The Beer

I’ve been reading the last two books of the Southern Reach trilogy since I finished Annihilation. I can't write about those books without big-time spoilers, so instead of a book pairing this week, here’s a look at a beer whose name alludes to a Robert Frost poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

The beer is called “Lovely, Dark, and Deep,” which is how Frost describes the titular snowy woods towards the end of his poem. (For the full poem, see below.) I first had this beer a few months ago, in the thick of winter, pulled from the fridge of my big brother, Dave. At the time, the wicked cold outside had me craving a smooth, velvety, dark oatmeal stout. I was a little disappointed in this effort from Brewery Ommegang. (You might know Ommegang from their Game of Thrones series of beers.) It was thinner than I wanted an oatmeal stout to be, and I tasted the sweet note of the added lactose too much.

Now that I’m studying beer styles more formally, I returned to this beer last week with an eye towards giving an objective appraisal to a beer that I don’t personally love. I get frustrated by reviews on Untappd and Beer Advocate that rate not how good a beer is but, rather, how much the reviewer likes the beer. The latter is subjective, and it muddies a beer’s rating. A beer can be well-made even if it’s not to your personal liking, is what I’m saying. Maybe those beer-ranking sites need two separate ranking systems: one where you can keep personal notes of which beers you liked, another where you can rate the beer according to its style.

My tastes aside, "Lovely, Dark, and Deep" does live up to what the Beer Judge Certification Program style guidelines say an oatmeal stout can be. In terms of its color, "Lovely, Dark, and Deep" is spot-on with the BJCP's description of an oatmeal stout's ideal color: "medium brown to black in color, possibly opaque."

Like I said before, I generally go to an oatmeal stout for a full, velvety mouthfeel, but the BJCP guidelines do give some leeway there. “Light use of oatmeal may give a certain silkiness of body,” the BJCP says, and the Ommegang description promises, “The finish is silky smooth.” True enough. The place where the BJCP description and Ommegang’s description of “Lovely, Dark, and Deep” differ, every so slightly, is mouthfeel: BJCP indicates “[m]edium-full to full body” while Ommegang promises a “medium to full body.” To my palate, that body is definitely more "medium" than "full," but that difference is subtle, subtle.

Originally, the sweetness of “Lovely, Dark, and Deep” seemed to me like it would better fit the BJCP description of a sweet (aka milk) stout. But the BJCP says that some sweetness is a-okay in an oatmeal stout: “An English seasonal variant of sweet stout that is usually less sweet than the original, and relies on oatmeal for body and complexity rather than lactose for body and sweetness.” While “Lovely, Dark, and Deep” is too sweet and lactose-y for my liking, that doesn’t mean that it’s not a perfectly suitable oatmeal stout.

Maybe Ommegang added the lactose to make sure that the beer was not only “dark and deep” but also “lovely.” Many readers read "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" darkly, but if you read it looking for its light, you can see a certain sweetness in it, and definitely a loveliness.

The Poem

As you read "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," note its simple diction, its lulling cadence, and its consistent, perfect end-rhymes:

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

The poem is lovely on its simple, sing-songy surface, but its formal complexity adds depth. Frost writes in perfect iambic tetrameter (each line paces along “da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM”), lending the lines a nursery-rhyme cadence. It may seem like his many monosyllabic words would make it easier to adhere to meter, but those short bursts actually make meter more difficult. So there’s a deceptive amount of art running beneath the words’ simplicity. Frost’s rhyme, too, is perfect: there is nary a slant rhyme to be found in those 16 lines.  But look at the way that the rhyme interlinks the stanzas - the third line of each stanza provides the rhyme that will dominate the next stanza. (The first stanza rhymes aaba: “know,” “though,” “here,” “now.” The odd man out there, “here,” provides the dominant rhyme of the next stanza: the bbcb of “queer,” “near,” “lake,” “near.” And so on.) Frost is nothing if not a master of meter and rhyme, the sound of which provides a smoothness to his verse that suits the silkiness of an oatmeal stout, and the complexity of which give his verse the depth that a beer called, in part, “dark and deep” requires.

A lot of critics want to read a death wish into the speaker’s longing for the repeated “sleep” of the final stanza, and this would certainly suit the line that Ommegang chose: "lovely, dark, and deep." Frost himself resisted this metaphor, however, noting, “He [critic John Ciardi] makes my "Stopping By Woods" out a death poem. Well, it would be like this if it were. I'd say, ‘This is all very lovely, but I must be getting on to heaven.’ There'd be no absurdity in that. That's all right, but it's hardly a death poem.” Ommegang must side with Frost in this matter. If they, like the critics, read “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” as suicidal lament, then there would hardly be a place for the sweet note that the lactose adds to their “Lovely, Dark, and Deep.”

So while it’s not my cup of tea (pint of beer?), I can definitely appreciate how Ommegang’s “Lovely, Dark, and Deep” adheres to its style as defined by BJCP, and the ways in which the beer matches the poem to which its name alludes. More beers whose names allude to literature, please!

(P.S. Please DM me if you’ve finished the Southern Reach trilogy and have answers. I finished Acceptance last night and am still not quite sure what happened in this trilogy, after 900 pages of reading. Help.)