CASKCADES

Background, left to right: 5 ounce taster of Deschutes The Abyss Imperial Stout and 12 ounce tulip of Georgetown Brewing Company Cherry Picker Belgian Dubbel. Foreground: Chicago-style vegan dog at CaskCades.

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Georgetown Brewing Company Cherry Picker Belgian Dubbel. Served in 12 ounce tulip glass. 7.9% abv.

The pour is a clear bodied ale that ranges from orange-red to ruby red, depending on where it sits in the glass. There is the thinnest of ivory heads.

The nose is sour cherry and a hint of yeast. As it warms, there is an airiness and cleanness (as though following a rainstorm after a long absence of precipitation).

The tongue is sour cherry with a bit of marker, fruitiness, flower petals, and faint orange peel. The mouthfeel is medium. The finish starts out as cherry and leads toward marker, alcohol, and yeast.

I like this beer a lot.

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Deschutes Brewing Company The Abyss Imperial Stout (2017). Served in a 5 ounce taster glass. 11.4% abv.

The pour is a finger-thick tan head resting upon a black body.

The nose is coffee/espresso, roasted malts, and dark chocolate.

The tongue is roasted malts (almost like a burnt campfire log), dark chocolate, espresso, black licorice, and biscuits. The mouthfeel is thick and oily. This is excellent as always, but would be better served by being cellared for a couple of years to allow the flavors to settle and become a bit more nuanced.

SHIMMERING

"[W]e call the whole shimmering mess 'color.' You might even say that it is the business of the eye to make colored forms out of what is essentially shimmering. This is how we 'get around' in the world. Some might also call it the source of our suffering."

—page 20, Bluets by Maggie Nelson

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Also: brilliance, shimmer, shining, glimmer. The ancient Greek color experience as more than just "pigment."

"The Sea Was Never Blue: The Greek Colour Experience Was Made of Movement and Shimmer. Can We Ever Glimpse What They Saw When Gazing Out to Sea?"

DIVINE DARKNESS

"In the Gospel accounts of the Transfiguration—ground zero, as it were, for the onset of this "bright cloud" of agnosia—the cloud is shadow, Jesus's raiment a "glistering white." Yet for the the past two thousand years, in mosaic after mosaic, painting after painting, Jesus stands transfigured before his witnesses in the mouth of a glowing blue mandorla—a blue almond, or vesica piscus, the shape that, in pagan times,unabashedly symbolized Venus and the vulva."

—page 64, Bluets by Maggie Nelson

MUSE, HOMER, ODYSSEUS

Poseidon mural. Downtown Ilwaco, Washington.

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"This triplicity of authorship—Muse, Homer, Odysseus—together with the duplicity of the chief actor, makes the Odyssey the most complexly told tale I know. It is complicated though not bottomless, but rather clear and decodable. The abysmal infinities of romantic irony are not the Muses' way."

—page 120, "The Poet of the Odyssey," Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad by Eva Brann