Author: Richard Murff

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Bitter Memories: Random Thoughts About ESBs.

CREDIT: Courtesy: Facebook

I was 17 the first time I had my first really interesting beer. At the time, you either had to go to California for interesting brew or hop the pond to Europe. In my case, I found myself in the U.K. at a place called the Black Lion. The interesting beer in question was a Tetley’s Bitter. It was one of those “Wow!” moments — and not because the legal drinking age in Britain was 16, so I didn’t have to skirt a felony every time I wanted to hoist one. It was because, for the first time, I drank a beer that was something more than an alcohol delivery system for a spirited half-wit.

I’d been told that everything in Europe was small, but not this beer. It was the first time I’d seen a proper 16-ounce pint. Thinking about those dinky 12-ounce mugs we had back home, I thought, “Mmmm. More.”

I had also been given to understand that all the clever people had cleared out of Britain. But that glorious Tetley bitter was an eye-opener. Tetley is “artisanal” in no one’s book, but if this was the way the Brits did garden variety, mass-market beer, they must be interesting people. Sure, the Boston Massacre was a bit off-sides, but the Brits couldn’t be all bad. Being my first time out of the country, I was soon to discover that Britain was full of interesting things: like the accepted global etiquette of having complete strangers start bitching at me about American foreign policy. But that’s another story.

Courtesy: Facebook

The “bitter” is a little misleading to Americans (or it was to me). It’s basically what the Brits call a Pale Ale. It’s got some hops, but a lot less than the average IPA. The style is called different things in the U.K., but over here it’s simply known as Extra Special Bitter (ESB). In a lot of ways, the ESB is the perfect beer for making the diplomatic leap from domestic to foreign affairs. It is interesting without being overwhelming. I would say the opposite about that lady in mismatched tweeds who tried to beat me up about Libya.

Fortunately, you don’t have to go quite so far for an ESB these days. High Cotton Brewing makes a great one, which they call “ESB,” because they are sensible and kind. It is a deep golden beer with medium hops balanced with malt and not terribly carbonated. With a 6 percent ABV, it’s stronger than a lot of pilsners, but it isn’t going to knock you off your barstool.

As far as food pairings, the ESB plays well with others — from pub grub, to good cheese, and on up the foodie chain. Here is where that balance really comes into play: It complements your food; it doesn’t fight it. High Cotton’s ESB is available around town, but if you choose to prop up that fine copper bar at Second Line, you can pair it with almost anything without a fear of a misfire. Fried chicken livers, yes; the braised chicken thigh Verno, hard to miss; the oyster po-boy, well, obviously.

If you have an unrealistically high opinion of your own cooking and want to have an ESB at home, you’ve got a couple of good options: There is High Cotton, of course, but Hattiesburg’s own Southern Prohibition Brewing also makes a great Jack the Sipper ESB in a slightly more dramatic can. Worth a search.

As I sat at the bar taking this bitter trip down memory lane, I thought I’d date myself with the story of some deranged Brit bent out of shape about Uncle Sam poking Libya in the eye over something or other. Since then, that has become something of a timeless move for the U.S., so maybe not. And while I can’t be sure, I swear I ran into the same lady years later, between the first Gulf War and its sequel. Neither her opinions nor her breath had improved much.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

It’s a Beer, It’s a Wine … It’s Barleywine!

So you like those big, bouncy beers — something a little different, hard to find, an ale that fights back? May I suggest barleywine?

What’s barleywine? It’s beer, only more so. It’s … it’s … well, that’s kind of a long story.

The Greeks made a fermented drink out of grain which they called Krithinos Oinos — or barley wine. Since you can’t really juice a grain, this stuff wasn’t really wine, but it wasn’t ale either. It was just barley wine, and that was that. The name crops up there and again throughout our drunken history, particularly in the 18th century, when brewers attempted to cross-sell between “beer” and “wine” cultures.

Where our story picks up is 1870, when the good people at the Bass Brewery produced their No. 1 Barley Wine-style ale. Whatever the earlier stuff was, this was a proper ale. It was a marketing gimmick — or possibly an early exercise in risk-management. Barleywine traditionally has an ABV running anywhere from 8 to 16 percent. Before the era of “big beers,” that was the sort of alcohol content more often found in wine. Yet here the Brits were, drinking it out of those big glasses. Bass No. 1 has been the recipe from which all modern barley wines are derived.

Wiseacre’s Snowbeard Barleywine

Yet it would be another century before the style came to American shores. In 1965, Fritz Maytag liked the beer at Anchor Brewing so much that he bought it, just on the eve of the company shutting its doors. Maytag probably didn’t intend to change the American beer scene the way he did; he just liked the beer. But 10 years later, Anchor Brewing was booming and introduced Old Foghorn Barleywine. The term “barley wine” became one word, not for any technical reason, but because the word “wine” chapped the distributors. Having gone and bought the place, Maytag thought he’d like to keep the doors open.

To say the style took off like a rocket might be a stretch, but not much of one. Barleywine brewers pack in extra malt to increase the amount of fermentable sugars, which makes barleywine high in alcohol, but also very sweet. To counteract the sweetness, they then go heavier on the hops. The logic is something akin to chain-smoking cigarettes to get the taste of tequila out of your mouth. Somehow, here it actually works. The end result is — words fail me — a “complex” beer.

Being the first American barleywine out of the gate, Old Foghorn was, and still is, closer to the English style, which tends to be more restrained as far as hops and barley. Since then, however, a lot of different interpretations of the old No. 1 have cropped up, and a uniquely American style has developed — more hoppy and bitter. For a bigger bang, Sierra Nevada Big Foot Barleywine is considered the first — and one of the best of the American style. It is a tricky beer, and brewers like to show off, so as far as taste profiles, barleywines have a lot of wiggle room from light and hazy in color to almost stout.

They are, however, often hard to find. What’s easy to find is the Wiseacre Taproom on Broad. Waltz on in and grab a 22-ounce bottle of their Snowbeard Barleywine to go. It’s Wiseacre, so it’s a good-looking bottle (but unavailable on tap, and you can’t consume on premises), and inside it’s a big boom of malt and caramel and weighs in at 10.1 percent ABV. Pairing it with a food truck caravan that gathers behind the Wiseacre taproom is probably not the best way to go. Snowbeard wants some good red meat or a stinky blue cheese.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Hot or Cold? Depends on What You’re Drinking

CREDIT: Steven Cukrov | Dreamstime

I distinctly remember visiting my twin brother at Ole Miss to see him and his friends with their hands crammed into coolers, spinning cans of beer in the ice. The trick was a new one to me at the time, because in Tuscaloosa you could buy cold beer, while in Oxford you had to buy it off the shelf. The whole point of the exercise was to bring the temperature of the beer down as quickly as possible. This was necessary because if you serve anything cold enough, your sense of taste is dulled. Given what we drank back then, the colder the better.

The trick did actually work — sort of — but it was also a lot of trouble. I drank whiskey.

The first time I went to the U.K., long before craft beer was a thing in the South, I was warned that the Brits drank warm beer. What I found was that their ales weren’t warm, they just weren’t ice cold like in America. Being a hell of a lot better than anything that I’d had at home, they didn’t have to be.

The same is true for wine: Temperature matters, a lot, in both storage and serving, so you want to get your numbers right. With whites and Champagnes, if you are drinking the stuff that gets served at typical fund-raisers or huge New Year’s Eve parties, like cheap beer, the colder the better.

Go up the ladder a bit to a nice Sauvignon Blanc, and you want to be a little more careful. If you don’t have a temperature-controlled storage, you’re fine keeping the whites in the fridge, but take the bottle out of the fridge about 15 minutes or so before serving. What you are shooting for is about 50o F — where it’ll still have a good chill, but the tastes will come alive.

Steven Cukrov | Dreamstime

Another one you want to keep in the fridge is Vermouth, which is a fortified wine, not a liquor. This is crucial. One reason we like those bitingly cold martinis is because most of us make the classic cocktail with vermouth that has gone off. It’s sort of like making a chocolate shake with sour milk. Fresh vermouth tastes completely different than what you are likely getting at a bar. Keep it in the fridge and throw it out after a few weeks.

Conventional wisdom holds that reds, on the other hand, work best served at room temperature. But remember the people who came up with that rule lived in drafty chateaux (or a drafty hovels) long before central heating. They wore heavy, form-fitting wool clothes that made everyone their own portable space heater. To that lot, room temperature wasn’t 74o F but somewhere between 60 and 65 degrees. Which is a pretty drastic swing. If you want to throw the red in the fridge for a few minutes before serving, that’s fine.

Do be careful; what wine really likes is consistency. Trying to chill wine quickly in the freezer is a bad idea. In fact, a drastic swing in any direction is bad. If you overdo it and decide to rewarm the bottle quickly, the wine will likely get some strange thoughts at odds with what the winemaker intended.

If you are really into it, and the above sounds fraught with peril, you can get a “wine cellar” that is no larger than a dorm-room fridge and costs about the same. It takes out the guesswork.

On the other end of the thermometer is Sake, which is supposed to be served warm, specifically at 98.4 degrees. Admittedly, I only know this from repeated childhood viewings of You Only Live Twice. I don’t claim to be a Sake expert, but years ago an undergrad with two very cold hands and a pair of almost-warm beers assured me that this was, in fact, true.

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Bubbling Under: Australian Sparkling Burgundy

You have to admire the Aussies for their seeming inability to care what other people think. Case in point: the almost Champagne-ish wine known Down Under as a “sparkling Burgundy.” Up here on this side of the planet, we call it a “sparkling shiraz.” Whatever its name, the Aussies do take a degree of national pride over the stuff. So tread lightly when poking fun of their wine. Australia is an evolutionary lone wolf with fully weaponized fauna and flora, so you do not want to throw hands with an Aussie.

Americans, living without the specter of killer house plants, have long had the opportunity to not only out-innovate the Old World, but to out-snob it as well. Show me a cosmopolitan American sommelier who will even consider the sparkling shiraz, and I’ll show you an unpretentious, open-minded, albeit a soon-to-be unemployed, one. As a result, the dedicated stateside oenophile won’t touch it either.

Historically, we have a good reason to be touchy, given our great sparkling red wine shame: Cold Duck. It was a weird, sweet fizz made of an unholy mix of sweet whites and reds and Champagne. It’s an old German recipe, but at one point in the 1950s, Cold Duck was the most popular “Champagne” in America. That’s on us, and we really should be embarrassed. Still, guilt by association is no way to pick a wine.

Sparkling shiraz is powerful on the fruit, so do yourself a favor and look for a dry one. If you aren’t careful, you’ll have the sensation of drinking a Jolly Rancher Fanta. Or Cold Duck.

The problem is you won’t likely have much of a choice. Being relatively unknown in the states, the selection is slim. You’ll likely need to head to one of the bigger liquor stores, where you preferably know someone you trust. For me, that’s Buster’s, where they only had one on the shelf: the wonderfully named Black Bubbles by Shingleback. It retails for $29.99, and that is about what you’ll pay stateside for a sparkling shiraz worth drinking. It’s won several awards, but none in the northern hemisphere.

This is Champagne the way it would be rendered on a Jimi Hendrix concert poster: It’s a vivid purple with a violet fizz, whirling with an aroma of black currents and cherries. It’s a picnic wine — made for pizzas and burgers or a turkey sandwich with a big slice of gouda. It’s good, but it’s also just different.Even if it doesn’t become your go-to, it’s worth sharing a bottle with a few of your less-judgmental friends.

If you want to preserve the bubbly fizz, drink it out of a Champagne flute, which will create less surface area through which the gas can dissipate. Don’t fret about it though; I’ve had the right Champagne on the right day out of a juice glass, so whatever works. As for the temperature, certainly in the summer and probably in the spring and fall, you’ll want it chilled if not exactly cold, which puts the flavor on mute. In the middle of what we call winter here, room temperature works fine.

The Aussies aren’t the only ones in the sparkling red game. Other cultures that never mistook Cold Duck for Champagne make and drink their own without a hint of shame. Rose Regale Sparkling Red comes from the Piedmont region of Italy made from Brachetto grapes. It’s a little lighter and sweeter and drifting a little closer into the neighborhood of Prosecco.

It’s entirely possible that they embrace their “sparkling Burgundies” Down Under because the rest of us sneer at it. Given the few Aussie’s I’ve met, though, I think they just like what they like. This is a country that could vote itself free of the Queen, but they just can’t be bothered, cause, you know, she seems like a nice lady and all. It wouldn’t seem cricket, mate.

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Oyster City

It gave me a fine feeling of hometown pride a few months back to order a Wiseacre down at SoBou in New Orleans. Still, I try to drink local wherever I go. There is something about local breweries that act as a barometer for the local vibe.

Where I’d gone was St. George Island, a long, thin barrier island some 28 miles long and barely a mile at its widest, out in Apalachicola Bay. It’s a great, dusty little beach town in a world where dusty beach towns are getting hard to come by. That the place hasn’t yet been ravaged by developers may have something to do with a third of the island being a state park and the gulf side being a nesting ground for the loggerhead sea turtle.

At what looked like a sort of charming garage on the dodgy side of the island called Paddy’s Raw Bar, the beer selection is mostly cheap domestics and a few cheaper ones, but as with most places, the waitstaff will proudly push the local brew, here the aptly named Oyster City Brewing Company from across the bay.

In the spirit of things, I ordered the Apalach IPA and sat reading the sensible hurricane evacuation directions — 1. Grab Beer 2. Run Like Hell. — and hoped this wouldn’t be one of those IPAs with something to prove. I was there for the oysters, and they will sit as well with a Jamaican Red Stripe or a Budweiser as they will Champagne.

The Apalach IPA is well balanced and light, with a good flavor that went well with the briny oysters. There is, though, a definite downside to finding a great local beer three states away: the distribution — or more to the point, lack of it. Oyster City beer is available from Tallahatchie to the legendary Flora-Bama bar — which does include Highway 30A, Memphis’ southernmost suburb.

The Apalach fits well into a busy schedule: parking myself on a beach for a few hours until I managed to drag myself down to the secluded park at the eastern tip of the island to go fishing. Or not. Fishing in a thunderstorm is strongly discouraged by the Florida Parks Department. You’ll be the tallest thing on the beach, made even more so swishing around that six-foot-plus metal-tipped fiberglass shaft. The effect of just a little bit of bad luck at this point, the park ranger told me, is electrifying.

All other options exhausted, I figured I’d just do my job and drove across the causeway into town to visit the Oyster City brewery in person. Their beers tend to be on the light side, but that doesn’t mean watery pilsners: The chalkboard sign out front proclaims a love of “blondes, reds, and browns!” Inside, I found what just might be my favorite taproom, with tables and chairs set in the same room as the vats of brewing beer. The friendly bartender, Jennifer, offered me a Red Snapper IPA — released every year to celebrate the start of red snapper season. It’s made with beets to give it a bright-red zing but lightens things taste-wise. Thankfully, it doesn’t taste like borscht.

That gulf air is hot and salty, so if you find yourself down here, try the Lemon Shark Wheat, a Belgian-style wheat steeped in the lemon grass from a “patch of Florida next door.” Oyster City does make a stout, but they won’t release it until Thanksgiving when the average Memphian has retreated back to the bluff.

None of this is to say that Oyster City can’t get clever with their beer, the Dirty Blonde Ale and Hooter Brown Ale are both available as soap — for those of you who want to step out of the shower smelling like a Florida taproom. Make of that what you will.

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Beer Run to Mississippi

On the afternoon of July 1st, I drove into a changed Mississippi under gray clouds that foretold a fine summer rain. Some 15 hours earlier, at precisely midnight, that state’s House Bill 1322 went into effect, allowing for legal existence of that wonderful institution beer lovers in Tennessee have taken for granted for so long: the brewery taproom.

Until that day, the nine breweries in Mississippi could only sell their product through a distributor, on tap through restaurants and bars, and in package. They weren’t allowed to sell it onsite, but could offer paid brewery tours that gave away free samples. It was a measly loophole that didn’t encourage visitors to hang around and hoist a few.

Now all that has changed. Granted, Mississippi has not been on the cutting edge of the craft beer industry. Only Georgia — despite big, cosmopolitan Atlanta — still doesn’t allow on-premise sales at breweries. Back in 2013, Mississippi became the 49th state to allow home brewing. But this is Mississippi, so, all things considered, coming in 49th out of 50 is like winning the silver. (Lucky Town Brewing in Jackson, has released a brew called Old No. 49 Farmhouse Ale to commemorate the “victory.”) So it was that Mrs. M and I — under those cloudy skies and with R.E.M. on the stereo — went down to Water Valley, a little Oxford bedroom community. Along with the other eight Mississippi breweries, the Yalobusha Brewing Company was celebrating the long overdue HB1322. Located in what Water Valley calls downtown, Yalobusha has staked out a great spot in the former Hendricks Foundry building, connected to a small coffee shop by an even smaller games arcade. Flanked on either side of the building were food trucks offering tacos and a pizza stand. It’s neat.

Yalobusha Brewery

There, over two great offerings from Yalobusha — its wonderfully named Snopes Pilsner and Blues Trail Farmhouse Ale — was as good a place as any to consider the implications of the three-year political slog it took to pass a law with a lot of economic upside and little to no downside. After all, there are a lot cheaper and quicker ways of getting into drunken foolishness than drinking craft beer at a homegrown brewery. But Mississippi was the first state to pass prohibition and the last to repeal it, so its relationship with alcohol is complicated.

Which has given brewers that much more to celebrate. Theirs is a business with pretty thin margins after everyone involved has taken their bit. The general rule of thumb among the brewers with whom I spoke was that each barrel sold on premise (without a middle man) generates about $1,000 of much-needed revenue. Sell enough of those, and you start making new local hires to deal with the demand.

The legal fight was largely spearheaded by Jackson attorney Matthew McLaughlin, who is also the executive director of the Mississippi Brewers Guild. McLaughlin expects the number of breweries in the state to double over the next 18 to 24 months. “It, in theory, lowers the risk of new products that they [brewers] want to introduce, because they have the opportunity to test in a taproom.”

Low-risk testing leads to more innovation, which leads to more products and growth which, politics aside, ought to be pretty straightforwardly a positive outcome. Breweries are embracing their new freedom in different ways. For the moment, Yalobusha is all about the beer, letting the local pizza place and food trucks handle the suds-sopping pub grub aspect.

The Lazy Magnolia Brewery, in Kiln, is adding a small kitchen to its works in order to make it a destination brewpub. If you’ve never heard of Kiln, Mississippi, don’t worry, few have. Apparently, that includes the global satellite communication system. The website offered directions and a helpful warning that if you put their address in GPS, you will get lost.
Which sounds like a road trip I’m just going to have to take.

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Writer’s Bock

CREDIT: Richard Murff

Suffering from writer’s block, I went over to see David Smith at Hammer & Ale in Cooper-Young, because the guy knows an awful lot about local beer. Standing before the constellation of 24 revolving local and regional (if you include Iceland) beers, he pointed out the very popular Yazoo Summer Seasonal Gose. “It’s a light ale, citrusy sour with coriander and sea salt.”

He wasn’t talking about a new salad on the menu, but one of those continental sour beers that started showing up about two summers ago, claiming to be the next IPA.

“That sounds dreadful,” I said.

David has spent a lot of his adult life in the art world — operating on taste rather than utility — and was kind enough not to call me a Neanderthal. “Well,” he said, “we are going through a lot of it.” Knowing what I know about the good people at Yazoo Brewing, this was probably one of the better examples of a traditional Gose. It may not be to your tastes, but they don’t get it wrong very often.

I’m a professional, so I ordered a flight of four, including the offending sour. It wasn’t as powerful as those Lambics that make you want to suck your tongue, but four ounces was enough for me to know I’d had enough. It was very tart. In Yazoo’s defense, these sour beers are not for me. A couple of people in this city have tried to change my mind about them but, evidently, I just don’t like the style. To be fair, it wasn’t dreadful, and if a lot of people are drinking it, there’s got to be a reason.

Richard Murff

Next on the flight was a limited Lagunator Lager — a bock-style lager by Lagunitas, another brewery not known for getting it wrong. It had that heavier bock finish, but it wasn’t anything you’d call a heavy. It was light enough and very good. It is the sort of beer someone who spends the depths of winter plowing through Scottish ales would love to hoist in the summer.

My next beer was a Longfin Lager by Ballast Point. And this was where I stumbled on a really great summer beer: very light and crisp, without tasting watered down. It’s the craft beer that Mrs. M, a Bud Light girl, and I would likely agree on. And that’s the sort of compromise that makes for a happy marriage.

Where Ballast Point lost me was on the final stop: Mango Even Keel IPA. I like IPA, and I like Mangos. But similarly, I like chocolate, and I like olives, but not chocolate-covered olives. If I were inclined to throw some mango into something I was drinking, that something would be rum.

My dominant thought while drinking it was, “Can’t we just leave IPAs alone?” These waves of innovation are teetering on the edge of what the Brits would call “Too clever by half,” and they invented the stuff. It’s like trying to put a modern spin on your grandmother’s fried chicken when you ought to just admit the old gal got it right the first time. And I say your grandmother because neither of mine could boil an egg.

The great thing about Hammer & Ale, though, is its mix of new and traditional beers. Experiments, even failed ones, can be fun. So even if I was offended by mango in my IPA (this is a pretty popular selection, so try it yourself), I could contemplate the ordeal with a pint of one of my go-tos, like Founders All Day IPA — which lives up to its name with enough hops to know it’s there, but not so overpowering to get bitter in the heat.

It’s the sort of beer your grandfather might have had. Again, not my grandfathers, they were from Clarksdale. Mrs. M’s grandfather, on the other hand, was a Brit. I don’t think he could boil an egg either.

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Rosé, Can You See?

For the record, rosé wine is not a mix of red and white grapes; that would be called “gold wine.” Mixing wines together was how the Romans made it, but they had to dilute their vintages because they were so harsh. When it came to vino, what the Romans lacked in finesse, they made up for with gusto. They attacked whatever it was they were drinking with a weapons-grade enthusiasm.

Rosé, on the other hand, calls for a lighter touch. It is made from red grapes with a process that is close to how white wines are created. The truth is that all grapes, even red ones, have white flesh that produces clear juice. What gives red wine its dark color — and tannins and all its other wonderful qualities — is the grape skin. Pinot Gris (or Pinot Grigio as the Italians say) is actually a big blue-purple grape, even though it’s a white wine. When the grapes are crushed, the juice is separated from the skins to keep the light color and flavor.

To get a rosé, red grapes are lightly crushed, with the skins allowed to sit in the juice from anywhere from a few hours (for a wine light in color and flavor) to a few days (for a darker, bolder wine). The result is a fresh summer wine — a white for red wine lovers.

You don’t need to look for an old respectable vintage when choosing a rosé. In fact, don’t even try. If you did find an older vintage, there is probably a nasty reason it hasn’t been opened. Age doesn’t improve a rosé.

The free-market upside to all this is that good rosés are cheap. After a quick trip across the top shelf of several liquor stores, the most expensive one I could find was about $30. And from what I’ve tried, there is no reason to pay any more than $15.

The real problem with pink wine is perception, perhaps rooted in having watched your Aunt Erma haul around a hatbox full of Franzia. Or maybe that’s just me. When I pull the cork from a rosé bottle, I can almost hear the train conductor calling, “Now arriving at Rosé … Next stop: White Wine Spritzer!” I have no moral issue with white wine spritzers; that’s just not a road I want to travel.

Because rosé can be created from any red varietal, they are made nearly everywhere. European rosés tend to be drier — wine speak for less sweet — than New World wines. I am, however, painting with a wide brush here. The Provence region of France is famous for its dry rosés. Champs de Provence will run you about $16 a bottle. It’s light and pale and dry enough so you don’t get sweet mouth. Or, I’d imagine, a roaring hangover. There are also several Côte du Rhônes that are very good. Try M. Chapoutier’s Belleruche for about the same price point.

If you are looking for a bigger wine with more fruit, try New World rosé wines — Californian or South American. And Spanish rosados are another lively option. Or Germany’s Villa Wolf Pinot Noir Rosé. Only the Germans would have a winery called Wolf. I was at a loss to describe this vintage until a friend, a veteran of the wine business, told me the word I was looking for was “fleshy,” which is wine-speak for God only knows what. Still, the term was weirdly on the mark. So yes, the Germans make fleshy rosés.

As for food pairings, rosé is the sort of wine that really sings with cheeses and cold, smoked meats or oysters with a mignonette sauce. Or, for that matter, fried chicken. Don’t sneer until you try it; this is Memphis.

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Beer With Me

I don’t really care what Emily Post or your happy meteorologist says. In Memphis, the summer begins at the barbecue fest. So, the other week, I was down by the river, sponging off the hospitality of the good people of the Sicilian Smokers Barbecue Team. I was pointed to the beer tap.

“Bud Light?” I asked.

“Well …” said the Smoker, “it’s a Anheuser-Busch product. …”

My finely tuned taste buds detected … well, they detected a cheap domestic beer. Since they were giving it away, it was almost certainly Natty Light. But it was sort of raining and sort of hot, and all was right down by the river again.

Never lose your taste for Cheap Domestic Beer (CDB) — not just the much-maligned Budweiser or Natty Light, but the Milwaukee’s Beasts, Olympias, and, if you can find it, Hamm’s. It’s the beer for those of us who waited until Sunday night to do our weekend homework. What else would you take to the lake? Or for that matter, drink at a Tom Petty show? I can assure you that Petty’s “American Girl” was not drinking a Rye IPA.

And it’s not just because CDB is cheap, either; sometimes it’s not. I bought a couple of Bud Lights for the enchanting Mrs. M and myself, and FedExForum dinged me $22. Granted, they were huge. And the gigantic lukewarm beers that were not getting any colder in my hand perfectly fit the thumping rhythm of “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.” It was a great show that took me back to the Mid-South Coliseum days. The people behind us were roaring drunk.

“Don’t get me wrong. I love the good stuff,” said the Smoker who’d pointed me to the tap. “But really? Here?”

Craft brews may incite much conversation and beery navel-gazing, but CDB is for people of action. Short bursts of it, at any rate. The Sicilian Smokers had just made a new guy enter the barbecue sauce wrestling contest. Heaving and groping while covered in molasses and who-knows-what-else is not the time a sane person thinks, “Wow, I need a creamy milk stout.” Then again, does it really matter if your drink makes you want to throw up after your food has already thrown up on you?

A good friend of mine on the Smoker team placed third in the hog race, which required chugging a beer. This was surprising news, as his widely acknowledged area of expertise is wicked-good hot wings (which also placed) and not an enthusiasm for forward motion. True, the contestants were handicapped by age and BMI, which explained his impressive showing, but your more artisanal craft brews are just a bit too precious for that sort of work.

So, get off your high horse and crack open a Miller High Life. And even the most terminal hipster will concede that there is a time and place for Pabst Blue Ribbon. (They only say that they drink it “ironically.”)

My personal favorite CDB, though, has always been Dixie Beer — forever tied in my mind to college road trips to New Orleans. The last gallant delivery from the historic Dixie Brewing Company was made at close of business on the Friday before Katrina ate the brewery on Monday. Now, the old building is part of the University Medical Center, and the beer is made on contract in Wisconsin. I met the owners once and asked why I couldn’t find it in Memphis. They responded by offering me a job as the regional distributor.

The new Dixie brewers swear they haven’t touched the recipe. They shouldn’t. You know what you are getting with CDB. “I know what Budweiser does to me,” said a Smoker. What Budweiser does to him, or me or anyone else, is … not much. That is kind of the point. Still, with determination, anything is possible. The last thing I heard, as I climbed those impossibly steep steps up the bluff, was someone shouting, “Hell, I’m too drunk to Über.”

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Ghost Gauntlet

I was drinking a brown ale. At least that’s what I think that it was. It was brown and certainly an ale — but there are purists who will argue that this doesn’t qualify it as an official brown ale. With all due respect, it was a brown ale.

This state of confusion was caused by the Flying Saucer’s “Ghost Gauntlet,” which consists of four unnamed local brews, numbered sequentially to keep you in the dark about just what you are drinking. The ABV is listed, but I’m pretty sure that’s just the legal department being a wet sandwich. I ordered number … well, why spoil the surprise? It was brown, an ale, and very good.

The bartender, Brandy (such a fine girl), wouldn’t even tell me what I’d ordered after she’d laid it down. So the only option at that point was to drink up and hope my luck held out. It did. Kirk Caliendo, the Flying Saucer’s friendly GM, assured me that all the Ghost Gauntlet beers have been vetted.

The point, of course, is to drink all four in the gauntlet sometime in the next couple of weeks, then go online and vote for your favorite. Whichever candidate garners the most votes goes into the 75-draft-beer lineup.

The Ghost Gauntlet is good for anyone falling into a “beer rut,” or worse, overwhelmed by the choices out there. For me, whatever the hell I was drinking was a pleasant surprise, one that I’d almost certainly have missed had I relied on my own waning brainpower to order. The purpose, other than having a little fun with beer, says Kirk, is to “judge based on the palate, as opposed to the perceived value of the brand.”

If running the Ghost Gauntlet is a bit much, or you’re one of those control freaks who wants a modicum of control over what you ingest, higher up on the menu is the Transcendent 20: a selection of beers that takes the guesswork out by focusing on the absolute best of the best of a style, as picked by Kirk and “touched by about four or five others,” locally and from the corporate office in Dallas. This includes Brandy (who does her best to understand).

Anyone remotely familiar with the current beer scene will recognize most of the names on this list: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Duvel Belgian Blonde, and standbys like Founder’s, Oskar Blues, and Dogfish Head — but even the most pedantic beer snob will admit these are standbys for a reason. The list isn’t definitive and will change from time to time.

Then there are the Exceptionals, the silver medal winners that rotate out a little more often. The bottom line is that one side of the menu style lists beers by region and style, and the other by excessive awesomeness.

All this is part of a remodeling and grand re-opening which closed the Saucer down for six weeks. As Kirk told me about the kitchen (about three times larger), the new food menu, and improvements to the beer garden to enhance the acoustics, all I could think was that the contractors had done a fantastic job, because I still couldn’t see what they’d done.

It is still the Flying Saucer, though, and they still sport 75 beers on tap and about 150 labels in bottles. The remodel has left the famous porcelain saucers festooned on walls and ceiling — a testament to those who have tried 200 different beers. Don’t get too ambitious. The Saucer will only give you credit for three a day, so thanks again, legal.

Of course, it’s for your own good, and no one wants you bathing in the stuff — it’s bad hygenie and bad manners. For the true beer adventurers (in this harbor town), you try four of the Memphis brews on the gauntlet and get another local kid on tap.