Check Me Out!

Hot off the presses at the City Pages comes breaking news from Kevin Murphy that (gasp) hoppy beer tastes good:

I remember the day I became a hop-head. Just November last, my job as a professional heckler had brought me to San Diego. I was with my old colleague Mike, and, at the moment we were done with a particularly tough day in the studio, he pounded his fist on the table and pleaded, "Why isn't beer coursing down our throats at this very moment?"

We drove to a strip-mall smack in the heart of a keenly Asian community, where sits a square pub called O'Brien's. Decorated like a foreclosure, with chunky swivel chairs stolen from a mid-seventies Radisson lobby, O'Brien's Dri Mark bill of fare offered at least two dozen drafts I'd never heard of. Beers with taunting names like Ruination, Double Bastard, Decadence. At the advice of Mike's young charge Conor I ordered a Pliny the Elder?an Imperial Ale, I was told. An icy honey-colored pint was delivered picture-perfect, and I took a lusty swig.

"You might want to sip it," Conor said, but too late, my head was attacked from the inside by a combination of aromas and flavors I'd never known to emanate from beer. Grapefruit, skin and all, my tongue shouted at me, while my nose hollered Who hit me with the sack of pinecones? Who's burning the incense and stuffing artichokes in my nostrils? My soft palate actually puckered and yeast filled the brain pan the way it does with champagne of a certain quality I can never afford. As I drank, sipping now, the room became brighter, as if it had a sunroof, and I felt an ease, a joviality normally reserved for Hobbits, massaging my soul.

"It's the hops," my friends explained, and I was undone, smitten with the kind of fibrillating trill I once felt back-rubbing the women in my theater classes. I was, and am, a hop-head.

I returned to Minnesota and told my few ale-crazy friends where I'd been and what I'd done, and they smacked their foreheads in incredulity. "You went where? You tasted what?!" Without knowing it I'd fairly stumbled on one of the nation's nexuses of world-class American brewing; people who know such things melt at its mention. Never one to think that any state has anything over Minnesota, particularly not California, I determined to find that flavor, that perfectly distinctive buzz, among the growing brace of very proud local brewers. A quest for hops began.

Cursory research revealed that the Minneapolis Town Hall Brewery has for years turned out an array of beers with luxurious amounts of hops. This was my starting point, and may well be my finishing point.

Next week: Murphy returns with an exclusive inside scoop on the wonders of sliced bread.