Beer Run Blog

A Georgia Beer Pioneer Comes to Colorado

Living in South Carolina in the late 1990s, SweetWater Brewing was an ideal that you hoped other brewers could achieve. Its 420 Extra Pale Ale was as edgy a taste as you could find in the hops arena, and the rest of its portfolio was a dive into different styles.

I didn't think it would be 20 more years (save for Great American Beer Festival tastings and occasional trips to Atlanta or Savannah) before I could sip SweetWater again in the comfort of my own home. And, like much in the craft-brewing scene, the Atlanta pioneer, which began distribution to Colorado on Feb. 1, has changed over the past two decades. But it remains a very relevant national brewery.

It entered Colorado this month with its hoppiest foot forward, coming in with four different IPA variants and a quartet of seltzers that will give the best light-bodied fruited malt beverages in Colorado a run for their money (for whatever that may be worth to beer drinkers). And while SweetWater is definitely a worthwhile addition to the Colorado-sold portfolio, it's going to have to rely on some of the unique niches it plays in to really stand out in this crowded field.

The best way to do that is to show off its G13 IPA, a beer that smells so dank you might mistake it for a joint but surprises you with a pleasantly drinkable body that is reminiscent of biting into a dandelion and is reflective of an old-school West Coast IPA. In fact, what stands out most about it is that its aroma, which walks a tight line between being boldly assertive and being overbearing, actually seems to balance the medium-sized body and make it more intense. Made with a hemp flavor blend, this is a beer you don't soon forget, and you want more.

The same can't be said for the High Light Lo-Cal Easy IPA, which, like the rest of the 100-calorie, 4% ABV ilk, is a beer that seems to hope you can write off its lack of flavor as a small downside to its healthier makeup (and the fact it comes in 15-packs rather than 12-packs). There is an upfront, bitter bite from its hop blend that includes El Dorado and Simcoe, but it fades quickly into a light body that is a whole lot of nothing. It's not that this beer is any worse than 100-calorie IPAs in general, but it certainly doesn't elevate the style.

SweetWater's H.A.Z.Y. IPA, its newest addition to its year-round lineup, does a better job of capitalizing on a trendy style, though it lacks the bomb of tropical flavors that many of Colorado's best purveyors of this genre offer. Instead, it presents a softer flavor, with an exceptional grain base that doesn't diminish the hop presence so much as it makes the specific hops flavor harder to pinpoint. This is a worthwhile addition to the local scene specifically because it is so different from the pack, though dedicated haze bros might think it doesn't go far enough in pushing away from traditional IPAs.

And then there is 420, still enjoyable after all these years, though its hop profile — Centennial, Cascade, Simcoe and US Golding — feels like a throwback, particularly with the presence of a woody malt sweetness that emboldens the flavor even as it cuts down on the hop bite. Those with ties to the Southeast are likely to feel a pull to this, but those new to the brewery might find it hard to identify the characteristics that would make this beer memorable to those not taking notes on it. The palate is clean, the hops explosion is laid back, but its flavor falls short of standing out.

But then there is the Oasis hard seltzer line, which offers the biggest surprise kick of the bunch. No, really. Its Raspberry Lemon bursts with the nose of a fantastic popsicle and offers a spark from the combination of berry and citrus flavors, and its Strawberry Kiwi has one of the juiciest flavors of the genre and remains refreshing. Beer aficionados aren't going to turn their stripes over to the seltzer world because of these two offerings (two other Oasis brands are a bit more boring), but even they will have to admit that SweetWater at least manages to get a lot of flavor out of an often flavor-free sector.

SweetWater isn't stopping with just these initial offerings, as the brewery announced just last week that it's bringing a tropical wheat ale and a barrel-aged sour hazy IPA made for its 24th anniversary to town. Maybe some of the more experimental beers from its Woodlands Project will follow. 

If you haven't tried SweetWater, it's worth getting your hands on some and thinking about how similarly aged Colorado breweries, like Oskar Blues or Left Hand, have aged and kept pace with the massive changes in the craft beer scene. This is, no question, a brewery for hopheads who like their beer less tropical and more steeped in woody, grassy, more traditional hops, mixed in with some terpene advancement. But there's something to like here.

Labels: Georgia beers, hazy IPAs, IPA, Pale Ale, seltzers, Session beers, SweetWater Brewing

Is This Colorado's Most Improved Brewery?

While the release of any hazy gives you a window into a brewery's quality — Is it really making the hottest craft style well or does it seem like it is making the beer just to try to be in conversation? — that may never have been more true than with Holidaily Brewing's December release of Big Henry Hazy IPA.

Few gluten-free beer makers have tried to make a New England IPA, and some of those that have ended up producing lighter-bodied beers that didn't approximate the appeal of the style. But Holidaily's offering shows not only why it stands out from the group but why the Golden brewery may be Colorado's most improved brewery over the five years since it opened in February 2016.

What jumps out at you the most about this latest gluten-free release is the fact that you can't tell this is a gluten-free beer. Big Henry includes a great deal of pineapple flavor with a touch of passionfruit as well, and it has a touch of an alcohol burn on its nose. It doesn't have any flavors that would tell you there is no barley in here, or that it isn't classically made in any way.

And this is the story of Holidaily, a brewery launched by industry veteran Karen Hertz (pictured above) because she wanted to drink good beer again while dealing with health conditions that required here to go gluten-free. Substituting millet and buckwheat for barley and utilizing yeast raised in a gluten-free environment, it's spent the past few years blowing away the expectations of drinkers thinking that a lack of certain ingredients automatically means drinking beer with a plastic aftertaste.

The brewery launched with just three beers on tap but grew fairly quickly because it showed it could meet a specialty demand. And, as Hertz often has emphasized, it's sought to expand its reach to drinkers who don't need or seek out gluten-free beers but want Holidaily because of its flavor.

One way it's done that is by offering a greater variety of beers than most gluten-free breweries. Walk into the taproom, and you're likely to find something sour, something barrel-aged and unique offerings like a cherry Belgian ale in addition to standard styles.

But the bigger success has been in creating tastes that stand-out, regardless of the consideration of ingredients in them. Patchy Waters, its pumpkin ale that sells out quickly, manages to capture the many flavors of the season without any of the backtaste bitterness that accompanies spice-forward beers. The Favorite Blond is a smooth porch pounder with just enough hop backbone to give it real personality. The Riva Stout is roasty and sooty without being bitter or burnt.

But Big Henry is arguably its most impressive product yet. Yes, the body is a slight bit lighter than some of the style, but still allows the tropical flavors to shine and to give the impression that this is thick and stewy, even if it's actually a bit easier on your palate. The recipe was inspired by Boombastic Hazy IPA, Holidaily's GABF medal winner in 2019, but was given a bill of more classical (and less expensive) hops such as Cashmere, Mosaic and Simcoe, so that it could can Big Henry at a price substantially less than the $24/4-pack it otherwise would have cost.

Even if you don't find yourself in northwest Golden where you can stop by the taproom, it's getting easier to find Holidaily out and about. It is offered on tap in a number of breweries that don't have their own gluten-free options, and Hertz expands to expand retail distribution outside of Arizona and Colorado this year. And the brewery has become a key part of the Colorado beer community, as demonstrated by its announcement that it will donate 10% of all taproom sales on Jan. 28 to Falling Rock Tap House, to help the restriction-battered beer bar stay open.

Labels: Gluten-free beer, hazy IPAs, Holidaily Brewing

A Treatise: Hazy IPA Is Here to Stay - And You Should Learn to Love It

Just one sip of Epic Brewing's Lupulin Burst leaves you no doubt that you are putting an entirely new style of beer into your mouth. It isn't just that you are looking into a glass of murky, almost soupy liquid. It's that what flows over your tongue is so full of pineapple and mango, so juicy and yet still so crisp in its hop backbone, that you can't categorize it as much as you can sit and admire.

Well, actually now you can categorize it - it's a hazy IPA, a strange-looking riff on America's contribution to the increased bitterness in worldwide ales that was mocked at first as the product of lazy brewers, then slowly grew an acceptance as it developed an increased following. This year, the Brewers Association created a category for Great American Beer Festival judging called "Hazy or Juicy IPA," and it received 414 entries - far more than traditional category leader American-style IPA and more than enough to tell haters of the style that their time was done.

But the realness of hazy IPA - and its true beauty - lies in more than its mass proliferation in the craft-beer scene. After two years of evolution, it lies in the fact that this style is no longer an off-shoot of IPA so much as it is something truly different. At its best, the beer represents an outpouring of tropical flavors that even the boldest traditional IPAs have only hinted at in their aroma and flavor. It signifies a blending of bitterness and softness that once might be considered unthinkable, as well as refreshment in a way that aggressively flavored beers have never presented.

And it's time to stop nitpicking, to quit complaining and just to give this evolutionary and revolutionary style its due, because it's not going away.

"The average bitterness (in IPAs) is coming down. I think that's about consumer preference," said Neil Fisher, head brewer and owner of Weldwerks Brewing, after an experimental brewing seminar on New England-style IPAs at this year's Big Beers, Belgians and Barleywines Festival. "We tried to veer away from brewing to the aesthetic and more toward brewing to the style that we love. Nobody who is doing this is saying 'I want to make it hazy.'"

Fisher, who is one of the true pioneers of the style, began making juicier, more approachable IPAs because he, like many beer geeks, was turned off in the late 2000s by the rush to produce triple IPAs and other such beers that exceeded 100 IBUs. He estimated at the Big Beers seminar that 95 percent of the brewers making hazy or New-England-style IPAs were brewers producing less than 20,000 barrels a year who don't have labs set up to record earth-shattering IBU levels in their products.

Much of the flavoring in these hazy IPAs comes from dry-hopping, giving them both a more appreciable nose and a more prevalent taste of these citrus hops, whether they be Mosaic or Citra or El Diablo. At certain rates of dry-hopping, you actually lower the IBUs in beer, making it less lastingly bitter while blowing up the flavor of the lupulin and letting it be so bold as to bend genres on the juiciness that one can pack into beer.

Weldwerks seemed to introduce Colorado to the idea of hazy IPAs through its Juicy Bits, a beer that is light on bitterness in the nose but heavy in pineapple in the taste, ultimately finishing smoothly while bombarding you with flavor. And quick to the party was Outer Range Brewing of Frisco, creating palate pleasers like In the Deep Steep Double IPA, a beer that offers both huge citrus and big hop acidity lingering on the back of your palate, producing oddly soft and tropical tones that leave you longing for more.

But if not every brewery was quick to jump on board with the trend, several have made up for lost time in just the past six months with beers that push the envelope even further away from sharp bitterness and toward an almost Hawaiian burst of flavors that celebrate the diversity of hops.

Epic is the poster child for adaptation of the style, jumping into the genre only this year but producing a beer in Lupulin Burst that is so uniquely flavorful that it very well may be the best beer of any type produced so far in 2018. But the Denver brewery deserves credit also for making a slightly smaller version of the style, RiNo APA, that want an easier haze that is delightfully subtle in both its bitterness and its juice.

Great Divide Brewing, which seemed slightly conflicted on how far it wanted to dive into the haze pool with its Heyday IPA introduced in April, went full-in this summer with its Hazy IPA, to great results. This presents a citrusy, lush hop that never fails to finish its introduction with a back hop bite, and it all comes at you so smoothly that you'll want to drink all night.

River North Brewing hits home too with its Mountain Haze, which relies on Citra hops to give you both sweet and bitter but threads a needle perfectly between the two flavors, leaving you both sated and thirsty for more of the flavor when you are done.

Still, some of the finest hazy IPAs in Colorado come from smaller brewers who have thrown caution to the wind and produced such genre-redefining examples of the beer that they can not be ignored.

Urban Lumberjack IPA, from Lakewood's Westfax Brewing, resembles hop soup but boasts both sweet and full pine and satisfies in every drop.

And Colorado Springs' Cerberus Brewing  has crafted an Elysium IPA that is slightly more bitter on the back bite than some of its stylistic brethren but envelops your taste buds in mango and guava on the way there such that you feel you've been feasting on something Polynesian with just a hint of pine needles as the aftertaste.

There undoubtedly will be more breakthroughs and more notable, crushable hazy IPAs to come. But the best way beer drinkers can prepare for them is to accept that this is not just some bastardization of the IPA - unlike, say, the milkshake IPAs that have earned their own level of hell in Dante's Inferno - but a turn toward a different flavor profile that opens up a new storehouse of tastes in craft beer.

This is worth celebrating.

Labels: Big Beers, Cerberus Brewing, Epic Brewing, Great American Beer Festival, Great Divide, hazy IPAs, Outer Range Brewing, River North Brewery, Weldwerks Brewing, Westfax Brewing

The Fruited IPA: Can We Just Kill This Trend?

Debate continues to rage after some two years on whether the New England IPA, a hazier take on the style with more citrus and tropical fruit overtones and less bitter bite, is inspired flavor or just laziness. But whether you like this slight variation on America's favorite craft-beer style or not, this discussion serves only to distract from a far more virulent strain of experimentation infecting the IPA.

For two summers, craft beerdom has been inundated with India pale ales inexplicably brewed with additives of fruit that sometimes are subtle and sometimes are really not. And it's time for the drinking public to stand up and say they want their hoppy beers to taste like pine and flowers and occasionally grapefruit but certainly not like a watered-down tangerine or pie-baking experiment gone awry.

These fruited IPAs may be considered gateways to the more acerbic, classically American version of the bitter beer, but in almost every instance they bastardize the heart of the beers that they are riffing on, and not to positive effect. And what you get, in many instances, is a strange knock-off of far better beers that should be left alone to define a brewery.

Example A of this is Weldwerks' Fruity Bits Strawberry Shortcake (right), a New England-style IPA made with strawberry. The brewery's Juicy Bits is Colorado's standard bearer for the hazy IPA, bursting to life with both the sweet and bitter sides of citrus fruit; when it's double-dry-hopped, it becomes simply one of the best beers in the state. But when ingredients as clashing with bitterness as strawberry and vanilla beans are introduced to the beer, it becomes an out-of-place, training-wheels IPA in which the hops become such an afterthought that is seems stylistically misplaced.

Avery's Real Peel IPA, made with tangerine peel, strikes a similar discordant note. Here is one of the chief hop purveyors in the state mixing in one of the most subtle citrus fruits on the planet to the effect that both the hops and the fruit get lost in the blend. Coming from the same brewery that will blow your taste buds out and make you smile with its Maharaja Imperial IPA, there is a disconnect.

New Belgium's range of fruit-accented beers tell a similar story. Its Citradelic tangerine IPA is aloof in both its fruit and hop tastes, and the medium-bodied beer seems unsure of what it wants to be. It sets the stage for its Juicy Mandarina IPA - a wheat IPA that isn't actually infused with fruit additives but leans so much toward fruit tastes in is hop profile that it too loses the flavor of said hops.

I mention these three breweries in particular because they literally are three of the best in Colorado that are taking these strange side roads when they have hit so many times over with full-flavored hop bombs and barrel-aged sours, and even with subtle delights like an Avery Joe's Pils or the sadly discontinued New Belgium Mothership Wit. They clearly know what they're doing.

Not all fruited IPAs miss the mark. Numerous breweries, for example, have used grapefruit to increase the bitterness of the style, appropriate as some hops can taste naturally like the fruit. Sam Adams livened up its Rebel IPA by adding in mango juice, giving it heightened tropical feel even as it did not tone down the natural grassiness of the hops. And Denver Beer scored a surprising victory this summer with its Maui Express Coconut IPA, using the coconut not to add a  particular island taste but to calm the hops just enough that you can feel a different element in what may be the closest thing to a summer IPA that the industry has developed.

But the fruited IPAs in general seem so hell-bent on yelling "Look at my creativity!" and trying to lure non-hop heads to the style that they become needless diversions in a genre of bitter beers that still has lots of room to grow without tossing in everything in a grocer's produce aisle. Let's recommit to the idea that IPAs are bitter, piny, earthy, flowery and sometimes naturally citrus-y without the need to introduce flavors that veer these offerings away from what has made the style great.

Labels: Avery Brewing, Denver Beer Co, Fruit beers, grapefruit IPA, hazy IPAs, IPA, New Belgium Brewing, Sam Adams, Weldwerks Brewing

Checking in on ... Evergreen Brewery & Tap House

Nestled at the feet of several mountains, Evergreen is a reachable world-away-from-the-world stop for Denverites, a place where one can lose themselves in a solitary hike for a few hours before facing the gauntlet of Interstate 70 again. But up until just the past few years, it was a place where folks had to do this without that one gem of city life they desired to transplant with them — a local brewery.

The 10,000-person hamlet now has three places that make their own brand of Evergreen-inspired beer. And for the outdoorsman with a thirst, particularly those hiking or biking at Elk Meadows Park, an oasis in the form of Evergreen Brewery and Tap House offers the kinds of refreshing ales and mountain views that are preferred — nay, necessary — to cap a perfect day in nature.

Now two years old, the brewery and kitchen consistently offers five or six of its own creations, plus an equal or greater number of visiting taps, including one typically small-batch sour that it lovingly refers to as its Microbe of the Week. Sandwiches are stacked with meat, and the five-item kids' menu adds to the family-friendly air of the completely enclosed porch with views of Snyder Mountain.

But to be sure, the main reason to stop here is the Ginger Cream, an exorbitantly refreshing and full-flavored ginger bomb for a creation with so light a body. The kick of spice, combined with the easiness of the body, may make this a perfect post-hike beer, refreshing you even as it makes you consider its unusual taste.

Evergreen doesn't rest on just one tasty brew, however. Its Elk Meadow IPA is balanced but still carries a piny bite. Its Two Kilts Red Ale has classical up-front malt with a late-breaking bitter bump in the back. And its West Coast Coast Quaker oatmeal stout presents a full-mouthed roasted feel that borders on coffee.

About the only recent beer that didn't land well was its Tiny Ricks Inter Dimensional Amarillo/Simcoe Pale Ale, a hazy beer that offered bitterness but no particular hop bite, leaving it to feel undefined.

But this is relaxation and mountain living in the form of a brewery. And it's worth a stop, either for the solitary hiker or for the brood of explorers, right after you peel off your boots.

Labels: Evergreen Brewery & Tap House, ginger beers, hazy IPAs, hiking, IPA, oatmeal stout, sour Belgian