Oak Creek, the smallest little smartie in the (domestic, southwestern) room

Quickly, another nod to Oak Creek for simply doing something interesting, notable if not noteworthy (but noteworthy!). I was at the brewery last year and spoke to the brew-master about what I felt was the odd, compelling, marshy 'textural thing' that seems to run through their entire line of beers (even the hefe! Ha!). He described this as the beers' 'German influence' which confused me at the time but now, thanks to a few new beers brought in by Diamondback Distributors (http://diamondbackws.com) i.e. Flensburger and Oxfordshire, it has started to make sense. So, yes, I didn't get it back then but we certainly did get it, like, ages before Eric Asimov decided to try to tackle the issue in the Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/dining/reviews/05wine.html). A bit spread thin these days?

So, what is the thing to get? It's some appreciation of what a classical session beer may look like. It has to do with water characteristics, viscosity and texture and the sense of locality rooted in the water weight (analogue being W. drinking a little king - "this is exactly what I imagine Cleveland to taste like"). But not water like "oh! Canadian glacier water," or "oh, this was frozen in the Alps, like, an hour ago." No, water like everything is standing still for a while and all the little hidden things have had time to grow a bit and, its, you know, some kind of melting pot, a marshy melting pot. Words here are viscosity (like the necessary viscosity of heterogeneous things in solution, everything bumping everything else forming the appearance of some thickness, again with the swamp metaphor), algae-moss, pond scum, etc. Physically this looks like trouble producing head in the glass, everything slow and lazy and preferring, in the end, to be rather flat.

So this is a whole family of beer I didn't get for awhile, those marshy thick-but-not-sticky German and Anglo pub beers. Hen's Tooth finds its way into this, definitely the Flensburger Beers and Oxfordshire "Marsh Mellow." I get that the latter is a horrible name but really it is perfect, perfectly smart about the beer.

So, Oak Creek channels this tradition in a way I haven't seen from domestic breweries down here. It puts their beer in its own class and we applaud them for that.

Tasting notes: peanut shells.