by colinmcgray | Mar 19, 2015 | Lock Box: March 2015
| 4.1% ABV | Session IPA | West Yorkshire, England | Sometimes, less is more. This is especially true with beer. Big brews with burly ABVs often don’t lend themselves particularly well to beach days or all-nighters around a campfire, where the “just one more” mentality tends to reign supreme. Spring Good Times Enter the “session” IPA, a beer style that has come very much into fashion over the past few years, and it’s easy to appreciate why: all of the vibrant personality and hoppy goodness of their big brothers, and yet manage to be every bit as smashable as the mass-brewed swill. These flavorful lil’ guys tend to appear en masse as the summer months approach, meaning their heyday is upon us! It’s difficult to find a craft brewer that doesn’t offer at least one more casual beer for the season, meaning that summertime is the perfect time to down an entire six pack without risk of (too) much judgment. The Summer Wine Ethos One such offering comes from Summer Wine, a relatively new (they went commercial in 2008) brewery from Yorkshire. Focusing on beers that are “unapologetically flavour forward in nature,” Summer Wine seeks to challenge the beer status quo that seems to rule the area; the Yorkshire beer scene has become, in their opinion, dormant and unsurprising. Instead of sticking strictly to this sleepy way of life, Summer Wine is determined to “tear up the rule book and…[redefine] how Yorkshire beer is perceived.” Already growing at an impressive rate, the brewery promises that they’ve only just begun, and are bent on offering a pantheon of surprising beers...
by colinmcgray | Dec 16, 2014 | Cellar Builder: December 2014
| 4.7% ABV. | Sour Pale | Buxton, Derbyshire, England Buxton, Derbyshire, England | 330ml bottle | An exciting fusion of fresh, hoppy and tart sourness, and a brilliant example of the creativity that underlines so many of the collaboration projects happening in the craft beer industry at the moment. In 2013 you would have been very hard pressed to find a British brewed sour beer at all. As we enter 2015 though, it’s a very different story altogether. Throughout 2014 we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of U.K. produced kettle sours. Without getting too sciency just yet, think of kettle sours as quick-to-produce sour beer. There has also been an increase in the number of more traditional long maturation Belgian inspired sours, of the sort that can take years to produce. By their very fickle and slow to produce nature, we just haven’t seen as many of them on the market yet, but they’re coming, trust me. Somerset’s Wild Beer Co. has been forging some particularly impressive ground when it comes to long maturation sours, but that’s a story for another day. Buxton are one of the English breweries creatively spearheading the bleeding edge of craft beer in the U.K. alongside the likes of The Kernel, Magic Rock, Siren, Beavertown, Partizan and Wild Beer Co. This band of colourful breweries isn’t just making waves at home in the U.K. either, but also in the significantly more well established and demanding craft beer market in the United States. Collaborations, like sour beers, are all the rage in craft beer at the moment, they serve to excite the brewers...
by colinmcgray | Nov 19, 2014 | Vault Reserve: December 2014
(10.2% ABV. Quadrupel, Westvleteren, Belgium) 330ml bottle Westvleteren 12 (XII) is the most sought after beer on the planet, bar none. A world class Trappist Belgian quadrupel style beer with few peers. The most limited production, regularly brewed, Trappist ale. Laden with rich candied dark fruit and bittersweet molasses flavour and aroma. Matures incredibly well when cellared. With few notable exceptions, Russian River’s Pliny the Elder and Younger, and Three Floyds Dark Lord aside perhaps, no beer has ever garnered so much buzz and rumour as Westvleteren 12 (Westy 12 to its friends). For many beer lovers and beer geeks, Westy 12 is an extremely elusive fermented pot of gold at the end of a hoppy rainbow. To say you have actually tasted the beer continues to be a point of pride for beer drinkers both old and new. A mark as it were, of just how serious a beer nerd you actually are. There are a few simple reasons why this one Belgian beer has become such an iconic point of desire. It is brewed in relatively small amounts at the Trappist monastery Abbey of Saint Sixtus of Westvleteren, alongside only two other beers; Westvleteren Blonde, a 5.8% ABV. Belgian style pale ale and Westvleteren 8 (VIII), a malty 8% ABV. mahogany coloured Belgian style Dubbel. With the exception of a small amount that was sent to market a couple of years ago in Europe and the U.S., the beer is not distributed at all and must be collected from the brewery itself. This lack of distribution combined with the fact that the beer garners the highest ratings...
by colinmcgray | Nov 19, 2014 | Vault Reserve: December 2014
| 8.0% ABV | English Wild Ale | Lewes, East Sussex, England | 750ml bottle | Monolith is one of a rapidly growing number of English produced sour and wild ales. Bittersweet with an acidic edge and an intentionally funky aroma, this soured black beer spent eight months resting in an oak foudre that previously housed Chianti. Sour beers and ales fermented with “wild” Brettanomyces (or Brett) yeast strains, are becoming more and more popular in the U.K. This is in large part due to the sterling efforts of Somerset’s Wild Beer Co. While there are other breweries in the U.K. producing excellent sour and Brett fermented ales, few are doing it with the dedication, regularity and celebration that Wild Beer are or to the extent that many U.S. craft brewers now are. You can however now add Burning Sky to the short list of British breweries taking sour and Brett beers very seriously indeed. Like Wild Beer Co., this East Sussex based brewery is dedicating significant time, infrastructure and cash to building an ambitious barrel aging and sour beer program. In an effort to help supplement their bold wood based venture, Burning Sky produces a core range of high quality American style pale ales, IPAs and Belgian farmhouse style saisons. The relatively short turnaround time of these ales means the brewery can remain financially operational until the sour projects, which have a much longer maturation time, are ready. Monolith has many of the same characteristics that distinguish the archetypal Flemish red sour ales produced by Rodenbach, the much lauded modern pioneer of aging soured beer on a large...
by colinmcgray | Nov 19, 2014 | Vault Reserve: December 2014
(10.0% ABV. Wheatwine, Bristol, England) 330ml bottle One of the very first commercially brewed wheatwines in the U.K. Rich, desserty and beautifully complex. A beer with massive cellaring potential as well as being moreish and delicious freshly bottled. In keeping with many native examples of this new American strong ale style, Bristol Beer Factory have keenly experimented with the base idea of a strong wheat ale by aging it in bourbon barrels and by blending in some cold brewed coffee courtesy of Bristol’s Extract Coffee Roasters. The malt bill of the beer is 75% wheat. For the uninitiated and non-brewers among you, that is a very high percentage indeed. The result of so much wheat; without getting too sciencey, provides loads of fermentable sugars for the yeast to eat up and convert onward to a hefty 10.0% ABV. Equally important is the uniquely smooth, creamy and full mouth feel that so much wheat protein gives the beer. Add to that the vanilla notes from the oak bourbon barrels and the roasted cocoa notes of the high quality Extract coffee and it’s not a stretch to describe this beer’s overall flavour and aroma as vanilla latte like. This is the third release in Bristol Beer Factory’s new Unlimited series of small batch limited release beers following a 7.0% ABV. Belgian Rye and an 8.5% ABV. Double IPA. This being a robust and strong wheatwine, it’s the first brew in the series that has significant cellaring potential, the Belgian Rye and DIPA being designed to be enjoyed as fresh as possible. The aging and evolutionary potential of Wheat Wine is especially exciting...
