Author: Richard Murff

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Can It! What’s a “Crowler”?

When I first heard of the term “crowler” — the can version of the growler — I was more confused than intrigued. Why would any non-Australian person need a can of beer that size? I’d always assumed that the folks Down Under saved those Foster’s empties to fling at kangaroos.

So I went to the big neon sputnik that is Joe’s Wines and Liquor on Poplar and asked assistant manager, Kaare Bivin-Pederson, to explain. Which he kindly did. “Since a can is neither gas or light permeable, they are much better for storing beer for longer periods.”

“Interesting,” said I. What I was thinking was not nearly so polite, namely, “God’s Holy Trousers! We’ve got to lay up vintage beer now? Can’t we just drink the stuff?”

As is often the case, I’d missed the point entirely. Cellaring is about letting flavors mature over time. The utility of the can is that the taste and fizz don’t change at all. In a glass growler — even one properly sealed and stuck in the back of your fridge — beer’s flavor will morph over time. In particular, those high-gravity beers (those topping 10 percent ABV) and cask-aged beers will continue to “evolve” in glass, and not always in a good way. Kaare explained all this as he pointed to the gleaming wall of taps and video displays that are only slightly less spectacular than the sputnik (but much more practical), adding: “Take this Lagunitas Hop Stoopid, for example — after a few weeks in a glass growler, it’s going to lose its flavor.” So hopheads take note.

Crowlers are great for taking your favorite Memphis beers on the road — it’s still the only way to get Memphis Made in a can — or for saving some of a limited production beer to enjoy six months later, exactly the way it came out of the tap. “Oh, we’ve tested it,” says Kaare. “It’s still got the fizz.”

Joe’s will fill and seal the can in the store and mark the date. The cans themselves come from Oskar Blues, the brewery that in 2002 cracked the mystery of turning a can into a hand-held keg. They are responsible for Dale’s Pale Ale, Pinner Blunt, and the wonderfully named Old Chub Scotch Ale — which pairs well with those plaid holiday pants no one wants you to wear. The company’s secondary mission, evidently, is to can the entire planet, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that they really did revolutionize the process, so that the beer doesn’t have that metallic twang that we of a certain age associate with Milwaukee’s Best.

We were having a pleasant, informative chat until Kaare, half amused, pointed over my shoulder and said, “We have canned wine, too … and it tastes exactly like it does out of the bottle.”

First of all, that’s a terrible thing to say to anyone, and secondly, he didn’t actually say it was good. What he said was, “You need to watch how you drink those. If you attack it like a beer, you’ll be under the table.” That’s sound advice. I stood there looking at a tin of pinot noir thinking, “Wow, it really does look like a beer.”

In full disclosure, I didn’t try one. Although I can see the advantage, in that, like the crowler, canned wine gets a pass into places that don’t allow glass containers.

The truth is, and I’m not proud of it, I’ve imbibed a couple of bottles of Night Train in my day, reviewed by John Belushi in The Blues Brothers as “a mean wine.” And once you go down a rabbit hole like that, you pretty much lose the moral high ground on canned vino. At any rate, an enormous crowler of beer is probably okay for a first date, but a can of Bordeaux is ill-advised.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

NOLA Weekend

You haven’t really experienced New Orleans until you carry a comically drunk stranger back to his hotel (aided half-way through this foolishness by yet another complete stranger), dump the fellow in the lobby, and politely ask the concierge to call housekeeping or security.

I’d dropped in the Royal House Oyster Bar for some oysters and sauvignon blanc — which work together particularly well — and struck up a conversation with a friendly chap, right about the time he quit working particularly well. Shortly after he’d decided that we needed to write a book together and demanded to pay for my dinner, he dropped his wallet on the floor. On his way down to get it, I grabbed his bald cranium so he didn’t split said skull on the marble bar. Say what you want about the crime in New Orleans, everyone around helped him gather his scattered wallet. Having lost the argument over my bar tab, I felt obliged to get him across the street to his hotel. It was like a village, and he was our idiot.

Sazerac Bar Roosevelt Hotel NOLA

He was drinking chardonnay. I don’t think that explains anything, but I thought you should know.
It’s hard to criticize the hordes of bleary-eyed tourists roaming these streets at 9:30 a.m., because it is very hard to find a place where you aren’t expected to be drinking. The Bottom of the Cup Tea Room on Rue Chartres looked innocent enough until a bohemian lady brought some badly strained tea, dumped it out, and proclaimed my fortune. She said I would go away thirsty.

Directly across the street is SoBou (South of Bourbon), the newest member of the Commander’s Palace restaurant family. Like the décor, the food is excellent but more modern than the flagship. One very New Orleans touch was the beer taps in the tables (and it did my heart good to see Wiseacre among them). It’s self-serve, and you’re charged by weight — like a boozy version of YoLo.

There are several local beers, and they do know how to brew for hot weather here, but this is a cocktail town. And few scream “N’awlins” in the right accent like the Sazerac: rye, bitters, and a little simple syrup shaken well and served in a glass with an absinthe rinse. You can get a good one in Memphis, but at the Sazerac Bar in the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel, you can get a good one in context: the long undulating bar, spotless and gleaming under the low art deco lights. I’m always slightly surprised to not find St. Peter working the door. They also charge $16 per cocktail.

Honestly, the rotting elegance of the Napoleon House is my favorite spot to have the world’s first cocktail. My mother’s family is from New Orleans, so the city has always been something of a psychic anchor for me, and the Napoleon House is a link in that chain.
I stumbled onto Café Soulé, on Rue St. Louis, almost by accident. You should, too. They claim their food is French–Louisiana fusion; given that traditional Creole is a fusion of French and whatever else was handy, that’s a bit vague. At any rate, the prices are good, the service friendly. The waiter shook my hand when I told him my middle name was Jaubert, and he remembered the old department store that used to bear our name. The place was filled with French people, whatever that tells you, and the crawfish étoufée, with some spice, plays well with a fruity Beaujolais.

I ran into the fellow from the oyster bar a day or so later. He looked rough, but he remembered me. In his honor, I offer this cautionary advice: Southern belles have long employed the trick of accessorizing until perfect, and then removing one piece of jewelry. There is a very feminine wisdom in this — the bedrock assumption that left to our own devices, we tend to overdo it.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

The War on Terroir: Three budget-level French wines

Prior to the Civil War, one of the biggest wine-producing regions in America was — wait for it — Missouri. The grape was Norton. Prohibition wiped the slate clean, so American wine-making, in a modern sense, is less than 100 years old and only seriously got started about the time the Beatles released Revolver.

On the other hand, the first wines to come out of France’s Rhône Valley pre-date the Romans. While the French take wine production very seriously, drinking the stuff is so ingrained in the culture that they’ve stopped being in awe of it. Sort of like with American tweens and the magic of Instagram.

Despite this, though, many Americans shy away from French wine. It may be a simple matter of taste: Most Old World wines don’t tend to hit the senses with a full frontal assault like the New World ones do. Part of the problem is, I suspect, simple translation: Everything sounds so damn existential in French. They are always going about the terroir of their wine — its sense of place. Actually, it just means dirt plus weather. To demystify the concept, just drive down Hwy 61 through Clarksdale — which is a three-hour round trip of weapons-grade dirt, plus weather, plus sense of place.

The other problem is more down to terroir, as it were. New World wines are labeled by grape varietals (merlot, pinot noir, malbec), while French wines are nearly all blended styles sold by region. Americans like to know exactly what we are getting, and we like it spoken in ‘Mericun. In practice, though, French regions stick to certain styles that have been governed by tradition and environment and, since 1932, the Appellation Contrôlée (AC). Under that umbrella is a fair bit of variation, but that’s where it gets fun.

You could do a lot worse than begin this adventure with the Rhône valley’s Côtes du Rhônes. This is what the French drink when they don’t want to talk about wine, thus freeing them up to go on about sex, food, and American foreign policy. I gather they disapprove of the latter.

If you live near Buster’s liquors, go there and stand before their wall of French wine. If the prices shock you, turn your head down slightly and start there. It’s a solid collection of Côtes du Rhône for under $20. As Mrs. Murff has pointed out, I am, in fact, the cheapest man currently living (she’s got me there). I picked out three at $14.99 each.

A Parallèle 45 is made in Tain l’Hermitage — which again sounds grander than it really is — it’s just a small town near a big hill. Because this is France, said hill has a very old story about a Frankish knight returning from the Crusades a gravely wounded war hero. As a reward for his service, the queen of France allowed him to live there to mend his wounds. He never left. The villagers knew he was up there by himself and called him, sensibly, the Hermit. Hence the name of the hill. When Craig Brewer does a movie about an off-the-grid lunatic, it’s not nearly so romantic. At any rate, Parallèle 45 is fruit-forward and with some spice to make it interesting. There is a touch of alcohol heat from the grenache, but the syrah gives it a bit of lightness. Saint Cosme comes in at the same price point, but the beauty here is that they don’t taste exactly alike. My favorite of the three was Famille Perrin, a Côtes du Rhône Villages, which is a slightly higher classification for the same price. There is less heat and some spice that doesn’t make itself quite so obvious. It’s a full flavor without being heavy.

In short, quit being a slave to the varietals, and take a trip with some blended French beauties. Sure, it’s a bit mysterious, but in the words of the Good Doctor Hunter Thompson, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

Les vins

Saint Cosme, Côtes du Rhône, $14.99

Famille Perrin, Côtes du Rhône Villages, $14.99

Parallèle 45, Train L’Hermitage, $14.99

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Great Pumpkin Beer? Not So Much.

I have to admit that I’d never even heard of pumpkin beers until after Starbucks injected the Pumpkin Spice Latte craze into the marketplace a few years ago, which generally prejudiced me against the whole idea on moral grounds.

In an industry as hip as craft beer, if you simply ignore bad trends, they won’t linger, but jack-o-lantern brews seemed to return every year like the Headless Horseman, and I got very Ichabod Crane about avoiding them. As it turns out, I was completely wrong about pumpkin beer being trendy. It’s actually very traditional. On the other hand, so are witch hunts.

According to the marketing department of the Brooklyn Brewery (I know this because it’s printed neatly on every bottle of their Post Road Pumpkin Ale): “In the 18th Century, colonial American Brewers brewed wonderful and interesting ales using local ingredients. Barley was the favored ingredient, but pumpkins were favored by brewers.” As marketing copy goes, that’s just terrible, but it’s more or less accurate.

The real question at hand, of course, isn’t historical; it’s “How does this stuff taste?” As it turns out, not as bad as I’d feared. It wasn’t heavy, like stouts, and was mildly flavored. Post Road is one of the few pumpkin-flavored brews to use actual pumpkins in the brewing process, something that I understand is a frightful pain in the neck. Even so, I can’t say it really tasted like a pumpkin. The flavors were more pumpkin pie spices: ginger, nutmeg, clove, and cinnamon.

Back in 1801, Samuel Stearns mentions pumpkin beer in his The American Herbal; or Materia Medica (because back then you said things in Latin if you wanted to be taken seriously, as opposed to adding a Power Point graph). Our colonial forebears were forced to be clever, mainly because their lives literally depended on it. Pumpkins, unknown in Europe prior to the Atlantic exchange, were readily available in the New World, while malt was not. People in desperate need of a stiff drink will ferment literally anything with sugar in it. This attitude is best summed up in what scholars believe was America’s first folk song, penned in 1643:

For we can make liquor, to sweeten our lips,

Of pumpkins, and parsnips, and walnut tree chips

Well, let’s hope it never comes down to tree bark beer again, and we can just stick with pumpkins for the moment. As cross-Atlantic trade developed, malt became more readily available, and pumpkin beer became the sort of thing rustic boobs drank because, evidently, there have always been beer-snobs. Pumpkin beer made a comeback during a period of nostalgia for colonial days in the 1840s and 1850s, when it was considered retro. Then the Republic blew up and the Civil War happened, and that was it for pumpkin beer for a while.

The next time we saw the stuff was in the micro-brew wave of the 1980s. Buffalo Bill’s Brewery made an Original Pumpkin Ale — allegedly brewed from a recipe of George Washington’s.

Now, pumpkin beers have become a perennial fall favorite, even though, as I mentioned, most aren’t really brewed with pumpkins. The Jack-O Traveler Pumpkin Shandy, for example, is a wheat beer — lighter, with more of that pumpkin pie spice. For my money, it just tasted like a “flavored” beer and left a lingering aftertaste that could only be removed with that other most American of drinks: bourbon. Which is exactly what I was trying to avoid by drinking pumpkin ales in the first place. In sum, pumpkin brews are not for me.

But, that said, let’s end on a high note: A chemist friend tells me that there is some scientific evidence that pumpkin spice acts as an aphrodisiac. What you do with that dubious bit of intelligence is your own business.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

A Flight of Beer Will Help You Wing It

The thing about writing a column about drinks and drinking is, to put it bluntly, who cares? Taste is a personal thing, wrapped up in not only your palate and your nose, but also the context in which it’s consumed. For instance, drinks are always better at a friend’s wedding and, for some reason, in war zones. The fact is that tastes don’t always translate because we can’t really put our finger on why we like something. We just do.

Despite the (very) subtle brilliance of my opinions, you need to go out and hoist a few unknowns on your own. Cheap beer tends to chase the same flavor profile, and the really interesting stuff tends to be pricey, which is why we tend to gravitate to a short list of favorites. I know a few people that will “drain pour” out a beer they don’t like, but I’m not one of them. It’s like a first date: Even if you know off the bat it isn’t going to work and you’ll never have another, you’ve got to stay till dessert.

Once, when I was working on a book about craft beer and I kept getting full pours of some brewer’s pet project, the results were mixed but the bottom line is that I gained 15 pounds in about six weeks. Which is where the beauty of a beer flight kicks in — a rainbow of two- or three-ounce samples to taste without a full-beer commitment. It’s like speed dating for your palate. They’re available all year round, but the best time to order a flight is during a seasonal change. That’s when brewers start rolling out fresh selections.

Flight of fancy — the full spectrum is on display at Boscos.

I took the charming Mrs. M to Boscos for a change-of-the-season flight of eight beers. Or at least I had a flight. For those, like my wife, who prefer a light beer, what you get when you order a Flaming Stone Beer at Boscos is sort of the theoretical golden ideal of a Bud Light. And much better, obviously.

This time of year, Boscos serves up their Oktoberfest — another lager — but it’s a toasty, malty thing. Also from Germany is a Sticke Alt beer, an old-style brown ale that is different but in the same neighborhood as their year-round, English-style, Midtown Brown Ale. Which one you like better, I suppose, says something about where you stand on the Brexit issue.

Boscos TIGUrS SMaSH is a true local brew, made from Cascade hops picked at the U of M. It’s hoppy and bitter and leaves you slightly confused as to what’s going on with the typography.

Boscos is also serving an Ice Age Pale Ale, which is light and very mild, due to its use of the Glacier hop variety. It’s light, less hoppy, and very good — like the Muzak version of Boscos standby Bombay IPA. I finished the flight with the Isle of Skye Scottish Ale, which has been a favorite of mine for years. If nothing else, it tastes Scottish.

I won’t order all of them again, but none of them were bad. If you do this enough, you’ll almost always get something you don’t like, but that’s the point: Now you know. And more importantly, you are part of the process. Remember that a crucial (if unsung) ingredient in brewing up something innovative is occasionally screwing it up. As a drinker of locally created beer, being part of a brewer’s feedback loop is important. They need you to test their new ideas and, to be honest, keep their weirder inclinations out of your glass. Brewers call it a “feedback loop” because it’s more dignified than referring to their customers as “lab rats.”

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Gaucho Grapes

Fall is officially here, and our minds naturally turn from crisp and/or bubbly whites to reds.

Pinot noirs are a light, fruity option, and they aren’t as expensive as they were a few years ago when they were the cute, young thing. You might need to pay a little more for something that isn’t going to taste like alcoholic fruit juice, however. Beware cheap pinots.

But do consider the malbec. It’s called the “working man’s merlot” for a reason, although it’s not entirely clear what that reason is. It could be that the fabled South American gauchos (like our cowboys, but with a little more style) drank it, or that it was cheap when it was first discovered in the U.S., not by sommeliers and wine critics, but ordinary folks looking for an affordable and interesting bottle. Malbecs are typically a little less polished than merlots, but, from where I’m sitting, that’s okay. It keeps things intriguing.

It has only been in the last 10 years or so that the malbec varietal has come out of Argentina with any force. It’s got a lot of fruit in it and was traditionally used in France as one of the five varietals blended in the headier Bordeaux, until most of the European stock was destroyed by a major phylloxera epidemic in the mid-19th century. Malbec is a fussy vine, or at least it was in Europe; its root system rotted easily. After the epidemic crippled the French wine industry (and made absinthe a thing), the malbec vine stock largely fell out of favor in France. But around that same time, a Frenchman named Michel Pouget took some vines over to Argentina’s Mendoza region. In the high, hot, dry climate, malbec flourished. Gone were the rot problems it had had in France. For 100 years or so, the grape was grown and enjoyed in Argentina, with very little of it making its way outside the country.

But it’s here now and available at most local purveyors. And it’s probably here to stay, because it plays well with others, pairing nicely with lighter fare, on to the upper rungs of the gourmet ladder. If you’re into the wine’s gaucho heritage, it’s most in its natural element with grilled meat.

By the 1990s, Chilean wines had begun to put South American vintages on the world’s radar, so it was perhaps inevitable that Argentina’s malbecs would be discovered. Now, this working man’s wine has risen in popularity — and the experts and the market have taken notice — and prices have risen accordingly. But there is a wide spectrum of options.

If you’re looking for something special, say for an anniversary, there is a fine Chakana 2012 — with a groovy stylized jaguar on the label — that retails around town for about $28. More in the Saturday-night-dinner neighborhood is a 2014 Maipe that’ll set you back about $16. For just knocking back a glass on a random Wednesday, let me suggest Cigar Box Old Vine malbec for $11. It’s a little younger vintage, but it doesn’t really taste like a Wednesday-night wine. Hell, for as little as $7, you can buy Ché Gaucho, which isn’t bad for that price point.

That the Argentines could produce a great, easy-going wine from vine stock that had essentially failed elsewhere says as much about their national spirit as it does the terroir. According to a former Chilean president, “Argentines are Italians who speak Spanish and dream in French.” If you’re looking for decent wine with some soul, that’s not a bad combination.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Tailgating Time

Ever since Milo of Croton reportedly carried an ox across the Olympic stadium before killing, roasting, and eating the thing in a single day, sports fans have been tailgating. Tailgate parties are about the easiest entertaining there is — which is probably why men are allowed to throw them. It’s casual. Your clothes are supposed to have team logos and numbers on them and probably someone else’s name across the back. Small talk is replaced by deep and unwieldy philosophical discussions on the impending cosmic implications of The Game.

It should be pointed out, however, that these primordial get-togethers aren’t as easy as they were back in Milo’s day, or even back in mine. When I was in college, there were only about three beers, and they all tasted exactly alike. Budweiser was slightly more expensive than Miller, which made it more sophisticated. (I swear I had a friend who drank Bud when scoping for a date because he thought it made him look like a bon vivant. Nowadays, he pulls the same stunt with Range Rovers.)

Cheap domestic beers still have plenty of fans, people who like them because they’re used to the flavors and those beers take them back to yesteryear, a carefree time when you could drink a beer without having to talk about it. But those days are in the past for most of us. Now, if you set out a cooler of Budweiser or Coors at your tailgate, you’re going to look like you’re just mailing it in.

Cash Saver

Having a nice variety of beers is the key to the modern tailgate party. And when I want variety, I head to the Madison Growler and Bottle Shop, a sort of shop within a shop at the Cash Saver on Madison. The growler station sports about 30 local and regional brews on tap. And one aisle over, in what I like to call the “Glorious Hall of Beer,” there are 300 or so varieties.

I like Tin Roof, which has an aptly named Gameday IPA that hits the mark. It’s got some hop to it that’s balanced out with citrus, so it isn’t wildly bitter. And not to be too blunt about it, but at 4.3 percent ABV, you can safely drink a fair amount of it. Also, I know it’s a marketing gimmick, but speaking as one of the eight living Americans who actually like reading William Faulkner, I also like Yalobusha’s Snopes Family Pilsner. I should add, generally speaking, you can’t go wrong with a Pilsner at an early season tailgate. They’re lighter in flavor and alcohol, and more suitable for warm weather.

Speaking of Faulkner, it’s best to avoid moonshine because, well, it’s moonshine. You might think you can hold it, but you can’t. No one can. Not even Faulkner, although he never seemed to get the memo. That edict goes for most hard liquor at a tailgate. Sure, there is always the tried-and-true Bloody Mary, but go easy; game day is a marathon, not a sprint.

And there’s always the wine option, though with all due respect to Milo of Croton, who supposedly consumed 18 liters of wine daily (probably to wash down the ox), vino just seems out of place at a tailgate. Instead, consider cider. I know. The very word conjures up both the insufferably trendy and antebellum family heirlooms in the same breath. Which is no mean feat. That said, Sonoma Cider and Smith & Forge both make good hard ciders that aren’t too sweet. But do check the ABV, some of the newer ciders really pack a wallop. Still, while I’m no doctor, I did go to a lot of med school parties, so I’m pretty sure something made of apples can’t be too bad for you.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Horse Play

Innovation is swell. However, a word of warning: When innovating in the realm of booze and booze delivery systems, don’t overthink it. The guys from Brew Dogs making beer out of Welsh seaweed aren’t innovating; they are trying to fill airtime. The best innovations are, more often than not, the simplest.

One generally accepted historical theory is that beer was invented by the Egyptians, accidentally. You can’t get more simple than that. And it goes without saying that whoever said, “Hey guy! All your barley got soaked with rain, and now the water is all fizzy and weird. Let’s drink it!” was almost certainly not doing any complex thinking. Still, we are all standing on the shoulders of that simple, common brilliance.

The best innovations also address a need. Which is why Ben Garrett took a horse trailer and fashioned a food truck for beer. Well, that isn’t exactly what Barnwall Event Co. did, but the genius of the thing really sings when you call it that.

The Barnwall Event Co. bar trailer

Ben’s wife, Paige, told me that her husband is always coming up with ideas — “some of them good.” Ben noticed that retrofitting horse trailers for various purposes is fairly common in European countries. Specifically, it was seeing a rolling gin bar called the Gin Tin that sparked the idea for Garrett. What he saw was a gleaming mobile bar, fully stocked and ready to be parked wherever you want to go. Needless to say, this was one of Garrett’s good ideas.

Paige and Ben scoured Craigslist and found a welder in Millington named Doug Peel to kit the thing out with lines, sinks, a sound system, and a 42-inch TV. As a horse trailer, it still retains a certain roll-in-the-hay chic, with rough wood paneling behind the beer taps. But there’s still plenty of room for a full bar.

I went with the charming Mrs. M to the Barnwall Event Co. launch party the other week out in Eads. First of all, this thing is not as large as you are likely imagining: The trailer fits in a regular-sized patio. In fact, it looks entirely normal, except there’s a bartender inside. What can I say? The setup works. It offered an interesting focal point as we stood around in the country eating … well, hoisting a drink and talking and wearing boots. The implications for all of this, now that fall — more to the point, football season — is here, are intriguing.

People get married, companies throw get-togethers, and charities have fund-raisers. The trailer, Paige tells me, is available for those and all sorts of other events: Carnival, St. Crispin’s Day, tail-gating, you name it.

For example: You may really want to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day, but throwing a first-rate hootenanny is likely going to ruin the first week in November for you, because it’s work to throw a party. Which is where the simplicity of a moveable bar for hire — about the size of a mini-van but more chic — comes into play. You can focus on the effigy-burning while the guy in the horse trailer handles the drinks.

A couple of millennia ago, our proto-Egyptian drank some old, milky water that had somehow learned to talk back. It was a good move, and a brave one, too. The Barnwall Event Co. bar/horse trailer may not be as accidental or bold, but still, it’s pretty damn clever. Wish I’d thought of it.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Saturday With Champagne

“Remember gentlemen, it’s not just France we are fighting for, it’s Champagne!” A young Winston Churchill so described the mission of his men in the First World War. Noël Coward drank it for breakfast, and Hemingway drank it at bullfights. We mortals generally toss it back the night whenever someone gets saddled with new in-laws. For a drink with such a flouncy reputation, champagne and sparkling wines can be fun, when properly applied.

The proper application, by the way, is with oysters at a random Saturday lunch. Don’t worry if the month has an “r” in it or not. That was a useful rule of thumb when oysters were harvested into unrefrigerated carts and covered in burlap. The extreme heat of the “without an R” months could cause the wet oysters to steam themselves slightly open in the cart, causing the brine to drain away, allowing the oysters to get funky. These days they go from seabed to refrigerated truck, and it doesn’t matter how you spell the month.

You might argue that there are better things to do on a Memphis afternoon than eating a dozen or so oysters, drinking a crisp bottle of bubbly, and taking the inevitable nap — but they can wait. Trust me on this one.

This little bacchanal can be accomplished without breaking the bank. The first time I splurged on a good bottle of champagne, it was Veuve Clicquot. I didn’t order via a sommelier or because the Queen of England favors it, but because that’s what James Bond drank in all the Ian Fleming books — as often as not with scrambled eggs. I reasoned that Fleming, being something of a well-heeled soak, would know the good stuff. He did.

A bottle of VC Brut will set you back around $50 at most local wine purveyors. If you are neither Her Majesty nor in Her Secret Service, that might be more than you are looking to spend, but it’s a great champagne for the price.

In the same range is Pol Roger, a favorite of Winston Churchill — another cash-strapped aristocrat willing to suffer the best of everything. He drank it at lunch every day and saved Western Civilization from itself. I don’t know if there is a causal connection, but there we are. The company even named a wine after the man. Hell of a loyalty program, but he was hell of a customer.

The point of this exercise, though, is to rescue this great wine from the clutches of engagement parties and New Year’s Eve. Back when Hemingway was a starving ex-pat artist, he drank gallons of Spanish sparkling wine while he was on hunting and fishing trips, sleeping with married women, and hectoring poor Scott Fitzgerald with all that fizzy “live for today” foolishness.

A bottle of Freixenet, from the Penedès region of Spain, will cost you around $10. At that price, this oyster-and-champagne afternoon for two will cost you about the same as lunch at any local gastro-pub in the city. The Spanish sparkling wines are cheaper than those made in the Champagne region of France because you can’t legally call them champagne. The French are very French about this. Remember, though, that’s marketing, not necessarily quality. Freixenet is a decent value, and it doesn’t have that sickening sweetness of those cheap “New Year’s Eve with 2,500 of Your Closest Friends” bubblies.

In the end, it’s best to not worry too much about price. The truth is I can’t even recall the name of the “finest” bottle of champagne I ever had, although I remember the night we drank it very well. A friend in the wine business had just gotten engaged, and the folks at the old Bayou let him open the bottle for the occasion. I remember his explaining that the heavy, sour “breadiness” was a sign of really good champagne. Someone said it tasted like Play-Doh, and she wasn’t far off, either. That, he said, was a sign of quality and quickly pointed out the proper circumference of the bubbles.

He was certainly more educated on the subject than I, but the true sign of a great champagne is that you want to drink it again. Soon. On a Saturday. With oysters.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Chill. Summer Brews to Help You Beat the Heat.

Memphis is hot, but you knew that. This may well be the fault of the military/industrial complex or the Republican party or global climate change, but when sweat starts seeping through your shirt, you need to know which beer to order.

Taking measures for drinking in the heat is actually more difficult than cold-weather tippling; you can always throw another log on the fire or put on a sweater. But in the summer, eventually you run out of clothes to take off, unless you want to commit some social gaffe you’d rather not explain to your mother. So I shuffled down to see David Smith at Hammer & Ale in Cooper-Young to talk beer and the hellish ambient temperature.

One great advantage of the craft beer boom is that beers are seasonal, rather than the one-size-fits-all lagers that dominated the U.S. beer scene for 60 years after prohibition. The drawback is that buying a beer now is like getting vegetables at the farmers market: You’re surrounded by a variety of fresh options, but sometimes you just want to have what you had last time. Still, if you approach the selection with an open mind, you’ll find something that does the trick.

The gleaming taps at Hammer & Ale showcase a few local summer favorites, like Wiseacre’s Tiny Bomb lager, High Cotton’s Biere de Garde, and the wonderfully named Crystal Method from Ghost River’s Brewers’ Series (a filtered hefeweizen that loses the cloudiness of traditional wheats). All of these beers are brewed to be light, fresh, and interesting enough to keep your attention. Hammer & Ale has an oatmeal stout on tap — the Poet by New Holland. They’re selling some, but not much, in this weather. Smith tells me it goes well with ice cream as an R-rated root beer float.

Then I sampled a Grapefruit Shandy by the Traveler Beer Co. Shandies are often approached with a degree of apprehension by the male of the species. I’ve had a few in my day, but usually it’s been when a female, at least slightly out of my league, made the suggestion. This one was like drinking a tall glass of Mama Mia — refreshing as hell — and didn’t threaten my man card too much.

I think the Brits hit the hot weather beer target spot-on with their hallowed India pale ale — brewed for Saxon boys who were shipped off to wilt on the Indian subcontinent. It’s been the best-selling craft-beer style in this country since craft beer was a thing. IPAs are generally light and spicy, and you never have to construct a back story to order one. Beware, though, IPAs are hoppy and can get bitter when your glass loses its chill. Perhaps because it was originally brewed for soldiers, the style tends to be higher ABV (alcohol by volume), which is fine when you’re sipping but dangerous when you want to knock them back. To this end, the good people at Founders Brewing have put out an aptly named All Day IPA. It’s a little lighter on the hops and the alcohol at a 4.2 ABV.

Smith said that his current best seller wasn’t a local beer, or even a domestic. It was Einstök White Ale, made in Iceland, which isn’t particularly known for sweltering summers. But Iceland isn’t as random in the history of American beer as it sounds. With all due respect to Christopher Columbus, the Norse were the first Europeans to spend much time in North America. In 1002 or thereabouts, Leif Ericson bought a second-hand boat from a man named Bjarni Herjólfsson. Bjarni was out of the sailing business because, as he related to Leif, a few years back he’d got drunk on his way from Iceland to Greenland and run into Canada by mistake. Leif took the hint.

As far as Einstök goes, it is clear, crisp, and light — like the umlaut over the O. It’s different without trying too hard. Worth checking out and adding to your summer beer arsenal.

At this point, I feel compelled to mention that having a tall glass of water along with whatever brew you choose is always a good idea. Or in the words of the British SAS (who’ve thrown back plenty of IPA in their day): “Hydrate or die.”

It is Memphis, after all. And it is hot.