Tag: Hammer & Ale

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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

Spicy Spring

“I don’t drink too much, I’m just a victim of great weather,” I said, sensibly — although it’s possible my mother would classify that as more excuse than explanation. Any way you look at it, though, the weather is nice. Spring has sprung.

The onset of spring in Memphis is like watching a very amiable couple decide what to have for dinner — it’s a lot of back and forth. Then summer shows up and obnoxiously delivers some sadistic combination of heat and humidity. We aren’t quite there yet, so if you didn’t know that spring was here by standing on your front porch you can always turn on one of the eating channels for this season’s “newest” warm-weather food trend: Southeast Asian.

Which is fine by me as I love those wild, colorful, spectacular flavors. Not sure how “new” any of this is, because people in Southeast Asia have been eating for a long time. Still, innovative twists on old recipes abound, and if you want to stay on trend, you’ll need to find the perfect beer before the million little pieces of what we’re calling the modern media runs the idea completely into the dirt.

High Cotton’s Thai Pale Ale

Last weekend, we headed over to Hammer & Ale to squat on their parking-lot themed patio and think this one over. I ordered a Soulful Ginger, brewed just down the street by Memphis Made, a brewery that has never been afraid to monkey with new ingredients. It was weird, or more charitably, unexpected. Not bad, though. I liked it; it just took a sip or two to grow on me. Good Japanese whisky will do the same thing to you. With the first sip, you think, “This isn’t Scotch!” and the second you think, pleasantly, “No. No it’s not.”

Soulful Ginger is weirdly good: a light, refreshing, saison style with hints of ginger and peppercorns to give it a little spice and a clean finish. Originally from France and Belgium, saisons were brewed in the cooler months by farm workers who weren’t too busy to keep them hydrated in the warmer months when they were. The French name for seasonal workers was “saisonniers.” Saisons are some of the great unsung beer styles, and an obvious one to adapt to hot and steamy climates like Thailand or Midtown. It is a great beer to go with something spicy, maybe something with lemongrass and sesame oil. The flavors just click with that palate of ingredients.

If the ginger is a little too out there for you, High Cotton Brewing has another good option on tap these days. It’s called Thai Pale Ale. Now, anyone who has spent any time in Southeast Asia knows that they are not big ale drinkers over there. Primarily, they stick to what we’d call the kind of watered-down lager that, until the 1990s, was about the only beer you could get stateside. And it’s popular for a good reason: The weather is hot, the food is spicy, and the beer goes down easy. In some parts of the world, there is always a thirst to quench.

High Cotton has applied the same idea for the devoted hop-head who’s looking for another option to pair with spicy foods. Thai Pale Ale is light and crisp but still has that “hops pop” that gives it a finish able to stand up to a great whacking dollop of Sambal Oelek chili paste without trying to fight it.

Either option is a great beer if you’ve been so inundated by clever Southeast Asian food recipes from the internet that you feel you just must whip something up at home. Go grab a growler of either, or both, and have at it. If you miss the mark on dinner because, you know, internet recipes, just pour yourself another pint and chill.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Writer’s Bock

CREDIT: Richard Murff

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

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

“That sounds dreadful,” I said.

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

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

Richard Murff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Chill. Summer Brews to Help You Beat the Heat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

The Drinks of Summer

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

It’s that time of year when no one wants to admit that it’s too hot to sit on a patio and drink all day. Enter the drinks of summer.

Jameson Slushie

Slider Inn has an amazing patio — now with misters — and the absolute best way to enjoy it is with a Jameson Slushie (or two). The slushie consists of Barritt’s Ginger Beer, house-made lemonade, delicious Jameson Irish Whiskey, and bitters. Depending on the glass situation, it either gets served in a branded Mason jar or a pint glass. (The latter is obviously the better deal.) At $9 a pop, Slider is selling upwards of 300 each week — the hotter the weather, the higher the sales. They are very drinkable, probably too drinkable. I can’t imagine summer without them. I won’t!

Justin Fox Burks

Slider Inn’s Jameson Slushie

Frozen Lemonades

The newly opened Mac’s Burgers, which is out east in part of the former Dan McGuinness, is also selling freshly squeezed frozen lemonades — some with alcohol, some without. The virgin options include blueberry, strawberry, mango, peach, pomegranate, and pineapple — all made with freshly puréed fruit. Their spiked varieties ($8 to $11) include a Jameson Slush (sounds familiar!), Arnold Palmer Freeze (Tito’s Vodka, lemonade, and iced tea), and Frozen Bellinis (peach lemonade with an inverted champagne split).

Boozy Milkshakes

Staying cool downtown requires a boozy milkshake. Oshi has six to choose from, and they are also available without alcohol, but where’s the fun in that? Even the most lactose intolerant would be foolish to pass up the Kentucky Head Hunter. It’s made with bourbon, apple brandy, vanilla ice cream, and bacon dust. Yes, bacon dust! It mostly tastes like frosty bourbon, which is awesome if you consider how much bourbon it takes to outshine the ice cream. Other popular shakes are the Malt Shoppe (vanilla ice cream, malted milk balls, bourbon) and the Godzilla (crème de menthe, Godiva white chocolate, vanilla ice cream, Oreo pieces). They’re $10 a pop, $6 without booze.

Beer Floats

Beer drinkers need not feel left out. Hammer & Ale is serving beer floats ($6). Genius, right? There’s only one flavor of ice cream — vanilla — but the choice of beer is up to you. (There are 24 to choose from, however, a dark or a sweet beer is recommended.) So far the most popular picks are the Gotta Get Up To Get Down Coffee Milk Stout from Wiseacre and the Illusive Traveler Grapefruit Shandy. Now that they serve food, you could have a beer float for dessert or just have one as a treat between regular beers. (Mexican soda and ginger beer are also available for teetotalers.)

Justin Fox Burks

Hammer & Ale beer float with Wiseacre’s Gotta Get up to Get Down.

Coffee Soda

And because we need a different kind of buzz on occasion, City & State is now offering house-made carbonated coffee sodas. Say it with me: coffee soda. The first, the Hampliner, is a carbonated iced coffee with pomegranate syrup, fresh lime, and maraschino cherries to top it off ($4.75). The second, the Purist, is carbonated iced coffee with simple syrup, lime juice, and lime slice for garnish ($4). The Hampliner is rich but not too sweet. It feels decadent, which is what summer is all about. Beware, the Purist may give you a grown-up feeling since you’ll pat yourself on the back for being so smart and ordering it.