always something new

I have not been keeping up with my beer store obligations!  There are two that I never saw before, one of which already closed.  But, the other is a Belgian specialty store, La Maison Belge, filled with beers of the low countries, several shelves of wine, and a table of chocolate.  It's a little too hot for me to risk the chocolate, even Belgian chocolate (drool), since I had other errands to run.  But, the helpful shopkeeps found me a stout to take.  It's actually a Dutch beer, Maximus Stout 8, but close enough to Belgium I guess.  They must have the Dutch beers for the people who aren't quite sure about the typical Belgian sour.

Something wicked?

First impressions: stouty smell, sweetish but earthy, fine and resistant head, dark brown rather than black color.  Going well so far.  The taste is bitter at first, but with a hint of sweetness, shifting quickly to a dark chocolatey flavor.  In spite of the obvious stoutiness, it's a rather light beer, with the taste clean and unlingering, and delicate to begin with.  The head holds up, reducing but not disappearing, and the taste stays pretty much constant.  It does lose a little bit of sweetness and start tending to sour towards the end, but still a fine summer stout overall.

Supplier: La Maison Belge
Price: ~€3.40 (someday asking for receipts will be a habit)

into the brambles

I don't know why I took this chance with a lambic.  Maybe because it's raspberry, which I love, maybe because there's a lambic tasting happening next week (can't go, though), maybe it's just the weight of the temperatures that makes me look for something less cozy than my black beers.  Anyway, it's St. Louis Premium Framboise.  The bottle is a bit smaller than normal, 25cl, so it nearly fits all in my beer glass in one pour.  Hopefully, even this small amount won't be too much lambic at one time.

Ahh, beer in the sun...

There's an immediate waft of fruit when you pop the cap, and the beer pours smoothly into the glass.  It's a promising dark red, like fizzy cranberry juice, but sweeter smelling.  More like black currant, now that I think about it.  The taste is sour and in-your-face at first, but slowly dies back to a sweeter feel.  As it gets sweet, I have a prickle of worry that the beer will get syrupy or heavy, like some lambics do, but St. Louis manages to stay light and even a little fluffy.  Although the beer appeared fizzy at first, I don't get a lot of bubbles while I drink, so it's just smooth and juice-like.  I'm quite pleased, actually, it's better than many fruit juices that rely on heavy flavors and probably too much sugar.

Supplier: Espuma
Price: €2.60

northern tsar

Even in the summer, there's nothing like a good deathly skull to grab my attention.  And on a bottle of stout?  Fantastic!  The gods of beer smile upon me!  Naparbier has been good to me in the past, so no qualms in snapping that up.  It may be a little out of season, as a pumpkin imperial stout, but Pumpkin Tzar might give me comfort in the overheated night with memories of reasonable temperatures.

I don't know what the white streak is, every label had a different one

There's a good, strong aroma, a little but sour but definitely smoky undertones.  It's a fine opaque dark brown, with almost no light getting through it anywhere.  The taste is practically explosive, round and mouth-filling, dirty and smooth.  It turns into sort of a licorice flavor, which is a small disappointment.  I was hoping for coffee.  Suddenly, after the second sip, I start to notice a little burning and check the ingredients.  Yep, habanero chili.  Much like The Mayan, the pepper doesn't make itself known until the beer is going down, or even after, so it's an interesting aftertaste sensation.  It's a heavier sort of pepper, though, so the burn is a little bit stronger.  It starts to get a little more bitter and salty, moving away from the licorice, which is good for me. I find a greater sweetness starts to come out after a few minutes, which may be the pumpkin finally making an appearance.

Supplier: Espuma
Price: €4.75

fields of summer

It's summer again, and time to be thinking about how nice it would be to be in a more reasonable country, temperature-wise.  Shades of those countries are welcome in beers, like Primátor.  I've had a few of their selection over the years, but not the Weizenbier, which sounds like just the thing for sunny, bright summer evenings.  It actually hasn't been so sunny or even warm these past couple of days, going so far as to rain inside the metro, but little details like those never stop me from tasting a new beer.

It's frothy, well-headed, and a rich golden colored beer.  It's also a little cloudy, like a tasty wheat beer might be.  The aroma is sharp and sweet, just what you expect from wheats.  The flavor is oddly sour, with a little sweet at first.  It's kind of like those sour candies we used to eat as kids, a little sweet in the beginning, but suddenly turning on your tastebuds with a much sharper taste.  It mellows after a couple of sips, going a little fruity, maybe banana-y.  It reminds me of Hoegaarden in that respect.  There's a lingering sourness kind of in the middle of my tongue, though, again like a sourball or something might leave.  The beer stays fizzy, but if you don't get a nice big mug for it, later pours lose their head pretty quickly.  Something to keep in mind later, for the sake of aesthetics.

No, I don't make up those prices myself

Supplier: Birra y Paz
Price: €2.70

The End (What I Thought In January)

I had a regular compulsion during the 2016 presidential election: I would google image search Spanish Civil War posters and stare at them, especially the Republican ones.  There was something so melancholy about them.  "They thought they were right," I said to myself, "They thought they were on the right side of history."

It's a sad parallel to my current vision of my country of birth.  We thought for eight years that we were moving, ever so slowly, into enlightenment.  Even with a few mis-steps and stumbles, like a "stolen" election and a mandate for that stealer in the next one, we were on the road to something better.  The American Experiment was continuing to produce hopeful results, in spite of the disappointing ones.  We had a minority president; we allowed homosexuals to legally marry nationwide; even in the face of terrorism, we tried to stand up for our values of diversity and individual liberty.  Then came the campaign of 2016.

First, a businessman who came off as an ignorant and short-tempered buffoon won the nomination of a major party.  He counted among his supporters a loud number of "anti-SJWs", although they were mostly a loud minority.  The troubling thing is that past politicians saw campaigns and careers lost with a mere hint of association with the likes of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups.  This time, few people cared enough to stop taking his campaign seriously and start taking his threats seriously. There were voices of alarm about what he planned to do to "help" the inner cities and the economy as a whole, but little notice was taken on a broad scale.  Fears were centered in liberal populations.  The media refused to take him or his support seriously, giving us assurances that his opponent would win, even if the victory was by a narrow margin.  Then, we woke to shocking headlines on November 9.

We have had bad presidents before, either unpopular, or incompetent, or both.  This time, the threat is not the man in the post himself, it is his braying entourage, who despise the very framework of the government they are to be part of.  A number of writers have taken to their outlets to try to explain to us disillusioned liberals why those who supported their adversary thought it was the right thing to do.  Many examples do little to convince me of their good intentions.  Perhaps fittingly, the only place I found the explanations not only believable, but also truly clarifying was a comedy website.  I admit freely that I do not understand conservatives, and I have done very little to remedy that.  Like most of us, I stay in a fairly tight bubble of information that lets me feel good about my values and tell myself that those on the other side are mistaken or deliberate hypocrites.  How can my country be full of such people, at least in a concentration that can't be diluted with other groups?  I feel a bitter schadenfreude upon seeing tweets and posts from Trump voters who whine about the possibility of losing their Medicare or access to women's health care at centers like Planned Parenthood.  I nod sagely, thinking to myself that they should have known a politician, even an amateur one, would try to keep at least a couple of campaign promises.  My liberal heart tells me they don't really deserve to lose those, or any, services, but it's so easy to say, "They were asking for it."

This is one of the differences between liberals and conservatives in a broad description: Liberals feel compassion for those who are suffering, even if through their own actions, while conservatives trust that there is some kind of cosmic justice at work when people are suffering.  As I said, a broad description, one that has room for many exceptions on both sides.  Do you see how liberal I am?  Our compassion and our need to try to be fair can be exploited by those who have narrower targets and stronger ambitions.  We hesitate to block any progress just because it isn't going in the direction we want.  We want both sides to have a turn, and when there are instances of bad behavior, we often try to find examples from the other side, for balance.  Or something.

Now, some groups are calling for resistance, telling us that the tactics of the other side, now seen more as enemies than ever, are the ones to adopt.  No wishy-washiness, no appeals to fairness.  Now is the time to double down and obstruct.  There are also voices bemoaning the very suggestion, reminding us that we should be better than our enemies, and we should keep hold of the moral high ground.  It is an easy thing for most of them to say, coming as they do from comfortable circumstances.  We are reminded that we as a nation and as a collection of groups have survived other bad times and bad actions on the part of our presidents.  But, as the new resistance will be quick to tell you, we didn't all survive.  The most vulnerable may be overlooked at best by a "progressive" administration, but they could very well be targeted by this one.  People are afraid.  Not that they might have to pay a little more tax to fund a public school or hospital, not that they will not be allowed to use their position as employers to dig into their employees' personal beliefs, not that they might have to be reminded that people who have attractions different from their own exist.  Those fears will probably exist forever anyway.  People are afraid that they will be denied jobs, health care, services, and even "right to life" because of factors beyond their control.  People are afraid of being denied any possibility of control over those factors, even where it is possible.  I, personally, am probably in little danger.  But I have been raised to value fairness, and those fears seem deeply unfair to me.

This is actually what makes me most angry about our last election.  It seems to have validated aggressive and obnoxious behavior to the point where it is the only way to make your voice heard.  I might have hesitated to condemn criticism in the past, or tried to be fair about dishing it.  Now, I think the best thing we can do it criticize, and do so unmercifully.  We can avail ourselves of all the raw emotion in the world, and all the black-and-white viewpoints.  The goal is to block every single thing that might be proposed.  If the opposition are spineless, they must be voted out or removed to jeering voices.  We can never "wait and see" again, because we are risking our future.

Those posters seemed like an odd thing over the summer of 2016, but in November they came to be more like a premonition.  The Spanish Republic was fighting fascism, and lost.  Not, they say, because of the objective supremacy of the Nationalist army, but because of their own lack of union. There are posters promoting their strength in diversity.  There are posters pointing out the heartlessness of the enemy.  In the end, all for nothing.  True, we arrived at this place through our own democratic process, not through insurrection and civil war.  But the conflict of values is similar: diversity versus homogeneity; secularism versus religion; international relationships versus isolationism.  We know the quote about fascism coming to America, being as American as possible. It is up to us to make sure the definition of America is never limited to "fascist".

more ice cream for the coming summer

So, the beer floats just keep cropping up and I keep drinking them.  This time it's a tasting at El Sainete, downtown.  It's a very modern looking place, with several levels and 18 taps of craft beer, so things are promising.  I got there early, worried about how public transportation would be during Pride, so I had a pre-cata caña.  One of the beers was a Czech pilsner which I hadn't heard of before, so that temptation was impossible to pass up.  I only had a caña, 20cl, but it was €2.  I found the prices for quantities of less than a pint to be bit high, although that's fairly common.  Kout na Šumavě Koutská desítka pilsner I found to be light, bubbly, and only a little bitter.  It has a rather herbal flavor actually.  The sweetness evaporates in a moment, but that small bitterness hangs around for a while.  It's a tongue twister of a beer, in that it leaves a mark.

First we had Firestone Union Jack IPA with mango ice cream, which was much like the All Day mango at Toast Tavern.  We tried the beer by itself first.  Union Jack is a bit smoky, but hoppy in smell.  The taste is light, however, and the bitterness doesn't come out until the aftertaste.  When mixed the drink looks like a fresh squeezed orange juice.  As for the taste, the mango dominates, it's fruity, sweetish, and the bitterness has been conquered.  It's much creamier than what I had in Toast Tavern, since I didn't mix that one up.

Action pour!

For some reason I didn't get a picture of the ice cream

The second sample was a lambic, but not one of the fruit ones that we find all over.  Geuze Boon is a simple naturally fermented beer without added fruit, but the ice cream for the float was a snappy, tart raspberry.  The beer has a bitter smell, a little skunky, in fact.  The taste is cidery, sour, even grabby, but becomes sweet in the aftertaste.  The ice cream provoked a few eruptions, but with a little less beer I didn't have that problem with my glass.  Mixed, it resembles strawberry juice or a milkshake but with foam.  The taste is more beery, more bitter and less fruity, but it is very much like a fruit lambic.  Morte Subite was mentioned by more than one of us.  Even when the foam goes down the drink is foamy in appearance, and with a little more lambic than half the mix it's sourer and better in my opinion.

Very foamy

Beeruption!

Real raspberry, with seeds

Number three was Nómada's Manchurina gose, another sour beer.  Gose is a ... special sort.  It's not the bitter or grassy kind of beer we come across most often, it has another character.  I find it carnivorous.  It smells like deli meats, with smokiness, saltiness and a touch of bacon.  The additive was chocolate ice cream, which caused a few eruptions, but was less disruptive than the lambic.  Blended, it looks like a chocolate milkshake or Colacao, but the taste isn't what you might expect.  It's sour, chocolatey, but with the lime of the gose quite noticeable.  Some people thought it was like a milkshake that had gone off in the fridge, and there is a taste that could be called simply "sour milk" there.  But it still smells like a butcher shop.

The craft ice cream store, if you're curious

Finally, we had a "classic" beer float, stout with vanilla ice cream.  The beer was actually an espresso stout, by the Japanese Hitachino.  There is some coffee in the beer itself, although it's a mix of coffee, salt and stout bitterness.  Some people mentioned soy sauce, but I wonder if that's just the psychology of a dark Japanese liquid.  Again, when adding the ice cream, the foam comes right to the top of the glass.  I was lucky that mine didn't go over.  The taste is sweet and chocolatey, but a little too sweet for me.  A little more beer, approaching two-thirds of the glass, is better, more like dark chocolate.  There's just a touch of sweet, a little caramel, a little cream, and towards the end there's a little licorice, but not enough to bother me.