Light drinking news this morning. Couple of reasons: I took my oldest children to Mall Cop last night (my rating: 5, but better than I though it'd be), with the result that I wasn't able to get a head start on this post last night. I also didn't run across a single drinking story during the week. It doesn't help that I'm not in a drinking mood. Things have exploded around the office, and I'm doing everything I can just to keep my head above lite beer water (but in this economy, I ain't complainin' . . . I just need to make sure clients pay me for the work). I've drank only once (that's not a typo) this calendar year, which means I'm either turning into a bore and/or a loser. Other people might abstain for good reasons, but none of those reasons are driving my dry spell. I'm just pre-occupied with other things.
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NYT writer recommends a $35 bottle of beer:
[T]he beer comes in a 25.4-ounce bottle, rather than the more typical 12 ounces. More important, it is superb: brown in color yet bright in the mouth, with a bracing, spicy, tart, almost woolly complexity reminiscent of a Belgian lambic.
About the only thing against it is the price.
Aside from that, what makes this beer so unusual? The Abbaye de Saint Bon-Chien is one of a growing number of beers that spend some time aging in oak barrels, which may be typical for wine and whiskey but is a rare thing indeed for beer. In a way, the brewers of these barrel-aged beers have reached backward into the future.
Centuries ago, barrels were the only vessels in which to brew and store beers. Most brewers strove to eliminate any flavorings that wood might impart to the beers, soaking and scrubbing the wood to make the barrels as neutral as possible. In industrialized times, of course, steel and aluminum serve a brewer's purpose with far less effort and wear than wood.
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While scouring for beer news this morning, I found a blog post about this somewhat new place in Asheville: The Thirsty Monk. It's a brewpub in Asheville, North Carolina devoted entirely to Belgian ales. I hear Asheville is a beautiful place with mild temperatures year round. Some places get all the luck.
