WILLIAMSVILLE — No doubt with marketing tongue in cheek, those jokers from the Diageo company have come up with a petition campaign to make St. Patrick's Day an official U.S. holiday. Many, particularly in Boston, may assume this is already the case, but it is not so.
Diageo owns Guinness, the world's most-consumed stout - some 10 million glasses a day, a million pints in Ireland alone - although it's safe to assume that there's a noticeable spike in consumption each March 17. So the aptly named Proposition 3-17 is aimed at collecting a million signatures online (www.proposition317.com), by midnight on March 16. If successful, current plans call for Guinness brewmaster Fergal Murray to travel to Washington from Dublin and present the petition to Congress.
As of Feb. 27, the petition was lagging by 932,794 signatures, but then I just saw a television commercial about it, too, so who knows?
I'd like to see an amendment to the proposition that includes a prohibition against green beer, the egregious practice of adding food coloring to a pale lager and thinking that that somehow makes one Irish for St. Patrick's Day.
But it is indeed the black stuff, dry Irish stout, which really runs in Irish veins, ever since Arthur Guinness purchased an unused brewery at St. James Gate in Dublin for 100 pounds in 1759. Guinness took a black beer style called porter (so called because it was favored by London market porters), and produced a fuller-bodied “stout porter.” The adjective eventually became a noun, and the beer style established itself over time.
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It's a mistake to confuse the inky depths and hearty flavors of stout with its strength, a misinterpretation I hear all the time: “Oh, I don't like Guinness, it's too strong.”
While rich, dry, and roasty, Guinness on tap is actually a mild beer, at only 4.0-percent abv (alcohol by volume). The classic golden pilsner beer, Pilsner Urquell, is 4.3-percent abv, showing that color has nothing to do with the alcoholic strength of beer, and that alcoholic strength has little to do with the flavor and character of beer. (Compare these two with the dishwater foam of Budweiser, the strongest of the lot at 5.0-percent abv).
Stout can be strong; however, just as its body can range from thin to viscous, its flavors can range from bitter to sweet and reflect any extras the brewer cares to toss into the mix. Guinness may be a world-classic stout, but it hardly defines the style; brewers worldwide have had 250 years to tinker with it. Although the starting point is usually the same - highly kilned malts to give the beers their rich, dark ruby or opaque ebony color, and the bittering qualities of unmalted roasted barley.
Without trying too hard - three quick shopping stops one February day in Brattleboro (at Discount Beverage, the Food Co-op, and Windham Wines) - I snapped up ten different brews that ran the stout gamut. Three foreign entries were Guinness, and from England, St. Peter's Cream Stout and Young's Double Chocolate Stout.
Guinness remains the benchmark dry stout, while St. Peter's (imported by Brattleboro's own Anne Latchis through Eurobrew, Inc.) is an example of the sweet variety, often called milk or cream stout because of the addition of milk sugar (lactose). Cream stouts tend to be less bitter than dry stouts, but no less sturdy.
Patrons at Windham Wines produced a mild riot of grumbling a while back when Young's Double Chocolate Stout was removed from the tap offerings, so the beer is now permanently on draft. I'm not quite sure what the Young's brewers were doubling up on, but it's a 5.2-percent abv cream stout with added chocolate flavors on top of stout's typical chocolate malts. Works well as a standalone dessert, too.
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Two more chocolate stouts came from Rogue Ales in Oregon and Trout River Brewing in Lyndonville. The Rogue is a typically winning beer from one of the northwest's finest brewers (they also make one of my favorites, Shakespeare Stout), with another near-dessert chocolate profile.
Trout River's version actually straddles two categories, since it is also an oatmeal stout. Adding oatmeal to the brewing grist tends to make the stouts creamier, more velvety, and less grainy. That said, the Trout River version seemed a bit thin to me, with a muted chocolate note.
Wolaver's Oatmeal Stout comes from the organic side of Otter Creek Brewing in Middlebury - the real green beer. I haven't actually cracked this one open yet; it remains something to look forward to, as does the Chicory Stout from Dogfish Head in Delaware, a sort of kitchen-sink stout with chicory, licorice root, Mexican coffee, St. John's Wort, plus oatmeal.
Otter Creek has been producing quarterly specialty beers on what it calls its World Tour, and the ninth entry, debuting last fall and therefore inexorably vanishing from shelves, is the Otter Mon, a Jamaican-style sweet stout clearly fashioned after Dragon Stout from Kingston, Jamaica. The molasses-like character comes from the addition of raw sugar cane.
The Imperial Stout from McNeill's Brewery in Brattleboro is one of Ray McNeill's top efforts. The style, often called Russian Imperial Stout, stems from the appetite of Catherine the Great for potent black brews to (seemingly) ward off the cold of St. Petersburg. And imperial stouts are indeed stronger in alcohol and frequently raisiny in character. McNeill, never light on the hops, lets them add a floral character to his interpretation, and it's as close to a shamrock as one needs to go on March 17.
Remember, no green beer now - go black.