Samuel Adams White Ale
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(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
Loading ...Boston Beer Company’s Samuel Adams seemed an appropriate “welcome home” after a week in Texas.
Samuel Adams White Ale is a seasonal brew that has been in the back of my refrigerator for some time now. I almost drank it weeks ago, but several helpful folks on Twitter recommended I drink the Imperial White instead — which I didn’t have in my arsenal at that time.
With the unusual restrictions of this beer-a-day challenge, the only way I can compare two beers is to drink them on back-to-back days. So I bought a bottle of the Imperial White and waited for a weekend when I could do just that.
I poured the White Ale into one of my curvy Sam Adams glasses, and the pour was fun to watch. It started out as a fairly clear straw gold color, but at the end yeast and sediment from the bottom of the bottle poured out and darkened the beer, cascading and swirling like a mini-tornado. Before long, the sediment evened out and left behind thousands of tiny suspended particles.
(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)When you’re trapped at the airport, sometimes the only thing you can control is what type of beer your order.
I spent several more hours in Texas than I had planned, thanks to poor weather. Had everything gone well, I would have been enjoying a beer at Fenway Park, watching the Red Sox play the Orioles — my flight was scheduled to arrive just as the game started, and I going to jet straight to the ballpark. Instead, my wife had to give up our tickets (she was in Boston, but didn’t want to go to the game alone) while I curled up at a bar in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport.
All around me, would-be passengers were drowning their delayed sorrows in tall glasses of Widmer Hefeweizen. Who am I to question the wisdom of the crowd in a situation like that?
Portland Oregon’s Widmer Brothers Brewery is purported to have brewed the first “American-style Hefeweizen” in 1986, serving it with a lemon to enhance the beer’s citrus notes and immediately causing the world to ask, “Wait, why is there lemon in this beer?”
It was bound to happen, but I wasn’t expecting it to happen in Texas.
While my basic goal is to drink exactly one beer a day all year long without repeating a single beer, I have a broader goal of discovering new beer. With a few exceptions, I have deliberately sought out beer that I’ve never tasted before.
There were some beers, seemingly ubiquitous on American menus, that I decided to drink only in emergency situations. And I had one of those during my last night in Dallas.
I was in Texas for a work conference, and the final night included an excursion to Lone Star Park for horse racing, drinks, and a buffet dinner in a box suite. I had hoped to find some more Texas or southern beer at the track — at least a bottle of Lone Star, since it shares a name with the race park — but one look at the bar told me I had bet on the wrong horse.
My second night in Dallas found me at Jakes Old Fashioned Hamburgers, where they had a decent beer menu — and by that, I mean the beer at the top of their list was Flying Dog Pale Ale. They also had a Widmer Hefeweizen and Fat Tire, but the remainder of the menu consisted of simple, mass-marketed lagers.
I settled on Anheuser-Busch’s answer to Shiner Bock, called ZiegenBock. ZiegenBock’s label proudly boasts the beer is “Brewed in Texas, Made Only for Texans” — which strikes me as an obvious attempt to beat Shiner at its own game.
When I asked my waitress about ZiegenBock, she screwed up her nose and said, “It’s like Shiner, but worse.”
Alas, my goal is to try new beer and if ZiegenBock is only available in Texas — giddyup!
I announced over Twitter that I would be spending a few days in Dallas on business, and I asked for beer suggestions.
Good suggestions came through, including Rahr & Sons and beer bars or restaurants such as the Flying Saucer and The Covey. (These last two are both in neighboring Fort Worth.) But the one beer everyone told me I should drink while in Texas was Shiner Bock, from the Spoetzl Brewery.
The conference schedule kept me on a tight leash, so I largely drank my one beer each day based on where I was having dinner. And Shiner Bock was EVERYWHERE.
I drank it on my first night in Texas, at a barbecue joint that served Shiner in 32 oz mugs. It was easily the biggest single serving of beer that I’ve had all year long — but as they say, everything’s bigger in Texas.
