so many things

Along with my NEIPA, I picked up an American IPA from Birra y Paz, oh so long ago.  It was the name and the label that really convinced me, Las Uvas de la IPA, with a pack of odd representations of...stuff.  Anger at various stages, I suppose.

That shopping cart doesn't even have ammunition in it

Immediately aromatic, with a striking hoppy smell.  Pours nicely, with a heavy orangeish color and off-white head.  The scent has perhaps a touch of pine.  The flavor is sharply bitter, much heavier than anything I've had recently, but it feels like a good summer drink in spite of being a little thick.  The bitterness is refreshing and not undermined by any sweetness playing down the strength of the hops.  This is a fairly powerful beer, both in alcohol at 9%, and in feel with its robustness.  A little too strong flavored for a mealtime beer, unless the food itself is pretty light.  Quite nice by itself, I don't feel the need for snacks, although I do not think it would be the best idea to chug this one down on an empty stomach.

Supplier: Birra y Paz
Price: €3.95

It's German Film Fest time!  I've only seen two yet, so the other two will come with the Vallehermoso review next week.

SPOILERS!!!
  
Die Vierhändige/Cuantro manos/Four Hands is part of the horror collection they are showing this year.  Horror!  Huzzah!  It seems like something Germans should be able to do.  As this is a festival, sometimes people involved in making the film come to talk with the audience afterwards, and the director was here for this showing.  According to him, the German public is a bit finicky with its films, preferring the more intellectual offerings (uh, Fack ju Goethe, anyone?) and this type of dramatic horror isn’t so well represented.  But it does do well outside of Germany.  The story is about two sisters whose parents were murdered in their house when the girls were very young.  For some reason they still live there twenty years later.  The younger sister wants to join an orchestra as a pianist, while the older sister still seems to be heavily traumatized by witnessing the crime.  She is extremely nervous about her sister’s well-being and checks up on her constantly.  Then, they hear that their parents’ murderers are being let out of prison and the older sister kind of flips out.  She chases the younger one through a parking garage and they are both hit by a car driving through the aisles like it’s supposed to.  The younger sister wakes up in the hospital and is told that her sister was dead on arrival, which upsets her, but on hearing from the police that threatening letters had been sent to the murderers, she seems determined to get on with her life.  She starts seeing the doctor from the hospital who told her about her sister, but when they start kissing in his car she reacts violently and leaves.  When she arrives home, she now appears as the older sister and furiously tears the house apart looking for her discarded things.  The sisters switch consciousness several times before the younger sister asks for help.  She realizes the older sister has tracked down the murderers and is planning to do something to them, possibly kill them to avenge their parents.  They talk to each other by leaving messages on the old answering machine and the younger sister resorts to chaining herself to the bed.  It doesn’t work; she comes to in her car, driving down the highway, and screeches to a halt, narrowly avoiding an accident with another car.  When she stops the car, she hears yelling and pounding from the trunk.  The female murderer is inside.  The younger sister decides to scare the woman out of town to save her life and knocks her out with chloroform before tying her to a tree, getting the story of the botched robbery out of her, and telling her to leave if she wants to keep living.  Presumably, the woman leaves because when the older sister gets her turn and shows up at the woman’s workplace, they tell her she has disappeared.  The male partner is still around, though.  He’s going to get his.  However, the younger sister has started to research both the murders and the car accident.  She finds the psychiatric reports saying her older sister was too racked with guilt to get over her trauma, and sees a photo of herself lying on the ground, covered in blood at the scene of the car accident.  She appeals to the doctor (who her sister threatened to kill) and he brings her to the psych ward.  When he says she doesn’t look that crazy except for her tattoo, the younger sister realizes that she isn’t possessed by her older sister’s protective, vengeful ghost, she is possessing her sister’s body and still trying to live a normal life.  She runs home to lock herself up, and the murderer breaks in and finds her.  The doctor comes to see if she’s alright, gets beaten by the murderer, the now older sister escapes the chains and kills the murderer with a coat-rack to his back.  She prepares to cut her own throat while sitting on the plastic covered couch, but then she sees the answering machine with a message on it from her sister, a message that screams, “It’s my life!  I want my life!”  The older sister decides that she has an obligation to stay in the world, so her sister will have some way to keep living.  She does go to some kind of treatment and at her sister’s funeral seems to be much calmer.  But, when she gets home there’s a message - her sister playing a piano part, which she joins in on.  The director said the movie is meant to tell us that whatever trauma we experience will never go away, but our can live our lives well by accepting it.

Der Hauptmann/El capitán/The Captain turned out to be a true story.  A German soldier deserts in the final days of the Second World War and comes across a car with a captain's uniform inside.  There's nobody around, so he puts on the uniform and practices giving imperious orders, when he is surprised by another soldier who mistakes him for a real captain.  The "captain" takes this lost man under his command and they go around picking up other soldiers apparently separated from their units.  He tells people he's taking stock of the situation near the front under the direct orders of the Führer, and finally he ends up at a prison camp where he decides to execute all the deserters in spite of the protests of the camp director.  An English bombardment destroys the camp and kills most of the people who are left, so the "captain" takes what men he can gather and starts an express trial tour.  He blows into town, kills a few "traitors", and has himself a party.  Finally, the military police catch up to him and arrest him.  He is tried for his crimes, but the examiners say his actions weren't so strange given the circumstances, and in the end he is given a very light sentence.  He escapes anyway, and walks out into the woods, over a carpet of human skeletons, and disappears into the darkness among the trees.  I thought it might be a story with a sort of "Catch Me If You Can" atmosphere, where the fraudulent officer is trying to stay under the radar and not have people examine him too much, but no.  The guy was a psychopath.  He had no problems killing and ordering others to kill, so his desertion doesn't seem like the act of a man just tired of having to commit violence.  He didn't even seem to enjoy it very much, it was just a thing he had to do.  The movie ended with the actors roaming a modern city in their Nazi costumes, harassing people in the street while the credits rolled.  The director was here for this movie too, and he explained that he really wanted to make a film that busted a few legends and myths that Germans had about the end of the war and people's behavior at the time.  At least, I think that's what he said.  He didn't have his own mic and the interpreter's mic had really bad, fuzzy sound.

Halfway through!

more taste testing

More and more places are deciding a nice, quiet beer tasting with a variety of well-made craft beers is a clever way to attract customers.  Of course, some places don't worry too much about it being quiet.  This is Spain, after all.  I had never been to, or even heard of, Macanudo Bar Espacio Arte, but if they have good beer I'm game.  The tasting was presented by a representative of Freaks Brewing, which I am familiar with.  One of the beers was even one I had tried recently.  But, we were also getting special tapas, so the experience will be different.

Uh oh, nice beer?

We all crowded around the bar and prepared for the first taste.  It was Flying Rebel pale lager.  It has a wheaty kind of scent, a little bit sweet and with a hint of grass.  The taste is surprising, though, being rather sour.  It's very light and despite the suggestion in the aroma of wheat, there's no sweetness in the beer, nor is there that grassy aftertaste.  There are only Saaz hops used in it, although it's not as bitter as you might expect.  Oddly, I got a little floral aroma as the glass came to its end.  Our first tapa was a mushroom spread.  It was a heavy tasting and spicy snack, peppery really, and a good choice to tame the sourness of the ale.

Tropical Explorer APA came out next.  I was wondering if it would be much different in the bottle as on tap.  We had a spicy pork tapa (actually the spiciness was from the extra sauce, not the pork itself) and the beer really neutralized that heat.  It was otherwise as I remembered from Craft Against The Machine; fruity smelling, but much more bitter and beery than you expect from a sniff.  Good combo.

Third was Lord Cobra IPA, which I had also sampled previously, albeit some time ago.  In spite of being an IPA it's supposed to be a versatile beverage, going with most food.  Especially strong flavors, they said.  Well, our tapa was a hot dog with pickle mayonnaise and beets, not what one would consider delicate in taste.  Lord Cobra did not pack a punch in its own flavor, just a little bitter and light flavored on its own, but was a welcome palate cleanser after the sticky and pickly snack.  A good mealtime beer indeed.  Now on the dessert!

We finished up with a stout (hooray!), Roast King Imperial Stout.  There isn't a very strong smell to it, just a little bit of coffee.  Even the taste is mostly coffee, but the Starbucks kind with a couple of shots of syrup.  There's even a hint of fruit in the background, but it's very subtle.  Our dessert tapa was a chocolate mousse with nuts, maybe pistachio?  After scarfing that up, the stout washes it right down, gaining a richer chocolate flavor itself, and a smoother finish.  Those touches of sour fruit get wiped right out. 

I found the noise of the room distracting, but being gathered closely around we could hear the rep pretty much the whole time.  I was also amused at the number of questions that came from the group.  In part, it would be that most were not beer snobs and just trying something new for the evening, but I also think it might be that people feel more comfortable in a louder environment, where anything silly can be brushed aside as a misunderstanding because of the noise.  Maybe I should put a white noise machine in class when the students don't seem to want to ask questions that they obviously need the answers to.

IPA and APA

Mouth watering stouts

branching out

It's time for another field trip!  The boys at La Tienda de la Cerveza have opened a bar, with craft beer taps of course.  They still have the store and the in-store taps, but now there's Craft Against The Machine, on c/ Embajadores 31.  It's a small place, so it's not implausible that you find it uncomfortably popular at a given moment, but it's not far from Mercado San Fernando and La Buena Pinta, so if you absolutely must have a beer at that time, all is not lost.  The place was a hairdresser's and they kept the tiles outside, so if you're not careful you might walk right by it.  Inside, there are more bar seats than tables, so you're best off in a small group.  Unless you're lucky enough to snag the back table.

Don't be fooled, there's beer inside

Cheers, explorers!

Interesting tapas here

I was hoping for a dark beer, but everything was pretty yellow on the menu.  There was a barleywine, but I wasn't especially in the mood for the heavy sweet beer that barleywines tend to be.  In the end, I chose Freaks Tropical Explorer APA.  It appeared as a slightly cloudy orange with a very moderate head.  There was the typical citrus aroma, but the taste has a bitter and sweet punch at the same time, while still being separate flavors.  Interesting.  I found it had a slightly dusty feel, thirst quenching, but still leaving a tickle.  In spite of the surprising combination, the taste is very mild, making this a good chat beer.  There is only a slight bitterness, and in this case that's pretty well tamed by the garbanzos.  When I got some pomegranate before taking a sip, I found a stronger orange citrus flavor to be pulled out.  Based on the name, I expected more fruitiness to be honest.  Still, Tropical Explorer is a nice beer, a good drink, and pleasant bar companion.

Price: €6/pint

no snake in the grass

I was pretty sure I saw a notice that La Birratorium was changing locations a couple of months ago, but when I went to sift through my email to find it, I couldn't.  Maybe I just dreamed it, I have vivid dreams sometimes.  But no, it was real, and they've moved.  A little closer to my house in fact.  Their stock is still sitting proudly on its wooden shelves, gathered by origin, so if you're looking for that perfect Norwegian beer, this is where to find it easily.  After a little wandering around I finally decided on Lord Cobra, an IPA by Freaks Brewing.  They seem to imply that the snake is the result of some experiment done by a shadowy government: "Son of ambition and colonialism, through his cold blood runs the scent of liberty and the poison of empire.  The aristocracy taught him to attack without losing control, fierce but always elegant."

Opening the bottle releases a sharp but sweet scent, reminding me a little bit of ginger ale.  It's rather a darker color than that, though, more of a rosy orange.  Also, once in the glass the aroma is much stronger in the citrus range.  Although a bit bitter, the sweetness of a fresh mandarin overrides it.  It's a simple, fruity taste, very light and refreshing.  I was expecting something with more...bite, I guess.  It's not a disappointment, but not as weighty for my personal taste for a cold weather beer.  It's a good thing we haven't had any cold weather for quite some time.

Supplier: La Birratorium
Price: €3.30