Travels with Barley by Ken Wells Page B

Barney Flats Oatmeal Stout (Boonville, California); Deschutes Black Butte Porter (Bend, Oregon); New Glarus Belgian Red Ale (New Glarus, Wisconsin); and Ommegang Abbey Ale (Coopers-town, New York). It occurred to me how much like a wine tasting this was—though Bradford insisted that though the style might be borrowed from wine events, the beer writer Michael Jackson is “quite correctly credited with beginning the development of a real vocabulary for beer. We talk about the malt-hop balance, things that actually apply to beer.”
    But, like a wine tasting, Bradford used the pauses between samplings to impart knowledge much as a wine steward might discourse on the origins of a certain vintage. He tackled a question about proper beer serving temperatures, for example, noting that lagers, because they are made at colder temperatures, are best served at colder temperatures, whereas ales and their darkish derivations such as stouts are best served in the range of cellar temperatures.
    He ventured into beer color, entirely a function of malt. “Malt is barley,” he said. “You let it sprout. Then you kill it. Then you roast it in a kiln.” Typically, the darker you roast the malt, the darker the beer. This explains why Guinness is black.
    As we moved deeper into the menu and got to the grilled steak with stout-beer sauce, I thought Bradford might fall over. “This is almost like veal stock,” he said, savoring a bite. Then, sampling the paired beer, the Anderson Valley Barney Flats Oatmeal Stout, he described it as “deliciously smooth. This is black malt with oats added. The oats help smooth it out.”
    He stopped and offered a confession that showed his private beer tastes were not quite as catholic as his public ones. “I love stouts,” he said. “It’s all I have in my refrigerator.”
    By the time we got to dessert—beer floats made with vanilla ice cream, Pyramid Apricot Ale, and Fat Dog Stout, and paired with New Glarus Raspberry Tart—I had to admit that I’d gone from being somewhat dubious of the Uptown Beer notion to being charmed by much of what I’d heard and tasted. It was hard to tell much about the beers that were churned up in ice cream but the New Glarus Raspberry Tart was surprisingly tasty for something I didn’t think I would like. It was as if beer had somehow been married to sparkling wine.
    I later looked up the Raspberry Tart on the New Glarus Web site and this is how it was described: “The voluminous raspberry bouquet will greet you long before your lips touch your glass. Serve this Wisconsin framboise very cold in a champagne flute. Then hold your glass to a light and enjoy the jewel-like sparkle of a very special ale. Oregon proudly shares their harvest of mouth-watering berries, which we ferment spontaneously in large oak vats. Then we employ Wisconsin farmed wheat and year old Hallertau hops to round out this extravaganza of flavor. Why wait for dessert?”
    Okay, that’s a bit of precious New Brewing preening, perhaps. But then again I had to admit: it wasn’t my father’s Falstaff.

Drinking beer … educates, creates friends and enlarges humanity’s grasp of its own commonalties.
    â€”L OS T ESTIGOS DE C ERVEZA
CHAPTER 4  · ON THE ROAD AGAIN
In the Shadow of the World’s Largest Six-Pack via La Crosse, Wisconsin
    I didn’t really get out of Minneapolis until Monday morning.
    Sunday can be a desultory day for beer anyway, so after sleeping off (and exercising away) my Gasthaus Wiener schnitzel, I’d pitched up early in the evening at Great Waters Brewing Co. and Brew Pub in Minneapolis’s twin city of St. Paul. It was a very slow night, however, and after taking a gamble on the Cajun jambalaya (which turned out to be pasta), I ordered my one and only beer for the evening before succumbing to Gasthaus lag.
    The beer was one of Great Waters’ cask-conditioned ales,