I lived in Louisville, KY a decade ago and a favorite spot
for a beer and The Cramps on jukebox was Mag Bar. I stopped back in town
recently and while smokers are now exiled to the sidewalk and a gourmet pizza shop
is open next door, it’s the same dark den I loved and was just a little scared
of.
That trip back is where I first had a beer from New AlbanianBrewing Company, just across the river in New Albany (get it?), Indiana. That
night, it was Bob’s Old 15-B -- a roasty, but still complex, brown porter.
Who’d think that I’d see a New Albanian again beer here in my current home of
Florida? Turns out an Ohio distributor, Cavalier, also has a warehouse in
Lakeland.
The beer I found is Black & Blue Grass, a Belgian ale
spiked with toasted black pepper, blue agave nectar, and lemongrass. I was
concerned NABC picked the ingredients just to make the name work, but it’s an
interesting combo. I suspect that without the extras, we’d have a
vaguely-wheaty, orange-red ale without a lot of character.
That first sip hits you with a lot of things at once – the
herbal lemongrass, the flavor but not the heat of the pepper, the leafy green
of the agave. Because the yeast has done its job of eating sugar and making
(let’s be honest, “excreting”) alcohol, it’s not at all a sweet beer. It’s a
very clean flavor, almost cleansing the palate as you drink it.
At first sip, all the herbal notes together hit me as “hair
tonic,” the jasmine/lavender whiff of a barber shop. I eventually got past that, but it’s a
personal association that’ll keep Black & Blue Grass from becoming a
regular in the rotation --an interesting one to try and then move on.
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