The Last Midwestern Hurrah

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It’s the holidays, hombres y mujeres, and so blogging was going to be sporadic anyway but this holiday is more sporadic than usual. Events have conspired (a lot of them) to send me packing to the mesas. Amigos, I’m moving to Tucson, Arizona, effective in about one week from today–give or take a day or two caused by road delays.

I’ve already begun reading Tucson and Arizona blogs. I’m familiarizing myself with the norms and mores (that’s pronounced MOR-ays) of the great southwest. I’m reading history books and guides to plants. I bought a map.

While this blog’s calendar runs from February to February, the next to makeover will occur on January 1st (or 2nd) when I start talking about desert things along with the normal national and international things.

I suspect that I’ll still keep up with Indiana/Indianapolis news, but I’ll probably comment less frequently on it as I do now.

And I anticipate more pictures of murderous fauna.

It is not my opinion that this blog will suffer from the move in the long run, which should be good news for you 15-50 regular readers.

If you are familiar with the area and have good advice, specifically camping, hiking, music, food, and art advice I would love to hear it. I would double love it if it was cheap/free.

Indiana Beer Blogging

Filed Under Beer, Indiana, Porchy, Review, Travel | 4 Comments

UPDATE I (below).

This is not a beer blog but it’s not like this would be the first time that I’ve betrayed my New Year’s Resolution to up the political commentary and decrease the odd-and-ends. But let’s be frank, shall we? The big news in politics right now is that banks have somehow been allowed to get “too big to fail” and the government is (once again) proving that they’re not really up to the challenge of managing the financial sector appropriately. And, here’s the frankness, I, like John McCain, am not afraid to admit I don’t really understand all this financial mumbo jumbo. I suppose one day I’ll sit down with a thick, gray tome on the subject and at least be able to offer something different than what I picked up from the front page of the WSJ and the Krugman/Kristol Op-Eds in today’s NYT. But that day is not today. So today, you get some beer blogging.

The board meeting on Friday ended earlier than anticipated and which meant I had what has long been rumored to exist, the fabled “free time,” which I decided to use by taking a different (and slightly longer) route back home from North Manchester than the one I took there. This new route went right through Kokomo, birthplace of the most popular blues song of all time, “Sweet Home Kokomo,” which you probably know as the Robert Johnson/Stevie Ray Vaughn/Eric Clapton/Keb Mo’/Blues Brothers hit “Sweet Home Chicago.” From talking with Rita Kohn at an Indiana Humanities Council lunch a few weeks ago I learned there are two (count’em ONE–TWO) brewpubs in the tiny burg of Kokomo (Kokomoburg) and I decided to hit them both. You have to make long road trips count, after all.

The Brass Monkey has a gorgeous exterior in the historic downtown district but this isn’t about architecture, is it? The insides were humble but I was greeted happily by the hostess who directed me to a table outside by request. The outside is a bricked alley between the Brass Monkey and the building next door. I grabbed a couple of brew industry trade magazines and ordered the sampler. The sampler came with five beers but the waitress added a half-sized sample of a sixth beer–the Silver Back Stout–because “[I had] to try it, we just won an award for it and it’s really good.” How can you turn down a sales pitch like that?

The beers I tried were the following (and in this order) (descriptions are pulled from the Brass Monkey website, linked above):

  • Turnacle (not on site): A limited edition brew of some sort
  • Green Tea Pale Ale: American pale ale brewed with green tea and fresh grapefruit peel
  • The Tenacious Apple Tripel: A traditional Belgian tripel fermented with apples
  • Speak No Evil Belgian IPA: Best of both worlds, incorporates Belgian and American grains with Belgian yeast and American hops
  • Hear No Evil Imperial IPA: An earth shattering nine separate hop additions
  • Silver Back Stout: Best described as a breakfast stout, Silver Back is a combination oatmeal/coffee/sweet stout

Since July 2008 the Brass Monkey has done this great thing they call the One and Done. They make one batch of some experimental beer and never look back. They had just run out of the Swampwater the night before (“a stronger than average dunkleweizen”) which means all the beers above (with the exception of the “limited edition” Turnacle should be available on future visits.

The Turnacle was a shocking beer. It was very tart, very bright. I don’t remember the class of beer it was in but it set the mood straightaway that I was tasting the product of a brewmeister not afraid to reach beyond the traditional.

The Brass Monkey was also out of growlers. Good for them, that means they sold them all. Bad for me because I wanted to take home a growler of the Green Tea Pale ale. The GTPA hits like a traditional American Pale Ale, although a touch thicker bodied. It has a silky finish that leaves the mouth with the herby flavors of the Green Tea and a slight astringency–but in a good way. To me this beer is a perfect combination pushing the bounds of the style without fully abandoning it. It’s more in the Dogfish Head model rather than the Schlafly model of zymuroligical advance–and as those who know me can attest, I’m a Dogfish Head devotee.

Skipping over the Tenacious Apple for a moment, the next two beers were both IPAs–a Belgian and an Imperial. Both beers were solid examples of their class although–and as I mentioned to the owner when I was done–I am certainly going to mix these beers up; so I apologize. If I remember right, the See No Evil (the Belgian IPA) was a better beer with a nice floral aroma and a citrusy finish. The Imperial was muddier beer, more earthy and with less pop. If I reversed them, I apologize. But both were good beers.

The Silver Back Stout was a good beer too but I have to admit, the high ABV of the preceding beers left my palate a shambles by this point. Three of the five beers I had tasted had ABVs of over 9%, the Tenacious Apple clocks in at an astonishing 10.1% Yee-ow. So, while I am left with little doubt that the SBS was a good beer, I’m hard pressed to tell you much about it.

The only sour note in the mix was the Tenacious Apple Tripel. According to Mike, the owner of the Brass Monkey who was kind enough to invite me to his table to chit chat about industry things, it’s a popular beer and dangerous too boot so take the following criticism with a grain of salt. If a beer like this is popular, there must be a reason.

I initially thought I would dislike the beer because it had apples in it. I don’t like fruits in my beers. It’s a personal preference but I don’t disparage the fans of Oaken Barrel’s Razz-Wheat or various “strawberry blonds” etc. But, as it turns out, that is not this beer’s problem.

The tripel was all high ABV with no maltiness in the back end. The alcohol notes and burn rushed to the roof of the mouth and into the nose. The bitterness dropped down and into the sides. The thin body of the beer just couldn’t hold up and it was hard to taste the beer. It was like the tongue was just out of commission. The alcohol content killed the ability to discern the aroma and the finish was just alcohol and bitter.

It is a dangerous beer though, I imagine. Had the day been hotter and the beer a touch colder, I could have easily knocked back two or three of these beers and thought as much of the process as if I had knocked back two or three Coor’s Lights. The difference being that the ABV difference would have knocked me right back (three Apple Triples would have as much alcohol in them as roughly six Coor’s).

The above commentary makes it sound like an awful beer and I would not want to leave anyone with that impression. I would not rate it highly in terms of technical brilliance, but in general that beer was fine, but I’m a forgiving judge on these matters. A beer like the Tenacious Apple has a role to play in the wider landscape of available beers.

Overall the experience at the Brass Monkey was great. Microbrewmeisters often find a hop schedule and a set series of grains that they prefer and use as the base of a lot of their recipes. The resulting effect is that though the customer may be drinking a red, or a blond, or a stout, or a pale ale, with but very minor differences between them they all kind of taste the same. The best brewmeisters brew from outside their comfort zones providing unique recipes that take advantage of the differences between beer styles. The Brass Monkey is of this latter breed which is better for them and better for the customer.

They are currently brewing tiny batches (15 gallons at a time) but I anticipate that they may change shortly.

I had such a good time at the Brass Monkey and enjoyed their beers I was going to forego my trip to Half Moon for the future. Unfortunately I had failed to make a mandatory restroom stop at the Brass Monkey and since I had to stop again anyway, I decided to make the most out of it.

The Half Moon is a microbrew set up in the model of a Ram or Rock Bottom: All wood interiors, dark, quiet, kind of classy (for a brewpub). It was basically empty when I showed up and the brewmeister was having a pint with another customer at the bar when I pulled up my stool.

The waitress gave me samples of the Scottish Ale and the Nut Brown. The Scottish Ale was a good match for the style but not at all adventerous. The Nut Brown was murky and earthy. The flavors were all jumbled up and no single part stood out. I quickly chose a pint of the Scottish while I tried to determine what I would take home. I tried a sample of the IPA. Again, a very muddled and earthy beer with almost no hint of florals or citrus. I’ve had other IPA like this one so I won’t say it was poor form, but I will say that I chose not to buy a growler of it.

The other beers were a “Pre-Prohibition Pilsner,” a “Wildcat Wheat,” a “Stoplight Red,” and the “Cole Porter.” My girlfriend is never really excited by the stouts and porters which is unfortunate because based on the three beers I had I assume that the Cole Porter is exactly the kind of beer the brewer would be good at. I’m not a fan of reds, wheats, or pilseners, and as I had already said, I didn’t really care for Elwood’s IPA or the Old Ben Brown, so I filled by growler up with the Scottich and sprung the extra 15 bucks for the growler koozie. If you’ve read my other blogs, you know I’m a big fan of owning the proper koozie and Kokomo is about 90 minutes from home, so insulated padding seemed perfectly in order.

The brewmeister said nothing to me even after his friend disappeared; and, the bartender was studying biology while I drank alone in the middle of the bar. I would never have called what I received “bad service” except that the service I was treated to at the Brass Monkey was so good. The hostess greeted me right away and enthusiastically. The waitress was conversational without being overbearing and she made sure I was able to taste all the beers I wanted. The owner invited me to sit at his table and talk about our favorite beers. But then, at the Half Moon…nothing. Not bad service, not at all. It just wasn’t exceptional service. Add to that the mediocrity of their beers and the best thing that came out of that visit (aside from the bathroom break) was the awesome growler koozie, which is pretty great, but I wish it said “Brass Monkey” on it.

I took the growler over to a friend’s house that night and the Scottish was a consensus “good beer.” There was a wide variety of beer interests represented in that small sample group so I think it is a positive thing that the Scottish was so roundly applauded. Perhaps the other beers would have been as warmly welcomed. (It is also possible that my palate was having a hard time discerning flavors because of the abuse they had sustained earlier). As a fair-minded beer judge, I think Half Moon deserves a second chance which I hope to give it in a couple of weeks.

UPDATE: 1: Because I’m often confused by things businessy I’ll basically repeat what Andrew Lewis wrote me in an email: Andrew is the owner/brewer of The Brass Monkey. Mike rents space to AL/Brass Monkey and sells the beer to the public. So I may have misspoke when I said that Mike was “the owner” of Brass Monkey. It’s more like he’s the owner of the establishment where one can buy Brass Monkeys’ beer….if I even understood that correctly.

St. Louis: The Cuisine I

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I’m not a real gourmand. I might be a foodie, but I doubt it. I like food, a lot. I know a lot of food facts and food history. And I like to cook. But really I just like eating. Not necessarily in a loutish stuff-my-face way but also that.  That’s all preface for the fact that I only have four things to comment on in regard to food on this trip and all four took place in the St. Louis portion.

Miss Saigon:

There is a little restaurant just off the University of Washington campus called Miss Saigon. The decor is Easter-chic (kitcheny stencils in pale pink, yellow, green and blue–a description that makes it sound less Pier One than it was). The staff was friendly and the noodle bowl I ordered was good. But what made my visit to Miss Saigon commentworthy was the Vietnamese-style coffee.

Now, I’ve never had this tasty bevarine before and other, more urbane, readers may be underwhelmed by this description but this is my blog and if you want to write about the best Vietnamese coffee you’ve ever had be my guest, either in the comments here or start your own darn blog.

Basically they have this tiny metal cup in which they place the coffee grounds (Cafe du Monde Chickory) and hot water. The coffee drips down onto condensed sweet milk (sweet condensed milk) which sits like white gelatin underneath the black coffee. People confused by what beverage connoisseurs mean when they call various black or brown drinks “red” will stop being confused after the next step.

It would be logical for the black (or dark, dark, dark brown) coffee to turn a decent shade of mocha or beige once it was combined with the milk, but it doesn’t. Rather it turns an earthy orange–a warm burnt umber perhaps–but I’m not good with colors. And I should also add that this mixing of milk and coffee is a labored ordeal. The condensed milk is reluctant at first to accept the coffee at all and must be coaxed to do so with effort, including scraping the sides of the glass with a knife or fork. The waitress explained to me that it was important to get all the milk to balance the coffee properly.

Once mixed the coffee is poured over ice. Ouila! Delicious.  Slap your hands and let’s move on.

Toasted Ravioli:

We were told before departing to the Lou that we had to have the toasted ravioli–some sort of genius regional delicacy that was not to be missed. It was fine but exactly what you would expect of deep-fried pasta filled with stuff. I’m from Indiana–home of of the Indiana State Fair and I am no stranger to the effects of deep-frying on various foodstuffs. I mean, deep-frying turns Twinkies into eclairs–that’s amazing. Deep-frying ravioli turns it into…deep-fried ravioli.

I may be biased because the waitress didn’t understand that when we asked that the sausage be taken off our order, we meant that it be taken from everything. Even when I ate meat I didn’t really like sausage all that much, so I was disappointed to find it in my cheese ravioli’s. On the other hand, the sausage ravioli was probably a more authentic experience than the cheese variety (unless that cheese was going to be Provel). So I say: Eh. Try it when you’re in St. Louis because it’s from there and it will help make your experience in the city unique to that city which is important in traveling, I think.

Ted Dewes:

Ted Dewes is a custard joint and it’s practically world famous. It’s Concretes were the inspiration to what ya’ll know as The Blizzard from Dairy Queen. The biggest difference between the two is that The Blizzard is made from ice cream and The Concrete is made from ice cream with eggs in it (a.k.a. custard). There is nothing in the world that people rave about more than custard and I’ve never gotten it. I like custard; I like it a lot. But I also like ice cream and the difference between the two is not worlds, it’s a few uncooked eggs. I suppose that adds something to the flavor, I do like custard more than ice cream. I suppose it adds to the texture–that’s what I’m told and, to be honest, I didn’t know that ice cream and custard were so closely related until just a few years ago because custard is so darned smooth and cream–and I assume that’s because of the eggs.

But how far is Ted Dewes from, say Ritters? Not far–maybe as far as ice cream is from custard. It’s probably a little better but I think Ritters has a wider selection of flavors. Oh! here’s something neat. Ted Dewes only makes vanilla. All the flavors they offer are blended in when you order. So, there’s that. With that said, I may not have sampled enough to make a solid estimate of its value. Nevertheless, it is excellent custard and if that’s your thing, then you have to go to Ted Dewes when you’re in St. Louis. If you are not in St. Louis and you’re thinking of a reason to go, Ted Dewes might be that reason. However, if you’ve been feeling down because you can’t get to St. Louis and the thought of not trying the inspiration for the Blizzard is causing you to drag you feet, well, don’t worry, it’s not that big of a deal.

St. Louis-style Pizza:

The girlfriend and I drove around a lot and wherever we went we saw Imo’s Pizza and so we knew that before we left we would have to try some. You see, we eat pizza sometimes as many as four times a week, sometimes twice in one day. It’s a problem. The opportunity to try a new (and apparently popular) pizza could not be passed up.

The Imo’s was delivered and we quickly flipped open the lid. My girlfriend made the “Wah-wah” noise that I don’t know how to spellout…it’s that noise that says “Suprise, you just won a … a pile of crap! Wah-wah.” With me? Good. Nothing stared back at us from the box. What…lay?…melted?…offended? there before us was a round cracker smothered in tomato paste with a glaze of toxic waste rolling around on top. But I was not to be deterred. It was “pizza” after all and I was raised on Tombstones. I come from the land of Pizza King. I once enjoyed a pizza buffet at CiCi’s. So I had a bite. It was…odd?…good?…crap?

The crust was so thin it cracked at the slightest move toward bending the slice. And by “slice” I mean the tiny squares (think “party cut” but smaller) into which the pizza was divided. The sauce was thick and sweet, a deep deep red that I presumed could only be artificially created. The cheese felt synthetic in the mouth. It caused me to salivate like it was salted. The texture was super creamy. It gave a certain smoothing, moist, nearly-tart sensation that has only been matched in my experience with American cheese. The Americany-quality of the cheese combined with that sweet sauce tasted vaguely (or more than vaguely) like Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee. But, as Wikipedia will tell you Hector Boiardi never made it any further west than The Cleve. The pizza was so deliberately wrong it presented itself as a regional favorite despite the fact that I did not know there was such a thing as “St. Louis-style pizza.”

But surely Imo’s got it wrong (Wikipedia says that Imo’s is thought to be the originator of the style–if true I can only assume that this is a case more analogous to music where the first person to do something does so crudely–perhaps more authentically but less palatable). So I wanted to find the Bob Marley to Imo’s Desmond Dekker (if you will…although that particular comparison is either to congratulatory to Imo’s or insulting to Mr. Dekker)

So when the girlfriend and I traveled to The Hill a few days later we did so in pursuit of two things: Toasted Ravioli and true St. Louis-style pizza. Of the dozens of Italian restaurants along Southwest and the surrounding streets that make up this historic Italian neighborhood we decided on Rigazzi’s for no other reason than one of the many guidebooks we stumbled upon recommended it. The fact that it was the oldest Italian restaurant in the area didn’t hurt either. So we hunted and found Rigazzi’s at the bottom of St. Louis Hill and around the corner a bit, hunkered down near the end of Daggett Avenue by the Kingshighway overpass to the east and warehouses to the south and west.

I should also mention, although we did not learn about this until later, that Al Capone was once arrested here. Awesome. I don’t know if Al Capone’s presence speaks to the authentic Italian experience but it does speak to the quintessential Italian-American experience.

Their beer selection is awful. I had the Bud Select. I could have had Bass, like the girlfriend, but I like to drink local and although Anheuser distributes Bass, I don’t think that counts.

The pizza was….

….

….good.

My eating partner is a touch more cautious with her comment. She will say, if asked, that it was “better than Imo’s.”  It might only be that the presenation was infinitely better. It actually looked like a pizza and not a burnt and half-melted Frisbee about to be tested for heavy-metal contamination. I sneakily asked the waitress what the “third cheese” in their Provel mixture was, “Provolone, Mozzarella, and…” she said “cheddar” but real Provel doesn’t have Mozzarella, it has Swiss. This could have been a slip up on the part of the waitress, or it could have been an unwitting admission that Rigazzi’s makes their St. Louis-style pizza more palatable by making it less St. Louisy. You’ll have to follow up with them to know for sure, but I have my guess.

The sauce still had that overly sweet, almost Chef Boy-Ar-Dee taste but the canned-paste quality was noticeably less severe than in Imo’s version. And the crust still cracked under very slight pressure (which I learned is because it is an unleavened crust and not because of its thinness).

All-in-all a decent food roundup: Toasted Ravioli, St. Louis-style pizza, and Ted Dewes, all a part of a distinctly St. Louis experience…and Vietnamese coffee…which is not part of the “St. Louis Experience”…but was for me. Also the goat cheese and curry flat bread at Schlafly that I mentioned yesterday that was probably the best food of the whole trip. I could have eaten that and drank Vietnamese coffee the entire time and wouldn’t have felt deprived.

St. Louis: The Beer I

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The experience of touring a megabrewery is significantly enhanced if you can juxtapose it against touring a microbrewery. Seriously. As a matter of fact, doing both significantly raises both experiences to such a degree that the combination is itself its own completely unique and totally enjoyably experience.

I toured the Coors Brewery in Golden, Colorado several years ago and did no such followup tour of a microbrewery. I was with a huge group of friends, many of which only reluctantly agreed to the Coors Tour and did not share my love of zymurgy and so would probably not have agreed to a microbrew tour even if I’d thought of such a thing…which I didn’t.

To me, the Coors tour was great, it was my first tour of any brewery and I was fascinated by the whole thing. However, I failed to see the difference between the Coors Brewery and any manufacturing plant. Several years later, I still fail to see the difference. In both someone points to various inhumanely-sized tanks and tells a crowd of laypeople the temperature of the tank, where it came from, and then motions to various hoses that lead into and out of the tanks. Then you walk to where the hoses lead. In the case of a brewery it’s often more tanks. In other plants it’s sometimes an oven. In any case, you almost always end up in a huge room filled with conveyor belts which end in rows of packed pallets. What I did not understand then was that a place like Coors needs to be put into perspective. You need to see what they do compared to what others in the same business are doing. You need to see that it’s not just possible to make beer without millions of dollars of metal and PVC but that it’s happening, right there, just miles from where you’re standing.

A couple years later, with dear friend The MCP, I toured the Miller Brewery in Milwaukee (at the time of the 100th Anniversary of Harley-Davidson, no less) and we followed the tour with one of Lakefront Brewery–a combination I heartily recommend. I so heartily recommend it that I repeated the experience just about a year or two later myself. On my most recent pass through Milwaukee about a year ago I went to Lakefront and not Miller and, don’t get me wrong, the beer at Lakefront, the environment, the ambiance, were all good, but, it was…lacking. I could tell from the look on my friends’ faces that, without Miller to provide them a frame of reference, Lakefront just wasn’t all I’d made it out to be in the lead up to the tour.

On this most recent jaunt to St. Louis I found myself, obviously, at the Anheuser-Busch brewery, with a follow-up two days later at the Schlafly Bottleworks and…maybe because Anheuser-Busch is so big…at the Trailhead Brewery in St. Charles.

The most important and most attractive reason to take a brewery tour is because at the end you often get free beer. What megabrewers know and understand, and what I know but do not understand, is that the second most exciting thing about a brewery tour is the bottling operation. People flip their lids about bottle-fillers and little robot glue-licker/bottle labelers. They love to see shiny bottles of beer hoisted from conveyor belts and placed in boxes–boxes getting taped and hoisted onto pallets–pallets getting wrapped–wrapped pallets getting moved to a warehouse. Sometimes you get to see the warehouse. People love to see all that beer in one place even though, even if they lived to be a million years old they could never drink all of it themselves. To me it’s weird.

For one thing, as a beer lover, it pains me to be in the area where megabrewers like Anheuser-Busch actually destroy their beer and brag about it to boot. This whole cold-filtering, pasteurization process is no good for beer. I mean, we all have our tastes and all but let’s call a turd a turd.

The other reason it’s weird is because, if you like to see lots of stuff in one place, there are bigger operations that do their job faster and store more of it than Anheuser does. I mean, what’s the difference between seeing ketchup bottled and beer bottled? Nothing really-not if what you like to see is bottles being filled and crated.

Oh well.

However, each megabrewer has some unique things to offer the tourbound and Anheuser is no exception.  The best thing Anheuser offers is Bevo (pronounced to rhyme with the Russian word for beer, pivo, that is: BEE-voh.) Bevo is a fox, based off Renard the Fox from fairytaledom. It is also a now defunct alcohol-free malt beverage (read: near beer) manufactured between 1916 and 1929. Bevo the Fox was the mascot for Bevo the Drink. Bevo the Fox was always in search of Good Food, Good Drink, and Good Times.

Statues of Bevo adorn the four corners of the building in which his signature drink used to be manufactured during those dark prohibition times. In the statues he is happily munching on a huge chicken leg. There is no mystery why a fox would think that a huge chicken constituted Good Food. Nor is there any doubt why having found, killed, and cooked a huge chicken, eating it would be considered Good Times. I do however have my doubts that Bevo the Fox (or anyone else) found Bevo the Drink to be Good. As Wikipedia will tell you, Bevo was so popular that it found itself deep in the pop culture of the Roaring Twenties, typically as a measure of incompetence. A new Army recruit was called a Bevo and it was said of those that couldn’t hold their liquor that they “couldn’t hold their Bevo.” In the absence of beer, Bevo was Good Enough, but not Good, I’m sure.

Nevertheless 100-year old German-style buildings with statues of Foxes eating chicken are pretty awesome and you should take the free tour to check them out. If you don’t like beer Anheuser-Busch is now in the business of making mixed liquor drink like the Bacardi samplers and energy drinks too both of which can be sampled in the Hospitality Room at tour’s end.

Oh! And there are horses too.

The girlfriend and I followed this tour up with a visit to the Schlafly Brewpub the next day, and the day after that we took a tour of the Schlafly Bottleworks (complete with three beer samples). Between the beer I had at the brewpub, the beer I had in the restaurant at the Bottleworks, and the beer I sampled after the tour (and counting those samples I took of the girlfriend’s beer) I tried every beer they currently have tapped. All are good, above average, even. But, in my opinion, the best beer they offer right now is their ESB.

I could venture off into a post better fitted to a gourmet website, but I won’t. It will suffice to say that it:

  • It is hard to create a new recipe that creates a flavorful balance between hops, alcohol, and malt flavors
  • It is harder to do so within the established confines of pre-existing beer styles

The Schlafly ESB does just that. They have successfully found a new way to present an ESB that is still recognizably an ESB but provides enough newness that it stands out from the rest. Some people try to do perform that task by just moving out of the style: “It’s like an IPA but we made it with FRUIT!” Schlafly did it with pure skill.

We also sampled a couple of beers at the Trailhead Brewery in St. Charles. I had their Brown and their Porter and both were good. My partner had the Blonde also pretty good. Nothing exceptional in the beers although the staff at the St. Charles store were all exceptionally friendly. The brewer took time to personally show us the inner-workings of the establishment even though he was ankle deep in wort at the time, a gesture that I could not show enough appreciation for.

Just for the record: We also took two cases of Tecate with us. In the presence of so much good beer (including some of the sham craft-style stuff that Anheuser puts out) the Tecate became almost undrinkable.

Almost.

St. Louis and Me

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So at the last minute two weeks ago my wonderful girlfriend, stricken with a mortal case of wanderlust, began planning a trip for us to lovely Hot Springs, Arkansas. Together we decided that I could not take off enough time to drive down there and enjoy it. Also, it was going to be fairly expensive…at least considering that the destination was going to be Arkansas and not, say, Florida.

So we canceled the trip and opted instead for a five-day jaunt in St. Louis, Missouri. Well, this last, last minute trip to Missouri proved to be unfulfilling for the wanderlust prone and it required a last, last, last minute trip to Jacksonville, Florida (and a stop-over in Athens, Georgia). Which took the time we decided I didn’t have and used as much if not more money that we had anticipated for the Arkansas trip. Nevertheless, it was a good trip and, as it turned out, much needed.

I don’t really have time to blog and since I didn’t read the paper or watch the news while I was gone, I don’t have anything to really blog about…politics-wise. So for the next few days, while I get caught up at work and the world, here are some things I did/thought about/noticed/ate/drank over the last week:

St. Louis:

Despite living no more than 4 hours from St. Louis through most of my life, despite having an aunt and uncle who live there, despite having a good friend who went to graduate school there, despite considering that same graduate school for myself, I have never spent anytime in the city. I’ve passed through on my way to other destinations, I have songs on my iPod about it, I’ve even studied in it in various history courses, but I never really got out, stretched my legs, and said hello.  And I have to say:

eh.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a real neat town. For one, it’s history is wrapped up with

1) French fur-traders which means there’s a lot of gothic arches in the windows and door frames. There’s lots of oddly-named streets (at least odd to someone who’s used to all the streets being named after Anglos, Saxons, and German-Germans). There’s a ton of Catholic Churches, sometimes as many as five in one block.

2) Jazz and Blues. I didn’t hear any live versions of either but the very first song on the radio on the very first day was a Louis Jordan song and I wondered “How does NPR know that I’m here?”

3) The American Frontier/Merriweather Lewis and Whathisname Clark and there’s still an air of rough-and-tumble in pretty much everything from contemporary city planning and people’s handshakes.

But.

There’s also distinct lack of compassion for the citizens of the town. I stopped counting, or even noting, the amount of new subdivisions, parks, tourist attractions, etc that were clearly built on top of the ex-homes of poor people. I don’t mean like, “really near the homes of poor people;” I mean “on the land that used to be where poor people lived but is now a park they don’t have the time to enjoy.”

From what I can tell, if a factory goes defunct in St. Louis the last guy out the door smashes a window and it all goes downhill from there. Very prominently as you enter St. Louis from the east is a huge warehouse with all the windows and many of the walls completely gutted and gone. It is neither the last nor the most prominent, nor the most troublesome symptom of a horrible disease rotting the town.

Mansions are preserved everywhere in the town. They live on brick roads lined with majestic shade trees, gated on both ends, in the middle of otherwise poor neighborhoods–not just here and there, but dotted off all major thoroughfares. It’s positively third world. There is the ghost of linen-suited aristocrats clubbing golf balls off their rooftops everywhere you look.

With that said, when St. Louis is at its best, it is stunning. It’s sense of historic pride is profound. Every era of St. Louis’ history is preserved and honored somewhere. Across the river from St. Louis (in Illinois) in Cahokia is a UN World Heritage site marking the center of the Northern Western Hemisphere’s largest pre-Colombian civilization. On Missouri’s side of the great Mississip is, of course, the Gateway Arch (or the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial as it is officially known) honoring America’s growth over the Mississippi and beyond. Over on the Missouri River on the western edge of St. Louis is St. Charles, an entire pre-Manifest Destiny town nearly completely preserved and converted into one of the most charming historic shopping districts in the nation (that I’ve seen). Right in the middle of town is a working class neighborhood called The Hill, which is not only a living testament to both America’s immigrant past (The Hill is an Italian immigrant stronghold) but also to its power as a melting pot. Also, Al Capone was once arrested there, in a restaurant called Rigazzi’s. There is of course the Anheuser-Busch Brewery and also Schlafly’s. Both have historic exhibits with pictures, beer cans, posters, etc of the area’s numerous ex-brewers.

I loved the St. Louis leg of our tour. It was a unique experience in a great many ways (more tomorrow) unfortunately the weather and the fact that it’s hard to consider anywhere in the Midwest “exotic” meant that when our time was up, we still had vacationing to do. So, if you’re looking to really “get away” and “forget your troubles” I do not recommend St. Louis. The town is no stranger to bad times and it is unlikely you will forget yours while there. There isn’t enough beer in St. Louis to wash away the pain and agony stomped into the bricks and concrete of which the town is built.

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