Wednesday Beer — The Cream Ale

Don’t laugh but apparently some people have been asking Anspach & Hobday whether their Cream Ale has lactose in it (as if the inclusion of lactose is some sort of craft beer Reinheitsgebot) — it doesn’t, but, being based on a beer style that was both pre-Prohibition and remains in the repertoire of a few US breweries, it contains flaked corn and oats. 

I first read about Cream Ale when Randy Mosher filed his review of Pelican Pub & Brewery’s Kiwanda Cream Ale for the first edition of 1001 Beers. The idea of this single-hop beer with a light colour and body but which Randy still thought good enough to be sampled intrigued me. 

Fast forward to 2015 and I’m driving between Seattle and Portland over six days for a travel feature and aiming to get to as many breweries as possible, which is how on a gloomy Monday lunchtime I arrived at Pelican’s Pub right down on the beach at Pacific City in Oregon (city is a bit of a misnomer as from what I saw the place looked the size of a suburb of Rhyl). Naturally, I ordered the Cream Ale, which was light and delicate with a moussec-like mouth feel. It was an excellent beer for lunch and dovetailed magnificently with a plate of fish tacos. 

As for Anspach & Hobday’s Cream Ale, I presume it’s the corn that helps to give it a lightness on the palate, while the oats add a smooth mouth feel. There is a floral and citrus nose, while the palate is herbal, delicately fruity and dry in the finish with a ring of bitterness continuing as if a visitor was pressing down insistently on the doorbell. 

This is a smooth and soothing beer, with a lot more character than I recall from Pelican’s Cream Ale. One other thing, The Cream Ale is a lightly hazy in appearance, which is a bit ironic as Cream Ale in the 19th century came about because US brewers wanted to emulate the brilliance of the lagers that were sweeping all before them (according to Jeff Alworth in his magnificent Brewery Bible). Next, I’d like to see a pre-Prohibition lager if anyone is interested in making one. 

Simple pleasures

So I walk along the old railway tracks, not the big things that the Pacific trains used to come belling along, but smaller ones, ones I suspect were used to take fish about between the various canneries in this part of Astoria OR. The bridge over the River Columbia stretches out left to me, the hills of Washington across the river, a glowing, fern-light green in the setting sun, all seen within the focus of a massive metal structure on which people are working this Sunday evening. It’s one of the longest bridges I have seen — at first I thought that it made the Severn bridges look like a couple of railway sleepers flung over to Wales, but in retrospect I think it’s was the metal work, the harking back to an age of steel and iron, that made all other bridges seem small.

You get to the jetty, said the woman in the hotel (and if you’re ever down this part of the world I cannot recommend the Cannery Pier hotel enough) and carry on walking this way, she said jabbing at the map. The sea lions make a lot of noise. The fishermen hate them, said her companion at the lobby bar, they eat all the salmon.

So I’m thinking of finding Fort George, a brewpub with a pretty good barrel-aging programme, but as I walk along the quayside, I spot Buoy Brewery and decide to pay my respects there as well, especially as I had been told that they make good lagers whilst I was at Pike Brewing in Seattle a couple of days before.

Buoy. We say Boy and the Americans say Boo-e. When I was first told about it I had to have it written down for me, though I refrained from asking for a rendition of tomato.

Inside, Buoy was standard former industrial use issue, with a restaurant at the front overlooking the river. On the serious side of things, the high-ceilinged, open-windowed bar glad-handed itself to me with the ease of a dive into a deep cool river. The beer menu suggested the likes of Helles, Pilsner, oatmeal stout and a barley wine — the guy at Pike wasn’t wrong, the Czech Pilsner had a sweet malt juiciness, a dry crisp finish but its mouthfeel didn’t have the bloom of PU and I felt it closer to Budvar.

I’ve got to do it haven’t I, I laughed to the barman when going up for the next beer. I’ll have the IPA and I’m glad that I did. There was a Citra dominated nose, a fresh tropical fruit palate, with added leafy and grassy notes, there was also grapefruit but it didn’t burst out of its skin and announce world domination, the balance of malt sweetness with the hop fruit reminded me of the scales of justice statue but I don’t think the brewer was blindfolded when he did this. The nose pulsated with fresh hop, citrus, grapefruit, and a pungent resiny underlay. It was so easy to drink even for 7.5%. What simple joys we find in small towns.

I made it to Fort George where I luxuriated in a glass of Plazm Farmhouse Ale whilst discussing Wittgenstein at the bar with a philosophy lecturer before heading off to a local dive with the head brewer, but that’s a story for another day. 

Tax breaks beer

It’s not just here that taxing beer is seen as a source of revenue for a cash-strapped government and it’s not just here that scare stories abound about the hike been used to pay for alcoholism. See: www.kgw.com/news-local/stories/kgw_021309_news_oregon_beer_tax.126942e1.html?npc and weep.