Captain Lawrence Brown Bird Ale started out as a seasonal beer, the name inspired, according to the Captain Lawrence website, by the brown birds who come around the brewery looking for spent grain to munch on. After customers suggested that the brewery extend the beer’s season to year-round status, they complied, and now this once scarce beer is all over the place in New York City.
On the short list of Captain Lawrence beers I hadn’t tried yet, I was intrigued when I saw it on the list at Marlow and Sons (one of my favorite Brooklyn restaurants, and the centerpiece of a mini-culinary Empire worth exploring), so I ordered a pint. It went quite well with the incredibly rich beer and cheese soup (that I suspect was made with the same beer but got too tipsy to remember to ask), and also went great with the desert – a chocolate caramel tart with sea salt. It struck me as both intensely crisp, and malty, bitter and round, with the right amount of sweetness. It pours truly brown, with a good amount of effervescent carbonation, and a fizzy head. Ruby if you hold it up to the light, when it pours the chocolate smells come out, along with caramel, a small whiff of biscuit, and they’re all rich, and in the way most Captain Lawrence beers are, perfectly balanced. There’s something so “pro” about these beers — very clear and filtered, very well balanced, consistent, that maybe belies the brewer’s experience at Sierra Nevada. This is not a bad thing at all, mind you — if you’ve ever seen the space, you know how much he does with how little room he has.
Brown Bird is another excellent entry into the pantheon of Captain Lawrence’s spectrum of beers, and highlights an oft-repeated BDB mantra — a brewery that can make great “big” and “session” beers at the same time is just that much more impressive than that brewery you’ve heard of because of the one cool 15% barrel-aged/sour/tongue-burningly-bitter/whatever beer, which no one drinks on a regular basis. Now, back to my growler.
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