4/22/10

I make my way back home to you

Ashley and I finally put my Christams present to use.
We made french fries
And Isa's "Beer-Battered Tofu" which coincidentally was taken from a Christmas present I got for Ashley. The beer used in the batter (and then later to accompany the meal) was Wolaver's organic Brown Ale. I visited the Otter Creek Brewery where Wolaver's is made last semester. It was a splendid brewery visit and I left with a mix n' match sixer. All of which were great. I like Wolaver's and I liked this Brown Ale for two reasons: (1) It's from Vermont, and when in Rome...; and (2) As a vegan, I, without seeking it out, come into contact with a lot of organic products. I suppose marketers presume the vegan consumer is the same as the organic consumer. That's fine with me. I'll take organic if they got it, but I'm really just at the health food store/co-op/farmer's market for the vegan goods. The one gripe I would lob at organic products, if I was pressed to do so, would be that organic products seldomly are comfortable with just being conventional products that just happen to be organic. You'll often find ingredients in organic products that you wouldn't find in conventional products like flaxseed, or spelt, or nutritional yeast, or brown rice. I know as a vegan, I'm viewed as just another hippie. I'm not. But it's like explaining to a 50-year old that you're not gutter punk, or death punk, you're hardcore. Hippies, health nuts, tree huggers, vegans, and raw foodist all sort of get lumped together. What I like about Wolaver's is that they don't try to appeal to all of these people. I imagine their organic beer is just as unhealthy for you as Budweiser, maybe even worse. They're not trying to re-invent the beer wheel. I think they're just old-fashioned brew enthusiasts that simply want to make organic versions of the beer they already love. Their Brown Ale didn't blow my mind. It was just really good. A really familiar traditional English ale, that probably tastes a lot like the English ale brewed by the English farmers that inhabited this part of New England a century ago. Both versions just happen to be organic.

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