Follow Sean Inman to the best in craft beer
A concise brewery bio
Next on the tour of Alaskan beer is Gold Rush!
Based in Skagway they have a nice core set of beers to warm up the coldest of beer hearts.
Dewey Dark Lager
Gold Dredge Red
Honey Bear Blonde
Long Bay Lager
Smugglers Cove Red IPA
White Pass Pilsner
Our second Alaskan stop is Skagway Brewing.
Here is their mining/historical named line-up:
Klondike Gold (5.7%)
A refreshing American wheat with more hops and less yeast flavor than its German counterpart, the Weisen.
Prospector Pale (5.7%)
A west coast pale ale with a medium to light body and a citric hop aroma.
Red Star Amber (6.6%)
A warm and rich ale with more body and a smooth malt finish.
Chilkoot Trail IPA (5.4%)
An American IPA, with a golden copper color and an earthy hop finish.
Spruce Tip Ale (5.5%)
A seasonal ale with a creamy rich head and young spruce tips adding crispness and vigor.
Boom Town Brown (5.6%)
A smooth and robust ale with a toasty flavor and a subtle hop aroma.
*This is my favorite*
Blue Top Porter (5.2%)
A creamy rich delight made especially to nourish and rejuvenate the
working class of Skagway.
Oosik stout (6.9%)
A full bodied oatmeal stout that’s roasty & smooth on the palette.
Scottish Wee Heavy (8.9%)
A Scottish barley wine with a smooth flavor.
In tiny Joseph, Oregon you can get good food and some local beer from Mutiny. (insert your joke here about brewing up a mutiny)
And what is super great is that the brewer is Kari Gjerdingen a graduate of UC Davis and Terminal Gravity. Eastern Oregon is big on women brewers it seems.
She has started with a wheat beer and a porter. And from the blogs and websites I looked at, the food is tasty too.
Eastern Oregon pub crawl!
Haines Brewing is based in historic Dalton City (which is part of Haines, Alaska).
Here is what I would order if I had their line-up in front of me….
Captain Cook’s Spruce Tip Ale – a seasonal ale made with, you guessed it, spruce tree tips.
DMMDI IPA – that is short for Devil made me do it. Pretty self-explanatory after that.
One of the first thing that hops out when you visit this brewers website is this tagline, “New Zealand’s first ultra cool, postmodern brewers of leftfield ales. Specialists in all styles.”
All you have to do is peruse their beer list to see that leftfield is an understatement.
How about:
Pot Kettle Black
“Remixed and remastered as a celebration of Pot Kettle Black’s double trophy-winning effort at BrewNZ 2009: Champion beer in the ‘Stouts and Porters’ class and winner of the ‘People’s Choice’ award at the Beervana festival.”
I always find something interesting from the Beer Advocate magazine (much more so than the website, which is a little on the trolly side) And on the last page of the recent edition is about a newish brewery in Massachussetts by the name of Cody Brewing.
They have two really out there offerings: Fruit cake strong ale and Wasabi lemongrass lager.
Here is what their website says about themselves:
“Little Brewery, Big Biere
Parish Brewing Co. is a nanobrewery (yes, nano! smaller than micro!) in Lafayette, Louisiana. Parish will be bringing Acadiana and the rest of Louisiana uncompromising, craft brewed beer (or biere in our native cajun french). Using only the finest ingredients, we’d never cut costs at the expense of flavor.
Think of Parish as an upstart local brewery in cajun country doing battle against boring, tasteless swill.”
This biere (the first on their list) really caught my eye:
“Canebrake
Brewed with Louisiana sugarcane! A new Louisiana tradition in the works. Crisp and easy to drink, this sparingly hopped American wheat focuses attention on the understated sweet remnants of sugarcane.”
Moonlight Brewing (like it’s famous, but no less revered neighbor, Russian River) is a bit of mystery to me and a lot of people. They don’t have large distribution circles but they are doing what they want to do, the way they want to. And for that, I applaud them.
Here are some of the brews from their Abbey (“The Abbey de St. Humulus, founded in 2005, is home to the Moonlight Brewery. We believe that Moonlight is the first and perhaps only Abbey brewery in the US. The Moonlight beers are not of European Abbey brewery styles, as we are not a European Abbey, but instead are of the unique California Abbey style range. The mission of the Abbey is to promote good will through good beer. Abbey de St. Humulus is in no way affiliated with the Trappist Monasteries.”) that caught my eye….
Reality Czeck – a 4.8% lager.
Toast – their slightly burned lager.
Bayou Teche is another small and very Cajun’ outfit.
Like so many others before him, Karlos Knott, the founder of the brewery, tasted quality flavorful beer while in Europe, in Knott’s case, Germany. He was further entranced by the Washington State beer scene that he returned too. That led to home brewing in 1994. Upon returning to Louisiana, Knott and his brothers, who all live on the family farm in Arnaudville, crafted beers to compliment Cajun cuisine and launched Bayou Teche.
LA-31 is their most famous biere but others are on the way like a hefeweizen that will pair with that lovely Cajun’ food.
Firestone-Walker is getting some competition for their Buellton outpost. Figueroa Mountain Brewing will be firing up their kettles with a nice variety of beers including Hurricane Deck Helles, Danish Red (for the Solvang crowd) and Stagecoach Stout. They have an experienced brewer on board and I hope they can compete against the massive crush of wineries in that area of California.
Good Luck and I hope to visit soon.
