The Poet Oatmeal Stout – New Holland Brewing Company

New Holland Brewing Company is a brewery near and dear to my heart. When I moved to Michigan in 2000, the brewery was still just getting off its feet, more or less. Later, I lived a few blocks from the beautiful brewpub in downtown Holland, MI. I’m thankful I can get their beers now here in Kansas City, too, although I will forever miss the weekly growler night when I could fill my 1/2 gallon jug with any of their mainstay beers for $4!

The Poet is one of NHBC’s mainstay beers, brewed all year. It is a nice example of an oatmeal stout and it’s one of my favorite beers. It pours black with red highlights and a nice tan head that sticks around for a long time. The aroma is roasty and chocolatey, although neither of those are main components of the flavor profile. Some dark fruit comes across on the nose, too.

The Poet has the slick mouthfeel you’d associate with an oatmeal stout (coming from the oatmeal itself) and the light carbonation adds to its silky texture. There is a good balance in this beer between malty flavors and the hops and bitterness that comes from the dark roasting of the malts. Up front, the beer is very balanced, with dark fruit predominating, then in the aftertaste a nice, pleasantly warm roastiness settles in. This is not the dry, carbonized roast of some stouts, but a mild, easy flavor that doesn’t leave you feeling like you just sucked on some charcoal.

The Poet isn’t the most complex oatmeal stout by a long shot, but it is a nice, easy drinker at 5.2%ABV and I enjoy it every time I drink it. It pairs really great with pretty much any kind of food outside of the lightest fair, so it’s no wonder it is perennially one of New Holland’s most popular beers.

Brewpub Visit: New Holland Brewing Company

I was in Michigan for a few days for vacation and visiting old friends, and we spent one day up in Holland seeing my old digs, trying to make a beer run, and visiting New Holland Brewing Company. The beer run wasn’t as good as I had hoped, and the weather was horrible the day we went up there, but NHBC was lively and I had some good beers.

When you visit the brewpub, which occupies the former Vogelzang Hardware store on 8th St. in downtown Holland, there are always three sets of beers

to choose from: Mainstays, High Gravity and Specialties. The mainstay choices are things the brewery makes year-round, like Mad Hatter IPA and The Poet stout. The high gravity series are the big beers, a lot of which are also made all year long, like Night Tripper, Existential (double IPA) and The Pilgrim’s Dole (wheat wine). The specialty beers are seasonals or one-offs that change frequently. On this visit there were 4-5, and I wish I had snapped a photo as I can’t remember them all, but one was a smoked lager, which I had, while there was a helles and a couple more beers to choose from. Thanks to NHBC’s Facebook page, I can now fill in these blanks. The specialty beers on tap while I was there were Copper Pot (Vienna Lager), Smokey Joe (smoked lager), House Lager (style unknown) and there was a helles whose name wasn’t available, either.

I tend not to like smoked beers, as the smoke can be way too overpowering for me, but I decided to try the smoked lager and see what I thought. I didn’t take tasting notes, so my recollections are the best I could do, but I really enjoyed this beer. The beer itself was a regular lager, basically in this case a vehicle to carry the smoke flavor, but the smoke was subtle and delicious. It would have paired really well with food, I think. I can’t remember a whole lot about the beer other than I liked it a lot and it was probably the best smoked beer I’ve had.

I also enjoyed a Night Tripper, which was $5.00 in a 10-ounce flute type of glass. The beer was served way too cold, in my opinion, off the tap, but it warmed up very fast after having my hands cupped around the glass for a few minutes. Again, I didn’t take tasting notes, but this is a nice imperial IPA. The carbonation is low, it is pitch black, and there are lots of nice roasty flavors along with dark fruits and quite a kick of alcohol on in the aroma and flavor. I enjoyed this beer a lot, but I found 10 ounces to be a bit much for me. I was going to do a mix of samples from the High Gravity series and while I enjoyed the Night Tripped very much, afterward I had wished that I’d done that instead of a full glass of just one.

My girlfriend wanted to have a Dark & Stormy, but they were out of ginger beer, so she had a mint julep, instead, made from NHBC’s artisanal Zeppelin Bend whiskey instead. The whiskey sells for something like $75/bottle, and their whiskey cocktails are $16 each! It seemed like an OK drink, but I think their bartenders are very much beer servers first and mixologists a distant second. It was not a $16 cocktail, in my opinion, although they did give her a nice hit of whiskey and can’t be accused of underpouring it.

They had a lot of liquor infusing in big jugs behind the bar, and I was tempted to try the cucumber-infused gin, but I passed. My stomach was so-so that day, and I just wasn’t in much of a drinking mood. New Holland started distilling their own liquors about 3.5 years ago or so, and when they first started making them available I had a “gin and tonic” there. Unfortunately, the “gin” was brandy with flavorings in it to make it taste gin-like, so it was AWFUL in a drink. That abomination liquor is now called Jumpin’ Juniper, and they do make a real gin now, but I was afraid to try it, even though I am a huge fan of Hendrick’s very cucumber-ish gin. Maybe next time!

Michigan Beer Run: Disappointing

I was pumped for my trip to Michigan because I thought I would return with tons of great beers that I can’t get around here, but unfortunately, the bottle shop I had planned to hit has gone in the wrong direction with its selection since I was last there. I could have made an epic run to Grand Rapids, about an hour north of where I was, but my focus was being on vacation, not driving all over the state looking for a good beer store, so I made due with what I had access to. All I decided to buy was a mixed 6-pack. Lame, I know, but I wasn’t going to spend money on stuff I can get right here in KC! My selections:

• Short’s Brewing Company Soft Parade – a high gravity ale made with blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries
• Short’s Brewing Company Huma Lupa Licious – “a complex malt and hop theme park in your mouth.”
• Bell’s Cherry Stout – I know, you can get that here, but not for $1.99
• Lagunitas Maximus IPA – 72 IBU’s and 7.5%ABV
• Great Lakes Dortmunder Gold – probably the only Great Lakes beer I haven’t had yet, I was hoping to score a 6-pack but this is all they had left

I also got the chance to sit at New Holland Brewing Company for a little while, but the weather was cold and pouring sheets of rain, so I found myself not really in the mood to drink much. I had a smoked lager and a glass of Night Tripper, their imperial stout, both of which I will review later. My GF had a $16 mint julep (more on that later, too) and I was highly tempted to try their cucumber-infused gin, but I was a little gun shy because of previous bad experiences with their gin, so I passed.