Follow Sean Inman to the best in craft beer
If you want to get a craft beer geek salivating then just say the word Yeti. To the normal population, it is just a creature of myth. To the beer nerds it is a beer with many different spins from the Great Divide Brewery in Denver. A favored stop on the GABF tour.
Limited amounts of their beer would make it here to LA but now the bounty increases! And the place to be is Blue Palms on Hollywood. (With their new parking system). You can try out some Yeti and other delightful Divide beer.
Everytime I hear about the Great American Beer Festival gold, silver and bronze winners, I think of all the categories that there are now. 79 plus the pro-am winner. That is a wonderful testament to the resurgence of craft beer in this country. I don’t care that 90+ percent of the country drink the industrial water lager because there is a bounty of great beer everywhere you go. And just like people now require better coffee and people refuse to eat individually sliced “American” cheese, soon craft beer will be the default.
So, check out the GABF website to see what beers you should be tracking down. And to get more number crunching check out the excellent Brookston Beer Bulletin.
….and a big congrats to my local, Eagle Rock Brewery for winning the Pro-Am competition with their wonderful Red Velvet.
If you are heading to the crazy cool GABF (Great American Beer Festival) this year well then this may need to be put into the itinerary. Once you read the press release, you will want to drink the beer.
“Mutineer Magazine and New Holland Brewing Company are excited to announce the official release of their collaboration beer, Mutinous Battle Chai, on Friday, September 17th at 2pm at Falling Rock Taphouse in Denver, CO. The event will last until all the kegs are tapped. There is no admission fee and cost is per beer. 100% of the proceeds from Mutinous Battle Chai beer sales will benefit A Child’s Right, an organization dedicated to global water relief and bringing clean water to children in underdeveloped regions.
“We are really excited about our opportunity to work with New Holland Brewing, as we bring the craft beer community together to support A Child’s Right. We are very thankful to our partners in this project, New Holland Brewing Company and Falling Rock Taphouse, for making our vision a reality.” – Brian Kropf, Mutineer Magazine
Technically, Mutinous Battle Chai does not fit the guidelines of any individual style category. The base beer was brewed with both pale and rye malts, spiced with an original interpretation of the traditional chai tea spice blend, and fermented with a Belgian wit yeast strand. The base beer was primed with brown ale wort and then underwent a secondary fermentation with merlot yeast on oak. The end result is a dry, amber-colored, medium-bodied Belgian-style spiced and oaked ale unlike any craft beer brewed before.
Other beers from New Holland Brewing Company, including Golden Cap Saison, Imperial Hattter IPA, as well as Hatter Royale Hopquila, a distilled spirit that has been steeped in hops, will also be available during the release party. This is the first time that New Holland beer will make an appearance in Colorado outside of the Great American Beer Festival.
“This collaboration has been an opportunity to have fun exploring flavor, and techniques, while celebrating this exciting time in the beer industry.” — New Holland’s Beervangelist, Fred Bueltmann
For more information on the recipe and brewing process of Mutinous Battle Chai, check out Issue 13 of Mutineer Magazine, now on newsstands.”
That’s right. The beer world has converged on Denver, Colorado for a massive amount of beer, people, breweries, events and fun. And why is the Search Party not there?
Well, dear reader, I had to make a choice. GABF now or the 1st Beer Bloggers conference (again in Colorado, this time Boulder). I chose the latter because I hope that interacting with the blogging world and learning more tech-ese will allow me to improve how I convey to you why I love the world of craft beer and why you should love it too.
In the meantime, the place to go to get your GABF fix when you can’t be in Denver is right here FoodGPS. Celebrator columnist Tomm Carroll is covering the action and you will learn all you will need to know.
Hopworks Ace of Spades (Gold Medal winner in the Imperial IPA category at the 2009 Great American Beer Festival) was released in bottles on April 13th at the awesome Belmont Station.
The label says, “This hopped out beast had Amarillo, Cascade and Centennial hops, added at every point; mash tun, first wort, kettle, and dry hop. All the green goodness results in a beer with a huge citrus hop aroma, flavor and deep clean bitterness.”
AS if that wasn’t enough for organic beer lovers, Hopworks is releasing another IPA called Google Gigabit as a pitch for the company to choose Portland as its destination for new high-speed fiber optics lines. Check out The New School blog for the complete story.
If I needed another reason to kick myself, here is another brewery that I missed while at GABF. Then it went and won major awards!
Here is their address:
601 W Holly St.
Bellingham, WA
98225
(360) 75-Beers
They have an Autumn beer dinner coming up. It might be a great time to check out their award winning beer.
Check out the time lapse HERE
Here is a short clip of Sam Calagione from Dogfish head pouring beer at the GABF…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kN_OKyyvqs]
Top 10 beers that I should have tried…
Ommegang – Adoration
Alpine – Willy Vanilly
Cascade – Vlad the Imp Aler
Hollister Brewing – The Pope
Oakshire – Collaborative Evil
Pizza Port /Carlsbad – 547 Haight
Short’s – Strawberry Short’s Cake
Surly – Coffee Bender
Weyerbacher – Double Simcoe IPA
Chuckanut – Vienna Lager
BEST BEER outside of GABF
Fresh Hop Ale from Great Divide
Lovely hop aroma. Bold but not aggressive. Cool lacing on the glass. Nicely balanced between hops and malts. Excellent bitter taste. It slightly edges out Elysian’s Loser Pale Ale.