The Beer: IV in Bell’s Leaves of Grass Series

I’m still bummed that D.C. missed Bell’s third entry in their Leaves of Grass series, which was named after Whitman’s famous elegy for Abraham Lincoln, “O Captain, My Captain.” (That beer dropped just when D.C. was switching between Bell’s distributors, and Bell’s doesn’t distribute in Virginia at all, so we missed it around here.) I would have liked to revisit Whitman’s much-loved elegy, and I’m also fond of the style of “O Captain, My Captain”: imperial pale lager, or IPL. A whole lot fonder than I am of the style of their fourth Leaves of Grass beer: smoked porter.

I’ve never met a smoked beer that I liked. Nope, not even Schlenkerla.

But I get it: it makes sense to pair a poem about “dense and murky clouds out-belching from [a] smoke-stack” with a smoked porter.

When you pop the top of a bottle of “To a Locomotive,” you smell the smoke from a mile away - this style would be such a gimme on the Cicerone exam. As soon as you open the bottle, every second you pour it, and as it sits in front of you - smoke, smoke, smoke. That aroma doubles down when you raise the glass to drink from it, then again as you swallow and it hits the retronasal olfactory receptors at the back of your throat. On the tongue, thankfully, there’s some chocolate for balance. Not quite enough chocolate notes, for me, to take care of the smoke, but take that with a grain of salt, since I’m an utterly biased reviewer.

Subjectively, this is a homework beer, one that I drink to hone my palate. Objectively, though, it’s certainly doing what it should do. Even if it may be a little too on the nose for its namesake poem.

The Poem: “To a Locomotive in Winter”

“To a Locomotive in Winter” is just what its title suggests: an ode to a train. Whitman published it in 1876, seven years after the Central Pacific line joined the Union Pacific line at Promontory Summit, Utah, thereby completing the transcontinental railroad. It’s an unusual poem for Whitman, who usually waxes poetic about nature and mankind. Furthermore, many of his poems seem frantic to include and address the entire world; by contrast, this ode seems oddly sustained and focused on just one subject.

Early in the poem, the poem is foremost a technical appreciation of the locomotive as artifact:

Thy black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel,

Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides,

Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,

Thy great protruding head-light fix’d in front […] (lines 4-7)

By the poem’s end, however, it’s full-on Whitman: an unabashedly enthusiastic ode to the machine’s spirit and its connection to the landscape, to nature, and to the America it traverses:

Fierce-throated beauty!

Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps at night,

Thy madly-whistled [sic] laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing all,

Law of thyself, complete, thine own track firmly holding […]

Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d

Launch’d o’er the prairies wide, across the lakes,

To the free skies unpent and glad and strong. (18-21, 23-25)

By so radically naturalizing the railroad, it’s as if Whitman asserts that this kind of modernity doesn’t out-date the poet and nature but, rather, does the opposite. The industrial era makes the poet even more necessary, as a means of reconciling with nature such powerful, man-made innovations. That is, only Whitman’s verse is capable of naturalizing a locomotive, of inviting it into our American (literary) landscape.

I’ll keep trying for this same kind of radical acceptance when it comes to smoked beers, including Bell’s well-done “To a Locomotive in Winter.” And I’ll look forward to the next beer in this series, “Song of the Open Road.” Though that beer debuted in January, I’m hoping that I can find one on the shelves still, since it’ll last quite a while because it’s a “Winter Warmer” that clocks in at 8.5% ABV. I’ll have to get my act together on tracking down VI, though, a kellerbier called “Salut au Monde!”, which came out last month. Or I’ll have to make do with missing another entry in this series, as it’s a bit hard to pop down to the bottle shop these days to see what’s on the shelves…

NB: I was pleasantly surprised to find that Derek Mong, with whom I overlapped in grad school at U of M, is also covering this series for The Kenyon Review.