YOU HAVE TO DRAW THE LINE SOMEWHERE

The lovely Tama and I just spent a weekend in the great, green, mold infused state of Oregon.  The lovely Tama spent Saturday In Corvallis fulfilling the moral obligation of all grad students – helping to interview incoming grad program applicants.  Since, to me, this was right up there with attending the opera while shaving my forehead with a cheese grater, I elected to stay in Eugene with my next older sibling leaving us free to pursue a rainy afternoon of brewery crawling throughout the local environs.  

First up was Oakshire Brewing… strictly a brewery with tasting room, they do leave room beside their loading dock for a local, independent taco truck.  A nice place, but overall they try a wee bit too hard to make a now, happening product. This leads to assaults on your taste buds from ales confused by orange peel, cardamom and the like and stouts make with coffee, free range oatmeal and organic, dark chocolate. These are all lovely tastes, but when you mix too many of them together with a heavy hand of hops what you wind up with is an uninspired train wreck in the back of your mouth.  Let us not forget the Reinheitsgebot the Germans came up with in 1487… if you wanna call it beer then it can only be made with water, hops and barley (they didn’t include yeast originally because nobody had discovered it’s existence yet).  That’s it. End of story. Add anything else and you can make it, but you can’t call it beer.  Must be time to re-read our history books.

From there we drove across town, through a driving but brief hail storm, to visit Ninkasi Brewing.  Now here is a brewery.  Doing a crawl, we were ordering samplers at each establishment.  I tried three or four beers here and will swear by them each and every one.  A lager, a red ale, a stout and a porter that was aged in a bourbon cask… traditionally one of my favorite taste treats.  I know, I know, you wonder how I can rail against flavored beer at one place and rave about beer with bourbon right after. The difference is timing.  They make a good, simple porter (which I sampled without the cask aging first…) and then let it sit in a barrel that lived its former life as a whiskey cask.  This adds some subtle undercurrents of flavor without being forward enough to cancel out something else.  I’m all in favor of running along the cutting edge but not if it destroys the lab rat in the process.

Our final stop of the day was at Hop Valley Brewing Co. which has a restaurant attached to the brewery.  We went with the six glass sampler here and got a nice cross section of their brew palette.  A few of their beers were good but unremarkable, one we were unable to finish a 4 oz. sampler, and a couple were quite good… mostly at the dark side… cask conditioned porter and stout.  My only question is, if you are going to go to the trouble to make organic, locally sourced, free range beer, why would you serve flash frozen, reconstituted french fries?

Those of you who know me or have read the header on this blog will know that my five year plan was to visit every microbrewery in the golden state.  Well, so much for aiming high.

With the influx of breweries who insist on dabbling in the dark arts of fruit flavoring and, god forbid, food pairings, I have made an executive decision to amend my vision. 

I conceived this plan while dwelling in Quincy with its population of 5000. After a year here in Insanity Cruz just the thought of multiple forays into the densely packed hell that is Los Angeles (7500 people per square mile…) only to find beers filled with blueberries or sushi grade tuna or whatever leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth and a knot in my belly.  I mean lets face it… 1870 was the last time that LA was the same size as Quincy and back then Quincy had a brewery of its own so why bother?

I’m not some corn-fed beauty from the Midwest longing to be in movin’ pitchers and, even as a child, Disneyland was something to watch on TV and generated absolutely no desire to actually organize a visit.  The California of my childhood was the coastal redwoods, a mission or two and the golden gate bridge tempered with the stories of Sutter’s Mill and the Donner Party.

Armed with this personal view, I intend to sketch a rough line east from Pismo Beach to Needles and cede everything south of it back to Mexico.  Sure we lose the Getty Museum but we get to keep nearly all the trees and Lone Pine where most of the movies of my childhood were filmed anyway.  And hey, that will move Northern California up so it includes the stuff above Sacramento. It’s a win/win situation in my book… are you with me people?