Two thoughts (and a lot more words): California and Stone Smoked Porter

Hello again and sorry for my week-long absence; I was on a family vacation in California.  To make up for the lost time, I offer you this somewhat long post.  The vacation there served as the inspiration for both topics in this post: Stone Smoked Porter with Vanilla Bean, their latest variation on their classic Smoked Porter; and what the beer scene looks like there.  I'll start with the second topic.



A beer for all.....or not

In the minds of most beer aficionados, California is huge.  Anchor, Sierra Nevada, and Stone, all in the same state?  Sounds great! Beer advocates make it up to be some sort of ale Mecca, full of the standard classics from those breweries and many other famous rarities.  New upstarts and quickly-expanding breweries like The Bruery, Fifty-Fifty, Lagunitas and Firestone Walker are getting lots of hype and winning awards.  On Beer Advocate's list of  highest-rate beers of all time, four of the top 20 are from California.  This list includes beers from all over the world, both current and retired.  On Rate Beer's list of top 50 beers of all time (again, current and retired beers from all over the world), five of the first twenty are from California, and the complete 50 includes an additional six.  When you narrow it down just to beers from the U.S., fourteen of Rate Beer's best American beers are from California, and for Beer Advocate's American list, the number is fifteen.

Yet when I was there last week, I was amazed at how few beers I could find relative to back here in Illinois.  The tap lists in restaurants and bars were as impressive as Chicagoland at best, and in general they were just a little worse.  Liquor stores were pretty much the same, and I didn't see any giant ones either.  The retail side in Illinois seems a lot better than in California; I can drive for half an hour in any direction and find a Binny's or similarly-sized specialty liquor store.  So what's going on in California?

The answer is simple: wine.  Buckets, barrels, and semi-trucks of wine.  According to the Brewers Association, there are 245 breweries in California as of 2010, or enough for every 152,000 people living there.  Put another way, about 1/7 of all American breweries in 2010 were Californian.  Sounds big, but by contrast to the 245 breweries in California, there are over 1200 wineries in California, out of a total of more than 3000 in the United States.  When measured by the total amount of gallons produced, California makes 89% of all wine made in the USA.  The United States is the fourth-largest producer of wine in the world, but California's wine industry is so huge that if the state decided to secede and form a separate country, California would overtake America's position on that list.

I did not know any of those specifics before this vacation.  If I had known, I would not at all have been surprised to find that a typical restaurant in San Francisco or Monterrey County (we stayed in both) would have four or five wine options for every bottle of beer.  Seriously, even Mom 'n' Pop places had at least a dozen bottles on hand.

So no, I was unfortunately not able to bring back any limited or regional bottles from Firestone Walker, Stone, Sierra Nevada, Ale Smith or Russian River to share with friends.  Sorry. :(



Stone Smoked Porter w/Vanilla

Thankfully, we have easy access to quite a lot of Californian beers right here in Illinois, like this one:

The regular Smoked Porter is one of Stone's most popular offerings.  It is a porter (that is, it is almost pitch black) brewed with barley malt that has been smoked.  Thousands of years ago, most beers would have been fairly smoky because the only way to dry the malt back then would have been to let it sit over a pile of burning logs, but these beers are a small niche in the modern world.  Most are only partly made with smoked malt, and the log of choice is usually beechwood.  I have no idea what Stone uses.  Actually, I've only tried the regular one once, so I don't know too much about it.  For this variation, they took Smoked Porter and added Madagascar vanilla beans to it.

It looks the same as the regular version.  Most porters and stouts are pitch-black and opaque, but this one is slightly transparent.  The foam that tops it off is rich and over an inch thick, and just a shade darker than white.

When I was a kid, me and a few friends once took a case of Coca Cola and decided to just throw random stuff in it from my neighbor's cooking cabinet.  Cinnamon, honey, garlic (that was a weird combination....), whatever we could find.  We may have even added bread crumbs, come to think of it.We discovered that adding a certain amount of vanilla extract to a can of Coke made it indistinguishable from certain root beers.  I was very pleased by this, as I liked root beer more than Coke anyway. 

Drinking and (especially) smelling this ale reminds me of that experience.  It smells a bit like someone took a can of Mug Root Beer or Sioux City Sarsaparilla and held if over a grill smoker for a few minutes.  Very cola-like or cream soda-esque, with little of the chocolate or coffee character one usually finds in darker beers.  The vanilla does not stand out as much as I wish it did, but rather melds into a general smoked-root beer sensation.  The smoky flavors are a bit more Scotch-like than I remember the regular version being; perhaps it is peat-smoked.  If so, that would likely make this the most widely-available peat smoked beer in the U.S.



This is a very tasty beer overall, and I slightly prefer it over the regular.  It has no rough edges, preferring to slowly entice you rather than hit you over the head with vanilla or smoke.  I would probably buy this a few times a year if they made it year-round, and I wouldn't mind at all if they decided to stop making the regular Smoked Porter in order to make room for production.  That being said, it is not what I was expecting, and I wish the vanilla was more distinct.  I also would not recommend either beer as an introduction to smoked beers despite the mild smoked flavors; it's almost too mild for a beginner (you would be very confused indeed if you drank a bottle of this and then tried, say, anything from this company.)

They also just released a version made with chipotle peppers.  I will be opening my bottle tonight.  More info about both versions can be found here.  Cheers!