A Real Pipperoo

So, the other night we had Farfalle Bolognese. That's the fancy name for bow-tie pasta with meat sauce. We don't call it that, though. We just call it spaghetti.

The Lombards invented Farfalle in the 1500s. In Illinois at that time, the corn-eating, chunkey-throwing Mississippians, after having built the largest pyramid in the Western Hemisphere, were falling apart thanks to the Little Ice Age.

Farfalle means butterflies in Italian.

I don't know how the Lombards did it, but ours looked like this:

Of course, a meal without a beer isn't a meal. So we tried another local brew. From Michigan. I know there are differences of opinion on whether we should consider Michigan a state, and I have my own reservation about people who live on peninsulas, but for our purposes, I'm including Michigan as a Midwestern State, and therefore local.

It only takes four hours to drive to Comstock, Michigan, the site of the Bell's Brewery, and you have to drive through Indiana to get there. Drive four hours from Austin in any direction and you're still in Texas.

Larry Bell started brewing beer for Kalamazooians in 1985 (That's right, The Kalamazoo. Hank Snow's been there. He's been everywhere.) and has since opened Michigan's first onsite brewery pub and expanded operations to nearby Comstock. Larry started out with 9 employees brewing 135 barrels a year and now employs almost 200 people who pump out 500 thousand barrels a year. This is a good, old-fashioned self-made American beer.

We tried the Amber Ale. The Bell's folks claim this beer is versatile in food pairing, but that's not why we picked it. With us it's more like, let's spend thirty minutes choosing a hand-crafted local six pack. Then we're like, oh yeah, we should eat dinner tonight, let's throw something together. How about spaghetti?

The Bell's folks describe the flavor bouquet of this brew with a long sentence using words like "herbal" and "floral" and "caramel". I got a sort of toastiness on the tip of my tongue and a hoppy aftertaste, but not much in the middle. I mean, it was no Domaine Dupage.

Overall, I wasn't blown away, but I would drink this beer again. And I would try other beers from this brewery.

Do what you want, but my recommendation: Give It A Try.

http://www.bellsbeer.com/