Oh, The Humanities!

I'm going to take a quick break from my ramblings on pubs to announce the availability of the strongest ale ever brewed at the Brewers Union. Not that I am set on this modern West Coast notion that stronger and hoppier beers are cool, as they are (hush, hush, top secret) easy to make and even easier to hide defects in. It's just that one of our local regulars requested a big malty ale and I decided to oblige. And, it has that feel of a momentous occassion like the record-setting going on at the Olympic Track & Field Trials down in Eugene. 7.1% ABV. Plenty of malt. A generous dose of Simcoe at flameout. We're working here with something like a Scottish Ale but without any smoke or peat, and it goes down way too easy.

I had originally decided to bluntly label it "David's Big Malty Ale", being that David is the name of the aforementioned local regular, but as he teaches Humanities down at the University of Oregon it ended up being called, "Oh, the Humanities!". We felt jolly clever about it, and I chuckled all the way to the Adobe Illustrator file that contains the pump clip artwork.

Tapping took place on Thursday. In our case we really do tap them, bona fide, with a rubber mallet and a cask tap. I am frequently amused by the flood of notices on the various beer sites about beer tappings, when all they do is twist down a Sankey tap and open the valve on a tank of CO2. Out comes dead beer. This, on the contrary, is living stuff, where we get to fiddle with it each morning and make knowing comments about how it is changing from day to day and from cask to cask. It is. It really is. Come down today and try a pint, and then return enthusiastically in a couple of weeks and see what I'm talking about.

Tomorrow I'll be brewing small beer again, just like old times. I'm shooting for 3.8% or thereabouts. Then I'll be back to rambling about pubs. There is a juicy comment in the last post that I want to tackle.