Stan's suitcase

Mr Stan Hieronymus visited Ireland in September and I was happy to be able to meet for a couple of pints in Dublin shortly after he arrived. I was good enough to take a couple of cans which he had shipped over off his hands, to save him shlepping them around the country.

First, and perhaps least remarkable, is the 2024 Sierra Nevada Oktoberfest, this year a collaboration with Gutmann of Titting, Bavaria's most romantic-sounding brewery. It looks like a modern festbier, being a bright clear golden. The ABV is on the high side at 6%. That does the job of giving it a voll und süffig body, with lots of dense fresh white bread leading the flavour. The hops bring quite a spiky bitterness, beyond grass and salad and into quite an English profile, of earth and zinc. A tiny note of celery in the finish is the only confirmation that the hops (Hersbrucker, Loral, Saphir and Spalter) are definitely German. From that list I would have expected something a bit more modern, but this is as trad as they come, small can notwithstanding. It's certainly streets ahead of the orange and sticky Oktoberfest beer which I'm guessing too many American breweries still produce, but here in Europe, this isn't very distinctive and different. It's satisfactory.

The other can came from one of Stan's local breweries in Colorado, Lyric. It's a double IPA called Can Full of Gas and is one of those eggy-looking hazy double IPAs, the full 8% ABV. It smells quite minerally, with the sort of kerosene effect I sometimes get from Nelson Sauvin, as well as dry plasterboard grit and some softer lemon and lime candy. Nelson is indeed one of the hops used, along with Riwaka. It's full-bodied and slick, feeling barely carbonated despite the substantial head. There's a rawness about the hops; a concentrated leafiness that makes it taste a little dreggy. That gives it a hard bitter finish, before which it's pleasantly citric, with a faint smoky burnt note, presumably from whatever was making it smell like kerosene. There's a certain amount of lemon meringue pie sweetness mixed in with this, but the leafy bitterness prevails. I guess it's a decent example of this sort of strong super-hopped beer, but it's not really to my taste, feeling a little rough or unfinished to me. I'm sure it has its fans though.

Thanks for the beers Stan, and I hoped you and Daria enjoyed your visit to Ireland.

Little and large

We had a jolly time of it one Thursday night in early December. Sierra Nevada's co-founder, Steve Grossman, was in town, prompting a night of revelry and €5 pints at UnderDog.

One of such was Oktoberfest, last year's vintage having been brewed in collaboration with Kehrwieder of Hamburg. As such, then, there's a northern influence, meaning less Bavarian softness and more of a hop bite. Not that there isn't a huge malt component: this is very bready, with an overall chewy and wholesome feel. The hops manifest as a selection of leafy vegetables, particularly celery, spinach and rocket. While it's very definitely a Festbier, it does shade into pale bock to an extent, with all that noble hop character. A little unwelcome caramel emerges as it warms, so I was glad to be dealing with only a pint rather than a litre. It still absolutely hit the mark, however, providing just what an Oktoberfest beer ought to, in a way that non-Bavarian breweries rarely get just right.

Later, a special bottle of Brux was opened. This is a collaboration with fellow Californian brewing legends Russian River and is a "domesticated" wild ale. From the name it's apparent that Brettanomyces is its signature feature. I thought it was quite understated, which is unusual because Russian River in particular likes to go properly wild with its wild beers. Here, I got an aroma of subtle rosemary and basil, followed by a flavour of Sauternes grape and breadcrust. An extra perfume and resin effect emerges as it warms, alongside a lightly earthy mushroom funk. It's good, I guess, but it's not as fun and interesting as the best of these, holding back on going full-tilt with the Brett. I enjoyed it, for free, but would have resented paying top dollar for a beer that doesn't offer as much as it promises.

We leave the pub and head home with cans now. The ...Little Thing series has been rolling along busily since it began, occasionally producing worthy successors to Hazy Little Thing, but mostly not. The next is at some remove from hazy IPA, being a pilsner called, of course, Crisp Little Thing. It's described on the can as an "easy drinking lager", which tends to be brewer-speak for bland. 4.7% ABV is certainly lower than typical for Sierra Nevada. Still, it looks well, being an enticing limpid gold in the glass, if a little lacking in head. It is crisp, so full marks there, but it's not plain or watery. There's a surprise stonefruit taste -- peach and apricot, with some bonus tropical lychee -- therefore it's certainly not a typical German-style lager like the Oktoberfest. This is definitely American, in a good and very Sierra Nevada sort of way. The fruity side does come at the expense of crispness, and it lacks that dry thirst-quenching power that the name suggests it should have. I'm not complaining, though. Rounded, fruity, uncrisp lagers are still absolutely OK with me when they're this well done.

They're going to run out of "cool" beer words soon, aren't they? With Crisp covered, the inevitable next step is Dank Little Thing. If you fancy some background reading, Stan has opinions. So, the brewery is going all-in on the stoner culture with their marketing here. I'm not sure that they walk the walk, however. Yes, the aroma does have a hard resinous edge, buoyed up by the heat from 7.5% ABV, which gives it a certain front-door-of-Amsterdam-Centraal effect -- weed smoke, not sticky buds. Any similarity ends there, however. The taste is centred on tropical fruits typical of hazy IPA, suggesting pineapple and mango in particular, set on a weighty base with the sweetness of orange-flavoured hard candy. The fruit is quickly overtaken by a sterner herbal bitterness, one which isn't beyond what bittering hops can do, but from the publicity material, and the phrase "ale with natural flavors" on the can, signifies the addition of terpenes. Black's of Kinsale went through a phase of doing this, in four of their beers from 2019, then stopped. It doesn't make the beer taste like weed and I doubt it'll get any stoners on board. Dankness works better when it's a side effect of high quality hops, rather than this sort of novelty contrivance. The overall picture is fine, but it does taste like a sweet and hazy IPA that's been bittered up in a way which does nothing to improve it. We go back to my contention that the original Hazy Little Thing is very hard to better.

Still, it's good that Sierra Nevada is still turning out interesting beers for this blog to cover. That's appreciated. I've often said that IPA is their strength, and a lane that they're best to stay in, but maybe there's room for more lagers too. They certainly appear to have developed skills in that direction.

Gebraut in Amerika

Blumenau -- pic from Wikimedia Commons

We had a visitor from Brazil at the monthly Beoir homebrewers' meeting in the Bull & Castle a couple of weeks ago (hi Tiago!). Though not a brewer himself, he brought us a few bottles of one of his favourites from back home: Eisenbahn Weizenbock. The brewery is based in Blumenau, a little piece of Germany in southern Brazil, and the output is appropriately Teutonic. The weizenbock certainly hits all the dark caramelised banana notes you'd expect from the style, though it lacks the spicy finesse found in top-drawer strong and dark wheat beers like Aventinus. One could get cross that it's another one of those by-the-book South American beers that shows little by way of creative brewing flair, but that would be churlish and ignores how tasty the contents of the glass actually are.

Meanwhile, on the Bull & Castle bar, a rotating tap had been given over to Sierra Nevada Oktoberfest. I had high hopes for this: a brewery as conscientious as Sierra Nevada wouldn't produce one of those awful sticky orange Oktoberfests that all the other American craft breweries do, would they? Sadly, they would: whatever demonic force compels them all to turn out these cloying horrors instead of something resembling clean German-style Oktoberfestbier was at work in the Chico brewhouse. Do people actually manage to get through this by the litre in the US? The thought is stomach-churning.

One nil to Brazil when the whistle went.