#dutchbeer #amsterdam

WIB Listening Party #64: Stingray

Vincent Abbate Leave a comment

featuring…

♫ Kenny Brown, Stingray

🍺 Two Chefs Funky Falcon Pale Ale

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

 

2003’s Stingray is a classic example of a really good album that slipped through the cracks.

Recorded at The Money Shot in Water Valley, Mississippi and released on Fat Possum, it’s the work of singer and guitarist Kenny Brown. Best known as the musical sidekick to R.L. Burnside until the latter’s demise in 2005, Brown grew up in the North Mississippi tradition, apprenticing with local legends like Joe Callicott and Johnny Woods before hooking up with Burnside for a partnership that lasted roughly three decades. More recently, his guitar featured on The Black Keys’ Delta Kream, Robert Finley’s Sharecropper’s Son and Hank Williams Jr.’s Rich White Honky Tonk Blues. So he’s out there, still doing his thing.

I scooped up my CD copy of Stingray for a measly $3.95 at a second-hand book outlet in Nashville, Tennessee, following a string of unforeseen circumstances. More on that in a bit.

What we got greasing the wheels this time around?

That would be Funky Falcon Pale Ale from Two Chefs Brewing. Founded in 2012 by a pair of now-former chefs (duh), Two Chefs calls itself “Amsterdam’s Finest Craft Beer Brewery” and adorns its beers with bold, brash colors and characters, like the Dia de los Muertos Mariachi gracing its Mexican-style lager or the gunslinging cowboy on its Green Bullet IPA. I admit I’m a sucker for creative names and designs – undoubtably they’re a part of what makes craft beer fun. But it’s what’s inside that counts, right?

We’ll see what the Funky Falcon has to offer and dive into the Kenny Brown album on the other side.

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WIB Listening Party #53: Blue Guitars

Vincent Abbate Leave a comment

featuring…

♫ Chris Rea, Blue Guitars

🍺 Morebeer Brewing Dutch Eagle

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

If you’re a blues fan (I certainly hope so) you’ll be familiar with T-Bone Walker’s oft-covered classic “Call It Stormy Monday” and an expression it helped make famous: “The eagle flies on Friday.”

Well at today’s Listening Party, the Dutch Eagle flies. Morebeer Brewing’s Dutch Eagle Pale Ale to be exact.

And while we soar high on eagles wings, we’ll also be skimming the deep waters of Chris Rea’s 137-song, 11-CD opus Blue Guitars – an underappreciated 2005 project which can take years to listen to in its entirety.

Last time out I documented a family vacation in Berlin and my uphill battle to get a taste of that city’s beer scene. Two weeks later we arrived in Amsterdam and it was more of the same. A pair of my favorite craft brewers, Oedipus and Lowlander, are based there. I heard their clarion call. But as I surveyed our plans for the week, I didn’t see any way I could easily sneak in a visit to one of their locations without totally blowing off my wife and kids.

Fortunately, being flexible and creative can lead to unexpected discoveries. So it was that as one half of the four-headed beast I call my nuclear family headed off to “look for shoes” – what, there are no shoes where we live? – I convinced my fourteen-year-old daughter to indulge my taste for good beer. She’s old enough to understand you must throw daddy a bone every once in a while. We don’t want him going off the rails now, do we? 

A quick Google search led us to a central but well-hidden pub called Mikkeller at Morebeer. And that is where I discovered Dutch Eagle, one of the best beers I’ve tasted in a while.

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WIB Listening Party #32: Break The Chain

Vincent Abbate Leave a comment

featuring…

♫ Doug MacLeod, Break The Chain

🍺 Lowlander Cool Earth Lager

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

Riffing on the environment, drinking the environmentally-friendly Cool Earth Lager, revisiting Doug MacLeod’s 2018 gem Break The Chain. Welcome to Listening Party #32.

This morning I was watching CNN’s ongoing coverage of COP26. If you’re reading this in the year 2050, it means this particular summit meeting – “The United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties” is the official title – wasn’t all for naught and that Planet Earth is still inhabitable. Hooray for that!

But I’m doubtful. Even as they put on a good show and say all the right things, I question our leaders’ willingness to put the long-term good of the natural environment ahead of economics and their own addiction to power and personal gain. 

Today’s news included promises to reduce methane emissions and a deal by 100 heads of state to end and reverse deforestation by 2030. Well, OK.

Then CNN brought in a representative of an anti-poverty organisation who put a damper on things. He pointed out how Britain was actually doubling down on fossil fuels while doing the climate change dance at the COP26 conference. Greta Thunberg also chimed in, calling out politicians for their hypocrisy and shouting about how we cannot entrust the fate of the planet to corporations and governments. In true revolutionary spirit, she said climate change would have to come from “the people.”

Next came an almost too-painful-to-watch report from Afghanistan showing impoverished parents in the act of selling their daughters in order to survive. Selling their daughters.

My main takeaway: humanity sucks. The systems we’ve created are unjust. Given that situations like this exist – circumstances so desperate that mothers and fathers would make the soul-killing decision to sell their children – is there really any hope that we can pull together as a race and reverse the seemingly irreversible downward climatic spiral?

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WIB Listening Party #25: Still On The Road

Vincent Abbate Leave a comment

featuring…

♫ Nathan James & Ben Hernandez, Hollerin’

🍺 Oedipus Gaia West Coast IPA

Words & photos: Vincent Abbate

My three-week summer holiday in the Netherlands is winding down. If you missed the first Listening Party from the road, here it is. It’s been a cheery, beery time by and large – tinged with feelings of guilt. While I was here at the coast swimming and drinking and getting the deepest tan I’ve had in years, deadly flooding, the worst in decades, hit parts of Belgium, Holland and Germany. Hundreds of families close to where I live in Cologne, Germany, lost everything.

Beer-wise, the past three weeks have found me in an almost constant state of temptation. In every well-stocked supermarket in the region, there are literally dozens of fascinating bottles and cans on the shelves. You needn’t visit a specialty store to find craft beer. It’s everywhere. My oh my …

Today I’ll tell you about a few of the ones I’ve tried, including what may have been my absolute favorite: Gaia West Coast IPA from Amsterdam’s Oedipus Brewing.

At last week’s party, buzzed on a thunderous glass of Dubbel Wit, I found myself looking for music that would pick up where the old-timey Tarbox Ramblers left off. Hollerin’, a 2007 release from San Diego-based duo Nathan James & Ben Hernandez, came to mind. I let ‘er rip and – as so often over the past six months writing this blog feature – rediscovered a great album that has been sitting neglected on my CD shelf.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you our very colorful tag team for Listening Party #25.

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