1900 Amber

This is by no means the best amber I've ever had, but sitting on the back porch of our vacation house (not our vacation house, but rather the one we were renting for the week) in Breckenridge watching the pollen and pine trees blow in the wind ... I found myself thinking that this is a perfectly executed beer.

There is nothing exceptionally special or unique about this beer, but I kind of think that is true of a lot of very awesome things in life...

Cheers!

1900 Amber (4.7% ABV)
Fort Collins Brewery
Fort Collins, Colorado

Coincidental Suddenly Summer (solstice) release

After driving through one of the strangest and coolest parts of the country, the kids needed a break.  So I found two breweries in Fruita, Colorado and we stopped.

First up, Copper Club Brewing Company (http://www.copperclubbrew.com/).  According to their website, "We have a dream . . . a dream of making great craft beer and putting a delicious pint in the hand of everyone we know.  Here at Copper Club Brewing Company, that dream becomes reality every day.  Love small batch beer served in a cozy pub atmosphere?  Come on in, have a seat and relax.  Yes, we really are that kind of place. "

We rolled in on the first day of summer, June 21.  Naturally I ordered a Suddenly Summer Ale.  Who knew that was the day this brew was released?!?  Not me.  The atmosphere was very chill and no one cared that we had our two slightly rambunctious kids (mostly just because they had been riding in the car for 4 hours for the second day in a row) with us.  The beer was cold, refreshing and lightly citrus-ed.  I really enjoyed it.

Suddenly Summer Ale
Copper Club Brewing Company
Fruita, Colorado

Beers of Bourgogne

After arriving in Dijon and checking into our hotel on yet another cold, windy and rainy day, we dropped our giant mounds of soggy luggage off in our room and wondered downstairs to the bar to plan our afternoon and the following day.  And to use the free Wi-Fi.

Despite it being happy hour, there was no one there but there was a bucket with 5 bottles of open champagne sitting on the counter of the bar with clean glasses sitting next to it.

We seated ourselves at a small table by the window and waited.  Waited.  Waited some more.  Finally, The Husband got up and went to the bar to pour a glass of, what we assumed was, complimentary champagne.  Sure enough, some small French guy appears at the very moment The Husband delivered my glass of champagne.  Little French man wanted to know what room we were in.  Seriously?

How do you try to tell someone in French that if they don't want people to help themselves, they should a) have a bartender present at the bar and b) not leave open bottles of champagne on the counter with clean glasses immediately adjacent to it?!? Je ne sais pas (I don't know).

So after wondering around the city on a bank holiday (Pentecost) in the rain for a few hours desperately looking any place that was open to grab a drink, we ended up back at the hotel.  We waited about 10 minutes again for the bartender to appear and then got two local brews (330mL for 6€ each) to take back to our room.

According to the brewery website, their beers are made using traditional Bavarian methods and adhere to the purity laws ("Reinheitsgebot") enacted in 1516 .  The Reinheitsgebot is very simple.  It states that beer must contain only malt, hops and water -- no additives of any kind.

Blanche - Weissbier (4.8% ABV)
Brasserie de Vezelay
Saint-Père, Bourgogne, France

Blonde - Pale Ale (5.5% ABV)
Brasserie de Vezelay
Saint-Père, Bourgogne, France

Neither The Husband or I can remember too much that was either remarkably good or remarkably bad about either of these beers.  We finished both of them and I remember commenting that perhaps the French people in Bourgogne should stick to making wine -- because -- as we learned on our wine tour the following day, they do that really really well.

The next day we spotted the other varieties produced by Brasserie de Vezelay in the market.

Homemade Swiss cooler at the Hotel Edelweiss

My improvised Swiss cooler (window half open for photo purposes).

After arriving at the Hotel Edelweiss in Wengen, Switzerland, we were cold, wet and hungry.  So we took the beer out of our luggage and wanted to chill it.  But alas -- no fridge in this quaint little hotel/ski-chalet.

I put on my thinking cap and opened the window to find a large windowsill outside.  I set all our beers on the ledge.  First thing I do in any hotel is try to open the window.  I'm not sure why -- but I do.  Every time.  I realized there were functional outdoor shutters, so I pulled the outdoor shutter closed and locked it to prevent any random winds from coming along and blowing my beer off the ledge.  I left the other shutter open to let the cool air circulate in the space.  Don't worry -- I checked below to make sure that should some strange event come along that would cause my beer to fall -- I wouldn't injure anyone sitting around eating their schnitzel dinner.  It was an alley below.  So we shut the window and headed off to dinner in the cold.

When we arrived back at our hotel after dinner, we popped this open and dug out all our maps to plan our adventures the next day.  We were fighting against a few factors: 1) the TSA had stolen or misplaced one of my running shoes when I left Phoenix and 2) it was cold and snowing on the mountain.  We did not expect to deal with either of these factors when we planned to go to Switzerland to go mountain biking and hiking.

So although the weather was crap, the beer was perfect.  Boozy and sweet.  A surprisingly good brew!

La Goudale (7.25% ABV)
Les Brasseurs De Gayant
Douai, France

About the brewery:  as of the date of my research, the Les Brasseurs de Gayant Brewery is the second largest independent brewery in France. The brewery was originally founded in 1919 in the Norde-Pas-de-Calais region of France that borders Belgium. Despite being one of the largest independent breweries in France, they specialize in producing high quality small batches of "biere de garde" style of beers.

About the beer / beer name:  in the fourteenth century, the good beers were called Goudale, Goudalle or Good Ale. A merchant called the Goudalier sold each of the "Good Ales" for 2 deniers a pot.  This particular La Goudale was crowned the "World's Best Biere de Garde" at the 2008 World Beer Awards.

As we headed out the next morning, we finally got to see some beautiful blue skies and the tip tops of the Alps.  Mother Nature teased us with just a few short hours of sunshine to soak in the beauty of the Alps.  And then it started to snow...

Drink local: Interlaken, Switzerland

Despite being abroad, we decided to drink local and unfiltered.  Naturtrubes...naturally cloudy.

Zwickel Bier (4.8% ABV)
Rugen Brau
Interlaken, Bern, Switzerland

Back to reality.

You may have noticed a lack of posts over the past week or so.  Well, that's because I took my beertography dog and pony show on the road to Europe.  International Beertography!  Or maybe it was a vacation with The Husband.  Either way, I was overseas and not interested in blogging.  But that doesn't mean that I didn't drink plenty of beer, photograph it and possibly even jog down some sloppy notes.

However, returning from a 19 day kid-free vacation to a home with no food and a few kids who are now on summer break and want to be entertained has left me with little to no motivation to a) stay up past 9pm or b) sit in front of a computer and think/read/write.  None-the-less, I had a beer tonight (YAY) while cleaning the pool (boo) and figured I should.   

The Tree, 4 years ago.

You see, we have this tree.  

It is a magnificently beautiful shade tree that happens to puke yellow blooms every year.  It is perfectly shaped, always green and shades half of the back of our house year round.  Every spring it seems to turn yellow as it is covered with small bright yellow flowers.  These flowers all fall directly into our pool.  And by fall, I actually mean cover the entire surface of and choke the pump nearly to death.  And once wet, these blooms smell funky and the smell lingers (like on my hands...right now).  And attract flies in the yard.  Gross.

The Palo Verde was named the official state tree of Arizona in 1954. The name literally means "green stick" in Spanish as it literally relies on its green stems and branches to help with photosynthesis.  The Palo Verde is a relatively small tree that can reach a height of approximately 32 feet and have a trunk diameter of up to 2 feet. Because it is a tree native to the desert, it comes fully equipped with a deep root system which allows it to tap into the ground water and survive periods of drought.  This is part of the reason we bought it -- to avoid roots pushing through the walls of our pool.  We never thought the blooms would be such a deal breaker.  And yes, I've done quite a bit of research to try to determine if there are any quirky ways to force the tree to stop blooming.

This year we thought we were going to escape the wrath of our beautiful tree.  As of May 9, it had about 3 blossoms total.  A-typical and nearly at the end of the blooming period for these trees.  So we hired a pool guy to help this summer (best decision ever) and asked our neighbor to come empty the skimmer basket once a day if he happened to see blooms on the tree.

Sorry neighbor.

Rolle Bolle (5.5% ABV) -- Summer Seasonal
New Belgium Brewing
Fort Collins, Colorado

So cheers to you tree.  You have been beautiful and helpful over the past four years but you will only live long enough to shade the back of our house another summer.

Rating:  Sadly, this beer is nothing special.  Just another summer brew from New Belgium.  Somewhat uninspiring.  Although I do think that people who don't normally like beer but do enjoy white wine may enjoy this beer.  The taste is somehow familiar.  

Recommendations:  DO NOT PLANT A PALO VERDE TREE NEAR A POOL, EVER.  But if you want a fast-growing, no-water tree to provide shade in your yard, these are wonderful trees.