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This week for podcast #7 we were drinking three beers: (i) The Lost Abbey's Devotion a Belgian blonde ale which Max brought; (ii) Firestone's Pivo Hoppy Pils; (iii) Newcastle's Brown Ale. The Devotion was definitely the top shelf beer of the night. Just look at the bottle!! It was huge and had a cork instead of a cap. It was very tasty though and came with a very extravagant description of all the things you could taste in the beer (e.g. cellar mushrooms, notes of spice, the brett, etc.). During the podcast Dan asks me to describe the beer and I ended up repeating the same foofy description on the bottle. The story behind this is I don't think a lot before talking *and* I really want a job as one of the people who write copy for beers, wines and whiskeys that talk about all the smells and tastes your supposed to get from the drink but never do. I did find out that "brett" refers to Brettanomyces which is a type of yeast that is usually seen as a contamination and hence something you want to get rid of, but Lost Abbey boldly put this in their Devotion. Good for them for not listening to the nay sayers who classify "the brett" as contamination. The term Brettanomyces is actually Greek for "British Fungus" since the brett first came to peoples' attention when in 1904 there was an interest in finding out what was spoiling British ales. It was "the brett"! One persons dross is anothers elixir.
Firestone is one of our favorite local breweries and this week we sampled some of their "Pivo Hoppy Pils". This was an excellent beer -- a German Pilsner with some extra hoppiness to give a Bohemian flair (yep I'm just paraphrasing what someone told me to say about the beer). No, but really, it was good. I picked this up at the store because of the Pivo in the name which reminded me of the Russian word for beer "piva". This in turn reminded me of a famous Russian drinking saying "Beer without vodka is like money to the wind." Hopefully if we talk about their beer enough Firestone will invite us to do a podcast at their brewery.
The third beer of our trinity this evening was Newcastle Brown Ale. I'm not really a fan of the clear bottle but the Newcastle is a decent beer. In the UK it's considered a working man's beer while elsewhere (i.e the US) it's seen as an upscale import.
The Lost Abbey Brewery and a listing of its fine beers can be found at http://lostabbey.com/
The link to Pivo at Firestone is at http://www.firestonebeer.com/beers/products/pivo
The Newcastle Brown Ale link is http://m.newcastlebrown.com/. You'll need you birthday to enter.