Tribute beers gone wild

After you're gone, how would you like to be memorialized? With a scholarship for worthy students? A park bench in your favorite spot? Perhaps you'd like a rose named in your honor? How about a beer in your memory? Recently, a spate of boutique beers have been crafted as tributes to dead luminaries. These new brews even try to capture in their profile some of the character of the person they honor.

Beers honoring a notable person aren't new -- Rogue Ales and Hair of the Dog, both in Oregon, both come to mind --but these honors are usually bestowed on members of the wider brewing community. What's new, it seems, is that brewing monuments are being erected to notables from the world beyond beer.

The idea of "tribute beers gone wild" was pointed out by Jeremy Cowan, the force behind one of these new beverages. He founded Shmaltz Brewing Co., a contract brewery that revels in its Jewishness. Its first brew was He'brew, the Chosen Beer, followed by Messiah Bold, both well-made beers promoted with a good measure of self-deprecating humor, followed by the winter seasonal, Jewbelation. The tribute beer, Lenny's Bittersweet R.I.P.A., is a heartfelt nod to the 40th anniversary of the death of Lenny Bruce. Despite the usual Shmaltz promotional shtick ("brewed with an obscene amount of malt and hops," "far beyond contemporary community standards"), the label description is charged with outrage at the premature loss of the satirist who challenged the hypocrisy of his time.

A tribute beer from North Coast Brewing Co. in Fort Bragg, Calif., due to arrive in our market soon, makes an unusual connection between the European brewing practices the company honors and the progressive jazz that the brewery owners support locally. Last year, North Coast created its first Belgian-style beers. Brewer Mark Reudrich described his team's brainstorm for a name that would evoke the monastic tradition of Belgian brewing. "We went through some lists of Latin-sounding names. We came up with Brother Octavius, things like that. Then Sheila, the office manager, said 'How about Thelonious?' And we thought "Wow ... and guess what? His last name is Monk!" So we had our little pun."

The beer is Brother Thelonious, named for Rocky Mount native Thelonious Monk, with the blessing of the Thelonious Monk Institute in Los Angeles. A portion of each case sale is donated to jazz education around the world, and the beer has been named the official beer of the 2006 Monterey Jazz Festival.

Flying Dog Brewing Company in Colorado had an association with gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson during his life, so it was natural that the company create a tribute beer after his suicide. Gonzo Porter is a super-sized porter, extra strong and roasty -- not hallucinogenic, perhaps, but a worthy beverage for hard-drinking, gun-toting Thompson. Like all the Flying Dog brews, it features ink-splattered label art by Thompson's longtime illustrator, Ralph Steadman.

The final beer in the quartet will require that enthusiasts travel to California, where Lagunitas beer is distributed. Freak Out Ale marks the 40th anniversary of the album of the same name by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and displays the album's cover on its label. The beer is a highly hopped, strong ale.

Lagunitas co-founder Tony Magee has been a Frank Zappa fan since studying his compositions in a college course. He plans a new Zappa tribute beer every nine to 10 months as anniversaries of successive albums occur.

Zappa's most popular beer-related quote appears on the label: "You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline -- it helps if you have some kind of football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer."

However, the label also prints the quote in context, which makes it clear that Zappa -- a famously abstemious man who lived in the midst of excess --wasn't exactly a fan of beer: "Consumption of beer leads to pseudo-military behavior. Think about it: winos don't march, whiskey guys don't march either (sometimes they write poetry, which is often more horrible, though). Beer drinkers are into things that are sort of like marching, like football ... In contrast to Mr. Beer Guy, picture a guy who is religiously devoted to Chateau Latour. Is he marching? He ain't marching."

RIP, Frank Zappa. Maybe you never had the chance to drink a really great beer, but you and other gifted artists are the occasion for others to do so.