Italian Sodas : Sanbitter & Chinotto

Yes, even Liquid Diets needs to have drinks without alcohol (or caffeine) in them! Actually, I’d just as soon drink non-alcoholic versions of what I do drink as I’m a lot more interested in the flavor than the buzz, but the alcohol is more or less a byproduct of what makes the flavors to begin with, so….

People who’ve read this blog regularly know I like bitter flavors and am crazy about Campari, the lovely red Italian bitter. I had the day off and took the time to go to the Italian market inside the River Market, today, and I found two things I’ve been wanting to find for a long time: Chinotto and Sanbitter. These are two non-alcoholic sodas that are common in Italy and I’ve been dying to try them. I bought a single bottle of Chinotto out of the cooler for $1.50 and a 10-pack Sanbitter for $9 or so.

Both of these sodas are marketed as “apertif” sodas. In other words, besides being delicious, they are intended to aid digestion. Digestion is an important concept in Europe, particularly in Italy. Long meals, long walks after meals, pre-dinner and post-dinner drinks and bitter flavors are all strategies intended to help the body digest the food you are eating. In a real Italian restaurant, dinner will take 3-4 hours, easily. It’s not a 30-minute table-turning, stuff-your-face-o-rama like we have learned to accept in this country.

Bitter flavors aid digestion by stimulating the 10th cranial nerve, the Vagus Nerve. Explaining what the vagus does is beyond the scope of this review, but suffice to say if the vagus is happy and stimulated it will have a calming effect on the body and enhance digestion and elimination.

Sanbitter is made by San Pelligrino, which manufactures a host of sodas and water products. It looks ruby red, just like Campari, and comes packaged in delightful little 100mL (3.4 oz) glass bottles with a bottle cap topping it. I don’t use the word “cute” very often, but these bottles surely fit the bill. According to the bottle cap, the sweetener is “sugar,” not high fructose corn syrup, so that is one advantage of this soda over something American (I know, a lot of the boutique sodas are made with real sugar, but they’re also very sweet, not an apertif soda like this).

Sanbitter tastes  a little like Campari in that it does have some of the same herbal and citrus notes. I saw it described as “extremely bitter” on many American websites as I was researching for this, but I disagree. I know my palate is tuned differently than a lot of folks’, but it is nowhere near as bitter as Campari, in my opinion. The next time I drink Sanbitter I am going to try it over ice (I poured it straight from the bottle) and if I have some, throw a slice of orange in with it. Sanbitter is a good alternative to Campari and soda if you’re looking for an apertif and can’t drink any alcohol.

Chinotto is also made by San Pelligrino and comes in a slightly larger bottle than Sanbitter. It looks like slightly watered-down Coke®, kind of brown/caramel in color. It is a sweetened soda made from chinotto, a small citrus fruit (pictured at the left) that looks like an orange. The flavor of Chinotto soda is like bitter orange with some hints of cola in the background.

I found the Chinotto to be more complex and enjoyable than the Sanbitter, but both were really good. I try not to drink too much soda pop, but if I am these are what I’d like to reach for when I have the chance. They aren’t too bitter (to me), and they are carbonated and refreshing, offsetting some of the sugar in them.

Tailgating & The Royals

Went to my first Royals game of the season, against the Tigers, and as is true of the 5-6 Royals games I have been to in the past 2 years of living here, we got our asses kicked, 9-1. The game was sold out, and the crowd was huge. K Stadium looks great and I saw the new Jumbotron or whatever that thing is called last year, but it is awesome, too. From 1/2 mile away it still looks better than the picture on your TV in your living room! So cool! We started tailgating around 3:30 and there were ominous clouds the entire time, as well as lightning during the game, but we never got more than a few drops. Very lucky, and it was great weather for a baseball game.

Tailgating was fun, but because of the huge crowd we had to park WAY over by the Chief’s stadium. It was a long walk and for some reason there were about 3 Port-A-Potties available. The average wait in line was about 30 minutes to pee. Needless to say, the parking lot was a pretty popular place to relieve oneself. Amazingly, the restrooms inside the stadium seem to have gotten smaller, with less capacity, too.

I refuse to pay $8 for a Bud Light or Miller Light, so I do all my drinking from the parking lot. I drank the following:

• Modelo Especial (canned) – just wanted to try it out. Nothing special, despite the name, but better than Bud/Miller/Coors/Natty Light/etc.
• Schlafly Pilsner – I love this beer. Really great, especially out of the bottle. This is probably what I would buy for a crowd if I was planning a party and wanted to have good beer there. Fantastic stuff.
• Boulevard Single Wide – good, solid IPA.
• Barron’s ESB – this is an Aussie ESB that I picked up on sale @ Gomer’s and reviewed previously. Not bad. I drank this while waiting in the line to pee for 20 minutes, so I was preoccupied. It was maybe a little heavy for a day at the parking lot.
• New Holland Brewing Company Full Circle – Just picked this up at Royal Liquor in MO last week. I had this several years ago on tap @ the NHBC brewpub in Holland, MI when I lived five minutes away from this wonderful brewery. It seemed to lack the typical fruit/grape flavor from kölsch style beers, and when I had it on tap long before it became a bottled mainstay, I remember it being very grapy and fruity. I will have to try it in a glass under normal conditions and see what I think. Interestingly, Full Circle used to be a “single malt beer” that I remember tasting like Bud or Miller Lite. It was better in the bottle than on tap, by a longshot, but then it disappeared for a couple years and the name was reincarnated with a new label and as a kölsch instead of a “single malt beer.” Good idea, fellas!

Boulevard Long Strange Tripel

Long Strange Tripel is one of the regular offerings in Boulevard Brewing Company’s Smokestack Series of beers. A tripel is a style of beer that originated in the abbeys of Belgium. Traditionally, Belgian abbey beers were named for the relative amount of malt used in the brewing recipe. “Simple” or enkel is a style most often referred to as a Belgian “blonde” ale. Then there are the dubbel and tripel beers, which contain twice and thrice, respectively, as much malt as the “simple.” Although not traditionally an abbey style, many breweries, including Boulevard, also brew a “quad” beer. As brewers add to the malt, the amount of fermentable sugar climbs, and so does the alcohol content. Boulevard’s tripel comes in at 9.0% ABV. On a side note, enkels and tripels tend to be light in color while dubbels and quads are usually dark in color.

As with all of the Smokestack beers, Long Strange Tripel comes in a 750mL cage & corked bottle. As with the other mainstay Smokestacks, the tripel is affordably priced at about $8 locally. Considering the relatively high alcohol content, bottle size and sugar content of the tripel, it’s best to plan on sharing it with a friend or two.

Long Strange Tripel pours a nice hazy yellow/orange color with a fizzy head that disappeared quickly for me. I drank my samples out of a New Belgium Brewing glass that is a lot like a wine glass and has a tapered rim to concentrate the aromas. The aroma has that unmistakeable “Belgian” yeast character and I also detect a fair amount of banana esters. It’s not uncommon to pick up on hops in the aroma of a tripel, but my nose didn’t detect any.

Interestingly, for not picking up on any alcohol (as is usually the case with tripels) in the aroma, the alcohol is very present in the flavor of this beer. The alcohol is a little spicy, playing nicely with the peppery phenols also found in the flavor. I was getting a little hops bitterness at the “top” and back end of the flavor profile, but the aftertaste was more of malt and maybe the sweeter part of orange, like low-acidity orange juice.

I’m not a master of food pairing, but I can imagine this would go well with stronger cheese, as the carbonation would provide some “scrubbing” action for the fat in the cheese and the peppery characters and upfront alcohol would not back down to the strong flavors of the cheese. This tripel might pair with some of the heavier stews that are often featured in Belgian cooking, too. Boulevard’s website recommends pairing Long Strange Tripel with desserts, especially chocolate, as well as with a vinegar-based salad to contrast the sweetness of the beer.

I like the Long Strange Tripel, although I haven’t found a Smokestack I didn’t like yet. Hopefully in a day or two I will be able to review Anderson Valley’s tripel, which I recently purchased, to contrast the two and get a better sense of the style. Of the four mainstays in the Smokestack Series (Double Wide IPA, Long Strange Tripel, Saison and Sixth Glass), I think this is my least favorite, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad beer by any stretch. I prefer the dry finish of the Saison, the hops of the double IPA and the complexities of the Sixth Glass, but Long Strange Tripel is another fine beer from Boulevard, and next time I drink it I’m going to experiment with some food pairings and see what that brings out in the flavor.

Initial Impression: Caldera IPA

This is the canned IPA I mentioned finding at Gomer’s a couple days ago. I had one while watching Lost on Thursday night and all I can say is WOW. It very well may be the hoppiest beer I have ever tasted. A much more complete review is coming, probably this weekend, but this thing was crazy-hopped. Nuts!

Beer Tasting

Bull E. Vard posted an unfortunate video of a retarded woman from Minnesota (by the sound of it) “tasting” Boulevard beers. Once you get past the irritating voice and disgusting belching, you realize right away that this whore has no idea what the %#*! she is talking about.

I have some experience with beer tasting parties, so I thought I’d share some insights into how to REALLY do a beer tasting event. This is the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) version. You can and should add food, cheese, dessert, etc to your parties, but that tends to take a little more planning and I am no expert, by any stretch, when it comes to food and beer pairings.

The good news, because there are so many ways to do these sorts of events, you have an excuse to do several in different ways. The simplest is just to have everyone bring a six-pack of whatever they want and drink some beer. This works pretty good, but you should have some general rules when it comes to tasting multiple beers in a short period of time…

Because of the strong flavors often found in beers, and the very real scourge of “palate fatigue” (especially with hops), the basic guideline for beer tasting is to drink lighter, weaker, less hoppy beers first and then transition to stronger, darker, hoppier beers later in the tasting. So, an example of a reasonable progression may be Schlafly Pilsner (pilsner), Goose Island 312 (American wheat), Magic Hat #9 (apricot pale ale), Singlewide IPA (India Pale Ale), Goose Island Bourbon County Stout (imperial bourbon barrel aged stout). You’d probably want to have some food on hand for cleaning your palate, too. Bread, crackers, light chesses, etc all make for good palate cleansers.

Another type of tasting event is to drink beer in “flights.” Flights take all sorts of forms. You certainly can set it up so everyone brings one particular style of beer, for example, an IPA flight (tricky because of palate fatigue) or an imperial stout flight (also fatiguing). What’s nice about this type of event is you get a chance to experience how different beers in the same style are. This can be a very rewarding way to drink some beer, particularly if you’re relatively new to experiencing the flavors of good craft beers.

A common type of flight in wine circles is a flight of drinks all from the same region. This doesn’t make much sense in a beer party since the “terroir” of beer is much different from wine.

Another cool, but rare, type of flight is the “vertical” flight. This flight consists of a single beer that was brewed and bottled in different years. For example, it isn’t uncommon to find people selling vertical flights of Sierra Nevada’s Bigfoot Barleywine because they release it annually and it is high in alcohol and ages well. By drinking the beers oldest to newest, you can experience how the flavors change and (usually) mellow over time. Especially with Bigfoot, the huge hoppiness that dominates it when fresh diminishes greatly over about six months and disappears almost entirely after a year.  This only works for beers that cellar well, which tend to be the high alcohol beers.

By far, the most important thing to keep in mind when doing a beer-tasting event is to have fun. Getting a bunch of people together to drink good beer shouldn’t be stressful, so enjoy yourself above all else! When you do get to food and beer pairing, keep in mind that, in general, most beers pair pretty good with most foods, even cheeses and desserts. You certainly can get really scientific about it, but you can also just buy a bunch of good cheese and a bunch of good beer, for example, and have a blast. Not every pairing will knock your socks off, but very few will be disgusting. If it’s bad, you just won’t enhance either the beer or the cheese, but that’s hardly a disaster.

Cans Spotted @ Gomer’s Midtown

Got an email from Gomer’s in Midtown about the arrival of some Caldera canned beers out of Oregon. They have Pale Ale and IPA. The good news: craft beer in cans (review to come). The bad news: they’re $14/six pack. That’s sticker shock, for me, until I think about the fact that, in a bar, I would pay $4.50-$5.00 per glass for the same type of beer, so, I guess all things relative $2/can seems do-able. They’re going to see about ordering a higher volume and bringing the price down some.

I’ll have a review up just as soon as I can drink some!

Drinking Updates

I was out at Old Chicago for trivia last night and had a couple Hazed & Infused(s). I almost bought a 6-pack on my last beer run, but I definitely will next time. Really good, nicely balanced beer. I was a little dehydrated from my workout a couple hours earlier, so they went down WAY too quick, but I think it’s a pretty low alcohol beer because I didn’t even have a buzz. I’ll do a proper review once I’ve had a couple bottles.

Had another Schlitz, this time fully cooled to fridge temp and right out of the bottle instead of in a glass. The beer was better this way, but it’s still not anything special and certainly not for $6/6. If I was at a party that had this, I would reach for it WAY ahead of BudMillerCoors, and maybe even ahead of Old Style.

I drank a second bottle of Paulaner Salvator. I don’t think doppelbocks are my style of beer. About halfway through the bottle I was having trouble getting the motivation to finish it, although I did. It’s just so sweet and malty that I have a tough time with it. I’m not a hophead, but I do like bitter flavors and the aromatics of hops, so when it comes to beer sugar bombs give me some trouble. It’s not that Salvator is a bad beer, it just isn’t for my palate. Given a choice between a doppelbock like Salvator and pretty much anything else I’d go for anything else.

I emailed Gomer’s to ask them to look into carrying Oskar Blues, particularly the Ten Fidy and Dale’s Pale Ale. I’ve heard good things about these beers and they’re ALL canned, so maybe this will bring some more choices for craft beers in cans for those of us who don’t want to rely totally on Fat Tire cans. Although, I will say I still love the idea of Fat Tire in a can, and the novelty hasn’t worn out one bit!

Schlitz Classic 1960′s Formula

If you’ve been following my beer blog for a while, you’ve noticed I like good beers, often times ones that are on the expensive side. Sure, when I want a beer, I want it to be something I’ll really enjoy, and that usually means something that doesn’t include the American “macro” beers (you know… Bud, Bud Light, MGD, MGD Light, etc etc etc etc etc etc). That said, I do enjoy the “classics” from time to time when the atmosphere is right: tailgating, going to the Brick, camping, things like that. If I have a choice of my canned cheap beer, it’s usually Old Style. I actually don’t mind Old Style and I try to keep some on hand at least through the summer when I want to have a nice tall glass of ice water beer.

All kidding aside, my first experience with beer was as a little kid (pre-5 years old) and my dad would line up little plastic medicine cups from time to time and pour us a bit of beer. We hated it, of course, but it was a fun game and I remember it fondly today in my early 30′s. I think my dad’s usual beers back then were Pabst and maybe even Old Style.

A while back I heard that Pabst was rebranding Schlitz, taking it out of the cans it has been sold exclusively in since 1998, and using the “classic” recipe to brew it. Schlitz in a can is pretty vile stuff. In a taste test I did @ the Brick last year (sadly, before my beer blogging days had started), I tried a handful of canned beers and Schlitz was the worst of the bunch except for Olympia, which is very close to being completely undrinkable. Natural Light was even better, and Natty was my “go to” beer before I rediscovered my enjoyment of Old Style.

In any case, I was wandering the aisles of Lukas Liquors today and lo and behold, the new bottled Schlitz! I was pretty excited, I won’t lie, but I was thoroughly surprised to see that a 6-pack cost $6! For another $2-$3 you can get a sixer of hundreds of different incredible beers @ Lukas! What a rip! But, in the interest of journalism, I picked some up along with a bomber of Anderson Valley Brewing Company’s Tripel (to be tasted against Boulevard’s Long Strange Tripel in a few weeks) and Schlafly’s Pilsner (which was only $1.50 more than the Schlitz!).

Once I got over the sticker shock, I cooled it for a while in the fridge (probably to about the same temperature as I drink most of my beers… low 60′s… a somewhat ballsy prospect for an American macro beer, which is generally best enjoyed as close to absolute zero as is possible. Being in a nostalgic mood, my glassware of choice was one of those vintage-style miniature pilsner type glasses that hold about 1/2 a bottle (I’ve been to bars that still sell Natty Light off the keg in glasses like that for 50 cents a pop!). My wonderful girlfriend bought me a set of Old Style glasses and a pitcher for Christmas last year, and it seemed like a perfect time to use such glassware.

I knew the beer would pour light yellow and fizzy, but the Schlitz poured clear and damn colorless! The picture above doesn’t really give an accurate color profile because that yellow is a heck of a lot darker than the way it really poured. I guarantee you’ve peed more yellow than this beer. The head was a typical white, rocky, weak head that disappeared quickly.

The aroma… it really did take me back to 1978, I think. Just like I remember smelling on my dad’s beers as a tot (I hope you don’t get the impression that my dad was a drunk… he enjoyed a beer or two after work like a normal guy, but I don’t I’ve ever seen him more than lightly buzzed in my life). Nothing really to say about the aroma except that it smells like nostalgia! No hops, no malt, no esters… just American macro all the way.

The flavor was light years better than Schlitz in a can, but still no match of Old Style, in my opinion. Don’t buy Schlitz thinking it’s going to be something special, and I’ll tell you right now that the $6 asking price is $3 too much. The nostalgia and fun is worth the price, but it’s really nothing you can’t get from 100 other American lagers…. no aroma, thin, watery body, clear, nearly colorless in the class, and essentially flavor-free with the exception of maybe a little corn and a little rice thrown in there. It’s 4.7%ABV and leaves a little goober in my throat, but there is no real aftertaste and I think it’s a miracle that a brewery can brew a 4.7% beer with almost no character, flavor or aroma whatsoever. If it wasn’t $1/bottle I could see myself enjoying this as a lawnmower beer in the summer, but there really isn’t much here except for marketing hype, honestly.