The Riddle of Dick's

I don't ever recalling having back-to-back beers as divergent as my first two Dick's. My introduction came in our winter ale tasting, when two tasters (me included) identified Dick's as the tastiest. Then came one of the least impressive IPAs I've had from a NW brewer. So, a good brewery with an off beer or a bad brewery with a lucky recipe? This is the riddle I went to solve last week when I went and got three more from the brewery: the flagship Dick Danger, a bitter, and a seasonal tripel. A worthy troika that would test the brewery's mettle and solve the riddle.

Dick Danger
A brewery can't necessarily choose a flagship--sometimes the flagship chooses a brewery (ask the Widmer's). But, when that flagship includes the word "danger" in the title, it raises the ante. Unfortunately, there's nothing whatever dangerous about this beer. It has a pleasing nut brown color, and a mild sweet hazelnut nose. If the nose and appearance are mild, the palate is ever more so. Everything is mild--malt, hops, body. It has almost no character. It isn't a bad beer, but there's nothing whatever to distinguish it. Danger? More like Safety Beer. Rating: Average.

Best Bitter
With Best Bitter, I begin to conclude that Dick's has naming issues. That style is more than a mild session, but hop character should be subdued. Not so here--this is a hop-forward beer that's bitter enough to be an ESB, though at 4.5%, too light. More like a pale ale. Not to belabor the point, but it's the old grammar thing--fine to break the rules if you know 'em. This seems like a brewery that doesn't know the difference between a best bitter, a pale ale and an ESB.

So, the beer: it pours a dull amber, and has a mild hop hop aroma. Much nicer than Dick Danger. The hops here are pointed, but not overwhelming. A sharp, resinous hopping. More body and some added malt character would push it to the next category. Rating: Good.

Tripel
The pick of this litter is the Tripel, which is also the most traditional. It is golden-orange, cloudy, and features a poor, snowy-white head, all authentic-looking. The aroma is sugary-sour, also akin to the classic Trappist models. These early indicators don't quite hold out through the flavor, but this is still a good effort. The elements are all there--alcohol, yeast character, sweetness, and a touch of funk. They aren't quite as assertive as the originals and fail to cohere into beers like those that hail from Belgium. Not surprising--those breweries have literally centuries of collective experience. Give Dick's another decade, and maybe this will have matured into a more exceptional beer. Still, you could do a whole lot worse. Rating: Good.

In the final analysis, Dick's seems like a young brewery learning its craft. (It's not: they've been around since '94.) Some of the beers are great, others are mistakes. None of the beers I tried had off-flavors; the failures are in sophistication of recipes. I won't turn down a Dick's in the future, but I probably won't go out of my way to find their beer, either.

Two Pales for Winter - Widmer '07 and Dick's IPA

When last I was standing in front of the beer cooler at Freddy's, I selected a couple of bottles that would more properly served in May. Maybe it's the same problem that infects holiday marketing--you want to get an earlier and early jump on things, so Spring beers come out in January.

Never mind the season, there's something to learn here: the two beers form a nice little binary set. Both are good examples of Northwest brewing: they are loose, funky variations on a style, done in a sort of grungy garage-band style. One succeeds, one fails. Why this is so becomes an object lesson in brewing.

Widmer '07 Pale Ale
Each year, Widmer releases a beer in it's "W" Brewmasters' series. Two years ago it was an IPA and last year a strong red. This year they ratchet back the oomph and give us a very summery pale ale with an amazing depth of hopping. They have used four different types of hops in various additions throughout the boil and after (it's dry-hopped), to create a sublime aroma that is sweet and citrusy, but with a distinct lemony note. On the palate, the hops comingle with the malt to draw out the sweetness--at 34 BUs, it's not actually very bitter.

The beer is a becoming reddish-pale; a strawberry blonde? Crowd-pleasingly approachable, but with lots of flavor. I sometimes find dry, slightly grating quality in the Widmer yeast, but this is purely sweet and hoppy. It reminds me of some of the beers I've tasted by younger brewers who are filled with exuberence--they want to use every hop in the house. It is certainly not the kind of beer one would expect from the largest, second-oldest brewery in the state: W '07 is of the more surprising bottled offerings from the Widmers in recent memory.

Stats
Malts: Pale, CaraVienne 20-L, Caramel 80-L, Carapils
Hops: boil - Alchemy, finishing - Alchemy, Summit, dry-hopping - Summit, Chinook
Alcohol by volume: 5.4%
Original Gravity: 13° Plato
Bitterness Units: 34
Available: Through July

Rating
Excellent.

Dick's IPA
Thanks to our winter ale tasting, Dick's has now entered my radar. I was pleased to see it getting some shelf space, and had high hopes when I poured out the cloudy golden bottle. Alas, Dick's is a textbook example of a rowdy beer gone wrong. At just 5%, it's far from a true IPA (most standard pale ales are stronger), but who's slavish about designations? The problem is that it's hopped like an IPA, producing a brutally aggressive beer with no legs to support itself. Hops can be a good thing, and some nuclear recipes have the layered hopping and malt backbone to support 75+ IBUs (by "layered" I mean hopping that contributes flavor and aroma along with alpha acid bitterness). But Dick's isn't balanced, and it seems like an amateurish effort.

Northwest beers are test their mettle with hoppy beers--not so much for the dollars as for bragging rights. Dick's has come out swinging, but they've shown that hops ain't enough for bragging rights--the entire recipe has to sing.

Stats
Malts: Unknown
Hops: Chinook, Tomahawk
Alcohol by volume: 5%
Original Gravity: 1.055
Bitterness Units: Unknown

Rating
Average.

Winter Beer Tasting

When I started this blog, I imagined many things. Looking into the future, I foresaw a site bristling with reviews of every beer and brewpub in Oregon; I promised myself glorious prose; I envisioned hosting regular tastings. In my reveries about that latter point, I saw the emergence of a professoriate of the palate, a council so wise and powerful it dictated the preferences of an entire state.

It is with this prologue that I announce the second Beervana tasting, which I conducted on New Year's Eve. A yin to this summer's pale ale tasting yang, we sampled seven dark winter ales. That time, if you recall, the difficulty was that the beers all tasted too much alike to identify. But winter beers are a whole different mug of grog, right? Whoo boy, is that ever not true. They are different enough to distinguish subtle differences, but as far as lining them up to the memories of the same beers in our minds--no chance. So it appears that our wise council is a bust.

Nevertheless, some interesting findings did emerge.

Tasters and Method
As before, we had a person who was not participating pour out the bottles into glasses marked 1-7. From these we all slurped and sipped, medievally, insensitive to germs. We took notes, tried to assign a name to each number, selected a favorite, and then subjected ourselves to the horror of learning how wrong we were. The panel (call us The Chastened) consisted of five seasoned palates with a combined expertise of several decades of beer swilling.

Tasting Notes
Although we all sucked at identification, it was interesting to see how similarly we all described the individual entries. Clearly, we were tasting the same beers and were well-enough equipped to agree on what they tasted like.

Beer 1 (Fish Brewing Winterfish)
Grapefruit hops, fruity. Light-colored, some alcohol.

Beer 2 (Full Sail Wassail)
Floral, smooth. Rich brown. Roasty. Piney hops.

Beer 3 (Golden Valley Tannen Bomb)
Unfortunately, this was a bad bottle. It was sour and fetid-smelling and easily garnered everyone's vote for "worst." Having had a couple bottles already, I know it's not a characteristic of the beer itself. Dunno what happened. It did, however, yield the most amusing quote: "That's the weirdest, grossest beer ever--I can't stop drinking it."

Beer 4 (Deschutes Jubelale)
Creamy, great head. Apples? Deep red. Lots of caramel.

Beer 5 (Dick's Double Diamond)
Sharply bitter. Aromatic. Creamy. Noticeable alcohol flavor.

Beer 6 (Pyramid Snow Cap)
Deep copper. Aggressive. Plummy and sweetish.

Beer 7 (Ebenezer)
Coppery-red. Creamy and gentle. Mild.

Assessments
Except for the Tannen Bomb, we found these all to be pretty fine beers. However, when people were pressed to name their favorites, three came out the winners. With two votes each, Dick's Double Diamond and Deschutes Jubel took highest honors. None of us had ever had Dick's, so factor that in. (Points for novelty? Who knows?) Pyramid Snow Cap picked up the final vote--and by a person who thought it was Snow Cap and who thought he liked Snow Cap the best.

Join us next time for our "Beers that are very different from one another" tasting, wherein we attempt to recapture our identification mojo....