The craft-beer boom has accommodated all sorts of business models: Madison-based MobCraft, for instance, uses crowdsourced recipes voted on by nerds across the country (in 2013 RateBeer named it the best new brewer in Wisconsin). And of course for years craft breweries—perhaps most famously Samuel Adams and Stone—have been rewarding the winners of their home-brewing contests by bottling the champion beers.
- Label art by Matthew LaFleur
Middle Brow has existed for almost a year and a half—it’s already held four home-brewing contests—but its first beer has only just come out. A dark saison called the Life Pursuit, conditioned with vanilla beans and cinnamon sticks, it won the brewery’s inaugural contest, which was devoted to winter warmers. Middle Brow posted a call for entries on November 20, 2012, and judging went down in January 2013. The beer was released on tap about a month ago, and bottles started hitting shelves early in March.
This beer has a wonderful creamy texture, light and frothy like a meringue. The taste largely follows the smell, though the spiciness comes further forward here—the prickly cinnamon heat, in tandem with the roasted malts, sometimes suggests cumin or black pepper. The fruitiness adds dried apricot to the plum and cherry, and there’s a touch of caramel too. The Life Pursuit has the spicy-sweet balance typical of winter warmers, and its richly bready malts are cut by a gentle tartness like peach or grape. I generally have little interest in the style, but this is a lovely beer.
And now for the metal! I’m not going to work especially hard to find a way to connect the Life Pursuit to a particular band or song, because I want to call attention to an album that comes out tomorrow—Coffinworm’s IV.I.VIII. I reviewed it for a recent Reader record roundup, in the process failing to resolve a question about its subgenre. You say “tomato,” I say “monstrous, hateful engine of death from beyond time.”
