Sausages, Elysian Avatar IPA and Full Sail Amber

I got stuck working late and had already gotten a call from my wife saying that she was going to go out and meet some friends and wouldn’t be home when I got home for dinner. There are a lot of things my wife won’t eat, like lamb, which I love so I don’t get a chance to eat them that often. This seemed like a great opportunity for that, but I got stuck working until a little after 8:00pm and didn’t feel like getting too involved in a cooking project. Sausages had snuck into my brain and I was hoping to find some lamb sausage that would hit a bunch of my cravings. I hit the local New Seasons market n the way home, because they have a great butcher department and generally very good sausage.

I was looking for lamb sausage and found some lamb, spinach and feta sausage, but also noticed that the pork, Marsala, and fig sausages were on sale, so I got one of those as well. Both sausages had the advantage of containing fruits or vegetables so I was able to convince myself that it would be a balanced meal. I did a quick cruise through the beer aisle and was thinking about trying to score one of those beers that I almost always overlook. Of course I instead got caught up in new things and things I hadn’t tried in quite some time and opted for a bottle of Elysian’s Avatar IPA, which is an IPA brewed with dried jasmine flowers. I had tried it once, years before at an Oregon Brewer’s Fest and decided to try the bottled version.

I got home, threw the sausages in the cast iron skillet and cracked the Elysian. I like Elysian a lot. They’ve won Large Brewpub of the Year award at the Great American Beer Fest, and the honor is well deserved. Their beers are generally very good across the board. I also have a weak spot for them because the head brewer was very fond of my Collaborator Saison which was served at OBF a few years ago and told me it was his favorite beer at the festival.

The Avatar IPA pours with a slightly hazy light copper/orange color with an off-white head. There’s a good floral hop aroma, with a hint of jasmine flower sweetness. There’s an underlying sweet malt and honey aroma and a slight candy note. On the palate the beer is round and medium bodied. There’s a sweet floral taste and a good malt backbone. The hops frame the malt sweetness very well but don’t come on too strong, but there’s a lingering hop bitterness in the finish. Overall, it’s an exceptional beer. The jasmine gives it a floral sweetness that fits very well, but doesn’t overwhelm the beer. It’s a dynamic and interesting beer, but not so much so that it overpowers food. It was good with both of the sausages.

As part of my attempt to retry a lot of beers that I normally overlook (because of the abundance of great beer available everywhere in Portland), I also opened a bottle of Full Sail Amber. Full Sail Amber is one of the old school Oregon craft beers. It was one of the first beers I had when I moved here in 1993. I had always regarded it as a reliable standby that could be found even in places that had a limited supply of craft beer. But like many of the old school beers, it’s widely dismissed or overlooked by my fellow beer snobs, which is a shame. It’s not a flashy beer, but it’s well made and very flavorful. It has a beautiful deep copper color, an appealing nose of caramel malt, toffee, and a piney American hop aroma. It’s medium bodied with a good malt and hop balance and it finishes crisp and dry. It’s an understated, somewhat unassuming beer (at least by modern craft beer standards where brewers seem to push the envelope constantly) which in many ways makes it ideal with food. This is a beer that works with food because it doesn’t demand top billing. It’s full of flavor but has a subtlety that many beers lack. In matching beer and food (or wine and food for that matter), subtlety and restraint often makes for a better match than flamboyance.

Of the sausages, my vote was for the pork, Marsala and fig. I love lamb and would have expected a lamb, spinach and feta sausage to be a little highly seasoned (because feta is so salty), but strangely it seemed a little bland. Perhaps they cut back a little too much on the salt to compensate for the feta. I admit that I use a fair amount of salt in cooking and sausage making and perhaps this sausage was geared towards “modern, healthy palates” that use less salt. It was very good, but I would have preferred a little more pizzazz. The pork, fig and Marsala was quite good. The sweetness of the figs and marsala married well with the inherent sweetness of the pork. It’s a recipe I may well adapt (ie, steal) at some point.