At New Albanian Brewing Company (NABC) we have a peculiar annual institution known as Gravity Head, and with the 15th version currently underway, I’m reminded of how Gravity Head’s internal alarm clock has a snooze button marked “Time Warp.”
No, this isn’t meant as an indicator of the way hours become minutes as the many strong ales seep into one’s corpuscles, spinning the random cosmic generator wheel and bizarrely conjuring pearls of wisdom previously reserved for holy men and theme park architects.
Rather, it is a consideration of longevity: How many of this year’s participating breweries were operating in 1999, when Gravity Head began?
Actually, more than I thought at first, and accordingly, the names are familiar. Among others, these are Bell’s and Three Floyds, Sierra Nevada and Stone, BBC and Great Divide, and Ellezelloise and JW Lees.
There’s also Rogue, arguably the most consistently misspelled brewery name ever.
(“Rouge” is the French word for “red,” people. Get with the program)
It’s embarrassing for me to admit that I don’t think or drink Rogue as much as I did before. My negligence owes mostly to logistics. Without a second liver, keeping abreast of beer from Indiana and Kentucky brewers alone is a formidable challenge, and so I don’t drink around as much.
But Gravity Head 2013 opening day may have brought my inner Rogue back into focus. To be sure, plenty of lovely flavors passed through my promiscuous lips last Friday, but the only beer I felt like repeating was the 2011 Rogue Old Crustacean Barley Wine, and not only because there was a time when the tapping of the vintage Old Crustacean keg at Gravity Head was like a ceremonial coronation for visiting royalty.
Today, amid the prevailing experimentation and extremities, aged Old Crustacean tastes quite apart from the gravity ale crowd in the graceful elegance of being utterly ageless. It drinks the way a Glenn Miller 78-rpm record plays … like the Parthenon appears during an Athenian dawn … and just as Joey Votto swings a bat.
Emphatically, permit me to add that Rogue hasn’t been standing still. There have been new brands (Voodoo Doughnut Maple Bacon Ale, anyone? (Editor’s Note: Which I think is AMAZING), a renewed commitment to sustainability in the form of the company’s own hop farm and malting house, and the addition of artisan distilled spirits to the product line.
But perhaps because Rogue’s core of founding visionaries established a system and an ethos capable of being grasped and passed from one generation to the next (think of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs), there is an immutable house character to both the brewery’s business and its beer. Rogue keeps rolling along.
Brewer John Maier’s creations remain simultaneously inimitable and infinitely flexible. Each beer is demonstrably singular, and yet at the same time, immediately identifiable as Rogue. You’ll never mistake Rogue for any other craft beer – or any other craft brewer.
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At two years of age, the Old Crustacean Barley Wine tapped for Gravity Head is ideal. The vibrancy and heat of youth are mellowing into prime middle age, and one joyfully discerns the beer’s solid, classicist element: Barley malt, but not malt calibrated solely to serve as underpinning for today’s customarily flagrant over-hopping. Even when Rogue was considered the hophead’s outer limit, this very reputation embodied a considerable misnomer, because the brewery’s house character derives so very much from a layered, nuanced, distinctive malt flavor.
The watchword is balance, and balance is not a pejorative term. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to recall an instance of Maier sacrificing balance for ephemeral expediency in any beer he’s ever brewed, and if he somehow erred, those beers probably aren’t being brewed any longer, anyway. Brewer and company are to be praised for the self-confidence to honor the dictates of their muse and the style they’ve collectively nurtured, because that’s what craftsmanship is all about: Consummate skill linked to an ultimate purpose.
Whether in 1999 or 2013, to taste Old Crustacean is to experience harmony; everything’s big, and everything fits together, and if this sounds like a love letter, of course it is, although I’d argue that it’s my prerogative to dispense mash notes when the mood strikes. After all, we go back a long way.
During the 1990s, before NABC contemplated brewing, draft Rogue was a rotating staple at the Public House. Every month or two, I’d call Jim Cline in Oregon, or he’d call me, and we’d assemble a pallet of kegs destined for the Indiana wholesaler. On occasion, a keg of something new would appear.
In 2006, when we finally visited Rogue in Newport, Oregon, Jim and his crew took very good care of us, and my single biggest goal upon returning home was to figure out how there might be a Rogue Ales Pub overlooking the Ohio River, with a full lineup of John Maier’s beers, and oyster shooters for good measure.
Time warps?
Sometimes time warps perspective, and then an honest man needs a shot or to of Barley Wine to remind him about both time and timelessness.
