Craft Beer Crosscut 5.12.19: A Flight For Mom

So honor the top woman in your life properly.

Peaks & Pints suggests beer.

Not frat-house beer. Not fluorescent stadium swill. Real craft beer. Five world-class, award-winning beers for a freakin’ reasonable price, arranged not merely as a taster flight but as a tiny liquid séance designed to summon actual conversation back from the dead. Because sitting down with your mom over a flight of beer turns out to be less about drinking and more about memory archaeology. You talk about the beers — what tastes like coffee, cedar, grapefruit rind, smoke, lemon cake, old forests, divine mistakes — and suddenly you’re also talking about childhood, family road trips, the meals she made when money was weird, the songs she played in the kitchen, why you were such a spectacular pain in the ass at age fourteen.

This is the key: put the cellphone down.

No scrolling. No phantom buzzing. No pretending to listen while secretly checking sports scores or doom-soaked headlines about civilization melting into sponsored content. Just sit there and talk to each other while the beer slowly loosens the machinery of ordinary conversation.

And thankfully, Peaks & Pints skips all the tired Mother’s Day nonsense — no “mother”-named breweries, no syrupy brunch gimmicks, no patronizing “girly beers” because thankfully we’ve evolved at least slightly as a species. Instead, Craft Beer Crosscut 5.12.19: A Flight For Mom offers five genuinely beautiful craft beers chosen because they are delicious, layered, surprising, and worth slowing down for.

Kind of like mom herself, really.

Craft Beer Crosscut 5.12.19: A Flight For Mom

Brasserie Dupont Brewers’ Bridge

6.1% ABV

Building a bridge between Belgium and the U.S. isn’t going to happen anytime soon. In the meantime, enjoy Brewers’ Bridge, a collaboration between Belgium’s Brasserie Dupont and America’s Allagash Brewing. The resulting saison has a soft yeasty sweet malt aroma with refreshingly tart, earthy malt flavor upfront followed by notes of coriander and white peppercorns. It finishes with slightly bitter notes of lemon peel and wheat grain.

Kulshan Pilsner

4.9% ABV

For the past couple years, when a mention of Bellingham breweries awards comes up, there’s always a discussion that starts with “Kulshan, again?”, but even though the rest of Bellingham’s growing craft beer scene is pretty damn awesome, the stamp that Kulshan Brewing has put on Bellingham can’t be denied. The brewery’s German-style “Pilsner” grabbed a gold medal at the 2017 Best of Craft Beer Award and a silver at the 2018 Washington Beer Awards, as well as crowned champion of Peaks and Pints Tournament of Beer: Northwest Pilsners last month — no doubt for its traditional clean and bready malt flavors supported by herbal, floral and slightly spicy hop aromatics and flavor.

Founders Canadian Breakfast Stout

11.7% ABV, 45 IBU

Founders Brewing‘s brewers awoke early one day and brewed their Breakfast Stout with flaked oats, chocolate, and two kinds of coffee beans. In 2010, they aged the Breakfast Stout in spent bourbon barrels that had most recently been aging pure Michigan maple syrup. Canadian Breakfast Stout, or CBS, was born, with notes of syrupy malt and strong alcohol.=

Deschutes Black Butte XXVII

11% ABV, 60 IBU

Deschutes Brewery Black Butte XXVII Birthday Reserve Porter is brewed with Theo chocolate cocoa nibs, pomegranate molasses and select spices, blended with apricot purée, then partially (50 percent) aged six months in bourbon barrels. It’s powerful and dense, with loads of aromas and flavors of figs, raisins, dried apricot, chocolate malt, vanilla bean, lightly roasted coffee, molasses, woody spice and peppery cigar box. Excellent imperial porter, aged beautifully.

Fremont 2015 Coffee Cinnamon Bourbon Abominable

14% ABV

Originally known officially as Bourbon Abominable, Fremont Brewing changed the name of the base beer from Abominable Winter Ale to the shortened and universally accepted Fremont B-Bomb Imperial Winter Ale in 2016. This name change was brought on by Portland based Hopworks Urban Brewery that had been brewing its winter seasonal with the same name, Abominable. The 2015 version is aged in 12 and 15 year-old American oak whiskey barrels and is a blend of 24 and 12-month old barrel strength Abominable Ale. B-Bomb achieves distinct bourbon, oak, cacao, leather, and dark coffee notes from its extended barrel aging and barrel blending. Each barrel contributes a different note and combining each barrel to create a coherent tone is a distinct art and true pleasure.

Craft Beer Crosscut 5.12.19: A Flight For Mom