Chillaxing Beers

You know its cold when you walk through the meat department at Freshchoice and can actually feel some warmth. These are the darkest days and appeal to the darkest beers and there is no better comfort beer than a stout stout. A stout can be as bitter as a Hurracanes support’s club or as sweet as a Marty Banks dropgoal. Either way, strong roasted malt will dominate the flavour. Because of its sweet or bitter qualities, Stout is also very good to cook with and sometimes you can even add it to the recipe. And in case you think its too cold for a cold beer, the flavour profile of a stout will usually improve if not served chilled.

For instance, Kereru Brewing’s “For Even Greater Justice Wood Fired Toasted Oat and Coconut Imperial Porter” gets warmer, more coconut flavor develops.  Tastes very much like a coconut topped marshmallow biscuit except at 8.5% you get warm fuzzies. 

Townshend’s “Key Stone Milk Stout” 5.5%. it’s called a milk stout as it contains lactose, a  sugar derived from milk and this imparts a very creamy milk taste to the gentle roast malt flavours. Forget you glass of milk before bed, this is way better.

Lord Almighty “Ursus Stout” at a lord almighty 12%ABV. Appropriately, Ursus is the name of a big American black bear. Tastes of dark roasted malt that’s just on the edge of charry bitterness. Its robust body with heavenly chocolate coffee notes and a soy sauce bitterness.  This is one smooth strong gnarly bear.

Tuatara “Black” 6.5% is part of a seasonal one off series and fortunately, is black by popular demand. Beguilingly smooth brewed with real chocolate which comes through in the aroma. A milky cocoa taste with lots of coffee and a bitter malt finish and very easy to drink. The brew comes in a lizard spine necked bottle and may well raise the hairs on your neck on the inside.

So, axe the chills and get a stout from your warm and happy place, FreshChoice.

Denis short but stout Cooper

Craft Beers Have Your Meals Sorted

Craft brewing is a constantly evolving culture and in many ways the definition is in the eye of the beerholder. With more craft breweries hopping up worldwide the creativity of the craft brewer needed to standout amongst the crowd is becoming ever beerzarre. Great food goes with great beer and some brewers have taken food and beer pairing to extremes and literally combined the two.

Try this for a set menu of malt morsels with suggested beer pairings:

Entrée:
‘Pumpkin Savior’ 5.6% from Rogue Farms. This rogue tastes like a brown ale with a delicate pumpkin and spicy background. You wait for it to end with a sweet note but instead it finishes pleasantly dry.

Beer pairing with Garage Projects ‘Spiced Saison’. The spritzy spricy cloves and nutmeg from this brew complements and enhances the Rogue’s pumpkin flavours.

Main:
‘Indra Kunindra’ by Ballast Point, 7% India styled export stout. It’s a stout Scotty, but not as we know it. Smells like it tastes, curry, lime and coconut with a heat that will have you gasping for air and flapping your hand wildly in front of your mouth. Too much and you’ll end up vindaloo. Goes well with a dipping sauce of white rice.  A limited release so get it whilst it’s hot!

Beer pairing with Good George IPA, with its big refreshing citrus hoppiness to help cut through the Kunindra’s heat.

Dessert: 
Garage Project’s Bossa Nova, a 7.7% tropical fruit salad IPA. Fermented with a Belgian yeast to produce slightly tart yet refreshing hopatropical flavours of apricot, pineapple, passionfruit and watermelons. The flavours are so fruit salady that you expect to find watermelon and passionfruit pips in each mouthful.

Beer pairing with Victory at Sea by Ballast Point, a 10% porter with coffee and vanilla.  This brew is wicked. The coffee and dark roasted malt flavours are certainly there but nicely subdued by the vanilla adding a smooth and satisfying milkyness. It gets the lick.

Get your five plus a day and beer pairings from Fresh Choice Nelson.

Denis behind bars Cooper

Ah-Ooooh Werewolves of Taupo

He’s a hairy-faced fellow, a craft brewer from Taupo, doing things with hops that will make you feel mellow. That is James Cooper, founder of Lakeman Brewing and he styles himself as a mythical beer drinking beast, as would 90% of the NZ male population. James aims to produce easy drinking flavoursome beers from premium malts, hops and the crystal clear waters of Lake Taupo.

His range includes Pilsner, Pale Ale, Lahar, Hairy Hop IPA and Taupo Pale Ale and all have a howl of a lot of hop forward flavour. In just two years brewing, he’s already tasted instant success. At the 2014 New Zealand Beer Awards Lakeman Pale Ale picked up a bronze medal in the British-style ales category and Lakeman Taupo Pale Ale won bronze in the US-style ales class.

And lately he’s been overheard at Beervana. Lakeman’s stand was the first to run dry and his foray into darker ales with ‘Jack Black Stout’ ranked third on the people’s best-rated beer list. It’s not on the shelves yet so keep a big eye out for it in the beer fridge at Fresh Choice.

Four of Lakeman’s line-up are in the pale ale style and craftily demonstrate the nuances of what different hop varieties can do to the flavour profile without rippin your lungs out.

The ‘Taupo Pale’ 5.7%, is my favourite, laden with a forest of hops with notes of blackcurrant, pines, grasses and lime complemented with an underlying maltyness.  Scarily satisfying.

Another equally good pale ale only different, is the ‘Lahar’ 5.6%. It exudes a tropical fruity aroma and overflows with smacks of blackcurrants and lashings of lychees with a touch of grapefruit. Monstrously good.

The ‘Pilsner’ 5.2%, had an intriguing complexity not often found in a pils. It has a sharp vanilla-like taste with a cutting bitterness, robust body and earthy woody hops. Huge bite in this brew.

For hop forward ales this guy is the beast. Pick up a Hairy Box Sampler for your hairy-faced feller for Father’s day and he’ll go Ah-Ooooh!

Denis ♬who loves brew the most♬ Cooper

Green Beer

Just as fresh herbs taste somewhat different to dried herbs, same goes with the hop cone. Because of the volatile nature of hops they are quickly dried straight after picking in an attempt to preserve all the aroma, flavour and bitterness that we have come to know and love, crave and cherish and adore…err, you get the picture.

Moving on, so the thing is, what does beer taste like with fresh hops, or otherwise known as wet hops, green hops or harvest beers, and sometimes seasonal beers?

Short answer, green. Long answer, earthy, woody, grassy green. Here’s a list of local fresh hop brews in my order of pungent hop power.

10/ Funk Estate ‘Oh Lordy’ 5% NZ Pale Ale; lord almighty green and mango hoppyness. 

9/ Renaissance ‘Grandmaster’ Fresh hop imperial India Pale Ale 8.5%; a barley wine cum double IPA, exudes earthy lime hops.

8/ The Mussel Inn ‘Lawn Moa’ Fresh hop lager 5%; a salubrious taste of freshly mown lawn clippings.

7/ Parrotdog ‘Kakapo’ Wet Hopped IPA 6.5%; a big fat green hoppy parrot.

6/ Panhead ‘The Vandal’ Fresh Hop 8%; get smashed on this fresh green hop customisation.

5/ Sprig & Fern ‘Harvest Pilsner’ Fresh hopped 5%; a ferntastic sessionable with green sprigs of passionfruit.

4/ Townshend ‘Oldhams Tap Pilsner’ 5.3%; grassy, grapey, and piney from a Tappy hop garden.

3/ Garage Project ‘Sea of Green’ Pilsner 5.8%; bitterly green lime hops that you get drowned in.

2/ Tuatara ‘Conehead’ Air-hopped IPA 6%; astonishing piney green passionfruit hops, finishing with a lagerish bite. 

1/ Enlightenment ‘Fresh Hopped Black the Ripa’ 6.66%; a hop mosaic, green, black and pale, all at the same time. A proper black IPA with heaps of malt and reeks of hops.

Fresh hop from FreshChoice. These will go faster than a kiwi saver kick start fund. Get em while they're hop.

Bellynote: ParrotDog have just been announced ‘champion small international brewery’ at the Australian Beer Awards. Kiwi beating Aussie in their backyard yet again!!!

Denis reviewing brewing Cooper

Gigantic Pelican and Ballast Point

By adding extra hops to their ales to preserve its qualities for the long journey to India the English inadvertently invented the IPA. A century later, the Americans added even more hops to this IPA style and produced an IPA flavour detonation that plonked their craft beer industry firmly on the world map. Then they supersized it and called it a double IPA.

San Diego is reputably "America's Craft Beer Capital" and one of its early craft beer pioneers is Ballast Point. These are the guys who built the San Diego IPA reputation with their ‘Big Eye’.  They should have given it a big Pee and Aye as well as this brew is the quintessential American IPA. Shiploads of pungent American citrus and tropical hop flavors, finishing off with a tongue buckling bitterness.

If citrus hops tickle your fancy then the Ballast Point ‘Grapefruit Sculpin’ is the bomb. This brew explodes with orange-rind and grapefruit hop haemorrhage and tastes like a cold marmalade bath on a hot tropical summer s night.

But wait, there’s more. Just as Wellington challenges Nelson as the craft beer capital, so too does Portland Oregon challenge San Diego as their country’s craft beer capital. Portland has been named a beer lovers paradise with a whopping 31 breweries making for a hell of a brewery tour. Two prominent examples are Gigantic Brewing and Pelican brewing.

Pelican brew a spicy little ‘Red Lantern IPA’ at 6.4%. The Red means rye and rye gives smoothness on the palette and a complexity of taste with a touch of spicy heat increasing the sharpness of its piney hops. The delicate caramel malt results in a satisfying refreshing cricket watcher.

Gigantic Brewing brew an IPA which they level headedly call IPA. This brew is like a baby faced assassin. It’s non-aggressive in bitterness with an even confluence of hops between citrus and pine and is very easy drinking.  However, its 7.3% will slap you in the face just when you least expect it.

For sheer hopulence, it’s hard to go past a West Coast American IPA.  

Denis cuddly beer Cooper

Crafty Christmas

Whoa! Only six more days to do your Christmas shopping or if you’re a guy, only five and a half more days before you start.  Usually I get all my gifts from the shop next to where I’ve managed to find a park.

So here’s a thought, instead of the old Susan Boyle CD for Christmas, what about one of those craft beers from parking friendly FreshChoice? A beer that you often had walked past and wondered what that’s like? Well, tis the season of good swill, and what better way to get an ‘out there’ gift for a bit of personal indulgence or for your favourite person who has everything.

Rogue Breweries brew beers that are as much ‘out there’ as dyed female armpit hairs. Two stand-out Rogues perfect for the Christmas day pig-out are the ‘Morimoto Imperial Pilsner’ as the pre lunch or dinner amuze booze and the ‘Double Chocolate Stout’ for the end of day Christmas crash.

The ‘Morimoto Imperial Pilsner’ at 8.8% is one big mo-fo. Like concentrated pilsner, it’s thick, strong and bitingly bitter with walnut like flavours and a dry finish. So strong it takes longer to sip than a six pack and even Rogue has appreciated this by supplying a swing top for you to regain enough decorum to re-savour the flavour on Boxing Day.

A stout in summer? No such thing as a bad time for a stout, especially the ‘Double Chocolate Stout’ 8.7%. This is pure decadence with velvety strawberry, caramellow and milk chocolate tones plus just enough hop bitterness and nutmeg bite to relieve any overt sweetness. Winner of 3 world beer champ gold medals, its perfect for a sofa loafer.

A present that doesn’t need wrapping since the label looks like Santa, is the La Chouffe 8%.  This brew even tastes like Christmas. It’s got the classic strong Belgium beer spices, with notes of cloves, ginger, pineapple, cinnamon and everything else found in a Christmas cake. Crikey, even the big foamy white head looks like a Santa’s beard. 

Malty Christmas and hoppy New Year

Denis Santamental Cooper