Author: Richard Murff

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Diamond Bear

When Diamond Bear brewing company was started in 2000 by Russ and Sue Melton, it was the first commercial brewery in Arkansas in 15 years. It was so named because Arkansas is the only state in which diamonds are found naturally, as opposed to on flashy jewelry. And Arkansas was once known as “The Bear State” for its high incidence of its citizens being mauled by one. While the brewery continues to expand regionally, those Arkansas roots are still thick and tangled: The company’s motto is “Beer in its natural state.” Which they seem to actually take to heart. Although Memphis can also claim a little hometown pride, since the company’s canning operation takes place at the Blues City Brewery on Raines Road.

Co-founder Russ Melton first discovered this passion for regional beers while stationed with the army in Germany and living in Bavaria. “I certainly was a beer enthusiast. I started home brewing, but I definitely had the intention of starting a brewery, he says.”

Apparently, living in Germany gives a fella strong opinions on beer, so Diamond Bear focused on solid traditional methods of European brewers. The brewery opened on a strong note, and as generally happens when a craft beer market opens right, the company has grown to about 18 breweries and brewpubs throughout the state — all while Diamond Bear has moved from one expanded facility to the next to meet growing demand.

Since prohibition, though, beer distribution across state lines has always been something of a headache. While available widely in Alabama, Diamond Bear had never broken into the Memphis market in any significant way. All of that changed about a year ago, when the company decided to self-distribute in Shelby County, focusing on the many beer festivals in this half-in-the-bag town of ours. It’s been a lively push, and sales tripled (from an admittedly low entry point). Now Diamond Bear beer can be found on draft or in cans in Memphis go-to places like Corky’s and Central BBQ, Soul Fish, and Loflin Yard.

Or, if you want to go take it home, you can find it at the Madison Growler Shop in Cash Saver. Their Oatmeal Stout has been one of their best-selling dark beers since the Growler Shop added it to the lineup a few months ago. And it’s easy to see why: This stout is solid. What it lacks in hep-cat innovation, it makes up by simply being an outstanding example of the style. What more can I say? It’s got hints of toasty oatmeal and chocolate exactly where those sort of things are supposed to be.

Diamond Bear brewery follows that least hipster of all rule books, the Reinheitsgebot, or German Beer Purity Law, first introduced by Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria in 1516. To put this in perspective, the United States didn’t pass the Pure Food and Drug Act until 1906 – some 390 years later. The German law stipulates that only water, hops, yeast, and barley can be used in beer. Still, there is a lot a clever brewer can do with only four ingredients. When you drink Diamond Bear’s Southern Blonde lager, you can tell.

Its flagship brew, a traditional English Pale Ale, has won heaps of golds and silvers in the Great American Beer Festival and the World Beer Cup. The Irish Red has placed in both as well. These days, it’s hard to run a brewery without an IPA, and ever the Arkansas loyalists, the Presidential IPA was named in honor of the opening of the Clinton Presidential Library. The Double IPA I called Two Term, obviously (biting political commentary withheld at insistence of the long-suffering Mrs. M.).

Tradition is great, but you do have to step out, from time to time. We’ll never know Duke Wilhelm’s thoughts on the subject, but Diamond Bear has partnered with French Truck Coffee to create a limited coffee stout using French Truck’s Le Grand Coq Rouge coffee … and we’ll just let you translate that name for yourself.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Chile Con Dixon

Hemingway once said that the only way to find out if you can trust someone is to trust them. True, if a little nerve-wracking. If Papa is to believed, he knew something about finding a new favorite wine — namely by trying a new wine. That can be expensive, which I also find nerve-wracking.

Fortunately, Memphis abounds with wine tastings, and after a week of being snowed in, the charming Mrs. M suggested the Dixon Gallery and Garden’s quarterly Wine Down — Cheese edition. “Well, A, it’s wine and cheese,” she said sensibly, wiping the cabin fever from her brow. And with an A like that, you don’t really need a B.

There are other wine tastings across the city that occur on a regular basis if you can’t stand beautiful art and lovely surroundings. No matter where you go, the controlled tasting is really the best way to learn about wine and — more importantly — what wines you like. There is really only so much learning on-trend buzzwords from wine snobs and making yourself omnipresent at happy hour will teach you.

A Catered Affair handled the food, and Buster’s Liquors & Wine supplied five Chilean wines, most from the 120 Reserva Especial line by the Santa Rita winery. Since Chilean wineries first pushed their way into the American market in the late 1980s, they have tended to fall in and out of fashion without much fanfare — not unlike my Wallabees. The upshot here is that the prices on Chilean wines have never really shot to the moon despite routinely turning out a solid product. The wines we tasted last weekend all had a very reasonable price point — around $10. Remember, that there is no trial without error, so while you may not like everything you try, you aren’t going to run afoul of actual plonk.

The Cabernet Sauvignon was a big fruity number with spice and chocolate that was paired with a variety of aged and smoked goudas supplied by Murray’s Cheese. This alone was proof positive that there really is something preternatural about the pairing of wine and cheese.

A little fruitier and not as big, was the 120 Pinot Noir — earthier than a typical Pinot, it had a hint of vanilla to keep it interesting. It was paired with a mushroom quesadilla with Monterey jack. While they went to together nicely, the fellow from Buster’s casually mentioned that it paired well with Dr. Pepper. A little unorthodox, but it’s always nice to know you’ve got options.

As for the whites, there was a lovely Sauvignon Blanc that was fresh and grassy. Sipping a glass while picking at some feta and olives, it was hard to not start pining for warmer weather to get here (something I’m certainly going to regret before next fall). Since I’m not a fan, I casually ignored the Chardonnay, but the tasting notes looked delightful and Wine Enthusiast magazine rated it a Best Value.

The tasting was a great way to sample and learn a little something without getting into an entire bottle or trying to take on a whole country or varietal at once, which is heroic, sure, but likely to end in drunken frustration. It’s best to take a smallish herd of friends so there are people around who refuse to take you seriously. You just might stumble on your new favorite go-to and get a little insight into your palate in the process. Which is really the point.

Or you might learn something ridiculous. The featured Santa Rita 120 Reserva Especial was launched in 1982 to commemorate the 120 years since the winery’s founding — in 1880. Hmmm. And for good measure, the 50th anniversary commemoration was bottled in 2014. The math doesn’t work at all; I’ve double checked it. The bottom line is that the folks at Santa Rita down in Chile’s Central Valley know how to make some solid wines, but bookkeeping like that might explain the great pricing.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Blackstone Brewing Makes a Successful Return to Form

Kent Taylor, co-owner of Nashville’s Blackstone Brewery, pointed to the glass in front of us: “We are all about what is in there,” he said. What I was looking at was an inviting pint of Blackstone Brewery’s St. Charles Porter — the most award-winning Brown Porter at the Great American Beer Festival, racking up eight medals. It is also a polished version of the homebrew Taylor used to whip up in his kitchen.

I’d dropped into the Flying Saucer in Cordova to pester Kent and the Blackstone crew about beer, markets — and to ask him, “Where exactly have you been for the last few years?”

Actually, Blackstone has been out of west Tennessee for about three years. It wasn’t a lack of demand for Blackstone’s beers, such as the St. Charles Porter or their Hopjack IPA — a dry hopped and hazy ale — it was more a matter of maintaining that tricky and elusive equilibrium of quality versus capacity. Whether or not a beer is craft shouldn’t depend on some minority ownership, but how the brewer deals with expanded markets. Getting philosophical about it, Taylor asks: “The question is, when you open up a new market, can you serve that market and continue to serve the original [market]?”

In a hyper-competitive market, very rarely do craft breweries fail or fly on the quality of their beer alone. Breweries, craft or not, are businesses, and businesses require focus on the product and the market and all the other things customers never see. The real trick, in any business, is to refocus when things change. And they always do.

It is fitting that Blackstone was relaunched into Memphis on Repeal Day, December 5th. In Tennessee craft beer circles, Blackstone is about as historical as you get. One of the first craft breweries in Nashville, the Blackstone Restaurant on West End Avenue predates the craft beer boom altogether. When the place first opened, customers walked out when they learned that they couldn’t get a Bud Light. Things have changed, and Nashville now has more than 20 craft breweries and counting. And no one seems to get their nose out of joint if they can’t find a Busch or a Milwaukee’s Best at a brew pub.

Blackstone had been churning out its award-winning beer at a rate of 1,200 barrels a year. The restaurant was a Nashville fixture. Then things changed — again. Co-founder Stephanie Weans lost her battle with cancer a few years ago. Taylor, a CPA by trade, was more comfortable behind the curtain. Stephanie had the personality; she was good at being out front. “Everything I know about running a restaurant I learned from her,” Taylor says. “And one thing I learned was that I wasn’t a restaurateur.”

In light of the painful loss of a productive partnership, as well as capacity constraints and a changing marketplace, it was time to refocus on what was in that glass in front of us: the beer. The Brewery contracted to refocus on what it was brewing, opening a new 15,000-square-foot facility with a 60,000-barrel capacity and a taproom. After shutting down the restaurant for a remodel, the decision was made to close its doors for good after 23 years.

The new capacity has changed things yet again. Now available in bars such as the Flying Saucer and Young Avenue Deli, as well as in local grocery stores, Blackstone is back, serving the entire state with an eye to opening up markets in Kentucky and north Alabama. Yet through the changes, their beer has remained remarkably consistent.

The Hopjack IPA is a great go-to ale. The wonderfully designed Dark Matter Black IPA is a clever twist on the style — still full of hops but with the darkness of roasted malt. You can get their award-winning Nut Brown all over town, along with that St. Charles Porter — dark, but not too heavy, with traces of mocha and cocoa.

And that is how you make a change and still fill the glass with a beer you’re known for.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Hangover Helpers

CREDIT: Elnur | Dreamstime

Understand something, if you have a hangover, then you have poisoned yourself. Maybe not in league with strychnine, but you’ve got some toxins to work through. Obviously, the best thing for a hangover is not to get gassed the night before. If you can’t manage that, then cut this column out and stick it in the pocket of whatever it is you think you are going to wake up in on New Year’s Day.

The ancient Greek god Dionysus is often pictured with a mitra around his head — a strip of tightly bound cloth to counter that pounding morning-after headache. If the god of the vine and ritual-madness can get a throbbing hangover, then mere mortals don’t stand a chance. Barring an anti-hangover hat handed down from Mount Olympus, let’s delve into some more modern cures.

Kingsley Amis helpfully wrote about both the physical and mental aspects a hangover. Sure, your stomach is churning and you have a splitting headache, but there is that other part: a sort of vague, paranoid depression. He suggests that if you wake up with a hangover, have sex with the person next to you: It gets your heart rate up and will “tone you up emotionally.” Amis was a hard-won expert on drinking, but he doesn’t appear to have known much about relationships.

Elnur | Dreamstime

For more single-handed hangover cures, the most famous was penned 101 years ago by P.G. Wodehouse in his first Jeeves and Wooster story “Carry On, Jeeves.” Bertie Wooster is feeling a bit ragged, and Jeeves appears at his door to whip up a cure of raw egg, Worcestershire sauce, and red pepper. “It is the Worcestershire that gives it its color. The raw egg makes it nutritious. The red pepper gives it bite. Gentlemen have told me they have found it very invigorating after a late evening.”

Not prone to original thought, Wooster says “I swallowed the stuff. For a moment I felt as if somebody had touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the tree-tops; and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more.”

I’ve tried it a couple of times (scientific method, you see). It never worked quite as vividly at as it did for ol’ Bertie, but it did get the job done — and fast. This makes sense: the egg is a blob of protein to counteract the sugar all the alcohol has been processed into, the Worcestershire sauce has salt to help retain water (dehydration is the real enemy), and red pepper sauce opens up the snoot for more oxygen. The pepper sauce also kills the crud associated with eating raw eggs.

So will a shot of whiskey, which puts you into “hair of the dog” remedies. People swear by the Bloody Mary, but for a number of reasons we aren’t going to suggest that route. Or a raw egg.

Almost nothing beats a painfully hot shower, Gatorade (lots of it), and going back to bed.

If you can’t go hide under the covers waiting for the cold embrace of death, you’ll likely run into other humans, which will aggravate the mental component of the hangover. Steel yourself to being cheerful — or at least likeably pathetic — despite your creeping cynicism about this grim world. This is not to lift your spirits, or anyone else’s. The point of the friendly disposition, however fake, is to manage people’s reactions to you. Social friction is not what you need right now. Honestly, if you already think that they are out to get you, do you really need proof?

My mother has never had a hangover, avoiding them with the obvious technique of simply not drinking. It’s not in the spirit of this column, but I thought I should mention it.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Wassail! A Christmas Tradition Worth Preserving.

CREDIT: Rafer | Dreamstime

It’s one of those old Christmas traditions that nearly everyone has heard of, many have plans to execute, but few ever pull the trigger on. With the deranged commercialization of the holidays, making a wassail just seems like too much trouble. You’ve got things to do, and that credit limit isn’t going to blow itself up without help.

The very word “wassail” is old — Pagan-era old. “Waes hael” was a traditional Saxon greeting meaning “to your health.” And they did a lot of drinking to health in those days. It was important because the Saxons were short on modern medicine and long on marauding Norsemen. A drink might ward off an infection, but it’s hardly a hedge against being cloven in twain by a Dane.

By 1066, when the Normans showed up in England, wassailing was a solid tradition, and not necessarily a Christmas one. In the November harvest, revelers would head out to the apple orchard, where they soaked pieces of toast in cider and put them up in a tree to attract robins, which were believed to carry good spirits. Then they yelled and carried on to scare off the evil spirits and, presumably, those lucky robins. What it lacked in effectiveness it made up for in style, and to this day we “toast” one another for good fortune.

All this good cheer was consumed from a communal wooden bowl, creepily called “The Loving Cup.” They’d drink, lift the bowl over their heads, and yell “Wassail.” If you are keeping track, Wassail has gone from a greeting, to a cheer, to a verb and a noun. Sort of like “Roll Tide” with ‘Bama fans.

The point was to get drunk enough to sing to a tree. At some point, city-folk decided that the whole thing sounded like a hoot. Lacking apple orchards in the grimy alleys of London, wassailing got moved to Christmas, and the town-folk just got drunk enough to sing to a door. From there it quickly devolved into an inebriated caroling/trick-or-treat mash-up. Except this wasn’t a couple of adorable neighborhood kids dressed like princesses and firefighters, but a half-in-the-bag horde of your social inferiors demanding that you fill up their creepy drinking bowl and, because it’s cold outside, make with some munchies, while you’re at it.

“And we won’t go until we’ve got some/ We won’t go until we’ve got some, so bring some out here.” Sounds a lot less quaint coming from a well-gassed mob. At any rate, people started making a festive punch to slosh out to the wassailers so they’d eventually go away.

Rafer | Dreamstime

Here’s a very traditional Anglo-Saxon Christmas Wassail you can try at home, just so you’re prepared:

1 orange

6 cloves

6 small apples, cored

6 tsp soft brown sugar

7 oz. extra-fine sugar

water for sprinkling

3 ½ pints cider

10 ½ fl. oz. port

10 ½ fl. oz. sherry or madeira

2 cinnamon sticks

½ tsp ground ginger

¼ tsp ground nutmeg

1 lemon, halved

Stud the orange with cloves to feel like a celebrity chef. Core the apples and sprinkle with sugar and water. Bake the orange and apples at 375°F for 30 minutes or until tender. Leave apples in the dish to keep warm and take the orange out. Cut in half and place in a large saucepan. Add the rest of the ingredients and the juices from the apple roasting dish to the saucepan, and gently heat until the sugar is dissolved. Do not boil. Leave for 30 minutes. Strain and pour over the roasted apples.

If that sounds like too much trouble, here’s another option. In college, I learned a simplified version at a Christmas party in Mobile, Alabama: Fill up a coffee percolator with vodka, and heat it up. Add a bunch of Red Hots candy. Serve warm.

I have no idea how my college-mates made the leap from making wassail to making this horrific concoction. And if I’m going to be completely honest, at the time, I didn’t much care.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Drink, Be Merry

CREDIT: Msheldrake | Dreamstime.com

By the time you read this, you will have mostly come out of that red wine- and tryptophan-induced coma into which you slipped sometime during the Detroit Lions’ game. While your post-meal memories might be a tad fuzzy, your motivation likely isn’t: That’s just what we do this time of year.

I’ve never been an unqualified fan of the hallowed holiday turkey, although my love of dressing is drastic. For years, I’ve been trying to make lamb the go-to meal for the holidays on the grounds that it is so much better in every conceivable way. Since this genius has been largely ignored by both my family and in-laws, I’ve decided that if we are going to set the menu on autopilot with reliable standards, at least we can give a little more thought to our wine.

If white wine is your thing, that Chardonnay that you were drinking in the summer or the last fund-raiser you went to likely won’t stand up to that roast turkey or ham. Try a Pouilly-Fumé or a white Bordeaux as a dry and crisp alternative. Of course, it’s hard to beat Champagnes and sparkling wines for the holiday spirit.

For reds, a Bordeaux and a Côtes du Rhône are tasty on their own and play well with that rich holiday fare. If you like a little lighter style with more fruit, try a Beaujolais. These wines must come from their regions in eponymous France to be labeled, but if you know the varietals that go into these wines, you can get good pretenders from almost anywhere.

Pouilly-Fumé and most white Bordeaux are made almost entirely out of Sauvignon Blanc grapes, so it’s easy to find a stand-in. The reds, that famous “Bordeaux blend” is 70 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, 15 percent Cabernet Franc, and 15 percent Merlot. Unless you are from the “right bank” of the river Dordogne, in which case it’s reversed a bit with 70 percent Merlot and 15 percent Cabernets. The Brits call all of it a “claret” because they love to annoy the French. Penfold’s in Australia got its start making great French “style” wines down under and produce a Koonunga Hill Cabernet Merlot blend that is a nice stand-in for a Bordeaux with black currents and plum and a little oaky spice.

For a slightly earthier route, it’s hard to beat a Côtes du Rhône, which aren’t terrible expensive. By law, save a few small producers, Côtes du Rhônes are at least 40 percent grenache with at least 15 percent supplementary Mourdére and Syrah to finish out the blend. So just look for a grenache/Syrah blend, and you will have a good pretender for this stable of French wine.

Msheldrake | Dreamstime.com

A less “big” option, is a Beaujolais, which Karen MacNeil — who knows a lot more about wine than I do — described as the “the only white wine that happens to be red.” They tend to be light-bodied with a lot of fruit. The always trendy Beaujolais Nouveau is available only in the fall, and you aren’t doing it any favors by laying it up. Fortunately, standard Beaujolais are available all year round. They are largely made with the big, fruity gamay grape, but Beaujolais are made with a unique process called carbonic maceration, which involves fermenting the grapes in a carbon-rich environment before they are crushed. A good stand-in here would be to look for a gamay or a young Australian Shiraz. Or just open a bottle of gamay’s diva cousin, the Pinot Noir.

It’s worth noting that one of the reasons you hear a lot more about Pinot Noir is that the gamay was actually outlawed in 1395 by the Duke of Burgundy Phillippe the Bold for being “a very bad and disloyal plant.” And if that isn’t a reason to pop a cork of the stuff, I don’t know what is.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Madeira for You

While living in London, Ben Franklin was known as “The Water American.” But while in Paris, his drink of choice was Madeira. Since the original 13 colonies couldn’t produce decent wine grapes, the American colonists imported a lot of the stuff. Its high sugar content and acidity made it so refreshing in the oppressive heat of the Southern colonies that social clubs were organized around drinking it. The seizure of John Hancock’s ship Liberty in 1768, after some bad noise over import duties on 25 “pipes” of Madeira, caused a riot and set the U.S. on the road to a colonial divorce.

But what is Madeira?

Like port, it is a type of fortified wine. It is named for the Madeira Islands, a Portuguese possession about 360 miles off the coast of Morocco. In the 15th century, when Portugal was a global super-power, the Madeira Islands were the last port of call for ships heading to the New World or the East Indies. To prevent spoilage of the wine on these long, not remotely climate-controlled voyages, grape spirits (read: brandy) was added as a preservative. So, it’s wine, but it’s got liquor added to it. Which isn’t the end of it either. Enter estufagem.

As the ships made their way to India and the Caribbean, the barrels sloshing around in the hold were subject to the extreme heat of the routes. Both the sloshing and the heat are bad for wine, or more precisely, transformative. Bourbon fans will note that the process sounds familiar, and you wouldn’t be wrong. What went into those barrels was not remotely what came out of them: A robust, smooth, nutty wine, leather brown in color, and positively unique.

The wine producers of Madeira didn’t even know this until a Dutch East India Company ship came back through with an unsold consignment of wine. They took to the stuff too. Unsold barrels were marked vinho da roda or “wines that have made the round trip,” and soon fetched a premium. Obviously, sending a shipload of wine on a grand tour to Brazil or India is expensive, so the merchants figured out how to recreate the process at home. Basically, by leaving the barrels out in the sun and rolling them round.

Today the process has been refined. The wine is stored in large stainless steel vats, heated, via hot water in coils, to 115oF for at least three months in a process called estufagem. Then it must rest for another 90 days in a barrel. This is called estágio because, oddly, the Portuguese have different words for everything.

The result is interesting. Madeira lacks the heaviness of its cousin, port, which is like red wine only more so. And unlike red wine, it is not only good but also refreshing. There is hazelnut to it and a little caramel. The acidic edge teeters on being crisp, even. I prefer the drier style, but there are sweeter varieties that are close to dessert wines. While it famously stands up to the heat, you could do worse than add it to the bar for the holidays.

Despite its roots here in the South, your options are a little limited in Memphis, but Sandeman makes a very good bottle. I’m told to avoid the “rainwater” style unless it’s for cooking or cocktails.

What to pair it with food-wise? Again, like port, not much — unless you are the sort who likes the odd stinky cheese for dessert. If you aren’t that sort, try it anyway — it’s a splendid way to wrap up a meal.

Or start a revolution. Madeira was used to toast the signing of the Declaration of Independence — which may explain John Hancock’s enormous signature. Thomas Jefferson was a fan and sipped it as he drafted said Declaration. Hell, I sipped some while drafting this column.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Blackberry Farm Brewery is Out of the Cage

No one goes to France for the beer. We all know that there is beer in the Fifth Republic, but the French tourism board doesn’t waste any space on its website about it. So, it would be idiotic for me to recommend Chef Kelly English’s Restaurant Iris, with its wondrous French/Creole food, for its beer.

Sure, Chef English is from Louisiana, and he takes the Creole part of his food seriously. And yes, New Orleans is known for beer — but more for the quantity consumed than the quality brewed. Nevertheless, here I am, being an idiot. Go to Iris and drink the beer.

The beer in question is Blackberry Farm Brewery’s new line of three canned brews: Screaming Cock Pale Ale, TN Times Pilsner, and Coyote Tactics IPA. All three styles were launched this summer and were available in Memphis originally through Iris, but are now available at Andrew Michael as well.

Blackberry Farm is relatively new to the craft beer scene, but they’ve done it right. Back in the late 1970s, the farm opened as a six-room inn snuggled on 4,200 insufferably beautiful acres in Walland, Tennessee. Since then, the brand has out-kicked the title of “luxury resort” to become something of an icon of sleepy-eyed relaxation, farm to table food, and a wine and cocktail menu that seems inexplicably wholesome. Even their website makes me mellow. All of this provokes the question: Can that Smoky Mountain air, free-flowing water, and free-range food be captured in a can? No, not remotely. We’ve all got to go to work in the morning. But it is very good beer.

Given the culinary level at which Blackberry Farm has been operating for 40 years, their move into the craft beer space isn’t surprising. Nothing will bring down a fine meal a peg or two like a bad wine or a bland beer. Nor is it surprising that BFB has produced some award-winning craft brews — including taking the gold in the World Beer Cup for its Classic Saison last year. Blackberry Farm beers are typically sold in “cork & cage” bottles, because they are literally corked like champagne. Beautiful, to be sure, but not the sort of thing that travels well. And they just don’t make that much of it. They can’t. “Craft” isn’t even the right word. As much as “artisanal” is overused, it’s the only one that will do here.

Admittedly, the lowly can o’ beer lacks the style we’ve come to expect from Blackberry Farm, or from Kelly English, for that matter. Sure, the labels are designed by Tennessee artists because, well, of course they are. In the end, though, we aren’t buying the packaging.

So on to the beer. The Screaming Cock Pale Ale is a great, crisp pale ale, and if you prefer the lager style, the TN Times Pilsner is another great choice that won’t wrestle with your dinner. The Coyote Tactics IPA is a little hoppier than the pale ale, but you still get the feeling that these are brewed to pair well with good food. And at a place like Iris, you really don’t want anything wrestling with the moulard breast.

Which is not to say that these beers aren’t interesting. In fact, it’s exactly that quality that makes them stand out. The craft beer circus seems to be getting more extreme and in-your-face every season, as opposed to getting better. I’ve tried a lot of far-out brews in my time, and I’ve enjoyed most of them. Sometimes, though, you aren’t in the mood to pull a sour face or suck your own tongue just to get closure on something as simple as a beer. That is what makes Blackberry Farm’s subtle approach so refreshing.

Is that reason enough alone to head to Iris? Maybe, maybe not. But that grilled lamb loin certainly is. So go.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Mead-Based Drinking: Oh, Honey!

So … there are 350 meaderies in the United States — which is about 348 more than my most liberal previous estimate. I was walking down the famous King Street in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, when something caught my eye in the gleaming window of the Savannah Bee Company: mead tasting. Well, what can I say? They had my attention.

Mead is an incredibly out-of-fashion beverage made from fermented honey and water. Over here, stateside, it is most associated with Vikings and the Britons they terrorized because, for the average American, it got stuck in their head while they were trying to nap through a high school lecture on Beowulf. The truth is that mead was made widely across Europe and Africa, and there is good evidence that the Chinese were enjoying the stuff as far back a 7,000 BC. To put this into perspective, what was happening in Denmark at the time was pretty much nothing.

While mead is, more or less, just honey, water, and yeast, it can still be sparkling like champagne or as carbonated as beer. Across styles, the alcohol content can swing from 8 percent to 20 percent, and that, coupled with the fact that none of varieties I tried tasted particularly boozy, is why you ought to keep an eye on the ABV.

I started with something called Tupelo Ambrosia, brewed by St. Ambrose Cellars in Michigan. Made with Tupelo honey, it is like a super-smooth dessert wine, floral and buttery. St. Ambrose also puts out a draft-style mead called Black Madonna, which tastes and feels like a sour blackberry beer, except not awful. Strangely, given my opinion on sour beers, I thought it was pretty good, as the sweet and sour balanced the whole thing out. The final St. Ambrose selection I tried was X. R. Cyser. Cyser is a style of mead made with apple juice, and this was a draft style that included thistle honey and maple syrup. It tasted exactly like an apple pie in a glass. Don’t misunderstand — it was a really good apple pie, and I can see how it would hit the spot after a long, lingering Sunday lunch in the fall or winter. But quaffing a glass o’ pie while watching the game seems a bit off.

For all you hopheads, Boulder’s Redstone Meadery has a sparkling mead — Nectar of the Hops — which they pitch as a “Mead IPA.” It was the lightest — weighing in at 8 percent ABV — and medium sweet. There was a lot going on in the glass. Given that I generally like IPAs, strangely, it was not my favorite. Boulder, for the record, hosts the annual Mazer Cup International Mead Competition. It features more than 300 homemade meads, which is believable, and 200 commercial ones, which is baffling.

The trophy (or battle-axe, or chain-mail shirt, or whatever Viking swag they give out) for my personal favorite would go to the Monk’s Mead. Made by Monk’s Meadery in that center of Scandinavian-American culture, Atlanta. They claim to be Georgia’s first meadery and, without any fact-checking on my part, that just about has to be true. Monk’s Mead is a wonderful drink that sits somewhere between champagne and beer in effervescence. It’s made with Wildflower honey, but it’s dry at the same time, with a hint — and just a hint — of fruitiness.

This was the mead that made me think I could sit back and drink a glass of the stuff, not out of novelty, but because it was just good. At nearly 13 percent ABV, it was dangerously easy to drink, and after a flagon or three, I can clearly see why you’d want to get into some old-fashioned Nordic “impulse shopping” or go colonize Iceland.

Or grab a battle-axe and reread Beowulf.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Meddlesome Brewing’s 201 Hoplar Tastes Good

“Meddlesome Brewing …” the lady said. “It’s just down the road. We’ve got their IPA — it’s called 201 Hoplar.”

“Well, obviously, I’m going to drink one of those!” I said, “I mean, with a name like that …”

And suddenly, I was transported back to some of the beer-fueled hijinks that sent me down to 201 in high school. But enough of that.

I’d gotten word that PizzaRev was opening up a Far East location out in Cordova, so the wife and I filled up the tank, grabbed our passports, and headed in the general direction of North Carolina.

Okay, it wasn’t quite that far, and it was well worth the trip to play with PizzaRev’s innovative self-serve wall of taps. You pour a glass and are charged for actual beer, not foam. A little gizmo that looks like the wristwatch out of a Cracker Jack box keeps track of your tab. How this works — technically — is some sort of witchcraft I’m at a loss to explain.

How the pizza was made is more straightforward, even if you design your own from scratch: Some nice kid slides it into a fiery oven. While we were waiting, we spoke with Ryan Guess, host of The Beer Show on WREC. Guess is the guru who selects the 15 taps for PizzaRev’s Memphis and Nashville locations. While every location is different, he likes to go heavy on local brews and mixes in a few national craft favorites like Founder’s, and even a Bud Light, for the steadfast Mrs. M.

“I have a beer I want you to try,” Guess said to her. “Pull a sample of the Sweetwater Blue.”

Now, I’ve been trying to fob weird beers on this lady ever since we were dating, and all I’ve ever gotten was a polite, smiling, “Mmm. Not my favorite.” Or words to that effect, before she orders her regular. Then it happened — she had a taste of the Sweetwater Blue and poured a full one with a perfectly functioning Bud Light tap not 12 inches away. It’s light with some fruit to it, and proof that at PizzaRev, miracles do happen.

Now, back to that Meddlesome beer. The newest craft brew in town, Meddlesome Brewing Company started making itself known in August. Since then, it has managed to get into about 72 locations stretching from Collierville to Mud Island. That’s a good thing, because their 201 Hoplar is a knockout — a good solid IPA that isn’t as hoppy as the name would have you believe. (They have a Double IPA coming soon.) The real test, though, would come with the pie.

Some things are just made to go together, and pizza and beer are two of them. Pizza is so ubiquitous, and so much of it isn’t very good that we tend to forget it is a fairly complex dish with a lot of layers. We had a sausage and mushroom with a double crust, which was very good, if not terribly original ordering on our part. It was hot, not greasy, and those inherently salty flavors of sausage and cheese put a boom on the palate that welcomed Meddlesome’s American-style IPA beautifully. It is a medium-bodied, very drinkable ale but had enough of the hop nose to stand up to what was going on with the pie. Basically, you knew you were eating a pizza and drinking a beer — and doing it well.

Guess said that there wasn’t a pizza on the menu he couldn’t pair with one of the beers on tap. And after the stunt he pulled with the Sweetwater Blue, who was I to argue? His next suggestion was a Wiseacre Oktoberfest. He wasn’t wrong. It’s a bold, copper-red lager with a full maltiness and a clean finish. For the mysterious Mrs. M., his second suggestion was a Yazoo Hefeweizen. Which produced a polite smile and a “Mmmm. Not my favorite.”

I can’t sneer; he’s still sold her on one more craft beer than I have.