bring this up today, instead of on Monday, is that the San Francisco Chronicle profiled the 82-year old Jim Stitt, the artist who’s drawn virtually all of Anchor’s beer labels, including 35 different Christmas Ale labels, beginning with Anchor Porter in 1974. (There’s also a photo gallery with more of Stitt’s labels.)

This year’s label features the “iconic Monterey cypress near Stanyan and Fell Streets, where the Panhandle meets Golden Gate Park. Lit up from head to toe shortly after Thanksgiving every year, it’s San Francisco’s unofficial Christmas tree. And this year, it becomes the very first San Francisco native to have its portrait on Anchor Brewing Co.’s Christmas Ale.”

My favorite quote from Stitt is this. “It’s a handmade beer, so the label should be hand-drawn.” Below are all 35 of Stitt’s hand-drawn labels for Anchor Christmas Ale.

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Labor Day Hop Picking

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On Labor Day this year, Moonlight Brewing held their annual hop-picking event for friends and family to come and help harvest their hops. Since the kids were out of school and the lovely wife off work, we made a family outing of it, reminiscent of 19th century hop-picking when entire communities stopped what they were doing to help the farmers with the hop harvest. My daughter, Alice, was a hop-picking veteran, having come with me the previous year, but both Porter and my wife, Sarah, were newbies.

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Moonlight Brewery’s owner/brewer Brian Hunt with his hops.

It was a beautiful sunny day in whatever town Moonlighting says it’s in, and nearly three-dozen folks showed up to help. I’d guess we knew a little better than half the people there, so it was great fun sitting around, chatting, enjoying Brian’s beer straight from the tanks and picking the hops. There was also abundant food, and even Sean Paxton, the Homebrew Chef, put together a plate of some delicious cheeses. After we were done, we pulled out the Washoe Boards and played a few games, too.

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Alice wasn’t content just picking the hops, she wanted to help cut them down and carry them back, too. The kids had a blast and, as always, it felt great to pitch in and help. It was the perfect way to spend our Labor Day.

Below is a short slideshow of our day at Moonlight’s hopyard. If you click on the button on the bottom right with the four arrows pointing outward on it, you can see the photos in glorious full screen.

Happy International Bacon Day

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Happy International Bacon Day everybody. It’s a relatively new holiday, to be held each year on the Saturday before Labor Day Monday. If you’re a regular Bulletin reader, you already know of my unbridled love of bacon. I already had some for breakfast and am now plotting how to work it into the rest of today’s meals.

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It’s no secret, of course, that beer and bacon work very well together. Rauchbiers and other smoked beers often have bacon aromas. But as far as I’m concerned, bacon pairs nicely with many styles of beer. But what about a bacon beer?
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Well, it turns out that at least two breweries are making one. First, Garrett Oliver is making one for the bowling alley, Brooklyn Bowl, that’s across the street from the Brooklyn Brewery.

Using a special malt smoked in the same room as the bacon made by Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams of Tennessee, he’s making a bacon barley wine ale. Picking up the story from the New York Times:

[Brooklyn Brewery] plans to brew about 15 gallons of barleywine with that malt. In the meantime, he’s been infusing a brown ale with the flavor of Benton’s bacon fat through a technique known as “fat washing.” (Nick Fauchald described the process in this profile of the bartender Eben Freeman.) Oh, and the bacon-fat-infused ale was also aged in bourbon barrels, because bourbon and bacon go together like, um, beer and bacon.

Eventually, the barleywine with the bacon-smoked malt and the bourbon-aged, bacon-fat-infused ale would be blended to create one monstrously bizarre beer.

“One of two things will happen,” Mr. Oliver predicted. “Either this will be the most amazingly disgusting thing you’ve ever tasted in your life. Or I shall rule the earth.”

A little closer to home, the Uncommon Brewers down in Santa Cruz are also working on a Bacon Brown Ale. Given their track record of successfully using uncommon ingredients in their beer, I’m actually optimistic that they could pull this off. Bacon is being used these days in all manner of different ways, so it’s only a matter of time before somebody perfects a bacon beer.

Flag Day Buds

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You’ve probably seen this before, it’s been around since at least 2002, but it seemed appropriate for Flag Day. It’s from a “[s]torefront display in a West Virginian town situated along the New River.” It was taken by Marjorie O’Brien, who at the time was a photography major at Northern Michigan University’s School of Art and Design in Marquette. It’s a great photo, though due credit has to be given to the store for putting together such a simple yet effective display using cases of Budweiser, Bud Light and Natural Light in the front window.

 

 

Beer In Art #32: Flag Day Beer Art

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Since today is Flag Day, I thought I’d look at some beer art that also uses the American flag. The reason it’s Flag Day is because in 1777, “John Adams introduced the following resolution before the Continental Congress, meeting at Philadelphia, PA: ‘Resolved, That the flag of the thirteen United States shall be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white on a blue field, representing a new constellation.'” Since that time, breweries (and all other business ventures) have been wrapping themselves in the flag to sell products, invoke patriotism or just celebrate living in America. It will probably not surprise you to know I’m also a flag geek, though I think I may have already revealed that tidbit before now (oh, yes I did).

 

Here’s a typical example from the 19th century, a New York brewery’s calendar for 1899.

But even in modern times, several microbreweries have used flag imagery on their labels, most notably Stoudt’s American Pale Ale. Stoudt’s flagship (pun intended?) APA uses a bold, stylized painting of an American Flag that looks like a cross between a Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns.

I don’t know who painted it and there’s no information on the label itself. I could call Carol Stoudt and ask, but it’s Sunday and it can no doubt wait until tomorrow. They even extended the artwork to the six-pack carriers.

But I’ve always liked its jagged edges, the indistinct stars created from the white paint alone, and how the colors mix between all the ribbons of red and white while remaining clearly defined nonetheless.

Until I know about the painter, there isn’t much else to look at, unless you’re curious about Flag Day itself, in which case Wikipedia has a summary; or, if you want to know more about the U.S. flag.

 

Holiday Humor

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Today was almost entirely void of work, which I confess seemed a little strange. I’m finding not working is getting more difficult lately. So in a spirit of mindless fun, here are two really funny websites I’ve been looking at over the last week. Neither have anything whatsoever to do with beer but both have had me actually laughing out loud on occasion. Enjoy.
 

1. My First Dictionary

My First Dictionary is a hilarious recreation of those old children’s illustrated dictionaries, only the definitions themselves are hilariously twisted. And the idyllic innocence of the art makes them doubly funny. There’s a new one almost every day and I find myself having a hard time waiting until the next day’s is posted. Here’s an example of the only one that references drinking so far.


 

2. Awkward Family Photos

This was listed in “The Must List” of the most recent issue of Entertainment Weekly, which I was reading over the weekend. It’s simply a daily family photo that one might charitably call “awkward.” Awkward Family Photos has some of the most amazingly bad photos you’ve ever seen in one place. We’ve all seen one or two of ourselves or a friend or relative, but these are soooo bad they’ve come back around to the other side and become good again, just on a different level. Here’s an example, a pair of twins.