Author: Richard Murff

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Murffbrau: Outlaw Brewing in Alabama

I probably should have known something was up when the place didn’t have a name on the door. I’d driven in from Tuscaloosa and went to one of those blank, nondescript office buildings that look like they used to be a hotel. According to the Bob Wayne song, “Everything’s Legal in Alabama,” this should have been fine. The truth is, no one ought to rely on outlaw country singers for legal advice. The brew supply shop didn’t have a sign because home-brewing was illegal in the state until 2013. I was in college long before 2013.

Murffbrau was an institution, started at the University of Alabama by my brother and — when I inherited the equipment — continued by me. It was flavorful and unfiltered. A little chewy for some, but it tasted like carbonated bourbon and was a mild hallucinogenic.

When most people say a beer is unfiltered, craft beer lovers mean a modicum of cloudiness and say things like “It’s authentic.” Murffbrau was, well … Have you ever had that live kombucha where the label tells you NOT to shake it up because you don’t want to disturb that half an inch of settled, all-natural sludge at the bottom? With this stuff, that’s what I mean by “unfiltered.” You really needed to pour the stuff into a glass slowly, to leave the crud in the bottle. Later you could use the leftover stuff to spackle drywall.

While Murffbrau was top-fermented, serving it chilled was ill-advised. Frigid is more like it. Cold temperature is an effective hedge against an awful-tasting beer. It doesn’t do anything to the beer as much as it does to your taste buds. Getting the temperature right — that is, to very, very cold — was crucial. This is hard to do in the shower.

In the working adult world, problem drinking is relatively easy to pinpoint. You might be able to hide it, but the mere fact that you are covering up your drinking makes the problem fairly obvious. In the undergraduate world, with its weird schedules and persistent lack of reality, this is trickier. A beer at lunch isn’t much of a red flag, but if you didn’t wake up until 11:30 a.m. …

It’s okay to tie one on during the weekend, but if the weekend starts at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday. … Well, you see the slippery slope. We had a general rule of thumb to tell whether someone was just having a drink or if they were drankin’: If you brought booze into the shower, it was pretty damn clear you were on a mission. The parameters of said mission may have been hazy, but you were on one, dammit!

So there I was, standing in the shower, in exactly what I came into the world wearing, with a pewter tankard balanced precariously on the soap dish (I’d been banned from breaking any more glasses in the shower), when in walks someone from down the hall who took one look at the scene and disappeared, only to come back with a Murffbrau of his own. And this story, I realize, is getting weirder in the retelling.

Getting back to the point, I stocked one of the old Dr. Pepper machines from the early ’60s with Murffbrau because it was fortifying and I’d told the girls that my pewter mug was stylish and clever. The hitch was that if brewing your own beer in Alabama was illegal, the selling of it must have been more so. But I just couldn’t resist. Because unless you were from California, in those days, craft beer meant homebrew. If you got sick of Miller or Bud, you were on your own.

Sure, today’s crafts, made in sterile conditions by people who know what they are doing, are better by every conceivable metric, but there really was something satisfying about owning your beer. Of course, we’d do well to remember the last line of “Everything’s Legal in Alabama”: … “just don’t get caught.”

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Cider Flight: Weathering the Season’s Apple Brews

All that Americana foolishness the wee ones are taught about Johnny Appleseed isn’t entirely BS — just about 65 percent. In truth, there was a fellow named John Chapman who introduced apple trees in groves to the west — back when that meant Ohio. The fruit he was slinging around Hell’s half acre, however, wasn’t for wholesome snacks and pie. They were little crabby things — cider apples — best used for tying one on.

With the cooler fall weather, of course it was up to DJ, Memphis’ favorite Irishman, to throw an All-American Ciderfest over at his pub, Celtic Crossing.

“It was my wife’s idea,” he pointed out. I feel you brother. In my house, the good ideas generally are, as well.

Sipping cider at Celtic

They’d had a Ciderfest last year, and along with periodic Scotch and bourbon and gin tastings, as well as World Cup-inspired beers, Celtic is a pretty good place to pop in and have something you’ve never tried.

“DJ,” I said, “you really love a festival.”

“Well, if you’re going to own an Irish bar,” he replied, “you’d better learn to throw a party.”

In these unsettled times, there is a certain genius to that. I mean, the Irish basically colonized half the large cities east of the Mississippi without firing a shot. They drank their way in.

For Ciderfest, the weather broke the habit of a century and cooperated with very fall-like temperatures on a crisp, beautiful day. Football was on the widescreen, and pale, fizzy flights were passed around all over the place — drawn from 26 different bottled ciders, and four on draft.

The flights are a great way to go, even though DJ and I both agreed that, with our generation, a flight was a way to try something new and decide which of the four you were going to stick with on the night’s epic journey to get plowed. These younger kids, though, will order flights and then more flights, sampling and tasting. According to DJ, “They want to own the experience. See all of what is out there. It’s really a better way than what we did.”

“Oh God, without a doubt,” I think I said.

Memphis’ own Long Road Cider was slinging a clean, crisp, and dry tipple called Lagerhead — which is worth the trip out there to try a pint. Of course, the big names were there, like Angry Orchard, with an unfiltered cider that tasted unfiltered, a rosé that tasted like a rosé, and an extra crisp that tasted … Well, you get the picture. Evidently the trend of esoteric craft-brew names hasn’t gripped the cider community just yet.

Then things did get creative. I’d had something that had been cleverly christened a Black & Wood earlier that week; it’s a Guinness and Woodchuck cider. This concoction is the artistic love child of a traditional Black & Tan and a shandy: The whole thing gets lightened up with the cider, but it isn’t as sweet as a beer doused in lemonade.

Woodchuck’s Pear Cider is another off-the-wall choice. It’s not what you’re probably expecting: It’s very good and lacks the bite of an apple cider. It goes down smooth, almost weirdly so. Mrs. M liked it, although she stuck with her Bud Light.

There was a cider-inspired food menu, but we managed to miss it, although at home I marinate pork in cider all the time, and it works beautifully. Sitting in Celtic, watching Cooper Avenue go one way then the other, we had the bacon-wrapped shrimp — which are beautifully non-greasy and will go with whatever you’re drinking — and the fries. Mrs. M has strong opinions on French fries, and these were in in her top five. Although it should be pointed out that the lady has been known, from to time, to change her mind on things.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

EMERGENCY DRINKING BEER. Why not?

As a former advertising guy, I’m something like the fabled eunuch in the whorehouse when it comes to the charms of most marketing gimmicks. I’m fairly immune. Don’t get me wrong, I do love a creative presentation, but I know that it can be a diversionary tactic for pretty unremarkable stuff. Still, this one got me.

Strolling along in the beer aisle of the Monteagle Piggly Wiggly, I spied something unexpected in an age of wild, swirling craft beer marketing. Perhaps it was that the design had the same stripped-down minimalist motif, color, and font of my first book. I hadn’t thought about it in years — other than when someone in Brazil bought a copy about six months ago — but there I was looking, and that unsung masterpiece had been rendered as a beer can. It read Emergency Drinking Beer in big, sensible letters and not much else, except for “All Purpose Blend” across the top. Well, okay, that’s clever. I’ll bite.

The design is actually a send-up of the emergency drinking water Anheuser-Busch donates for disaster relief, and the beer is put out by Georgia’s Wild Heaven Brewing. As it turns out, one of the founders, Nick Purdy, spent 15 years at the helm of Paste magazine, and the other, Eric Johnson, is from Athens, Georgia, and claims he could have had a career in music — which is probably not remotely true. We can, however, make the assumption that these two named a brewery after an R.E.M. song. That also got me, so there was no way I wouldn’t give it a whirl.

And why not? I was headed to a tailgate at Sewanee, so if it was truly awful, some undergrad would take it off my hands. Such is the “intensity” of the University of the South football program that I never actually knew who the Tigers were playing or who won the game, for that matter. Then again, neither did my daughter, and she lives there.

Wild Heaven calls Emergency Drinking Beer a “Pils-Style session ale,” but I’m not sure how they’re using the word ale because they also call it a crisp pilsner (a lager) married to a traditional gose. As you can imagine, it is sort of all over the place. It’s light but pretty hazy for a pilsner. It has the medium carbonation and light, lemony finish that comes from citrus zest, like an ale. There is a hint of a gose underneath, but it’s a bit lost in the all-purpose blend.

Here, we need to be careful not to dissect beer too much because it ruins the alchemy. Yes, there is a science and a craft, in both beer and wine, but very often the parts just inexplicably fall together, and no one seems to know the reason why.

Nothing I’ve written here looks like I’m headed to a positive review, and I wouldn’t suggest thinking about the beer too hard because when you analyze it, EDB comes off badly. Yet this is a pretty good beer. Not terribly exciting, but a fine can of … something … for a tailgate or mowing the lawn. At 4.4 percent ABV, it is a session drinker for a hot day. And if you are going to contribute to the delinquency of a minor by handing one or two off to some Sewanee sophomores, well then, you haven’t contributed too much delinquency — just a manageable smidge.

I understand that Emergency Drinking Beer has several seasonal variations of its all-purpose blend that include varieties like watermelon, berry citrus, and tropical. None of these were available when I strolled through the Piggly Wiggly, which is probably for the best. The beer isn’t so unique as to likely survive being monkeyed around with like that. And it makes me think of that abomination and sin against both beer and the Belgians: Bud Light Orange.

I’m sure the good people at Wild Heaven stopped short of that. At least I hope so.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Two Fine Farmhouse Ales From High Cotton and Wiseacre

It was one of my favorite styles for its earthy simplicity and clean finish, an Old World beer brewed to be refreshing and not much else. I’m talking about a farmhouse ale. As the parade of short-run craft beers has rolled by, I’d forgotten about it altogether. Fortunately, you can find a great saison in Memphis; you’ve just got to know where to go.

Farmhouse ale is a family that includes styles like bière de garde, gueuze, or sahti. A saison is a farmhouse ale, but not all farmhouse ales are saisons. Got it? They are generally earthy, tart, and dry. Beer writers are always using the word “funky” to describe them. They were originally served as part of the pay package, what we’d call (limited) benefits, of the seasonal farmworkers — called Saisons. Paying people in beer wasn’t that weird in a world before shrink wrap or Advil.

By most accounts, the style was developed in Wallonia — the French-speaking part of what is now Belgium. That settles very little on the national pride front because beer is a lot older than modern Europe. Belgium itself was only thought up by the British in 1830 as a hilarious way to annoy the French.

What annoys me is how hard it is to get a pint in Memphis. The grocery stores I tried don’t have it, so I had to go to the Mothership — or more to the point, the taproom. Both Wiseacre and High Cotton have their expressions of saison on tap, and Wiseacre has it in a six-pack. They are both very good, and you should try both because they taste absolutely nothing alike.

I headed down to High Cotton in the “It’s not Downtown, but you can see it from here” Edge District. Their version, called, helpfully enough, Saison, is an earthy brew, which certainly delivers on the “funk” (not to be confused with the “skunk”).

To test the intended parameters of the beer, I drank outside where, just days before the start of fall, it was 94 degrees outside. It passed the test, because it was refreshing as hell. It is more spicy than tart, with little hops taste and a big, malty bloom at the end of it. If you are a fan of rye beers, this is probably right up your alley.

That seems about right for a farmhouse ale. In its original incarnations, no one was pedantically scouring the countryside for the finest ingredients, which accounts for its earthiness. Farmers often used unsold fruit that wouldn’t make it through the winter, which accounts for the tartness. It’s not terribly high in alcohol because you needed those seasonal workers to get up off their backsides when lunch was over.

Wiseacre’s saison is called Tarasque. It’s named after a mythical creature that was a vivisection that included a lion, a bear, a turtle, and a scorpion. Legend has it that a French nun sang it to sleep. Tarasque, the good people at Wiseacre tell us, leans toward the French style. My middle name is Jaubert, so I guess I do as well.

What Tarasque lacks in funk, it makes up for in tartness and a clean finish. True to the style, it gives the hops a break and has a great citrus zing to it.

Wiseacre’s saison lacks that big, malty bloom you find on the back end of the High Cotton version. It’s lighter on the palate, less of an aftertaste.

Despite both being true to style, comparing the two has an apples-to-oranges feel. For me personally, I feel about that big malt finish the way I feel about a fine cigar. It’s not that I dislike it, but I want to like it more than I actually do.

For my money, I’d buy a six-pack of the Tarasque. If you can find it. It might be my new favorite beer, at least for the moment. I can be fickle. I lean toward the French.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

The Devil’s Harvest Breakfast IPA

I love the scenery in Oxford this time of year, although I’m not sure that they like the look of Memphis at the moment. Which is the thing about the kickoff of the football season — every year we all brim with the optimism of any new venture that we haven’t yet managed to screw up entirely. For half the football fans out there, however, that lofty confidence will crash and burn by the end of opening day. It’s enough to drive you to drink.

Still, as they say at Ole Miss, “We may lose the game, but we never lose the party.” Yeah, it’s kind of stupid, but they (we) have a point. Really, is it any worse than the University of Memphis’ unofficial war cry: “Actshulllly, we beat UT that time. Remember? Really. Google it.”

It was in this air of fashionable defeat that I found myself in Ajax’s Diner on Oxford’s idyllic square, ordering what promised to be a great morning-after beer for the team whose unsullied optimism of opening week had just been, well, sullied. It was Southern Prohibition’s Devil’s Harvest Breakfast IPA. It’s the “breakfast” part that made me think of someone suffering through the hangover of something untoward: a night that really went your way — or a gameday that really didn’t.

In my experience, Southern Prohibition Brewing out of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, knows what it’s doing: They retired their Jack the Sipper ESB, one of the few really good ESBs I’ve had on this side of the Atlantic. It’s a great warm-weather drinker. High Cotton makes a pretty good one as well.

Devil’s Harvest Breakfast IPA is a clean and refreshing ale. I’ve been all over the beer map this summer, and I’d forgotten how much I like IPAs, although this version isn’t entirely true to the traditional style. Here, the hops have more of a grapefruit zig than a heady floral pop. For all that, Devil’s Harvest has a great IPA aroma to it, and they’ve cut down on the bitterness. I’m assuming here that the “breakfast” part has more to do with the relatively light 4.9 percent ABV rather than the tart grapefruit finish. This is not the ale for drowning your sorrows the morning after. Although I can definitely see settling down after finals to show a couple of pints who’s boss, it would be a mistake to call this the mimosa of beer.

The end result is an IPA that stands up on its own for a pint or two and pairs well with big flavors of heavier fare. I hadn’t planned on getting the red beans and rice at Ajax, but it’s hard to resist. It’s fantastic and comes with a wedge of cornbread, too, so if you find yourself facing a sudden and unplanned carbo-load, this IPA is a pretty good choice. The pour is cloudy, and it has a good collar on it, but the truth is that Devil’s Harvest is light on the palate. I’ll leave it to you to make the call on breakfast.

Something vexed me though. Crossing the square, I noted a dozen or so young men in blaze-orange jumpsuits and shackles. I realize that quick defeat makes a team rethink its season strategy, but kidnapping the UT football team and chaining them up didn’t seem entirely sporting. Sort of like a late hit — except with multiple felony counts.

But I digress.

I was having lunch with a friend who has a real job, so he was drinking water. Devil’s Harvest was a hell of a lot more interesting than that, although he pointed out that the big building in the center of the square was the courthouse and those handcuffed fellas were prisoners, not the UT line after all.

I suppose it really is important to be a good sport.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Al Rayess: Drinking Lebanese Beer in Iraq

CREDIT: Facebook

You’ve never really seen the sunny Shi’a south in Iraq until you’ve seen it at midnight, when it’s still 91 degrees. It looks pretty much like you are picturing it right now, unless you haven’t turned on the news for a decade. Then it’s hard to explain.

Earlier that evening, I’d attended a meeting of community leaders discussing the establishment of a regional medical center and had managed to accidentally get myself on national television. Which is why I always travel with a blazer or a suit: You really don’t want to get caught in an international incident and not be properly turned out.

This was all pre-ISIS, back when no one was taking the civil war all that seriously. In the north, around Baghdad, you could buy booze. Despite the U.S. “withdrawal,” our people are all over the place there. Things were a little trickier in the south, where there were what we’d call Blue Laws. And like drinking in a dry county, life was easier if you knew a guy. During a civil war, everyone has a guy.

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Which is how I wound up with some of the nicest, most interesting people I’d ever met, drinking Lebanese beer in the back of a café. It was called Al Rayess, and it tasted, more or less, like an Amstel Light. I know this because there was some of that in the cooler as well — imported courtesy of the U.S. Armed Forces. How the café owner managed to get his hands on the stuff way down south, I have no idea. It seemed rude to ask, but I suspect there was a quartermaster sergeant somewhere in the Green Zone sending some fat checks back to the family — and more power to him.

The Arabs prize eloquence almost as much as Americans sneer at it. A formal debate is like dueling orations, theatrical and profound, and to Westerners, a bit stifling. Then you break rank and head out to some café that’s supposed to be closed. But you know a guy and you have a beer and it tastes like an Amstel Light.

The eloquence is still there, the poetic allusions and the vivid imagery, but the stifling orations evaporate. That’s when the theatrics get replaced with humor. While I was a lad at CBHS, for instance, they failed to lean into the part in the Epic of Gilgamesh where the priestess of Inanna has sex with a feral man in order to make him human. And then gets him drunk. Now that’s funny.

And I was drinking the best beer in the world. Not the one with the innovative take on a traditional style, or the most traditional style for that matter. Sometimes where the hops come from or how its malted makes less difference than a clean, light cooler that tastes like Amstel Light on a hot night, in a not strictly legal café, taking shelter from a world gone mean and unspeakably cruel.

And why not? Al Rayess is a refreshing beer, crisp and light. Fortunately, my translator, whom I’ll call Rafiq, was drinking a non-alcoholic Almaza NA, so while the conversation relaxed, we were still making ourselves understood. I asked Rafiq how the Almaza was, and he gave me the squinting-and-rocking-the-hand-back-and-forth motion. Apparently the “This’ll do” sign is universal, across all languages and beers.

They thanked America for overthrowing Saddam Hussein, which they either couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Either way, we did, and they were grateful. Like eloquence, Arabs also prize good manners, again almost as much as Americans like to sneer at them. So they were very polite when they asked why, despite the withdrawal, the Americans were still around? They liked me personally, they said, and asked — still smiling but not entirely joking — if we could please just go away.

I drank to that. Oh, boy, did I drink to that.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

A.M. Alt: The Perils of Day-Drinking

I popped into Buster’s to find an interesting growler from their Pegas system. The nice fella behind the counter told me that, through some voodoo or another, the system would keep a growler fresh and zippy for weeks. I told him that I’d need to take his word for it because while I’m usually on top of things, deadline-wise, I didn’t have a couple of weeks. I’d waited dangerously close to filing, and I had a previous engagement that night, so drinking it then was ill-advised.

Which is why I woke up Friday morning, sat down at my desk, and pounded 32 ounces of Hutton & Smith Altbier — at 7:15 a.m.

Altbier is German for “old beer,” which employs a top-fermentation method similar to English ales, but then is matured at a lower temperature for a cleaner finish. With the advent of “lagering,” most German brewers switched to the bottom-fermenting method like the one used in Pilsners. Hence, it’s considered an old-style beer — which, in Germany, is pretty old. It’s a style popular in Westphalia (Peace of Westphalia, 1648, ended the 30 Years’ War; that’s probably why the name is familiar) and almost nowhere else (who really cares about the 30 Years’ War?).

Of course, this makes it perfect fodder for traditional-minded craft breweries like Hutton & Smith. Based in Chattanooga, H&S is named for a) James Hutton, whose Theory of the Earth explained in 18th-century glory the enormous spans of time over which geological changes occur, and b) William Smith, who produced the first geological map of the Earth. Evidently, the good people at H&S decided these intellectual exercises required a fair bit of mental lubrication and named a brewery after them.

Which is no stranger than my scheme to quaff the growler of ancient Teutonic brew for breakfast, maintain enough focus to write this column, get it off to my long-suffering editor, Mr. V, then meet my father for lunch. There were difficulties with the day’s plan. First, that said column would get lost in the increasingly regular dump of lunatic fringe hate mail bombarding Mr. V of late. And second, that after a lifetime of disappointing experience with his fifth child, Dad would likely note that I had had a bellyful of beer before noon on a weekday.

“Big beers” refer to high-gravity or high-alcohol beers, and, at 5 percent ABV, H&S On-Sight Alt beer doesn’t qualify. Still, it has a weapons-grade beer taste and feel. This is what beer tasted like when you were 10 and snuck a snort while your dad was berating the lawnmower. Or at least it’s what you thought it tasted like, except this time it’s pretty damn good. You don’t have to put on a cool face for your older brothers and pretend to like it. This beer is like thinking back to some childhood fear and realizing that Dad was, in fact, a pretty mellow monster with interesting thoughts on the Rolling Stones: “Man, it’s the imperfection in Gimme Shelter that makes it perfect! Can’t you see that?”

That big, malty bloom followed by a clean finish becomes a real pleasure. Yet for all that big German beer flavor, it is remarkably light and crisp. There is a little more to it than a Pilsner and not so much going on as a hoppy IPA, and there is certainly none of that “Is this really a beer?” business you get when brewers get too trendy. I’m not sure I’d drink it with a salad, but it’s hard to think of a sandwich or burger this altbier wouldn’t complement.

At that aforementioned 5 percent ABV, it takes the edge off but not much else. I might suggest it as a method of coping for some of the people writing all that hate mail. That, and maybe pay a little more attention to your grammar.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Gose Story: How I Learned to Love a Risky Sour

It is entirely possible that I had to be soaked in salty brine off the coast of Apalachicola, Florida, for a week before trying a gose beer that I actually liked. Mrs. M and I were in the taproom of the Owl Café, sunburned and relaxed. And it was in that happy state that I spied the words “Briney Melon Gose.” I was having a good week, I thought, why not ruin it with a sour beer?

It wasn’t awful. In fact, it was refreshing. This wasn’t one of those “got something to prove” beers. It was an Anderson Valley Briney Melon — with a watermelon freshness to it, and the sea salt to balance the acidity and fruitiness. I’m not saying the gose will ever be a go-to for me, but I was feeling briny, my face was starting to resemble my briefcase, and, right then and there, the gose really hit the spot.

If I had to guess, my initial “just say no” reaction to sour beers stems from the typical craft brewer’s fetish for producing extreme versions of everything. The Germans, on the other hand, drink a lot more beer than we do, and they have gotten very good at it. They don’t tend to go for those ABV of 8-9 percent, sticking closer to the 4-5 percent range. This makes them more drinkable or, if you’re a beer writer, sessionable.

What gives me pause is that so many people describe these melon-laden gose concoctions as not tasting like beer at all. In fact, according to the Reinheitsgebot — German beer purity laws of 1516 — it isn’t a beer. The style is considered a regional specialty. And it is an acquired taste.

Originating in Goslar, Germany, gose is traditionally a wheat beer. What sets it apart from other wheats is the saltiness of the local water — which is a bit of a mystery in and of itself, as Goslar is nowhere near a seacoast. To counteract the saltiness, sour lemony flavors and herbs were mixed in. It caught on in eastern Germany, where they recreated the taste by adding a little sea salt to the water used in the process — which is what brewers do now, along with adding the strain of bacteria that makes it all go “sour.”

After World War II, the communists took over eastern Germany, and they tended to favor standardization over local specialties. Gose was forgotten on this side of the Iron Curtain, and, by 1966, the last bar serving it on the east side closed. It wasn’t until 1986 when production restarted. And stopped again two years later.

It really wasn’t until this century, after nearly every possible variation of the IPA had been played to death, that brewers jumped on the Belgian-sour-lambic bandwagon. The style was always a little too much for mass consumption, so they toned it down a notch with the gose style.

Anderson Valley Briney Melon weighs in at 4.2 percent ABV. It’s out of Booneville, California, and I couldn’t find it here. So, doing a little painstaking research, I found Terrapin Beer Co.’s Watermelon Gose out of Athens, Georgia (Go ‘Dawgs and, for that matter, R.E.M.). It goes down well: a little tart, but won’t make you pull a sour face. This is important if you haven’t already completely given up and are trying to look cool while you drink. Terrapin is available all over town, but for their Watermelon Gose, I had to go to the Madison Growler Shop.

People have told me gose beers should be paired with chicken and fish. Perhaps, but over the course of a meal, I’m not sure how many foods the tartness wouldn’t wreck.

Yeah, I tease brewers for being trendy, but I was resisting a refreshing and interesting beer on the grounds that … I’m a blockhead. So it gose.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

High Cotton’s Irish Red is a Taste of the Auld Sod

European heat waves are not impressive, at least not for humans born and bred in the American South. My brother just got back from the south of France and pronounced it “about like here.” Still, all things are relative, and in Ireland the mercury is up politically as well. They find themselves the linchpin of a “will they or won’t they?” Brexit deal. It’s all heady stuff but almost certainly not what the good people at High Cotton Brewing were thinking when they brewed up their Red Ale.

It is a style of beer that has its origins in Ireland. And in a very Irish twist, no one seems to have written down the recipe. It’s one of those varieties that just evolved over time — in a hundred different ways. Smithwick’s, which is available in Memphis, might be sold as a red ale here but not back home. In fact, in Dublin, if you order a red ale, chances are you’ll get a blank look. In the old country, it’s just known as Irish ale. This is either because it is so commonplace they didn’t feel the need to specify, or its initials — IRA — are the same shorthand they use for the Irish Republican Army. Be warned that if you stroll into a pub in Belfast and order a round of that, you are likely to get arrested. And there is no point starting an international incident before you’ve got a decent buzz going.

The Irish red ale isn’t particularly bitter. Hops aren’t native to the Emerald Isle, and so the use of hops in brewing is a relatively new thing. The Irish consider hoppy ales — like IPAs — a little too British. Of course, just because ingredients are local doesn’t make them good. (I don’t know if you can actually make beer out of peat, but I’m sure it’s been tried.) At any rate, these red ales feature kilned malts and a roasted barley that’s responsible for its reddish color.

If you want a great local example of the style, hoof yourself down to the High Cotton Brewery for a pint or growler of their version of the red ale (called simply High Cotton Red Ale), currently on tap. The High Cotton expression is a red ale that’s easy to drink, slightly malty and toasty. It is hopped, just a touch, but that’s not why you’re there. It’s a good summer brew that lets you quaff down a pint of the Irish luck without having to wrestle with a heavy, foamy stout that will fill you up like a keg.

It’s got a low ABV and a clean enough finish to make it “sessionable,” which is silly beer-speak for “you can drink a bucket of the stuff without getting three sheets to the wind.” It has a little spice to make it interesting but is also a beer that will pair with just about anything you’re inclined to pair with a beer, whether it’s a good old American cheeseburger or something more on theme, like fish and chips.

Beware of imitations, though. Because red ales are so mild and easy-drinking, Coors has gotten away with its George Killian Irish Red for years, but it’s actually a lager. There is nothing inherently wrong or deceitful about this, but I thought you should know. The name, incidentally, is used only in the North American market.

In sum, Irish ale is called red ale in America, and High Cotton has a fine example of the style in its Edge District taproom. You’ll note that I haven’t once mentioned green beer, which is usually Natural Light with food coloring. That’s not Irish; that’s not even Irish-American. That’s just waves of all-American mutts pretending to make a cultural salute so they can get blotto and make some attempt to get the ladies to dress like sexy leprechauns one day a year.

Which, if you stop and think about it, is fairly deranged behavior.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Post-Kayak Brews at Meddlesome

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

It all started when Mrs. M was too polite to say, “Hey Chubs, get off the couch,” instead, opting for the more graceful suggestion that we should be one of those “active lifestyle” couples. I assumed that she meant fishing. It’s roughly considered a sport, but if you can bear never to be very good at it, you almost never have to put your beer down. As usual, I was wrong.

That’s how we wound up at Shelby Farms, paddling around in a kayak. It’s cheap, it gets you moving, and the steering — if not exactly intuitive — isn’t hard to master. It’s wet, hot, and humid. The ducks, cub scouts, and other wildlife aren’t too obtrusive. In all, it isn’t a bad way to spend an hour. But be warned: Those kayaks do not have cup holders.

Justin Fox Burks

Meddlesome Brewing Company’s flagship IPA 201 Hoplar

Now I know I’ve written before about how those really hoppy IPAs get bitter and weird if you stand around and let them get hot, which makes them tricky to drink at outdoor events on a blazing day or sticky night. But where there is a will, there is a way. In this case, the way is to go inside. That’s why John Gorrie patented the first “cold air machine.” Granted, he did it for yellow fever patients, but you know how it is when you work up a hankerin’ for the hops.

For the Downtown, Midtown, or even East Memphis set, dropping into the Meddlesome Brewing taproom in Cordova seems a little out of the way, but I recommend it. It’s right around the corner from the boat house at Shelby Farms, and nothing is more important after a mild workout than replacing three times the actual calories you just burned, especially if you happen to be soaking wet and your shoulders are starting to hurt and you were seriously menaced by a turtle earlier. Yes, the brewery is basically in an office park, but inside it’s all “craft brewery chic,” and the food trucks circle. Get in out of the heat, or in our case, the rain — hot rain — and hoist a pint.

It’s hard to imagine a better post-kayak pairing than with a good hoppy IPA like 201 Hoplar. There’s just something about the slight bitterness that makes the experience crisp and refreshing, especially if you don’t have yellow fever. (If, in fact, you do have yellow fever, I’d recommend skipping the tap room and heading over to the nearby Baptist East.)

Meddlesome’s Brass Bellows Ale proved very popular in the Flyer‘s and Aldo’s Beer Bracket Challenge back in March, and with good reason: The beers that do well in these mano-a-mano tourneys usually aren’t very exotic or complicated. This light and malty brew fits that bill perfectly.

Perhaps because, in the beginning, the craft beer scene was dominated by ales, not too many brewers made lagers. Thankfully, that has changed over the last few years. Which — if you are drinking your way down the Meddlesome menu — leads us to a fantastic summer beer: Jerry “The King” Lager, named after a local celeb who has never had a drop of alcohol in his life yet owns a bar on Beale Street. This is because Memphis is a complete and utter mystery, even to Memphians. I digress.

Jerry “The King” Lager is a pale lager that is a little hoppier than you might expect, but it has a lighter touch than the IPA. It goes down easy — maybe a little too easy — and has a clean finish. This is a good hot-weather go-to and, along with air conditioning and things named after pro-wrestlers, is available all over town.

With our shorts now air-dried, we headed to the Cove to eat a dozen oysters. Mrs. M drove. Don’t you sneer; I did all the heavy paddling.