Congrats to Sage for getting top billing in today’s Media Gallery at The Daily Beast, featuring the hottest new restaurants in America.
To square this circle, we at ELV suggest you click on the link above, then click on the link at The Daily Beast back to Eating Las Vegas.
That way, you will fully appreciate the supercalifragilisticexpealidocious nature of this monumental occurrence in the blogosphere.
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Back in the day, all brewmeisters looked like this. These days, they look like Iacopo Lenci — a 26 year old Italian who started brewing beer in his garage — and now runs an uber-hip brew pub in Lucca, Italy.
One of the coolest things about being ELV is being invited by fellows like Iacopo to sample his family’s hard-to-find, artisanal, hand-crafted beers that hardly anyone in America has tasted.
So that’s just what we did with a batch of Bruton birra last Friday — courtesy of BEVI Beverages — a small distributor who has been single-handedly working to upgrade Las Vegas’ brewski IQ over the past few years.
Bruton makes precious little of its top fermented, unpasteurized, unfiltered and natural yeast brews — only 70,000 bottles a year. (By comparison, Dogfish Head — an American, boutique brewer — makes over 100,000 cases.) So getting a little of this precious elixir in Vegas is a small coup indeed.
Those brews are Belgian-inspired, but highly idiosyncratic and slap-my-ass-and-call-me-Sally delicious.
We asked Lenci why so many interesting beers are coming out of Italy lately, and he told us it’s because, unlike the Germans and Belgians, Italians aren’t so hidebound by tradition (and laws) that determine how and what they can make as malted/fermented-grain-beverages.
So instead of some same old, same old lager (or lambic), you get stone R — a Belgian-ale reinterpreted into a 7.5% alcoholic big boy, made with three different malted grains (barley, wheat and rye), and given tiny doses of white pepper and orange peel. It smelled to our staff like an intense gueuze, and went down way to easily for something approaching the strength of wine.
Speaking of wine, Bruton’s 10 is a 10% barley wine that will take (and needs) time in the bottle to allow its rich hoppiness to mellow. More mellow by far is the Lilith (named after a demon made from the rib of Adam – who knew?) that weighs in at 5.5% alcohol, and tasted to us like a fruity, slightly sweet English bitter. About the only one we tasted we didn’t want to overindulge in was the Bruton di Bruton — their everyday drinking beer that will be a big hit with the hop lover in your life. To our buds, it was bracing and refreshing, but to the American (read: dumbed-down, wooden, let’s-not-taste-too-much) palate, it will be way too astringent.
These beers are obviously not for the Bud Light crowd. You will be able to find them only in the better Italian restaurants in town, i.e. NOVE, Fiamma, Carnevino, Settebello, Enoteca San Marco, et al, but you will also find they are a revelation in a glass and go wonderfully with strongly-flavored Italian food (especially salumi and cheeses).
Prosit!
ELV note: Mike Steinberger, the SLATE wine correspondent, is one of our favorite wine writers. This article details additional accusations (and implicates additional scoundrels) in the wine auction scandals that were first brought to light in the book “The Billionaire’s Vinegar.” We at ELV have a hard time getting worked up over these things, as we think the insufferable, mega-rich, ego-driven, label-conscious, status-obsessed, a-holes who seek out, demand, and drive up the prices on famous wines are easy and understandable prey for the con-men who dupe them. In other words, it’s a fair fight and they all get what they deserve.
What’s in the Bottle?
An investigation into the startling fraud accusations that have upended the fine wine world.
By Mike Steinberger
Posted Monday, June 14, 2010, at 3:36 PM ET
Daniel Oliveros and Jeff Sokolin were known as the “sexy boys” because they often described the wines they sold as “sexy juice.” Oliveros and Sokolin ran Royal Wine Merchants, a Manhattan retailer that was, until a few years ago, one of the biggest players in the fine wine market. They lived as lavishly as their wealthy customers—staying in swank hotels, often hiring limousines, and routinely opening thousands of dollars’ worth of rare wines. Oliveros’ marriage to porn star Savanna Samson added to the aura and the intrigue. But what really set the sexy boys apart was their seemingly limitless stock of legendary old ! wines, many of them in supersize bottles—quantities and formats that no one else could get their hands on. They bombarded clients with faxes touting their latest finds: multiple bottles of 1961 Latour à Pomerol (“Kinky Juice!”), magnums of 1945 Mouton Rothschild (“our latest sexy purchase”), a double magnum of 1949 Cheval Blanc (“Perfect condition. Better than 1947!!! Trust me!!!”). It seemed too good to be true. Apparently, it was.