Friday, November 25, 2016
A Plum Good Idea
Brewers can take the same fruit and do wildly different things with it. In different hands, for example, a strawberry can be be a perfect sweet complement to the tartness of a Berliner Weisse or the added lightener to a blonde ale that makes it saccharine and undrinkable. So, it's pretty difficult to paint a fruit with one description in regard to its presence in beer.
That said, a handful of breweries are proving in recent months that plum not only can be a special addition to zip up the flavor of an already strong base beer but that it might be one of the best additions discovered in a while in order to give a bullish, daring jolt to tart beers.
Maybe the most proving example of this theorem is Trent's Plums, which truly has become the stand-out offering of Beryl's Beer, the too-often-overlooked barrel-aging specialists in Denver's RiNo neighborhood. This is a beer that walks the delicate line between taste-bud-waking tartness and over-acidity. But somehow, it's the presence of the fruity, juicy plums, when added to this sour brown aged for two years in red-wine barrels, that cut back on the tinge just enough for you to be both shocked and pleased. And it's a beer (tucked somewhere in the three tasters pictured above) that will make you go out of your way to stop at the brewery and try it again.
AC Golden put forth a slightly more puckery, but ultimately very successful, barrel-aged effort this fall known simply as Colorado Native Plum. Though just 6.5 percent ABV, it's a big ol' mouthful of tart - astringent with just a hint of sweetness that is all natural and shows no hints of the granulated sugar that can mark other, lesser fruit sour efforts. It's a challenge whose aftertaste sticks around for quite a while, but it too is balanced just enough by the dark-fruit addition to this aggressive beer.
Those who attended the Great American Beer Festival this year may have been lucky enough to sample a wider range of plum beers - or they may well not have been. Plum lambic offerings from the likes of Reno's Brasserie Saint James and Arvada's Yak and Yeti generated big lines - and then ran out quickly.
Is plum the next hot ingredient? The tart beers employing the fruit certainly have a limited audience. But it's a group of drinkers likely to recognize the enormous taste in the previously untapped fruit and seek out other brewers who are willing to try their own versions.
Brewers can take the same fruit and do wildly different things with it. In different hands, for example, a strawberry can be be a perfect sweet complement to the tartness of a Berliner Weisse or the added lightener to a blonde ale that makes it saccharine and undrinkable. So, it's pretty difficult to paint a fruit with one description in regard to its presence in beer.
That said, a handful of breweries are proving in recent months that plum not only can be a special addition to zip up the flavor of an already strong base beer but that it might be one of the best additions discovered in a while in order to give a bullish, daring jolt to tart beers.
Maybe the most proving example of this theorem is Trent's Plums, which truly has become the stand-out offering of Beryl's Beer, the too-often-overlooked barrel-aging specialists in Denver's RiNo neighborhood. This is a beer that walks the delicate line between taste-bud-waking tartness and over-acidity. But somehow, it's the presence of the fruity, juicy plums, when added to this sour brown aged for two years in red-wine barrels, that cut back on the tinge just enough for you to be both shocked and pleased. And it's a beer (tucked somewhere in the three tasters pictured above) that will make you go out of your way to stop at the brewery and try it again.
AC Golden put forth a slightly more puckery, but ultimately very successful, barrel-aged effort this fall known simply as Colorado Native Plum. Though just 6.5 percent ABV, it's a big ol' mouthful of tart - astringent with just a hint of sweetness that is all natural and shows no hints of the granulated sugar that can mark other, lesser fruit sour efforts. It's a challenge whose aftertaste sticks around for quite a while, but it too is balanced just enough by the dark-fruit addition to this aggressive beer. Those who attended the Great American Beer Festival this year may have been lucky enough to sample a wider range of plum beers - or they may well not have been. Plum lambic offerings from the likes of Reno's Brasserie Saint James and Arvada's Yak and Yeti generated big lines - and then ran out quickly.
Is plum the next hot ingredient? The tart beers employing the fruit certainly have a limited audience. But it's a group of drinkers likely to recognize the enormous taste in the previously untapped fruit and seek out other brewers who are willing to try their own versions.
Labels: AC Golden, Beryl's Beer, Brasserie Saint James, Fruit beers, Plum beers, Yak and Yeti
Tuesday, September 03, 2013
The Beers of Summer
Saying goodbye to summer is never easy. But after a year like this one, in which Colorado brewers added ingredients to beer that were quite unexpected - and, in almost every case, succeeded - it is especially difficult to want to turn the page.
From new fruits to vegetables to combinations of styles and additives that were a bit off track, breweries experimented and seemed almost to one up each other.
There were, for example, the grapefruit wars, in which beer makers went beyond describing their hop bombs as "having a citrus taste" and actually imbued it with a specific citrus fruit flavor. Strange Brewing made a Grapefruit IPA impressive in its combination of traditional hop flavor and acidity. But the best of the bunch - and maybe the beer of the summer - was Bull and Bush's 4.0 Grapefruit Pale Ale, which tasted remarkably similar to a fresh squeezed glass of juice with a malt balance and a tiny 4.0% ABV.
It was the summer too for watermelon. Fate's sublime Watermelon Kolsch (pictured to the left)
was full of both refreshment and watermelon pulp, adding to the joy of discovering a new style. Strange, ever the experimenter, also offered a Watermelon Hefe that brought a twist of excitement to a sometimes dull category of beer.
Trinity Brewing kept rocking its new sours but may have turned more heads with its Electrick Cucumbahh, a summer saison that used the natural sugars in the cucumber to sweeten the beer and make you see the vegetable anew.
Not content to stick just with fruits and vegetables as the new darlings of the season, Colorado Plus whipped out a Cinnamon Almond Ale that let the almond cream feel mellow the sharp cinnamon quite expertly.
Peach isn't a new beer additive, by any means. But Odell Brewing's Tree Shaker Peach IPA used the fruit in a different way. And even if the peach was only slightly perceptible, you knew you were drinking a hop bomb that had a different edge to it.
The summer became so ubiquitous with new additive experiments, in fact, that more traditional efforts almost felt half-hearted. A trip to Yak and Yeti for its summer wheat series left the Beer Geekette and I disappointed in a Strawberry Wheat that just didn't feel unique anymore.
The experimentation should continue in the raft of pumpkin and Christmas beers that are coming out now and soon will be on the horizon. But it wouldn't hurt to drop into some of the brewers mentioned above and remind them that a good idea works all year round, not just when it's hot.
Saying goodbye to summer is never easy. But after a year like this one, in which Colorado brewers added ingredients to beer that were quite unexpected - and, in almost every case, succeeded - it is especially difficult to want to turn the page.
From new fruits to vegetables to combinations of styles and additives that were a bit off track, breweries experimented and seemed almost to one up each other.
There were, for example, the grapefruit wars, in which beer makers went beyond describing their hop bombs as "having a citrus taste" and actually imbued it with a specific citrus fruit flavor. Strange Brewing made a Grapefruit IPA impressive in its combination of traditional hop flavor and acidity. But the best of the bunch - and maybe the beer of the summer - was Bull and Bush's 4.0 Grapefruit Pale Ale, which tasted remarkably similar to a fresh squeezed glass of juice with a malt balance and a tiny 4.0% ABV.
It was the summer too for watermelon. Fate's sublime Watermelon Kolsch (pictured to the left) was full of both refreshment and watermelon pulp, adding to the joy of discovering a new style. Strange, ever the experimenter, also offered a Watermelon Hefe that brought a twist of excitement to a sometimes dull category of beer.
Trinity Brewing kept rocking its new sours but may have turned more heads with its Electrick Cucumbahh, a summer saison that used the natural sugars in the cucumber to sweeten the beer and make you see the vegetable anew.
Not content to stick just with fruits and vegetables as the new darlings of the season, Colorado Plus whipped out a Cinnamon Almond Ale that let the almond cream feel mellow the sharp cinnamon quite expertly.
Peach isn't a new beer additive, by any means. But Odell Brewing's Tree Shaker Peach IPA used the fruit in a different way. And even if the peach was only slightly perceptible, you knew you were drinking a hop bomb that had a different edge to it.The summer became so ubiquitous with new additive experiments, in fact, that more traditional efforts almost felt half-hearted. A trip to Yak and Yeti for its summer wheat series left the Beer Geekette and I disappointed in a Strawberry Wheat that just didn't feel unique anymore.
The experimentation should continue in the raft of pumpkin and Christmas beers that are coming out now and soon will be on the horizon. But it wouldn't hurt to drop into some of the brewers mentioned above and remind them that a good idea works all year round, not just when it's hot.
Labels: Bull and Bush, Colorado Plus Brew Pub, Fate Brewing, Strange Brewing, Summer beers, Trinity Brewing, Yak and Yeti
Thursday, May 09, 2013
A Plus to the Colorado Brewing Scene
So many breweries open these days in Colorado that it's nearly impossible to determine immediately what the unique qualities are that each bring to the scene. But Colorado Plus Brew Pub, which debuts Monday in Wheat Ridge, has a lot going for it that jumps out right away.
First, it is a 56-tap beer bar/brewery in Wheat Ridge - with every beer coming from a Colorado-based brewery. Every craft beer haven that has come to the Denver area so far has planted itself in Denver - and with the exception of Hops and Pie, most are in about a one-mile radius of each other downtown. This is the first exceptional effort to take Colorado craft beer en masse to the suburbs, and one can only hope this effort to spread the gospel of craft beer takes root.
Second, it's a place that will offer beers from breweries that aren't mainstays in most bars. The first menu, rolled out for a Thursday-night soft opening, includes beers from Hall Brewing, Denver Beer Co., Telluride Brewing and Yak and Yeti - places you have to search pretty hard to find their taps outside their main brewhouses. With just 20 of the 56 beers expected to be constants and 36 expected to be seasonal rotators, the selections offer a lot of opportunity to explore the Colorado beer scene.
In addition to being a taphouse, Colorado Plus will begin offering its own creations for consumption in about a month. Adam Draeger, the full-time brewer at Yak and Yeti (pictured above), will also serve as the Colorado Plus brewmaster. His offerings will be unique. With the best Colorado IPAs on tap, he noted, he doesn't need to make one of his own. Instead, he'll focus on Belgian styles and hop bombs like a double IPA or Russian imperial stout that aren't readily available from elsewhere. That will add variety to the menu, and anyone who has tried his Yak and Yeti beers knows that Draeger knows how to craft something special.
And the menu, which also features Colorado wines and Colorado spirits, won't be shabby. Buffalo, lamb and pork sliders, mussels and tasty fries all blend well with the beers.
If there is one downside to the beer menu, it's that it might fall short of the expectations of hard-core beer geeks. While you have to respect the originality of any taphouse that serves Breckenridge and New Belgium beers but not Avalanche or Fat Tire, there was a slight lack of daring in the first wave of selections. There was just one sour on the menu - Dry Dock's Ambassador - and nothing seemed to come from the vaults of one-time beers, as you see at places like Freshcraft or Hops and Pie.
But the atmosphere is welcoming, the prices are very reasonable (no beer over $7) and the fact this is opening in the suburbs is special. No question, it will be fun to watch Colorado's newest beer bar/brewery grow.
So many breweries open these days in Colorado that it's nearly impossible to determine immediately what the unique qualities are that each bring to the scene. But Colorado Plus Brew Pub, which debuts Monday in Wheat Ridge, has a lot going for it that jumps out right away.First, it is a 56-tap beer bar/brewery in Wheat Ridge - with every beer coming from a Colorado-based brewery. Every craft beer haven that has come to the Denver area so far has planted itself in Denver - and with the exception of Hops and Pie, most are in about a one-mile radius of each other downtown. This is the first exceptional effort to take Colorado craft beer en masse to the suburbs, and one can only hope this effort to spread the gospel of craft beer takes root.
Second, it's a place that will offer beers from breweries that aren't mainstays in most bars. The first menu, rolled out for a Thursday-night soft opening, includes beers from Hall Brewing, Denver Beer Co., Telluride Brewing and Yak and Yeti - places you have to search pretty hard to find their taps outside their main brewhouses. With just 20 of the 56 beers expected to be constants and 36 expected to be seasonal rotators, the selections offer a lot of opportunity to explore the Colorado beer scene.
In addition to being a taphouse, Colorado Plus will begin offering its own creations for consumption in about a month. Adam Draeger, the full-time brewer at Yak and Yeti (pictured above), will also serve as the Colorado Plus brewmaster. His offerings will be unique. With the best Colorado IPAs on tap, he noted, he doesn't need to make one of his own. Instead, he'll focus on Belgian styles and hop bombs like a double IPA or Russian imperial stout that aren't readily available from elsewhere. That will add variety to the menu, and anyone who has tried his Yak and Yeti beers knows that Draeger knows how to craft something special.
And the menu, which also features Colorado wines and Colorado spirits, won't be shabby. Buffalo, lamb and pork sliders, mussels and tasty fries all blend well with the beers.
If there is one downside to the beer menu, it's that it might fall short of the expectations of hard-core beer geeks. While you have to respect the originality of any taphouse that serves Breckenridge and New Belgium beers but not Avalanche or Fat Tire, there was a slight lack of daring in the first wave of selections. There was just one sour on the menu - Dry Dock's Ambassador - and nothing seemed to come from the vaults of one-time beers, as you see at places like Freshcraft or Hops and Pie.
But the atmosphere is welcoming, the prices are very reasonable (no beer over $7) and the fact this is opening in the suburbs is special. No question, it will be fun to watch Colorado's newest beer bar/brewery grow.
Labels: Colorado Plus Brew Pub, Yak and Yeti
