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You will see the Sierra Nevada name popping up at your favorite beer watering holes as their Beer Camp packs (and kegs) start arriving.
One such event is at Select Beer….
This will be a chance to get a 50% taste of some breweries that normally don’t sell here. Plus there is the SoCal beer collaboration to celebrate too.
Taste off time! Two Goses go into the ring and only one comes out the winner.
In one corner, we have the Briney Melon from Anderson Valley Brewing v. the other time from Sierra Nevada.
Otra Vez
Pours a pretty a bubbly light yellow but then darkens to a big of a urine color. This has a tang to it right off the bat as the salt and citrus hit the palate. Quite spritzy. Grain taste tucked away shows up at the end. Which is where the prickly pear also shows up along with more grapefruit. All the ingredients listed make a distinct appearance.
Briney Melon
Jolly Rancher here and in full effect. The aroma is a bit off putting but there is watermelon in there. Really more tart than OV with less salt that might have balanced this out. The watermelon is quite fake tasting to me and the taste really sticks to the roof of the mouth.
The clear winner is the Sierra Nevada. It shows off each ingredient without lessening the impact of the other while still being close to the base style as well.
Our local L.A. breweries are part of the variety box from this year’s Sierra Nevada Beer Camp box, Team Julian created Stout of the Union…..
….a Robust Stout that is “rich, roasty and full of deep malt flavor..”
Check out the other regional collaborations HERE.
Two hop mavens have teamed up on a collaboration that requires barrel-aged IPA’s. A bit of a turn around from Stone Brewing Co. and Sierra Nevada who have been educating the beer buying public about freshness and “enjoying by” IPA’s for quite some time. The result is NXS IPA a blend of fresh hop IPAs, plus some barrel-aged IPAs.
Beer Camp Across America, the wide-ranging collaboration series from Sierra Nevada will return in 2016 with a jaw-dropping “30 (!) collaboration partners for a new mixed 12-pack…”
Then in the summer of 2016 those beers and more will be sent on a 6 city tour of beer festivals.
What is most exciting is that both Beachwood Brewing and Smog City are on the initial list (see below). Maybe they will both end up in the final 12-pack!
I guess it is Gose day. Here is the write-up from Sierra Nevada on their newly bottled, Otra Vez, “a sweet-tangy blend of native-grown prickly pear cactus and grapefruit combined with the zing of a traditional gose for a vicious but delicious twist on the stodgy summer sippers.”
The hop maestros of Chico are not content to “Harvest” Southern Hemisphere hops, Wild hops and now hops with no name with their Sierra Nevada Newly Developed Hop IPA. And you get the helpful listing of the (4) hops used in what they are also calling a 100-Day IPA.
The flavors that Sierra Nevada extol are quite wide-ranging and frankly, weird: “Complex flavors of cedar, chocolate, coconut, and orange-citrus create an incredibly unique flavor profile perfect for those truly passionate about IPA.”
Sierra Nevada has added a new bitter wrinkle to their IPA line-up with Hop Hunter but as I was beer shopping, I was also pointed to a new Golden IPA as well.
Let the taste off begin!
These two IPA’s could not be any more different and both have elements that I really enjoy in my hop bombs but both also contain stuff I don’t like so much as well.
The Golden IPA has a mild tea like aroma and then it just punches you in the face with bitterness. It is really sharp on the tongue. It isn’t heavy in body though and it does have some white wine and grapefruit pith notes that blend well together. But that carbonated bitter blast really set me back on my heels.
The Hop Hunter with distilled hop oils also has an aroma/flavor disconnect. It is big on that cat pee aroma. Close to off putting levels. But then you take a sip and it is a symphony of flavors. Mango, a touch of vanilla and even grape notes as it warms and in the background is a bready cereal note that offsets the mild bitterness and leads to the next sip.
I guess if I forced to choose one, I would go with the Golden due mostly to the aroma on the Hop Hunter. It was just not appealing to me. And the sharpness of the Golden, though not my favorite, was not the distraction that the aroma was.
Sierra Nevada continues with hop innovation. From their Torpedo to their new method of using oil distilled from wet hops steam right there in the field. Minutes after the bines are picked.
The beer beer will be called Hop Hunter IPA though I would have gone with Hop Science or something punnier. The oil will be part of a hopping schedule to create a fresh hop essence as long as the oil lasts.
P.S. I am not even going to touch the nonsense surrounding the font. Nope. Not gonna.
Thanks to the generosity of Tomm Carroll THE L.A. beer scribe, the Up From the Cellar feature this month is jam packed. We each brought our bottle of Fritz and Ken’s Imperial Stout to see if the same beer aged in different ways would make a difference. Plus Tomm brought a fitting nightcap of an aged bottle….
Now I only have 1 bottle left from the Sierra Nevada 30th Anniversary series. But it was worth it for this unique cellar experiment. Fritz & Ken’s Ale, an imperial stout, clocks in at 9.2%. Cellarable but on the lower end of the ABV spectrum to me.
Here is what I had to say when I first sampled it: An imperial stout that doesn’t reek of boubon! It’s about time. Nice stout base with a lot of warming alcohol. Surprisingly not super roasty flavored. Mild with a hint of cherry. pours dark black with espresso head to it.
Tomm and I compared our two bottles. Same beer. Both treated well. And yet the two displayed slightly different characteristics. Mine was a little thinner in mouthfeel with minor notes of chocolate along with a little bit of cherry hidden in it. His had a little more soy sauce taste to it and also more sparkle and a touch of smoke flavor too. Both had a bit of oxidation to them. The alcohol heat that I had when young had mellowed out of it. It was a perfectly passable stout. It would have been interesting to compare our bottles with one that had turned south because I feel this particular beer may have passed prime stage and it would have been good to see what those bad notes were and in what percentage they were present in our beers.
To finish up on a lighter note, Tomm brought out a bottle of Stone La Citrueille Cèleste de Citracado that was brewed with The Bruery and Elysian. A Yam/Pumpkin collaboration.
My review back in 2011 was: Not much in the way of pumpkin or yams but quite nice mix of lemon verbena and birch. Odd at first but this beer really grows on you. Pours light orange.
For a 5% beer that Tomm was worried would be a quick drain pour this was quite nice and still peppy after three years. There was no evidence of squash at all to my palate but the lemon verbena and spice notes were still going strong. Maybe that high flavor profile masked other issues but I didn’t get a sense of it being too old. There was still some bubbles to it as well. I don’t know how this beer has survived, but it has and it could probably go on longer as well.