Category: Food and Drink

The craft brewing craze has arrived in Indonesia. Seriously. I was strolling around one of Jakarta's swanky malls this weekend, pricing bespoke suits (everything's out of my price range), and happened across a fancy grocery store. I always have fun looking at grocery stores in other countries, and so I took a stroll through it. And while there, I noticed a display selling five kinds of specialty beers brewed by a firm called Storm Beer, based out of Bali. So of course I had to get a couple to sample.

Having lived for some time in the Napa Valley of beer, I have pretty high expectations of craft breweries. (I also have a limited tolerance for annoying craft brewing techiques, like brewers that attempt to outdo one another making the "hoppiest" or "strongest" or "darkest" beer in search not of good taste but rather of superlatives. But I digress.) So here are my reviews of three of Storm Beer's selections. I decided to skip two of them (Bronze Ale and Pale Ale) because I tend not to like those styles very much, especially pale ales. The remaining three are the ones that looked most appealing.

Before we get started, let me admit that I have no idea about how to taste and or rate beer. None. So this is just me aping the way that I've seen other beers rated.

Storm Beer Golden Ale
Pours a large head, but is highly carbonated so it evaporates quickly. Cloudy with a golden color. The nose hints of wheat and hops. The initial taste is wheat and yeast, followed by unidentifiable sweetness (not like a honey or sugar sweet, but I can't describe it properly). Dry bitter finish and aftertaste. Overall: for a summer beer there is probably too much flavor here, but it is pretty good and I prefer this to the standard local swill.

Storm Beer Iron Sout
Pours a nice head, also fairly carbonated. Brown/black in color. The nose smells roasty. Taste is surprisingly bitter and thin, less big and chocolatey or malty or roasty as I would prefer in a stout. Bitterness continues though the finish and aftertaste. Again, the word that comes to my mind is "thin." Overall: this is unremarkable as far as stouts go, but it's not a bad beer in general.

Storm Beer Tropical Ale
Another big foamy head, highly carbonated but less than the Golden Ale. Lemony yellow in color, not cloudy but still opaque. A distinctly skunky nose, reminiscent of the lower rungs of the Milwaukee ladder/my sock drawer, but combine that with a whiff of lemon. Confusing taste: starts with lemon, then moves to grassy and herbal flavors. Also a bready/yeasty note which does not combine well with the others. Finishes with more lemon and some light hops. Citrus taste lingers for a bit, and is not unpleasant, but the last bit of the aftertaste is of Icehouse. Whoops. Overall: sock drawer + Icehouse: this is a disappointment. Maybe a slice of real lemon might help. Would not drink again.

Yesterday I took a stroll around Menteng, the prosperous leafy “inurb” of Jakarta which is where I like to stay. It’s a nice part of town because it has sidewalks that you can walk a long and tree-lined streets that are pretty and shaded enough to avoid the hottest part of the equatorial sun around here. I walked for about three hours, with a break in the middle for lunch.

I’ve walked around this area before, so there’s not really much new to report about it. But I did get a couple of good pictures, in particular this wordless advertisement for PDI-P:

Sukarno the Orator

Some additional pictures are here. You get to the new pictures by clicking “next.”

For dinner I tried a cuisine that to my knowledge I had never tried before: Acehnese. There are a couple of reasons why I’d never had it before. First off, Acehnese food is hard to come by, as there are fewer Acehnese people in Jakarta than there are other ethnic groups. Second off, I’d always heard that it’s not much different than other Sumatran foods, in particular Padang-style West Sumatra food. I know now that this isn’t really true. Acehnese food blends Sumatran food with lots of Arabic and Gujarati influences, giving it a distinctly different kind of taste marked by notably different spices. Less of the Christmas cookie spices of Java and the eastern islands, and more of the peppery and sour tastes of central Asia. My very tasty dinner at Rumah Makan Meutia in the Bendungan Hilir neighborhood demonstrated this quite well.

Rumah Makan Meutia. Assalamu’alaikum.

I also can confirm that Acehnese food does indeed make use of a special herb that one tends not to associate with cuisine. Its seeds go in the basic spice paste and also gets used in ayam tangkap, a chicken and fried curry-leaves (etc.) dish.

Check out more recent food pictures here, including nasi rames, soto ayam istemewa, es teh tarek, mie Aceh, roti cane, and ayam tangkap. You get to the new pictures by clicking on “next.