Sour Beer #2: Rodenbach

The Easter Bunny left One Woman a Rodenbach. 

Rodenbach is a Flanders Red Ale from Belgium. It's a beer brewed in a very special way that involves cherry essence and oak vats. It's on the lighter side in terms of alcohol content (5.2%), but it packs so much flavor!

Here's what the all-star cast of The Other Woman and This One Guy visiting from NYC came up with to describe this cherry-tainted delight:

Color: Reddish Chestnut--the color of a Sorel horse! (- The Other Woman)
           A well-blended Manhattan (-This One Guy)
Smell: Delicious smell wafts across the room, a hint of malt, and just a tiny tiny pinch of hops.
Taste: Not as sweet as the last Monk's Café Flemish Sour Ale, the Rodenbach has a mellow oak taste, as well as a cherry bon bon flavor. It has a little bitterness, but it's of the round, friendly kind--"Like the Agostino bitters," says This One Guy. One Woman compared it to the taste of candied grapefruit zest.  The flavors go by one at a time, but really quickly. This made me think of what musicians who work with digital/electronic sound call an "envelope" to talk about changing character of a sound over time. That's more detailed than the term "finish" that tasters often use, and it really gets at this idea of a continuous change in character over time. The Rodenbach then, has a very short but rich taste envelope. We paired this beauty with a buttery Rogue Creamery Caveman Blue and a juicy salad of mixed baby lettuces with lemon shallot vinaigrette. Yum!

Musical Pairing: Vortex Temporum, by Gerard Grisey (click to hear the first part of the piece). A French composer of spectral music, Grisey took what he learned by analyzing the physical properties of sound using all kinds of sound analysis technology, and used that to write acoustic music. Vortex Temporum is an at times giddy, other times contemplative exploration of sound that explodes normal conceptions of linear temporality. And envelopes.

BONUS pics:
First harvest of One Woman's baby lettuce growing experiment! So succulent and sweet. And edible!

"hello, world!"

Mocha Porter - A Friendly Rogue

Porters and Stouts often get lumped together in a group called darkandheavy, misleading potential drinkers about its diversity. As I already mentioned in my recent report on young's chocolate stout, dark color does not automatically translate to heaviness, high alcohol, or high calories. This neat list at the shapefit.com website reveals that Guinness, Anchor Steam, and Tsingtao all have the same number of calories (153 kcal/bottle). Of these three, Guinness has the least alcohol by volume - only 4.2%. Porter gets its name, not from any sort of portly quality, but from its popularity among porters--transportation workers--in eighteenth century London, as the Alström Bros, founders of the Beer Advocate, explain.

Porters may be very heavy, or not heavy at all. The point is, don't judge a beer by its name, or worse, its color!!

Brewed in Orgeon, the Rogue Mocha Porter is a little bit of a trickster of a beer. Full of smokey, dark, and robust flavors, it seems like a heavy beer. But it's not. The initial sharpness of its flavors seem to defy food pairings, but it turns out to be an excellent food beer. 

It's all about the malts in this beer. With 9 different kinds of malts, they color and flavor this fun beer. One Woman tasted burnt sugar, moist tobacco, charcoal, a bit of dark toffee, and of course, mocha. With very little carbonation, it pours to create an airy crumpet-like head the color of a café au lait that quickly disintegrates. With all the burnt flavors, it would seem like the beer would be much heavier, but this is the beauty and the surprise of this porter. After the initial hit of flavors, it doesn't linger. It's not sticky-sweet either, so it doesn't fight with food. A little amazed about how well this porter slipped into the meal, One Woman enjoyed this porter with a meal of roasted beets with crushed almonds on a bed of greens tossed with a honey dijon vinaigrette, a grilled cheese sandwich (yeah, baby!!) made with a mild Petaluma Creamery cheddar and sautéed onions, plus a little spot of apple sauce on the side.


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Musical pairing: Igor Stravisnky's Rite of Spring, a riot-causing, very HEAVY piece that premiered in 1913. The selection tonight is dedicated to those still craving the weighty, heavy and dark of the primordial pagan ritual sacrifice. It's also probably one of One Woman's favorite works for orchestra. Congrats to David Milnes and the UC Berkeley University Symphony Orchestra for an awesome performance of the piece tonight!