Author: Richard Murff

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Mass is Minus: Have a Pint of Inefficiency

CREDIT: Richard Murff

Jeff Bezos, owner of the world’s largest bookshop, famously defined a book as paper and binding. Then he made a fortune on the position that there is no good reason to actually pay a writer: The time involved to think up, write, and polish a book until your brain goes numb has no place on a spreadsheet. Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, helpfully suggested that a constant stream of singles, rather than carefully crafted albums, would generate more pennies for the musicians whose careers he’s wrecked. Twitter and Facebook have made communication so efficient that we can’t stand each other anymore.

In a world swamped by data metrics, we’ve developed a fetish for efficiency. In a lot of ways that’s a good thing — engineering in modern cars leaps to mind. It’s also a tricky thing. Consider the American beer industry after prohibition, where a few large players dominated the market, determined to grow not on quality but efficiency. Each brewery chased the other’s market share by tasting more like the competition, which basically left America with two choices of fabulously cheap and nearly identical beers. For most of the 20th century, good ole American know-how made the United States the most efficient beer industry in the world. It was also the worst place in the world to live were you a beer-lover. Murffbrau’s heroic run in Tuscaloosa when I was an undergrad was not because I knew how to make good beer. The stuff was terrible, but it was different. I was also giving it away. I was also insane.

Richard Murff

My point still stands — embracing a bit of inefficiency in order to make something a little different is what transformed the U.S. beer market from the worst place to be for a beer-lover to arguably the best in less than a generation.

I know more people who head to North Carolina’s beer tours than to Napa Valley these days. Sure, wine snobs can be insufferable, but because they were always going on about terroir and starlight and a bunch of other imaginary metrics, no one ever expected them to be efficient. Wine-makers are just expected to be vaguely French at heart.

Craft beer is a delicious monument to inefficiencies: small batch, jerry-rigged distribution, and you might see the person who made it at the gas station. Yes, beer people can get as snobby as the wine crowd, but just ignore them. And sure, you get the odd swing-and-a-miss, but that’s part of the fun. Besides, a miss isn’t always a miss. I’ve definitely softened my stance on gose beer. For this week’s suggestion, I had a High Cotton Scottish Ale, because the unseasonably cold and cloudy weather (it was 88 degrees) put me in the right state of mind. The stars lined up here; it’s a great Scottish Ale, what can I say? It just tastes inefficient. It’s malty, with a bit of caramel and toffee, but clean. This is important because the mid-80s isn’t really all that cold. I’ve been in the back room of High Cotton. You could eat off the floors back there, but it is not a monument to economies of scale.

Even the distribution of craft beer is wonderfully slipshod if you go by the offerings of the local growler shops around town. And that’s the fun part: Put on your gas mask, secure a six-foot perimeter bubble, and say in a loud, clear voice: “Hey, guy, gimme the weirdest thing you’ve got!” Then say it again because chances are he didn’t hear you because your mouth was covered.

Go home, pour a pint, and read a book or listen to music, written by someone who actually thought it out. Or think something out your own damn self. No, it’s not very efficient, but beer is a pretty inefficient way to go about getting gassed. If that’s the goal, you’re better off quaffing vodka.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

High Point Grocery: The Same, But Better

CREDIT: Richard Murff

It was my friend P.C. Magness, the brain behind The Runaway Spoon, who said she hoped that someone would buy the old High Point Grocery and “keep it the same, only better.” True, that’s a tall, tricky order, but this is a lady who wrote a cookbook that actually makes you look forward to funeral food. So, anything is possible. As it happens, she got her wish.

For anyone who has actually lived in the neighborhood, the small, ’50s-era grocery store is almost always known as “the Little Store.” It was quaint, timeless, friendly, and convenient. It looked a little tired, sure, but it was such a fixture, the regulars ignored it. Even embraced it. Then COVID happened, and in April the Little Store closed with nearly everything else. With the lease coming up, and longtime owner C.D. Shirley eyeballing retirement, he made the decision not to reopen.

Richard Murff

Like losing naptime when you graduate to first grade, you just don’t know what you’ve got until you’ve lost it. Then Mrs. M announced that the fella from Cash Saver had stepped in to buy it and wasn’t changing the name. The fella’s name is Rick James, by the way, and whether he knew it or not, he did exactly what P.C. had hoped for: kept it the same, but better. I’ll admit some selfishness here because I was hoping that he’d recreate that great whacking hall of beer they’ve got in Midtown. Did that, too, up to a point.

Obviously, the Little Store is still pretty, well, little. You may not find some random Czech pilsner there, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a Memphis beer that isn’t on the shelf or in the cooler. And Memphis beer-can art is something to behold. To be sure, there are some solid non-local crafts to choose from, as well as Budweiser and other summer cooler-stuffing brands. It is still the Little Store, but Memphis beer is the star of the show. And there is a lot to choose from.

Since this foul year of our Lord went sideways, it’s been hard to keep up with the local craft scene because so much of it involved hanging around the taprooms, which have largely been closed. I’ve made a few attempts to turn my patio into a Murffhaus taproom, but it was just missing something — like other people (including that one guy who takes it a little too seriously) and that kid-in-a-candy-shop selection on tap.

I was pleasantly surprised at the simple variety being put out locally: standbys like Memphis Made’s Junt and Wiseacre’s Ananda, to newcomers like Beale Street Brewing’s 528hz of Love & Hoppiness. High Cotton has come out with its Oktoberfest, which, because this is Memphis, has a swine in lederhosen on the can. If memory serves, back in the spring October became our backup May before being re-canceled altogether.

To recreate a rescheduled and re-canceled May, you can always grab a can of something local and go get barbecue takeout for every single meal for a long weekend and get roughly the same effect as Barbecue Fest. To recreate Music Fest, go to Rachel’s and buy enough garden statuary so that your backyard seems crowded, drink enough so that you think taking your shirt off is a good idea, and then listen to music you thought you liked but really don’t. It’s not a perfect fit, but it’ll do.

For everything else that has gone away this year — crowded festivals and bars, schools, common sense, and an even remotely professional concern for personal appearance — the Little Store survived, the same just better. The local beer scene has managed to float along as well. That’s not by luck or government policy (or lack of). That’s just people sticking together through a really bad year.

And if that’s not worthy of a toast, I don’t know what is.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Foster’s Beer: How the “Oil Can” Got to America

The last time I spoke with an editor in New Zealand, we left it at: “That’s a great project, but you’ve got to get your own boat.” I couldn’t stay angry because I’ve always had a soft spot for the Kiwis and their Australian neighbors. They are staunch U.S. allies, yet refuse to take us seriously. Also, I like Christopher Koch novels, and their army has those really cool hats.

For me, it likely started back when cable television was scrambling for 24-hour content and introduced an entire generation of insomniacs to Australian Rules Football and Paul Hogan. Now that’s football, I thought. These guys are really gonna hurt each other!

And then there was the great whacking Foster’s Oil Can — at 24.5 oz., it made quite an impression on me: “No, Mom! I only had two beers!” The twist is that Foster’s was created by a pair of American brothers who sailed from New York to Melbourne in 1885. Their beer wouldn’t get to the United States until 1972, and when it did, it went big.

Before entering the U.S. market, Foster’s was considered a premium brand in Australia and then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Hard to say why really; the Aussies are not snobby as a rule. Perhaps they didn’t appreciate our military’s attempts at the time to napalm the length and breadth of Southeast Asia. As the brand fell from grace at home, however, it boomed stateside and in the U.K., where it is now their second-most popular beer.

In the 1970s and 1980s, premium beer in the U.S. merely meant “from far away,” which posed something of a problem, as light lagers have a pretty short shelf-life, even under the best of circumstances. Australia is very far away — so far that it is already tomorrow over there.

To better recreate what’s being quaffed in Sydney, the quintessential Australian beer is, in fact, made by Miller at Oil Can Breweries in Fort Worth, Texas, and Albany, Georgia, under the direction of a brewmaster they poached from down under.

Honestly, and this is going to sound like a cop-out, Foster’s tastes like a Miller with an Australian accent. More accurately, it is a good example of one of those East Asian lagers that tastes like beer while managing a lightness that floats above that sour aftertaste of mass-market beers. And in a hot climate with spicy foods, those options are seriously underrated.

There was no telling that to one Leif Nelson, a Manhattan physical therapist and self-proclaimed beer aficionado, who sued Miller for false advertising for giving the impression that the beer was imported from Australia. The case struck me as odd because a) Leif obviously didn’t read the side of the can before filing his lawsuit, and b) what beer aficionado would go to the mat over a brand like Foster’s?

Again, it is a good, light, hot-weather beer, and I thoroughly enjoyed researching this column. But Foster’s Lager is not intended to be discussed at length … and certainly not by lawyers. It goes well with spicy Thai and Vietnamese food and, closer to home, with fried catfish and chicken. You might want to order it in draft or bottles though. While the 24-ounce Oil Can is great fun, it does force you to drink the thing in double time if you want to keep the last half of it cold. And you do.

In the end, Nelson’s lawsuit was dismissed. He admitted that he really liked Foster’s and would keep drinking it if the printing on the can had been more obvious. The crux of the psychological complaint behind the legal one seems to have been a Manhattanite’s desire to feel “authentic” by drinking a beer made by the descendants of convicts exiled from the old Empire. And if you hoist a pint brewed in Georgia, that’s exactly what you are doing.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Conspiracy Brews: What Goes With Nuts on the Beach?

CREDIT: Richard Murff

Honestly, I wished I had brought that bottle of mind-erasing Pusser’s Rum from the other week’s column to the secret island compound where I am now.

While sitting on the beach, attempting to not string two consecutive thoughts together, I was vexed by a local lady holding court on the sand about how the COVID was a hoax. Well, there is some of that going around, but I was laid out on a half-empty beach a whole lot more than six feet away from anyone, save Mrs. M.

Off the cuff, I didn’t trust her — it was the color of her skin. No, not that! Like me, this woman was born white as an Irish potato, but she had spent way too much time in the sun in a body that was, quite frankly, not designed for it. She looked like a leather recliner.

Richard Murff

Memphis Made Uppercut Double IPA

As she was saying, the government needed all those ventilators for the underground child sex-trafficking ring it maintained, see? In this grim world, “underground” was meant literally, and the pediatric sex slaves lived so deep underground that they couldn’t breathe regular air. Hence the government’s need for ventilators. Understand?

Which, believe it or not, brings us to the problem with those light beach beers: They simply aren’t high enough in alcohol to deal with any level of crazy. Not in the proper style, at any rate.

Fortunately, Florida has upped the ante from 3 percent beer — which was great for making pyramids out of the empties but not much else — to that tower of inebriation, 4.5 percent. That may not seem like much, but when some deranged Minnie Mouse of a woman careens from government-run pedo-cave-brothels to the obvious conclusion that any COVID vaccine is, actually, just a human-tracking device, every little bit of bracer helps.

The reason for the social distancing, by the by, is that the signals from said tracking vaccine (which hasn’t been invented yet — true — but let’s not get bogged down with details) get all wonky if we’re closer than six feet. Understand?

Well, ma’am, it is a nice theory, but why would the government go through the time and trouble to inject tracking devices into a citizenry that won’t even go to the bathroom without their GPS-enabled smartphone? Even for a top-secret, evil government scheme, the whole thing just seems, well, redundant. Staring off into the surf as this played out, I vividly remember hoping that the science and athletic departments at Ole Miss had teamed up to bioengineer an honest-to-God, actual landshark that just might emerge from the ocean to devour at least one of us.

The truth is that you can drink all the 4.5 percent Red Stripe that Jamaica can produce (and at one point in my life I was really trying) and that’s still a pretty heavy theory to lay on a man recovering from setting a land-speed record for book writing.

The local Piggly Wiggly had stacks of Apalachicola’s local Oyster City craft beer that weighs in at regular craft beer ABVs. Their IPA is outstanding, but to get a six-pack would have required standing up. What I really needed was Memphis Made’s Uppercut Double IPA — weighing in at a solid 8.5 percent. That, I thought, just might be the thing to brace the medulla in the alcoholic half-grin needed to deal with the nasty vibrations this woman was putting out. It’s bitter as hell, but is nicely leveled off with some lovely citrus notes. It’s pretty good.

As my spine had largely turned to jelly for the duration, I wasn’t getting to the St. George Island Piggly Wiggly, much less making the nine-hour drive back to Memphis. I’m a clever boy, so in the end I just trudged up to the house and settled on a bottle of Mount Gay Rum and a bendy straw.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Goldeneye: Nuance is Dead and Pusser’s Rum

CREDIT: Richard Murff

A couple of years ago I wrote a novel that, in production, attracted the nominal interest of a movie producer. Later came the chatty email informing me that said producer had been righteously flattened by the #MeToo juggernaut, rather taking the wind out of the project’s sails. Later this month, that novel, Haint Punch, is being released. Which is swell. The publishers now want a short story, as a sort of sidecar to the novel.

Obviously, I need to hightail it to my super-secret compound on a barrier island and bat out some tale of intrigue and derring-do. It’s not that secret, honestly; it’s a rental. And there is no law saying that you can’t rent an homage to that most booze-soaked of fair-weather writers, Ian Fleming, and his tropical retreat, Goldeneye.

Richard Murff

Nuance is Dead and Pusser’s Rum

But what to quaff? These sandy climes always make me think of old sailing ships, so I opted to try some super-hoppy ale — like the Navy used to dole out. These ales were fairly high in alcohol because, in those days, battleships were just barely seaworthy, multi-berth coffins. The nice fellow at the Cash Saver pointed me to Meddlesome’s Nuance is Dead New England Style IPA. With a name like that, I wasn’t expecting a subtle brew, but if anyone was going to over-hop an IPA, why not Meddlesome?

Pouring it out into my rinsed glass, it was cloudy. Not peering through briny sea water cloudy, but like looking through … bread. The brewery’s motto is “Never Settle,” and this one didn’t. Not that that put me off. The slogan for the old Murffbrau was, “It’s not real beer, unless you can chew it.” So I dove in and …

These are the people behind 201 Hoplar, one of Memphis’ great craft brews. For all I know, this might be the cosmic ideal of a New England IPA. Nuance is Dead wasn’t bad, it was just too much. I had been warned, “This stuff is so hoppy it’s hard to get in the growler.”

The aftertaste is a little “clingy.” The weird thing is that the longer I thought about it, the more I wanted to try it again. I also wanted to shave my tongue. Make of that what you will.

I’m headed down to my poor man’s Goldeneye to bat out a masterpiece, so I need to concentrate. To cut the taste, I experimented with something called Pusser’s Rum — Original Admiralty Strength: Gunpowder Proof. I try not to get too excited about packaging, but this struck the right vibe. Fleming was a Navy man. The gal at Buster’s described it as the kick of moonshine and smooth of rum. I hate moonshine, so I said, “I don’t think so.”

Without missing a beat, she said, “Well, we sell it in a larger bottle, so if you’re unsure, this one is clearly the one you should be buying.” Fortune 500 companies pay top dollar to teach sales people how to just hurtle over objections like that. Well done.

I can assure you that Pusser’s Rum cut the taste of that loaf of beer I drank earlier. She wasn’t kidding about the moonshine kick or a good rum taste either. It’s a wallop of a dram; Mrs M. could smell it on the far end of the sofa. Drinking it neat really is like gunpowder, and over ice the whole thing opens up. Still a bit hot, but velvety too. An intriguing combination.

I have no one to blame, the warnings were right there on the label. Like the Nuance is Dead, the Gunpowder Proof rum was good — certainly worth a try — but just a little too much for me. Neither was the sort of thing that a very nearly award-winning writer quaffs before typing “It was a dark and stormy night.” Both just might work wonders, however, after typing “The End.”

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Four for Summer: A Nice Flight of Brews for a Hot Day

I just couldn’t write another column from my patio. And tales of drunkenness and derring-do across Hell’s half-acre are hard to come by when you haven’t been anywhere lately. So, there I was, in the middle of the afternoon on a Thursday — surrounded by exactly zero of my closest friends — out in front of Hammer & Ale, drinking a flight of summer beers.

I was plenty distanced, socially speaking. A keen observer might even say I was all lonesome. Sunlight is supposed to put a hurt on the COVID, and there was plenty of it turned up high. I just couldn’t reckon how to drink a beer with a bandana tied around my face or take notes with my glasses all fogged.

Breaking regulation, I went face-nude into the first beer of the flight. I’ve reviewed High Cotton’s Thai Pale Ale before, but it bears revisiting when a brutal combination of heat and humidity makes the weather go all “Bangkok.” It’s a beer singularly made for the climate, with both flavor and presence, while staying light on the palate. I don’t recall it getting bitter in the heat, but that may be because it was a small glass and I really quaffed it. Although, if you really wanted an authentic Thai beer buzz, you wouldn’t be drinking ale but a light pilsner.

And speaking of light, my second stop on the flight was a Frost Kölsch. Now, this is a great light craft: refreshing, crisp, and a civilized ABV. The sort of thing that Mrs. M might go in for, had she not been heroically called back into the office, like a grown-up. A few summers ago, I was down in Birmingham, and nearly every brewery in the city had its version of Kölsch. It’s so perfect for the summer heat — and for people not sold on craft beer — that I’m always a little surprised that more locals don’t brew up a version of it.

For the next beer, Hammer & Ale’s David Smith pulled me something called Lovebird, from Nashville’s Jackalope Brewing. This was an exercise in trust: It’s a wheat beer flavored with strawberries and blueberries. I’m not an unqualified fan of wheat beers and am really suspicious of fruit beers, but this one works. And works well. The wheat base and the fruit play nicely together because the brewers have kept it light. The real key to Lovebird is that Jackalope has used real fruit in their brewing process — as opposed to a syrup — which keeps the after-taste clean and not too sweet and clingy. Which is probably the part I can’t stand about fruity beers.

Smith also suggested a limited-edition IPA from Hutton & Smith over in Chattanooga — Locked Lips. Now the good people at H&S pass themselves off as granola beer nerds. And, quite frankly, that is exactly what you want in a brewer. A word of caution — don’t drink it outside. If I have one problem with Locked Lips, it hinged on a tactical error on my part: I saved it until the last to sample.

Taste wise, it is very good — big, hoppy, and balanced, without being bitter. Or at least it doesn’t start out that way. The issue is drinking outside when it’s 96 degrees. When it warms up, Locked Lips gets “bigger” and starts to boom the way those stronger IPAs will. It’s not even that it ever got bad, just a little too big to be drinking on an unshaded patio that used to be a parking lot. Or inside a steam-injected oven, for that matter.

I only wish that I still smoked. Sitting alone in the middle of the day drinking and sweating with a cigarette in my brooding hand, I might be able to pass myself off as some sort of poor man’s philosopher. Without one, I just looked like a sweating, friendless idiot.

Cheers.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Bohemia: When in Nicaragua, Why Not Have a Mexican Beer?

Just how the brain — or mine, at any rate — jumps from one thought to memory and back again is something of a mystery. Standing there looking at a six-pack of Bohemia beer, bandana tied around half my face, and hearing lots of talk about curfews and protests — if I’d had a bicycle chain handy, it would have been just like the demonstrations in Nicaragua.

I’d woken up in a cell-like room in a hotel in Managua to the sound of lively Latin music. The city was desperately on edge. El Presidente had stacked the courts with toadies, won himself an illegal third term, and started going around calling himself Comandante. Never a good sign. Still, it sounded like a party outside my door.

The hotel was a traditional sort of four-sided building, built around an open patio — with no hot water. The rain was coming down in sheets, as it does almost daily between May and October. The protests had been raging, despite the weather, as President Daniel Ortega had scrapped veteran pensions for — and I’m not making this up — fruit baskets. The old veterans couldn’t wait until October for the rains to go away, and a bunch of bananas wouldn’t do the trick.

I opened my door into the steaming mist and found in an enclave a bunch of women dressed up for a party, all swaying around a CD player, dancing and laughing. They were drinking Bohemia out of an iced Styrofoam cooler. My first thought was to ask them to turn the damn racket down, but it looked like a bridal shower or something. Honestly, I’d applaud anyone who could muster up the attitude to throw a party in that mess. The ladies offered me one, but what little Spanish I know was gleaned in hospitals and I couldn’t see how that would strike the right vibe. So I borrowed a pair of earplugs from my father in the room next door and tried to go back to sleep.

Dad speaks excellent Spanish. It was Father’s Day, and he wanted to see whatever it is that I do for a living, so we’d hightailed it down to Nicaragua and smacked into some social unrest. As you do.

Later, we popped into what had become our regular Chinese restaurant, sensibly called Restaurante Chino. The television, usually on the Spanish-language sci-fi channel, was now on the government Sandinista channel, and the place was empty, save one large table surrounded by Nicaraguan bureaucrats and Chinese “engineers” discussing a largely unworkable canal project intended to rip through the center of the country and destroy Lake Nicaragua. They were drinking bottles of Tsingtao.

Nothing against Tsingtao, but I liked the ladies’ style better and ordered a Bohemia. It’s a pilsner style, but not really the watered-down hot-weather version. Though it’s made in Mexico, Bohemia is a willfully European style, named after a beautiful region of the Czech Republic — and they still use Czech hops.

Stateside, if you want a Latin-American beer, it’s likely to be Mexican, and if you’re in a restaurant (remember those?), it’s likely to be a Corona or Dos Equis. Bohemia, though, edges out Dos Equis and leaves Corona far behind. Locally, High Cotton has a good Mexican lager, which stands up better than either.

When I find myself someplace interesting, I like to drink the local brew. While there is a good national rum, I’m not sure there actually is a Nicaraguan beer. After a devastating earthquake in the ’70s and a civil war in the ’80s, the entire city is a DIY project with the aesthetic of a parking garage. I asked one lady, the wife of a bank president, for her mailing address, and she gave me a P.O. box in Miami.

Still, the people managed, as they do. After it was all over, they threw a party and opened a beer. Probably a Bohemia.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Comeback Beer: Sampling Ghost River’s Zippin Pippin

The beard is coming in a slightly different shade than I remember. I may have started out to look like Papa Hemingway, but after the last two months I’ve been starting to feel more like Col. Kurtz. The city may be opening up a little, but that stint in our collective closet under the stairs has left its mark on us. It didn’t strike me how much we’ve changed over the course of the quarantine until I was leaving the grocery store the other day. A young lady, probably a college student, was about to drop her sack while wrestling with the car door. She called for her friend who was climbing in the passenger seat but, alas, she was soul-deep into some virtual drama on her phone and didn’t hear.

I went full Galahad and popped over, opening the door for her while simultaneously steadying her bag without letting go of mine. She thanked me sheepishly, and I went on my way. Which was when I caught sight of myself in the reflection of the back window: sunglasses, wild, uncut hair curling out from under a baseball cap, and I hadn’t yet pulled the red bandana down from over the rest of my face. Back in the olden days (read: March), suddenly appearing behind a lady looking like that with a bandit mask would have earned me eardrums pierced by a girly shriek and eyes full of mace in the bargain. I’d have deserved it, too. The new normal isn’t exactly normal.

What I had in my bag was a six-pack of Ghost River Brewing Co.’s Zippin Pippin IPA. I was going to pick out a far more exotic brew to review, but this was something of a comfort response; my first craft beer love was IPA. More than that, the name Zippin Pippin takes me back to a time when I had little to no concept of personal space and went around breathing on people with impunity. Perhaps these are rose-tinted memories. Even back then, I remember standing in line for my favorite roller coaster and socially distancing myself from the kid who’d shown up wearing nothing but his Spider-Man Underoos and a pair of knock-off Converse sneakers.

I got home and told Mrs. M about the encounter, and she helpfully pointed out that the baseball hat in question was from Sewanee, which is just shy of ominous. “But it’s really faded,” said I with a hint of sinister darkness.

“Because you wear it sailing!” she said. “Where’s the menace in that?”Now how would she have known that?

No one here is interested in exactly how I lost that particular point to Mrs. M.

At any rate, Zippin Pippin is a good year-round beer — a little more amber-copper in color than what you might expect, but a fine, solid IPA. There is something almost piney in the scent, with a good citrus zing to it. It is hoppy, but without something to prove. Having said that, what bitterness it has tends to linger on the palate. Something lovely for the hop-heads, but come Fourth of July, should you find yourself standing around in the 98-degree heat for five hours, it might make you want to shave your tongue. With an ABV of 6.9 percent, after a few hours, you might do it.

Like its namesake, Zippin Pippin is a classic — the comfort of the familiar with enough of a wallop to get us through this weird “are we or aren’t we” phase of the quarantine. And we’re going to need it, because re-entry is going to be tough. I mean that for all of us, not just those of us currently stress-testing the structural integrity of our pants.

As a birthday present, a friend of mine was given a highball glass with the company logo on it by his boss — you know, for a Zoom meeting cocktail.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Memphis Sands is a Great Festival Beer … Even If There Aren’t Any

It was a cruel joke on the part of Mother Nature. No, not the one where we accidently import the weapons-grade fauna from East Asia — twice. I mean the wheeze where we are blessed with a perfect week for Memphis in May Music Fest — comfortable, sunny but not hot — and have to cancel because it was just a hair too COVID-y. We’ll try again in October.

Barbeque Fest has been moved to late September, but we aren’t inviting Ghana back to dinner until spring of 2021. Live at the Garden has gone quiet for the duration, and there will be no rip-roaring “Hip Hips!” from Carnival. All we’re left with is swarms of murder hornets. Swell.

The truth is, in spring and summer Memphis is a festival. Which is something I’d never really thought about until this year. Like naptime in kindergarten, you never know what you have until you’ve lost it. With the city opening up somewhat, can we recreate that Memphis festival vibe at home? Well, not really. The whole point of a righteous festival hootenanny is to leave home and pack yourself butt-to-flank in a sweating mob.

Unless you are pining for a second act of the COVID shuffle, don’t do this.

You can, however, get the taste of a Memphis festival at home — with a local lager. If you are going to be a purist about it, you could head to the smallest room in the house with a space heater, invite everyone you’re quarantined with to pack in, and drink enormous Natty Lights from those cheap paper cups and hope that you finish before the bottom drops out. Bring in a few thousand of your pet mosquitos and it’ll be just like Tom Lee Park!

I wouldn’t do this either, to be honest.

A better option is to mask-up and go get a curbside growler or a few cans of Memphis Sands, which is whipped up by Wiseacre. It’s a German Helles style — and why not? The Germans invented wholesome day-drinking with light, effervescent, and low-alcohol beer. Back in the old country, this was considered a perfectly normal family-friendly activity. This is important these days if your carousing is limited to your own home. It’s hard to shake the little blighters.

If you are going to day-drink — and are someone who still plans to be employed at the end of all this — Sands isn’t a bad choice. Both the beer and that groovy Wiseacre artwork are inspired by our famous aquifers that supply the softest water in the country. (On a non-beer note, this soft water is why you’ll get better results from dish and clothes washers if you use a lot less detergent.) I digress.

Sands is a light, crisp, and refreshing lager. Mostly it is beautifully simple: Pilsner malt, lager yeast, and that lovely Memphis water. It is low on bitterness and has an ABV of 5.1 percent. To be clear, all local beers are made with that lovely Memphis water, but Wiseacre has turned the can into something of an homage, so it’s hard to miss.

Either way, it’s the perfect, simple, summer style and is probably what you wish your festival beer tasted like when the wood smoke wafts through the crowd and fills your nose on a warm day surrounded by all the best pork in the world. I’m going to make my own by throwing meat from Charlie’s on a grill from Bishop’s Hearth and Home that’ll smoke up the back yard while I sip a great hometown beer.

Get yours from wherever you want, but do make it local. If we keep our heads about us — despite bat soup and the murder hornets — we might just return to the place where day-drinking was for the weekends. And after breakfast.

Or at least it will for you, gentle reader. I do this for a living.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

The Greatest Beer Ever … I Think

CREDIT: Richard Murff

I was dancing with some gal who, remarkably, kept getting shorter — or maybe I was getting taller. It was hard to tell. Normally it takes a great deal of social pressure to get me to dance, but I was celebrating the creation of the greatest batch of beer in the drink’s long, illustrious history — and I was only a sophomore. Murffbrau, usually a bit on this side of awful, had joined the greats.

For this batch, I’d pulled out all the stops, including getting a big stove-top pot, as opposed to trying to make the stuff in a bathtub.

While I worked, my roommate — we’ll call him Alex — walked in with a bag of not-quite-fine brown powder and tried to sell it to me as cocaine. This was a little weird because I was never much of a drug guy. Although there was a lot of the stuff whirling around Tuscaloosa in those days, so I knew what it looked like and, if we’re going to be honest, what it smelled like.

Richard Murff

headier times.

“It’s brown,” I said. “It looks like you crushed up a few Ritalin tablets from that bottle on your dresser?”

“Naw man. This is the real shit.”

Alex was one of those people who acted and sounded reasonably normal until he got high. Actually, he didn’t have to be high — the mere subject of drugs would do it. Mention the word marijuana and he’d sound like the pothead in some campy teen flick and develop a passable Keith Richards stagger. Then his mother would call and he’d sound like he’d just come back from the library.

I passed on the “cocaine” and went back to beer-making.

I’d bottled the wort and waited a few weeks for the Murffbrau to reach its regrettable potential, so I was ready to dive in. Which was about the time that Alex showed up. He called me “Bra” and managed to drag it out across two syllables, so he was full of drugs — or full of something, at any rate. As his sleepy-looking girlfriend drifted back to his room to take a nap with the lava lamp, Alex performed the obligatory head check to make sure there weren’t any narcs hiding in the sofa, and dropped his voice. “We got a lot of ‘shrooms. You shoulda come with. Wanna buy some?” He threw a suspiciously clean bag on the Goodwill coffee table between us.

Now, having a roommate who is a small-time drug dealer has its pitfalls, but at least it’s bohemian and vaguely dangerous. Having a roommate who is a small-time pretend drug dealer is just stupid. I was sure the goon had gone to the farmer’s market, bought a pillowcase of shiitake mushrooms for $1.40, and was now attempting to sell them for $80 a baggie. Which he swore was the “street value.” Tuscaloosa had paved roads and internal plumbing back then, but nothing the urban vernacular would define as “street.”

I’d had enough. “So,” I said, opening the bag, “you wouldn’t want me to do this?” I crammed several handfuls of mushrooms into my maw and washed it all down with a cold, chewy homebrew. Alex was still yelling about how much money I owed him, as I left for a mid-afternoon stroll.

I have a friend who still makes fun of the way I was dancing some nine hours later. I had reason to celebrate, though, for I’d just made the greatest batch of beer I’d ever made; that anyone ever had, for that matter. My technique surpassed those of German brewmasters in their lederhosen, Belgian monks in their cowls, and the English brewers in their tweed. The girl with whom I was dancing (who by this point was only three apples high) left me for some fellow who had not perfected the art of brewing that summer. But the great ones are always abandoned on the verge of triumph.

It was worth it — if only for the beer. I only wish I could remember how I’d done it.