St. Charles Avenue Magazine Food Column, December, 2003
By Michael Depp

Ever since I quaffed my first few pints of Guinness stout at a Kilarney pub at age15, I've set the bar pretty high for beer. While my tastes are pretty expansive among European and Mexican brews, I've always been consistently disappointed by domestic offerings, which taste mostly to me more like beer-scented water with all the depth and nuance of airplane coffee.

The remarkable exception to this has been, fortuitously, Abita beer. While many American microbrews make lofty claims for their integrity, only Abita has been so consistently good, and for the past few years I've marked the passing of seasons with the arrival of new brews - fall means Fall Fest, December brings Christmas Ale, with Mardi Gras comes Bock. Now when friends elsewhere are slagging American beers altogether, I can counter from battle-tested experience: "But have you tried Abita?"

Since the brewery launched in Abita Springs in 1986, they've been growing steadily. They now produce some 41,000 barrels a year and distribute to 31 states, though not surprisingly they remain most popular closest to home. In the past few months, however, they've made one of their most ambitious and laudable moves, a rotating series of brews dubbed "Abita Select" geared at those with a taste for complex brews with all the subtleties and flavorful echoes of good wine.

First launched as a kind of low-key experiment on the taps at Bourbon House, Abita Select beers are brewed in a limited batch - only about 80 barrels per variety - and sold only in select restaurants (just 13 of them, including Bourbon House, in the New Orleans area). Each Select brew is paired with a specific glass designed especially for Abita in Germany, and those restaurants serving it are doing so from an illuminated blue tap, also custom-made for the line.

"We're telling restaurants to sell it like a sommelier sells a bottle of wine," says Leo Basile, Abita's sales manager, who oversaw the first wider rollout of the Select line this fall with a Kristall Weizen. I had the chance to try a glass recently at Cobalt, another participating restaurant in town, where chef Brack May paired a benefit dinner with the brew in November. Made from German wheat malt and Pils, Vienna and Cara malted barley, the Kristal Weizen had only the lightest whiff of hops and conjured the taste of perfumy cloves and mellow, creamy bananas. A Bohemian Pilsner will replace it as its run comes to an end early this winter with an Alt, English Bitter and others on tap, so to speak, for future months.

Abita also launched its first light beer on the market this fall (some two and a half years in the making), and though I've always held that such brews are a contradiction in terms, I'm willing to venture that theirs has some actual flavor lest they sully their otherwise untarnished name. Some other bright spots on the Abita calendar this month are the annual return of Christmas Ale, which will be celebrated with a downtown pub crawl on Dec. 12 (where drinks are only $1 at participating bars that night - details on their Web site at www.abita.com); and a beer dinner at the house of Blues Foundation Room on Dec. 10. Call 596-2479 for more information about that.

Steak and Crepes

Dickie Brennan's Steakhouse celebrated its fifth anniversary this fall, and while some in the local industry might see its namesake founder as a restaurateur with a Midas family touch, I've got to tip my pen to him for being one of the local restaurant industry's true visionaries and risk-takers. Six years ago, the steakhouse was a shell of a parking garage, and now it reflects the kind of perfection in detail one tends to take for granted in retrospect. It's not so easy when the bobcats are mucking in to dig out an extra six inches of ceiling space and it's your money on the line to see it through, but like everything else Brennan does, the steakhouse has taken hold of local diners. I can also attest to the fact that the anniversary filet - wrapped in bacon and topped with seared Hudson Valley foie gras - is the best I've had in memory.

But while I'm on the subject of Dickie Brennan, I'm going to out some long-simmering plans of his in the hopes that readers may finally spur him to action. Brennan has designs on opening a street-facing, walk-up creperie at his Bourbon House restaurant - a classic, simple creperie of the Parisian variety that will also serve go cups of his inimitable Bourbon milk punch, a drink so sweetly perfect that there aren't enough hyperboles in the English language to describe it. New Orleans has been lacking something like this for as long as I've lived here, though I can think of nothing more sublime than strolling through the Quarter with a warm crepe - maybe some melted caramel and bananas inside. Please Dickie - think of the romance and open it soon!

Holiday Reading

As you're doing your holiday shopping, let me end by recommending several cookbooks that have come across my desk recently. Call it a greatest hits collection or a debate-starter, but the Lafayette-based Acadian House Publishing has just released The Top 100 New Orleans Recipes of All Time, edited by John DeMers and Rhonda Findley. If conversations tend to lag around your holiday dinner table, this is one sure way to spark it up among local foodies.

The Junior League of Covington recently published a colorful volume of its recipes, Roux to Do, that offers some compelling fare including tuna burgers with wasabi mustard; Gruyere cheese, artichoke and tomato pie; and red velvet cocoa cake. Proceeds will go back into community service, so there will be more than one recipient if you give it as a gift.

And speaking of community service, I recently found the Food Network's "Jamie's Kitchen" to be the most riveting food TV I've ever seen, and the companion book just became available in the fall. If you don't know the story, London uber-chef Jamie Oliver, denounced by some as having become a bit too fluffy, spent the better part of last year taking 15 underprivileged youths under his belt and training them to be chefs. It was a rocky and fascinating road, but it has resulted in London's most popular new eatery - Fifteen - and an M.B.E. for Chef Oliver from the Queen. Do unto others, and happy holidays to you all.