Category: Beer
Hair Of The Dog Brewing Co. Blue Dot Double IPA
Hair Of The Dog, my favorite little brewing company in the brewing nirvana that is Portland, Oregon, is one of the couple of breweries whose beers I always have on my radar. Whether it’s during a trip to New York where you can occasionally find some of their offerings, or a rare trip out west, I always look to come back with a couple of their beers to try, and maybe to hold onto to for a while and see how they develop. This past trip out to Portland I was on the lookout for their Blue Dot IPA, a beer I’d tried on draft during our previous trip.
I still remember the evening that I first tried it during that previous trip. It was also my first visit to the Horse Brass pub. We were with some friends, and after dinner, knowing that we were interested in beer, they took us to the Horse Brass. I still remember being floored by the scope of their draft menu, especially the number of incredible IPAs. Of the beers we tried that evening, the Blue Dot IPA left an indelible impression on me.
Fast forward a year or so, and during our next trip to Portland we stopped at another beer institution, Belmont Station. We only had a brief afternoon in town, and were pretty tired at the mid-point of our trip, and so Belmont Station was the perfect stop. After perusing their selection for a while and selecting a few bottles to take home, we ordered some beers and sat on their patio for about an hour, catching our breath and relaxing in the sun. We picked up the Blue Dot IPA here, along with a bottle of 2008 Alaskan Smoked Porter, and a couple of other things. The hard part was not choosing what to get, but reconciling our selves to the fact that we couldn’t take home everything we wanted to. I suppose you have to leave something for a future visit!
While all of HotD’s beers are pretty hop-forwards, the Blue Dot is their real hop monster. It’s brewed to a strength of 7% (1.074 original gravity), using a combination of barley and rye malts. 80 IBUs are packed in there (I haven’t found any info on which hop varieties they use).
Blue Dot pours crystal clear, with a rich golden color, a fluffy white head, and medium lacing. The nose is a barrage of evergreen, piney hops. In fact, it reminds me of Christmas trees and the pitch left on your hands after you bring one into your house. In much the same way, the hop aroma quickly fills the room I’m drinking this in. The palate is medium textured and slightly velvety at the end. There’s just enough carbonation to liven up the flavors without being overwhelming. Flavors of citrus, resin, and piney hops dominate, supported by caramel, grain, and honey. As the beer warms the layer of caramel and grain thickens, sweetening the beer. In the finish, more hops, medicinal and piney, along with a touch of creme caramel.
This is really a vehicle for hops, plain and simple. As with the other HotD beers that I’ve tried, there is a layer of creamy sweetness supporting all of the flavors. I found it to be a big beer though, so see if you can split a bottle with someone, or find it on draft close to home.
New Belgium Brewing Co. La Folie
Belgian lambics have fascinated me ever since I first got interested in beer. It was Belgian Trappist beers that really drew me to beer in the first place, but lambics captured my imagination in a way that no style of beer had until that point. And so when I decided to begin homebrewing, one of the first homebrew books I bought was Jeff Sparrow’s Wild Brews. After reading this through, and trying nearly all of the lambics that I could get my hands on, I found myself reaching further afield for beers in this style. Needless to say, I quickly became interested in beers from breweries such as Russian River and New Belgium.
I’ve written before about Russian River’s “wild” beers, Temptation and Supplication in particular. Early on those were beers that I went out of my way to find. But New Belgium’s La Folie was actually the first American beer in this style that I was fascinated by, curious about, and excited to try. I remember reading about how they produced it using large wooden barrels, and how the concept and recipe were introduced by Peter Bouckaert who had come over to New Belgium from Rodenbach.
Similar to how Flanders style red beers such as Rodenbach are made, La Folie is aged in large wooden barrels for several years before bottling and relies on a range of yeasts beyond the traditional saccharomyces cerevisiae do their part to lend funk and tartness to the beer. Lactabacillus yeasts play a large role here, similar to lambics. The beers typically also end up with a strong wood element from the extended aging in barrels. At bottling time, the older beer that has aged for anywhere up to three years is blended with younger years, often times 2- and 1- year old beers. Again, this is similar to lambics, gueuze in particular which is a blend of 1, 2, and 3 year old lambics.
So La Folie is essentially New Belgium’s effort to put their own spin on, the traditional Flanders red style beer from Belgium. Along with Russian River, they are definitely one of the pioneers of American wild ales, and they continue to be inventive and chart new paths. Their Lips of Faith series includes several beers that use unique yeasts and aging processes.
This 750ml bottle was a gift that I was seriously lucky to receive. And so we sat on it for a little while until the perfect opportunity to drink it arose. La Folie rolls in at a moderate 6%, which is good if it’s just you and someone else sharing the large bottle.
The beer pours brownish red with rich, cranberry highlights. The nose is a veritable fruit symphony with apricots, sour cherries, raspberries all intermingled, underscored by notes of oak. The palate is very, very tart and light-bodied with a soft texture. The combination here makes the tartness stand out all the more. Striking fruit flavors abound – cranberries, cherries, raspberries, hint of apricots again – underscored by a note of tannins and creaminess. A little more sweetness than on the nose. The finish is dominated by sour cherries, lingering on a wave of tartness and underscored by a note of vanilla.
This is right up there with the best American wild ales that I’ve drunk. It’s similar to the Russian River Supplication with its fruit character, but is more sharp and tart, and doesn’t have the wine-overtones that the RRBC beer has that add a layer of richness. Nonetheless, the flavors in La Folie are very good and consistent throughout, not tailing off or getting more sour at the finish. This is a must-try for any fans of “wild” ales – if you’re lucky enough to live somewhere they distribute to!
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Alaskan Brewing Co. Alaskan Smoked Porter 2008
One of the few beers that I was really hot to try during our not-so-long-ago excursion out West, was the Alaskan Brewing Company’s Smoked Porter. I distinctly remember a few years ago when I began homebrewing and bought an issue of Zymurgy, there was an article in the back featuring a tasting of several vintages of the Alaskan Smoked Porter. I was relatively new to beer and brewing, and the concept of vintage beers was totally foreign to me.
Accelerate a few years forward, and while I’ve had the good fortune to sample a number of tasty beers, the Alaskan Smoked Porter has always stuck in the back of my head as one of those I’d like to try someday. Not an easy thing to do, since it isn’t distributed anywhere near our state, and we rarely travel out West. Thus it being one of the handful of beers that I was really looking for during our trip.
Alaskan Brewing Company first brewed their Alaskan Smoked Porter in 1988. Having opened their brewery in 1986, the smoked porter was one of their first attempts to recreate a style that had roots in Alaska’s brewing history. To produce the smoked porter they worked with the owners of the Taku Smokeries smokehouse in Juneau to produce the smoked malt. They used alder wood, a type of wood commonly used in Alaska for curing fish and other items. Alaskan Brewing Co.’s Geoff Larson wrote,
Alaskan Brewing first produced its smoked porter in December 1988. It was released as a single batch, and it was called Chinook Alaskan Smoked Porter (Chinook was subsequently dropped from the name). The inspiration to produce a smoked porter came from historical research conducted by Mary Larson on the breweries that were located in Alaska in the late 1800s and early 1900s…To produce a modern porter similar to that brewed a hundred years earlier in Juneau, Alaskan Brewery used the Taku Smokeries smokehouse. Work began by smoking malt for a porter recipe that then-Alaskan brewer John Maier had developed…They discovered that balancing the intense flavors of alderwood smoke with those of the beer was best achieved by using predominantly a cold-smoking technique…In this process, Alaskan uses wet alderwood with controlled and low temperatures of combustion…the malt is smoked and then dried at elevated temperatures that darken the malt slightly.*
The smoked porter has been vintage dated since 1993 when they began refermenting it in the bottle. This bottle is vintage-dated 2008, and rolls in at 6.5%.
The beer pours dark black with amber highlights. The nose is rich with wood-fire smoke, anise, cocoa and roasted malt. All in all, largely a mix of smoke and malt underscored by a hint of sweetness. The palate has velvety textured carbonation, conveying flavors of chocolate covered espresso beans, molasses, alder smoke – a pungently sweet smoke – , and just a trace of hop bitterness. The smoke becomes a bit more prominent and acrid on the finish, accompanied by flavors of smoke, coffee, and a trace of molasses. Much more bitterness on the finish than the palate, driven by the smoke and hops.
All in all, a great porter and it’s inspired me to brew my own smoked porter. The best thing about the Alaskan Smoked Porter is a) how the intensity and presence of the smoke increased throughout, and b) arriving at 6.5% meant that the beer conveyed loads of flavor without knocking you out.
*Quote from Smoked Beers, Geoff Larson and Ray Daniels, 2000, pp. 82-87.
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Hair Of The Dog Brewing Co. Adam Batch #72
About a year ago I ran across a bottle of Hair Of The Dog Brewing Company’s Adam in our beer collection. I had brought it back from Portland several months earlier and plumb forgot that I had it in the meantime. I distinctly remember being awestruck at the remarkable combination of flavors the beer presented: smoke, malt, gaminess, and more malt. At the time it was truly one of the most interesting beers I had ever tasted.
That was a bottle from batch #70. This is one of my favorite things about Hair Of The Dog’s beers, that each bottle indicates what batch it came from (with the exception of Ruth, their pale ale). Their beers are meant to develop over time, and there’s always the possibility of some batch variation. The batch marking is such a great way of giving the beer drinker a bit more information about what they’re drinking, and if they have bottles from other vintages they can compare them against one another. For a while, Hair Of The Dog’s website included a table indicating the brewed on and bottled on dates for both Adam and Fred. Sadly it is not up to date any longer, but you can view it here.
So I was excited to try this new batch of Adam, especially now that I had tasted it once before and was a bit more aware of what to expect from it. Even better, not too long ago I came across a homebrew recipe for Adam. It’s for a 10-gallon batch and was actually given to the author of the Homebrew Chef website by Hair Of The Dog founder/brewer Alan Sprints himself. What’s remarkable about this recipe is that it calls for 62 pounds of malt for 10-gallons of beer! The beer itself comes in at 10%, so those 62 pounds aren’t going to waste.
This bottle of Adam pours a very dark brown with amber highlights and a creamy tan head that forms two fingers thick and drops down to a thin, persistent layer. The nose is rich with molasses, smoke, raisins, and baking rye bread. The palate has a mild astringency made up of hop bitterness and darkly roasted malts. There’s lots of effervescent carbonation supporting a velvety texture. Flavors of molasses, smoky, caramelized barbecue, and dark rye bread, and a much more prominent smokiness than on the nose. The finish trails away with whiffs of smoke, followed by some more smoke, and then some astringent roasted grain flavors, and then again some more smoke.
The beauty in this beer is in how the smoky intensity builds throughout, from nose to finish. I found the smokiness to be much more prominent in this batch than I had in the previous one, which I enjoyed a great deal. In fact, the combination of pungent smoke, molasses, and dark rye was pretty great, and very enjoyable as I worked my way through the glass.
So were the different prominence of flavors that I picked up in Adam this time around a case of batch variation? Or was it just a different day, different time for my palate? Doesn’t really matter I suppose, but given how close the two batches were in time (#70 vs. #72), and the consistency of pro brewers, I have to give more weight to the notion of palate variation than batch variation. But who knows really.
Bottom line: a great, unique beer experience. Go drink one. Slowly. Let it really open up in the glass.
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Great Divide Brewing Co. Hibernation Ale
It’s that time of year when breweries left and right come out with their winter beers. Snow lies somewhere just around the corner up ahead, the leaves have nearly all fallen off of the trees, and if you haven’t already then you’re seriously considering turning the heat on in your house.
Really, the various winter beers hitting the shelves are a motley crew. There are barleywines, doppelbocks, imperial stouts, spiced beers, you name it. Any style is fair game when it comes to winter beers. But recently my attention has been truly caught up by old ales, a much less common winter brew here in the States.
It all began with Founders’ Old Curmudgeon, their old ale -style beer aged in bourbon barrels. I’m a bit of a sucker for bourbon-barreled beers, and quickly fell in love with the insouciant combination of flavors Old Curmudgeon presented: sweet, bready malt, brandy-soaked fruits, and vanilla, caramel, and a hint of whiskey from the barrel-aging.
But old ales aren’t all that easy to find, and I haven’t been very motivated to do much searching lately, and so it wasn’t until we were heading over to some friends house to help them move that I ended up trying another old ale (and another American version of the style). This time it was the 6-pack of Great Divide’s Hibernation Ale, their seasonal old ale released each fall. That night, after several hours of loading furniture, boxes, and bikes into a giant U-Haul, we all opened up a bottle of Hibernation Ale and thoroughly enjoyed the soothing warmth that it brought back to our tired bodies.
About a week later, I had the chance to try a second bottle of Hibernation Ale, at a moment when I could pay a bit more attention to it. It once again totally hit the spot, and this time I was able to pick up more of the flavors in the glass. I came away pretty excited by what a great, remarkably enjoyable beer this was.
Hibernation Ale was first brewed by Great Divide in 1995, and since then has been one of their consistent seasonal beers. Old Ales originated in the UK and were one of the typical winter offerings from breweries (alongside barleywines). They gained the name Old Ale because they were often left to age for several months before being served, in the process acquiring a darker color and sweeter, nuttier flavors from oxidation. Hibernation Ale is brewed each year in July and aged until October before being released in November. It rolls in at 8.1%, on the higher side of ABV for most old ales that I’ve dug up info about.
The beer pours a ruddy, amber brown, with dark red highlights. A thick off-white head forms and slowly dissipates to a thin film, leaving a trace of lacing. The nose is rich with rummy notes and deep, malty tones, with a hint of smoke and a trace of hops floating around in the background. The palate is deliciously smooth, viscous, and mouth-coating. Flavors of brown sugar, burnt caramel, bran, and molasses rise to the top amidst lots of toasted, sweet, chocolatey malt flavors. I picked up some hop prickliness early on, but as the beer warmed this disappeared. The finish offers flavors of rum, brown sugar, and coffee that lead to a trace of lingering hop bitterness.
This is without a doubt one of the nicest, most enjoyably warming beers I’ve had in a while. The flavors all work together perfectly, offering loads of flavor without overwhelming your palate. Most importantly, it really, really just hits the spot on a cool, November/December evening as you appreciate the austere simplicity that is Fall in New England.
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