Whoa! Check Out Annie’s Cans!

Courtesy Phil Peterson & The Ink

Good news for guys who like cans… Local brewer High Noon Saloon & Brewery in Leavenworth, KS is selling their Annie’s Amber Ale in cans! According to the story in the Ink (where I borrowed this picture from), the six-packs are selling for $8 at the brewery and liquor stores in Lawrence, KCK and Leavenworth will be stocking this beer soon.

I have no idea what it tastes like, but the can is beautiful and we all know what I think about beers in cans (hooray!). What’s even better is that they are local and reasonably priced. On the downside, it’s another amber in a can (boooo), but on the upside, ambers can taste like damn near anything, really, so it could be really boring or really great. I can’t wait to try it out! Please comment if you’ve had this beer and what you think of it.

North Coast Brewing Scrimshaw Pilsner

North Coast Brewing Company is a company that has been brewing craft beer in Fort Bragg, CA, since 1988. I didn’t realize how many North Coast beers I’ve had until I looked at their website for this article! They must keep the “North Coast Brewing Co.” logo very subtle on their packaging because I’ve also had Old Rasputin (imperial stout), Old No. 38 Stout, and Acme California IPA, all without knowing they came from the same brewery!

In any case, after a bit of a hiatus from drinking beer worth mentioning I decided to continue on with my “summer series” of beers and especially pilsners and session style beers. Scrimshaw is a pilsner in the German style, with 4.4%ABV and 22 IBU’s. It pours a hazy straw color into a pilsner glass with a nice, fluffy white head.

There isn’t a whole lot of aroma to capture out of this beer. Pilsners are subtle, well-balanced beers, so the aromas tend to be very faint in the European hops and a little malt, but I find myself having to essentially hallucinate to find either one.

Scrimshaw has a nice mouthfeel with just the right amount of carbonation. It’s an easy drinker but still prickly enough to quench thirst! In the early taste the European hops North Coast uses are apparent, but they quickly give way to the malts in the second half of the sip. Not much of an aftertaste. This is a solid, very balanced, clean beer. Scrimshaw would make an excellent choice for a “light” beer for guests who tend to like Bud, Miller, etc.

How NOT to celebrate Memorial Day in Kansas City

How not to succeed at a long Memorial Day weekend in Kansas City:

1. Don’t go to Martini Corner on Friday night for 6 hours and drink $2.50 Pacificos.
2. Don’t go to your friend’s house on Saturday for games, BBQ, and drinking.
3. Don’t spend Sunday at your friend’s pool getting hammered, then drink espresso, then go to Martini Corner again.

Espresso Finally Dialed In + Beer Update

Well, friends, after much trial and error with my new Kyocera hand grinder/mill from Orphan Espresso, I finally have my espresso dialed in again. The beans from Broadway Café really blow Whole Foods’ out of the water, too, even when they’re a week or so old. I can’t quite reproduce the full experience of Broadway’s espresso, but I’m close enough that it beats 90% of the competition in the Kansas City area, in my opinion. Not bad for a home setup, if you ask me! Broadway still has me on the body/texture front. Plus it’s cooler to have an espresso and watch all the hipsters than it is to sit in my house and have the same drink.

I really like the Young Press, too, for French press coffee. I have found that 2 scoops of whole beans will produce enough grounds for 2 measuring cups of water, which is about 1.5 “cups” of coffee (I hope that makes sense). I still have a lot to learn about French press, but I’m a happy camper when it comes to my coffee enjoyment, right now. The Gaggia is due for a cleaning this weekend, which is never fun and seems like a lot more work than it should be, but that’s life.

On the beer front, I have some French beers to try, as well as a huge stock of damn near anything you could want to drink. I seriously need to stop buying beer for a while! Sheesh!

Beer Steals @ Gomer’s Midtown

I went into Gomer’s in Midtown today and found a fantastic beer deal: 750mL caged & corked bottles of what I thought was Belgian beer (turns out it was French) for $4/bottle (or $3.48 each for 6+). Usually $9/ea.

I picked up two each of the wit, amber and blonde. The guy who rang me up said it was really good beer, so I figured it was worth the risk. It probably won’t last long!

Bodum Young Press & Kyocera Espresso Grinder

I’ve had mixed success with my antique PeDe wall-mounted hand cranked coffee grinder since I purchased it from Orphan Espresso at the end of last year. It started off great, but somewhere along the way it just stopped grinding fine enough for good espresso. Orphan gave me a bunch of ideas to address, but nothing worked. They also offered for me to send it back so they could take a look and/or refund my money, but I love the grinder so much I didn’t want to do that. Instead, I decided to get a new Kyocera hand mill grinder for espresso and use the PeDe for coarsely grinding coffee for French press.

I received my Bodum Young Press (see left) and the Kyocera (below) last week. I am no expert with French press, and my regular coffee beans are some OLD mass-produced stuff, so I wasn’t expecting much from my first experience using the pot. I wanted to get the grind settings correct and experiment with the coffee/water ratios, etc. The Young Press is nice looking and has a great form factor. The glass pot is double-walled and with the lid on retains heat pretty nicely. The handle and plastic bits around the glass are rubbery in texture and it’s just a well-designed, well made item. Orphan sells it for $20, which is a good deal.

photo courtesy of Orphan Espresso

Unlike my rehab’d PeDe, the Kyocera grinder is new and includes some high-tech elements. It lacks the charm of the PeDe, but it seems to work well and be designed for the long haul. This grinder is only sold in Japan and according to what I’ve been able to find Orphan Espresso is about the only company selling it in the USA. The grinder is fairly compact, holding enough beans in the “hopper” for a double basket. The burrs are easily adjustable and made from ceramic. I guess-timated the settings and had it dialed in really close, then messed with the adjustment too much and have been choking the heck out of my Gaggia machine! I’m very close to having it dialed in perfectly again. For my machine and Broadway Cafe’s beans, it looks like aiming for around 170 turns of the crank for a full dose is about where I need to be.

Yes, I said 170 turns! The good news is that the crank has plenty of leverage and because of it’s design you really use both hands to grind the coffee, but the bad news is it’s still quite a workout! So far the grinder has been working great, if I can only get the adjustment dialed in just right. It seems to produce a very consistent grind, it’s quiet, and it has plenty of adjustment settings. About the only thing I’m worried about with it is the handle, which is designed to be removed when not in use. The head is essentially just a thin piece of metal cut to fit the top of the burr assembly, and it already has developed a lot of play for me. This may not be an issue, but I could see it getting pretty worn out with use. Time will tell! So far, so good, though. This grinder is sold for about $70 or so on Orphan’s website. Perfect for the traveling espresso brewer, too, since it’s small and compact.

McCoy’s Imperial IPA

We headed out for a friend’s birthday this past weekend and went to McCoy’s in Westport. I like McCoy’s food and their beer is generally pretty good. Not very adventurous, but good, which I’d prefer to have over adventurous and not-so-great! Actually, Friday was SO beautiful (and since I was already off work), my girlfriend and another friend and I started with tapas and sangria at La Bodega, then moved over to McCoy’s around 6:00 with the intent of finding an outside table for 8. Needless to say on a perfect Friday night in Westport, THAT didn’t happen.

We had good food (I didn’t eat because I had enough at La Bodega) and I had their brown ale, which was good, as well as the Imperial IPA. It was nice and hoppy, but with a lot of malt, too. Actually IIPA’s are not my favorite style because I think they end up less hoppy than most regular IPA’s, since you have to pump so much malt in them. In any case, it’s a 9%ABV beer and the guy brought me a full pint of it for $5, which seemed like a good deal! lol About the closest thing I’ve had lately to compare it to would be a fresh 2009 Sierra Nevada Bigfoot, which is a barleywine, but when fresh has a lot of hops and is a lot like an IIPA, in my opinion. With a year of aging, all the hops will be gone from the Bigfoot.

Anyway, we did have to send a stout back. It had the mouthfeel of a glass of tap water. It was black, and the flavors were there, but it was like drinking a black glass of water. The waiter tried to say that it was because it’s on nitro, but that wasn’t it. It was probably the end of a keg. We didn’t get another, instead that friend switched to the brown ale. I’ve had the stout before and it’s usually like Guinness, so there was definitely something wrong with that one.

More Espresso Grinding “Fun”

After a couple months of my vintage PeDe not grinding quite fine enough for espresso, it all of a sudden, spontaneously, came back to life and is grinding great again. Wouldn’t you know, it was the day after putting an order in for a new Kyocera hand grinder and French press? Figures. Oh well, I will still get a lot of use from all of it, but I’m still completely clueless as to what caused the PeDe to stop grinding fine enough for months, that spontaneously fixed itself. One of life’s mysteries, I guess! I will report on the Kyocera when I get it.

New Theme

I was getting a little tired and bored of my blog’s previous theme, so I decided to change it up a little. On the upside, it’s always nice to have a change, but on the downside it may mess with the formatting of some of the previous posts (or it may not… maybe it’ll have a little to do with your browser). In any case, I apologize ahead of time for any funky formatting, super-thin two-word column widths, etc. Thanks for understanding!

Lakefront Brewery India Pale Ale

Lakefront Brewery is a Milwaukee, WI based brewery that has been around since the late 1980′s. I remember having some of their beers around the holidays about 10 years ago, before I was as knowledgeable about beer as I am today, and I even ate at the brewpub that is on the river probably 8-9 years ago. In fact, I’m even drinking this out of the Lakefront Brewery pint glass I bought on that trip. I think the KC area has had Lakefront beers for about the past 6 months, if not a little longer, but I could be wrong.

Lakefront’s IPA pours a cloudy orange color with tons of yeast floating in it. The head is thick like shaving foam and just slightly off-white, and I was able to build a nice ice-cream cone-like head over the glass, like is done with hefeweizens. I don’t think I’ve had an IPA that I’ve been able to do that with before.

Anyway, to review IPA’s, the story (which I’m not sure is true) is that English brewers used to make a higher alcohol, higher hopped beer (both of which aid in preserving it over time) for transportation to the colonies in India. When Brits came back from India they still demanded this style of beer, etc etc. Who knows? What I DO know is that IPA’s are one of my favorite styles.

Since this is a midwest IPA, I’m expecting a maltier, toned down version compared to say, a West Coast version. The aroma certainly lives up to that expectation… not a lot here. Some floral hops, but an almost sweet tinge to the aroma, overall.

With my first sip I noticed that the beer is fairly low in carbonation (maybe because I piled it all into that head!), and it makes for a nice, smooth mouthfeel. This is definitely not a West Coast style IPA. It’s very balanced, if not even on the malty side (for an IPA). Unfortunately, Lakefront’s website has no info about this beer on it, but it does have a recipe for IPA donuts using their beer! Sounds great, actually!

There is a little hoppiness that clings toward the finish of each sip, but this is really a malty beer all things considered. The hops tend to be a little grapefruity, but I think they’re muted by the malt. I think if you gave me this beer without the label, I would guess it is an American Pale Ale, rather than an IPA, just because the hops are so understated.

That said, this is a good beer and a pretty nice drinker because it’s so smooth. There is a TON of yeast in the glass, and it’s not my favorite IPA I’ve had in a while, but it’s not bad by any stretch, either. If I get a chance and actually drink through the trillion beers I have at home right now, I’d like to do a back to back tasting of this and Boulevard’s Singlewide IPA. I think they are quite similar in a lot of ways.