Here in PA beer buyers get to choose between picking up a case at the state storedistributor or buying overpriced sixpacks at a bar. As a result we keystone staters take time getting to know a single beer before moving on to the next one. Case in point, over the last week we’ve worked our way through a case of the IPA-style Two Hearted Ale from Bell’s in Galesburg, MI and at this point I can say that I’m ready for a review.
When you have plenty of time to contemplate a beer named for a Michigan river and story by Ernest Hemingway the mind begins to associate things. If brewing is an art and all art is essentially a running commentary on other art, could one think of beer itself as a form of literary criticism? Last year the Lagunitas Brewery commemorated an unwelcome visit from the DEA with a brew formulated to reflect the experience. A pointless twenty-day shutdown hardly compares to forty years lost in the desert, but here you have an especially bitter beer serving the same purpose as bitter herbs and saltwater on the Passover holiday. The principle is there.
Two Hearted Ale seems bigger than it is at 6%, which you won’t find out from the bottle label. A touch of bitterness contributes, and despite subtle contributions from malt and hops the beer comes across as dry, almost to a fault. If it were a sentence Bell’s Two Hearted Ale would be about eight words long, emphatic, contain no adjectives and take three or four samplings before you get everything that it’s trying to say. You may not find yourself among the Snows of Kilimanjaro, but Hemingway has written things harder to get through than this golden straw-colored brew. A lingering head caps this brew with a hoppy nose, and leaves behind a slight lacing when it retreats.
For more reasons to find some for yourself, see BA.
Friday Beer Blogging – For Whom The Bell’s TollPost + Comments (12)