Last night I went to a good friend’s home to share in a birthday dinner, an event worthy of the celebration of another trip around the sun. Along with the meal we all shared in some simply fantastic beers. Perhaps it wasn’t on purpose, but when the night was done and we’d looked back on the remains scattered on the table you couldn’t help but appreciate the irony of it all. As my good friend and brewmaster, Peter Hoey, celebrated another year we were able to also enjoy beers that have seen a few years themselves.
Before dinner we opened a bottle of Russian River Sanctification Batch 001, a 100 percent brett beer bottle conditioned with ale yeast. Vinnie Cilurzo no longer makes the beer this way and just to see the bottle was a treat. The beer was dry, light, and nowhere near as sour or acidic as new batches of Sanctification. It’s funny really, brett on its just isn’t all that sour, it requires other funky things like pedio and lacto-b to really add the souring characters many have grown to love. (not really sure what this means?) We sipped the beer, pausing for a moment here and there to discuss the details, but ultimately opting to just enjoy the brew.
Dinner was beef stew, Peter’s own creation, made with all the stew-fixin’s as well as an aged bottle of Bison’s Winter Warmer — one of the last beers made by Peter in his time at Bison (he wasn’t even around to see it bottled). For those who don’t know, adding beer to a stew or beef in general is a good way to tenderize the meat. The acidity of beer breaks down the beef and if allowed to sit long enough will result in a very tender bite. Yeah, it was good.
With the main course wrapped up it was time to get serious into the beer geekery. Peter spread out a plate of three cheeses, jam, crackers, and bread. The cheeses included an uber-creamy and buttery cheese that seemed made specifically for beer pairing, a stiff and pungent bleu cheese that called for a smooth barley wine, and Humbolt Fog — another pungent cheese that is as close to perfect as one can hope to experience. Peter took care of us.
The first two beers came out of the fridge and my heart leapt a little, Peter had grabbed a bottle of 1999 Sierra Nevada Bigfoot along with a bottle from 2000. Beers of this age need to be treated carefully when they’re opened and poured to avoid agitating the yeasts and sediment gathers at the bottom. With great poise Peter poured the beers into two glasses for each person. They both were rich with toffee notes, incredibly sweet with an added touch of brown sugar to capture the nose. The flavors were also similar, as one might expect, with no hop flavors to speak of yet they still maintained a shocking bitterness level. No, it wasn’t like the bite found in a fresh Bigfoot, but there was clearly a hop presence in the beers that had aged eight and nine years. Each had lost a lot in the body, becoming thin, but not anything a beer geek would complain about.
Pairing these with the pungent bleu cheese was a thing of beauty as the creamy and punchy flavors of the cheese were cut instantly by the sweet toffee flavors in the beer. If you haven’t tried a barleywine and bleu cheese pairing before, you really owe it to yourself to correct that oversight. I strongly suggest you pick an English barleywine or a well-aged American version as an overly hoppy selection can yield unappreciated results.
Next we had a choice to make. Peter had a couple bottles of Sierra Nevada Celebration that were seven and eight years old, but knowing what else was on the table we opted to try those another day. Instead we opened a bottle of North Coast’s Old Rasputin Millennium Edition imperial stout. As the name suggests, this is a bottle of the famous stout released to commemorate the new century and after eight years it was still every bit as good as it was fresh. The brew displayed bold coffee notes in the nose and flavor, along with a firm alcohol presence and subtle fruit qualities. Having this with the buttery brie cheese was a phenomenal experience as the cheese neutralized the acrid and acidic characters of the beer.
We had another Imperial Stout to get to before moving on: a bottle of New Holland’s Dragon’s Milk. Peter and I both shared this beer in Portland earlier in the year at the Oregon Brewers Festival. It was simply amazing to try on tap and we were both eager to experience it anew from the 22-ounce bottle. The beer was as complex as it was good, with woody and fruity notes found in the aroma and taste, overpowered only with the deep roasted coffee notes the dark grains contribute. The beer is simply astounding, a palate experience any beer enthusiast can appreciate. We certainly did.
At this point it was time for the star of the show, a beer Peter had picked up a few months back from one of Sacramento’s foremost beer and wine sellers. He told me about this beer when he got it, but wouldn’t say anything more than it was a special beer for a special meeting. Knowing Peter as I do my mind began to imagine just what exactly he could have that caused such excitement. I thought of some rare Belgian beers, or some obscure collectors item, but nothing prepared me for what he pulled out.
The bottle was tiny, a shape I wasn’t familiar with and when I saw the label that read Anchor Old Foghorn I was perplexed momentarily. I took the bottle, unsure what exactly it was, and saw that it was a Jubilee Ale… from 1983! I was holding a 25-year-old bottle of Anchor’s celebrated barleywine! “You gotta be kidding,” were the only words I could muster. The bottle held only eight ounces of fluid and after two-and-a-half decades, the beer had stained the bottle from the inside. Peter went on to tell me it was a gift from Daryl Corti, the famed food/beer/wine seller of Sacramento, a man with a palate that has impressed people from every industry. (He’s a man who can drink a wine blindly and not only tell you the variety, but the hill it was grown on. According to Peter, he is a master of olive oil, too). Hearing it was from his collection I knew the beer was properly stored and my mind began to race. Could this beer possibly be good?
We each got our samples and began to make our initial impressions. The aroma had lost a great deal, showing a faint sweet character like brown sugar and sherry. The taste, however, was shockingly intact, the same sugary notes clearly coming through and growing into the aftertaste. There were no hops in this beer, but that was clearly expected and okay.
Where could one possible go from here? We weren’t sure, but we weren’t done discussing life and were enjoying each other’s company enough to warrant further exploration. Peter generously pulled out a bottle of barleywine made at Sacramento Brewing Company several years back (2001 Babylon). As expected the beer was rich and creamy, with sweet caramel and notes of black cherry and raisin.
When it was time to wrap up I looked over the table to see what we had accomplished, and it was good. I then thought of the poetic nature of it all. Here we were celebrating another year of life, another trip around the sun for Peter, and here were beers that had been around for several trips of their own. Hell, one of these beers was nearly as old as Peter and I! I could imagine a much younger Fritz Maytag enjoying the beer as it was put into small bottles. I could remember myself in elementary school (I was seven in 83), the dorky and pudgy me that longed to be an astronaut. While so much has changed in our lives, it was great to see the constants — that a night with friends was just as cool now as it was then, that the same giddy excitement we had as kids over candy could still shine through with beer, and that when all is said and done the meaning of life Solomon espoused thousands of years ago remains true: to eat, drink and be merry.
