not buffaloed

Insufferable summer has arrived, it seems.  It's often hard to find dark beers in this town, and for most people the temperatures have something to do with it.  But, I found one for last week and one for this week too, although the decision was not easy.  Too many possibilities in the store!  I ended up with Partners In Crema, a coffee stout, from Wild Leap.  There were cheaper options, but you have to splurge every once in a while.  Call it a celebration of seasonal change. 

A rich, dark brown, like good coffee or chocolate, and a dark beige, stubborn head are the first impression.  Its aroma is stouty, slightly toasty, not too sweet.  There's a little tingle of grain in the flavor too, although it's more of a fully cooked bread grain than the grassy grain of lagers.  It's oddly robust, mouthfilling.  I expected a bit more coffee, since that's in the name of the beer itself, but I wouldn't say I'm getting a lot of that.  It's not the sticky pastry stout you might expect either, although it's among the heavier beers you could have.  I had the vague notion that the coconut would make it almost tropical, but the coconut isn't especially evident in the flavor either.  It takes a while for some sweetness to develop, but in the end I do pick up some.  There's a touch of vanilla, a hint of banana, overall it's a beer to sit in the shade with, even though it's the real days of summer already.

Supplier: Birra Y Paz

Price: €7.55

remember the empire

Still preparing for another quick round of beer culture, although it will be a different area.  Probably even less complete too.  I need something for today though, so I popped down to Birra y Paz for something nice.  Oh man, there were too many nice things to choose from.  In the end, I couldn't resist black beer and chocolate, so I came away with Náhuatl Xocolatl Porter.

It's not super dark, but definitely dark chocolate.  The head ends up being a thin cap on top, resistant.  I get a good whiff of chocolate aroma.  It's similar to a lot of chocolate stouts and porters I've experienced.  There's an oddly powdery feel to the beer, and it ends with a slightly salty tang that I wasn't expecting.  Overall, though, it's like a spiked hot chocolate, except, you know, cold.  It has a sweetness to it, but it's certainly not excessively sweet.  It's very smooth at first, before the finishing tang kicks in, giving the beer that dairy drink feel.  There is oats in the ingredient list, so that might be what's smoothing it out.  This is definitely a beer that you could have year-round, although for most it might be nicer with temperatures under 80.

Supplier: Birra y Paz

Price: €2.80

no rose colored glasses

Everything comes to an end, even pandemics.  This one is still hanging around, though, and it showed in the German Film Festival this year - few people in the audience, and hardly any Germans, if any at all.  Also fewer films than last year, but more than enough for the three movie pass, and this was the third movie.  Walchensee Forever is a biopic of a family primarily consisting of women and their experiences over the 20th century.  At first I thought they had some very good effects with films of the family in the '40s and '50s, especially the interview style film, but it seems the family has had interest and talent in photography and art since the grandfather married the grandmother.  He was an art student and eventually became a photographer in Munich, while her parents had a cafe/inn on the Walchensee which she carried on with all her life.  The filmmaker's mother says her mother only worked in the cafe out of a sense of duty to her parents, who were very happy with their profession, and in a short clip the filmmaker took after mother and grandmother argue about running the cafe, the grandmother says she would enjoy being young at the end of the 20th century instead of the beginning.  She could be a computer geek, she says.  A lot of the film focuses on the mother's younger sister, who killed herself after being diagnosed with schizophrenia.  The two had been a duo performing traditional Bavarian music in the 60's and had fallen into a lot of the other cultural trappings of the time, including drugs and Indian spirituality.  The mother met the filmmaker's at a peace conference in Mexico City after her sister's death, and went to live with him in San Francisco.  The films of them together during her pregnancy are very of the time, being naked in nature, living in a sort of half-wild area and having a homebirth.  Eventually the mother goes back to Walchensee to help her mother with the cafe, the relationship with the filmmaker's father having run its course basically as soon as she was born.  The filmmaker seems to be on a quest to define home and belonging with the interviews.  At the end she has her own child and goes with her mother to San Francisco to visit her father, giving the impression of their acceptance of the wheel of life turning, since the grandmother had passed away a while before at age 104.

I have another Berliner Weisse today, although the movie doesn't take place in or near Berlin at all.  Still a German style, dammit!  And it's not a German beer again, I admit, but it's Spanish and it's good to support local industry.  Maglia Rosa, with raspberries, comes from Cierzo, and it was a hard decision between that and some nice black beers.  They weren't as German, though.  La Buena Cerveza is packing up to move to a new location, so I have an excuse to go back for one or two stouts next month.

Much rosier than the strawberry weisse, with a party pink head of foam that quickly vanishes.  It gives the visual impression of a red berry soda.  It smells more like Mort Subité than Fanta, though, to my relief.  While there is a touch of sweetness and raspberry pokes here and there, the beer is definitely not sweet overall.  Now it's more like that strawberry one!  It's especially tangy at the back of the tongue, giving a little kick on its way down.  It has a champagne-like dryness that keeps it from any kind of fruit beer sticky, although I don't tend to find dry drinks especially refreshing.

Supplier: La Buena Cerveza

Price: €5.55

redeye

I had some time to kill before my movie yesterday and I thought I could hit up Fábrica Maravillas, where I haven't been for more than a year.  I got delivery from them during lockdown, but now they are allowed to serve beer in the establishment and again, and even got some outside tables to expand their seating.  The Beer Garden also has a small street garden now.  Weirdly, FM is not allowed to run the projector to show the tap menu or play music.  Maybe the projector blows viruses around and music encourages them to come in?  Who knows these days.  The NEIPA I had isn't the beer for this movie, however; I found a strawberry Berliner Weisse at La Buena Cerveza that ought to do the job very nicely.  It's not a German beer, actually, it's Polish, but it's the style that counts I say.

It doesn't have a strawberry drink look at all really, more of a grapefruit soda.  The aroma is heavy on the strawberry to make up for that I guess.  The flavor is much more acidic than the scent suggests, very clearly a Berliner Weisse, but a little fruity softness comes out later.  It's a bit more like strawberry flavoring than real strawberries, though.  The beer demands your attention when drinking, so it's not an especially good conversation beer, unless you want to talk about it specifically.  It has a touch of salt swimming around, so it feels like a good summer drink, replacing your reserves of sweated out minerals.  

Surprise!

My Saturday movie was Cortex, listed as a thriller.  The synopsis makes it sound like a man with a sleep disorder starts to doubt whether he's hallucinating or whether strange things are really happening around him, and while there's a little bit of that, it's more like a non-funny version of Freaky Friday.  Hagen, the man with the sleep disorder, seems to change bodies with Nico, a man he has seen in his dreams, who has been having an affair with Hagen's wife.  It confuses both of them, and it's hard for the audience to tell whether it's the truth or not.  At first you think both of them are just having some kind of breakdown, but later the movie pushes you to believe that they really have switched bodies somehow.  Hagen as Nico visits a doctor asking for medication to help with his "delusion" of having become Nico and the doctor prescribes some kind of sedative and suggests a visit to a psychiatrist.  It turns out he is Hagen's doctor, and he calls Hagen's wife to tell her a young man was just in his office impersonating her husband.  She urges Nico as Hagen to go back to the doctor and he says he would rather wait, to which she replies that she doesn't want him to end up like the baby seal.  The baby seal was something that Hagen had told her about from the day he proposed to her, a lost baby that probably died soon after they saw it swimming around near the beach.  Nico as Hagen has no idea what she's talking about, although he tries to feign that he understands.  Hagen as Nico sees more information about Nico's life in his dreams, but Nico as Hagen has to go through the house looking for information to be a better Hagen.  Hagen as Nico gets his prescription filled and the pharmacist warns him about the strength of the medication.  Later, after Hagen as Nico has had to flee his house before a trio of gangsters with business with Nico's brother come in to kill him, the pharmacist finds him in an U-bahn station.  They start talking about dreams on the train and the pharmacist turns out to be kind of a mystic on dreams.  He takes Hagen as Nico to his house and gives him tea to help him enter the dreamworld and find out what he is supposed to do.  He also tells him that dying in a dream isn't death at all, but the sign of a new beginning in life.  Hagen as Nico sees the gangsters track down his family after Nico as Hagen tries to save his brother by returning some goods he stole from them, and he races to his house to stop them.  He kills all three gangsters and wanders out into the rain after seeing how upset his daughter is.  Not far from the house he crosses a police blockade and when they see the pistol in his hand they yell for him to drop it.  He remembers the pharmacist saying that death is only a new beginning and he raises the gun, provoking the police into shooting him.  Coincidentally, behind him Nico as Hagen has run up on the curb as he is dying from a gunshot wound given to him by his own brother, who came looking for the stolen goods.  We see Hagen in a field of tall grass, calling for his wife, and then his wife and daughter come out of the grass to meet him, reminiscent of a reunion in heaven, although we saw Hagen as Nico shoot the gangsters and save his family.  At the last second, in the car, Hagen's eye flies open.  The movie has a Lynchian quality to it with the dream sequences zipping in and out and the weird, upsetting sounds that accompany them and Hagen's attempts to understand them.  But, while Lynch only hints that the movie might be a dream, Cortex is actually supposed to contain dreams, so more like Inception in that way.  It does seem to try to trick you a few times; in the beginning Hagen and his wife wonder if he has depression, and he looks sadly at a family photo where he's holding a child.  We haven't seen any sign of a child yet, so maybe the child died and they are still getting over it?  No, the daughter is alive and well, just somewhere else for the first half or so of the movie.  One might also wonder if Nico is some kind of manifestation of multiple personalities for Hagen, since we don't have any assurance that he and his life really exist other than Hagen dreaming him for a while.  It seems like that isn't the case, though, since the gangsters really exist and show up to threaten Hagen's family after he meets them, and since they don't recognize him it can't be a Fight Club kind of situation.  I guess the question at the end is who gets to stay in Hagen's body, since his awakening makes it look like he might survive.

Supplier: La Buena Cerveza

Price: €3.99

first film back

Last year was Heimkino, but this year the Film Festival is back in person.  I'm actually a little disappointed; it was so easy to just watch all the films on my couch, and now I have to go downtown and be in a theater with people... Well, at least there is a festival at all.  The first film was No Hard Feelings, about immigrants and refugees in Germany, with a touch of LGBTQ+.  I think if you don't read the synopsis beforehand you wouldn't know that the main character is doing community service as a translator for Iranian refugees, you might think he's just volunteering for some reason.  The story goes over his quest to accept himself as an Iranian-German, I guess, and a gay one.  He has trouble with different accents, and some Iranians make fun of him for his more German accent.  He starts a kind of secret relationship with one of the refugees and a firm friendship with the refugee's sister, who ends up having her case rejected by the government and her deportation ordered.  I was surprised by how little fuss people made about homosexuality - the main character's family doesn't seem to care at all about who he's attracted to, and even the refugees are not especially bothered.  There are a few comments, but nothing to make you worry about anyone's life.  The main character's parents seem to be planning to return to Iran, which he struggles to understand, but his mother tells him that they just can't let go of their connection to their homeland, while at the same time she hopes that his home is Germany.  The refugee woman ends up going on the run from the police to avoid deportation, and asks the main character to take care of her brother, who he's already started to be pretty serious with.  At the end, she's gone, and the two men are together, happy with each other, but wounded by the situation.

I did go looking for a German beer, and ended up buying one at the German supermarket.  A nice märzen, a little hilariously with the line "like in the good old days".  It's lighter than expected, clear and orangey.  Fine white head, although not very resistant.  There's a very, very mild scent of bitter, not the typical lager grain.  There's plenty of lager flavor, though, full and round, somewhat sweet.  It's kind of a thick feeling beer, not exactly sticky, but it doesn't go down completely cleanly.  It's not a bad beer for movie watching, to be honest.  Too bad I couldn't have it in the theater.

in preparation

One thing the craft beer explosion has done is reawaken interest in older, traditional beer styles.  Some of the first US craft breweries got their start producing those, capitalizing on a sense of nostalgia, or fauxstalgia, in the public.  Spanish beer is not immune to that.  El Aguila was once the biggest brewery in Madrid, and in fact in Spain, producing almost a quarter of all the beer in the country.  That was about 100 years ago.  Later, they got bought up by Heineken, lost momentum, and ceased production in the '90s.  Then, a couple years ago, somebody thought it would be a good idea to start up the label again.  And they are appealing to tradition, insisting on the consumer being aware of the first years of production; this one is 1900, for example.  The bottle has a bit of a city map of Madrid from 1900 on the neck, with the first El Aguila brewery marked on it.  Nothing else, though.  I'm told by people who were told by former employees that the beer made now isn't quite the same as what they were making in the 20th century, but memories can be tricky, and recipes can be tweaked.  Let's see if it's worth a trip down somebody else's memory lane.

May be a traditional beer, but sure looks like a modern logo

It's on the lighter side of gold, but good head.  It's one of the sweeter smelling lagers, a little bit grainy, but with a very natural and appetizing feeling in the nose.  The flavor is an interesting mix of bitter and sweet, alternating between the two as the beer slides towards the throat.  It's not a thin and inconspicuous beer, although I wouldn't go so far as to call it heavy.  It has a nice mouthfeel, with the sweetness giving it maybe the illusion of more weight than it really has.  There isn't much aftertaste, although there is a little feeling of something hanging around at the back of the mouth.  It's not a bad beer, it gives the impression of a more "nutritious" sort of beverage, one that would sustain workers over long days in the factory.  Of course, that wasn't the marketing fashion in Spain as it was in other places, but they were trying to mimic the beer, so it would have had the same effect, more or less.