Click on the following to read my reviews of these beers:
Guinness Original Draught Stout
Burger's Nut Brown Ale
Every year on Independence Day, the City of Houston, like all cities I know of in the United States, has a big fireworks celebration after dark. Houston's fireworks are usually impressive, and they're a sight well worth seeing, if you can manage to avoid the insane traffic that accompanies the event as everyone in the area tries to get to the downtown park where the fireworks are held--and then tries to get home afterward.
Fortunately, I have a better way to view the fireworks than struggling through the unwashed masses or trying to thread my way home on freeways along whose shoulders idiots have parked. Just as I hold a Christmas party, my very dear friend Provost hosts a gathering at his home on July Fourth. There are few better ways to enjoy a summer evening than with great music, delicious food, and fine friends in the lovely garden Provost has worked so hard to create.
There are drinks, of course, plenty of cold ones. If you've ever been to Houston in July, you know why that's a necessity. Beer and wine are the vices Provost and I enjoy together, and there's always something eminently potable in at least the former category at his Independence Day parties. This year, it was something special, and surprisingly good.
Burger's Nut Brown Ale is a homebrew, available only at Talking Leaves (Provost's home) in Houston. This was his first attempt at a homebrew, and I think it came out very well indeed. You see, I am not particularly fond of home-brewed beers. In my experience, they are almost always either tasteless or possessed of some oppressively unpleasant aroma, aftertaste, or both. The pilsners come across too watery and the ales far too heavy. But this nut brown ale was, quite honestly, delicious.
It did have a nut-brown color. It did have a head, though (and this, too, was a pleasant surprise) not too much of one. The flavor was, well, not really full-bodied but far more full-bodied than I'd expected. I caught no aftertaste at all. Now, Provost has mentioned more than once that the beer I drank came from a smaller bottle, and that his larger bottling efforts produced sediment, as they typically do, that had to be guarded against. Be that as it may, the glass of BNBA I had on Independence Day was a very nice drink. I'm looking forward to his next batch.
Well done, Provost. You start off my beer review page with a deserved 83.
Anheuser-Busch Tequiza
Ugh. No, "Ugh" isn't strong enough. Yuck. Urk. Blech.
That's approaching it. "Refreshing!" the label proclaims. "Drink Ice Cold." I'll agree with the latter, and the colder, the better. Better still, don't drink this stuff ice cold. In fact, don't drink it at all. Save the ice for something that deserves to be drunk.
I don't know what this new trend is in America--beers that work very hard at not tasting like beer, but like something else. First, we had "ice" beer, a colorless liquid that at least had some beer flavor. Then along came Zima, and I must confess, the occasional Zima isn't too bad. But that product seems to have opened the floodgates for beer-wannabes, or yuppie-brewskies, or something, and this silly concoction by Anheuser-Busch is the latest attempt to cash in on the gullibility of American beer purchasers everywhere.
"Beer with Blue Agave Nectar and the Taste of Tequila," so sayeth the label. Well, it looks like beer, anyway. I mean, it's yellowish. Could be beer; could be Mountain Dew. It's hard to tell from the outside of the bottle. And a sniff doesn't help; whatever's inside, it doesn't smell like beer.
It doesn't taste like it, either. Miser thought it tasted like bubble gum. Provost thought it tasted "not awful." I disagree. Formaldehyde would be flavorful compared to this offal.
If you want the taste of tequila with your beer, get some beer and have a tequila shot. If you want the taste of blue agave, go chew a cactus. But save yourself $2.00 and stay away from Tequiza. Unless you like a beer that gets a 7 out of 100 points.
Guinness Original Draught Stout
Guinness drinkers in the United States fall into one of two categories. Either they love Guinness, or they hate it. It's sort of like bagpipe music; adherents at both ends of the spectrum and very few people in the middle.
My guess is, of American beer drinkers, there are more in the "hate it" column than in the "love it" section. And to tell the truth, I'm not that fond of the Guinness that one usually finds in restaurants and pubs here. First, they almost never carry the beer on tap. Second, it's the Guinness Extra Stout that comes in a bottle with a fairly unattractive yellow label. And it is extra stout, there's no doubt about that.
So, when Bernardo and I visited a restaurant during a break in a legal seminar and our waiter told me the only dark beer he had was Guinness, I almost chose a pilsner instead. Luckily for me, when he said, "Guinness" he didn't mean Extra Stout in the ugly bottle.
This Guinness comes in a tall black can. It doesn't advertise itself as a stout, at least not in the labeling used on its American sales. No, the folks in Dublin hid the "stout" well down near the bottom of the can. A large part of the can is devoted to instructions on how to serve this beer, starting with how long one should refrigerate it to the way one should pour it to enjoy the "rich, creamy head."
This isn't puffing on the Dublin brewer's part. The instructions work. More importantly, where other beers may have foam that is almost a nuisance, this stuff certainly added to the pleasure of the moment. It was rich and it was creamy, albeit a warm brown color reminiscent of a good coffee lightened by good cream.
And the taste? Excellent. The "stout" part is still there but the rank bitterness of the "typical" Guinness is not. This beer is a deep, dark brown color, almost as dark as coffee, and it has a heavy, smooth flavor with no unpleasant aftertaste whatever. Like all dark beers, I find it more filling than a lighter one, but even so I did not find it oppressively heavy.
If you like Guinness, you should like this special find even more. If you don't like Guinness, you should consider trying it anyway; you may change your opinion with this beer, which I rate as a 88.
Belhaven Scottish Ale
The tall, cream-and-brown can this ale comes in advises one that "The Belhaven Brewery is Scotland's oldest surviving independent brewery dating back to 1719." One would think that in two hundred eighty years, the brewmasters might have learned a thing or two about their trade.
One might think that. One would not be disappointed, if one tasted this ale. To tell the truth, when I'm in the mood for a dark ale I'm sorely torn between this fine offering and the Guinness I like so much.
In color, this ale is a little lighter than the Guinness. Take the Guinness, and a Newcastle, and imagine a color midway between them. Now, deepen it two shades--well, maybe a shade and a half--toward the Guinness end. That's a Belhaven. It's a rich, deep hue but not so dark as to be "coffee colored."
"Delicate" is the only word I can come up with in describing its aroma. For a dark ale, it's very delicate, in fact almost underwhelming. But as I am not a fan of a strong beer odor (I am told that some people love the smell of beer, but I cannot bring myself to share that affection), I don't mind the delicacy in the least.
Taste-wise, I rate the Belhaven as weaker than the Guinness, but also a wee bit smoother. It's sort of like drinking an Old Peculier (another of my favorite dark beers, and devilishly hard for me to find at the stores anymore!) but without the bitter touch of the latter.
Many people are put off by dark beers as being "too strong" or "too bitter." I suggest the Belhaven to them. It deserves the 85 I'm giving it, and it may just change their minds.
Newcastle Brown Ale
It's a sad duty, given my patriotic bent, but the truth will out. American beers, at least the mass-produced ones, are just awful. Oh, I've had some very good beers in microbreweries, but the mainstream beer producers in this country just don't produce a particularly drinkable product. Perhaps it's the ingredients; too much corn and even rice in place of barley and hops. Maybe they even intend for it to be sickly in body and pale in spirit. After all, this is the land of "Nothing exceeds like excess," and the brewers want all those young American men to drink as much beer as their guts can possibly hold. The weaker the flavor, the more of it the buyers may put down.
I don't know. I just know there aren't very many American beers that flip my toggle switch. And, equally sadly, foreign beers other than Mexican are almost prohibitively expensive. That's why I like Newcastle. It's a decent, serviceable beer, and it's affordable.
Now, it isn't a light-colored beer, and that may put off some drinkers. It's a light brown color--hence the name, people--but that's where any similarity to the dark ales ends. Newcastle has a light flavor, none of the bitterness so noticeable to many people in the darker offerings, and it doesn't leave a strong aftertaste.
It isn't a great beer. But it's a very good mid-priced beer, and well worth keeping several in your cooler. My rating: 84.
I welcome your suggestions for beers to review.
Samuel Johnson (18 September 1777)