Better Beer Blog

For once, Sammy and I were able to make it to a festival at its early stages. The goal every time is to get to a beer festival early enough to get a seat and to sample some (hopefully!) good beers before they’re all gone. The Hop Rhizome Festival at the Bistro is different from other beer festivals in that the star of the show isn’t a beer or series of beers but a key ingredient: hops.

Hops, in case you weren’t aware, is one of the four principle ingredients of beer. Hops are used in beer as a bittering agent to balance out the sweetness of the malted barley. In addition, they give some beers a wonderful floral, citrus, piney aroma and contribute greatly to a beer’s flavor profile. In addition, hops have mild, antibacterial properties that allow its use as a preservative.

The Bistro had four varieties of hops for sale: cascade, centennial, Chinook and nugget. By far, cascade is one of the more popular hops used in brewing today. It’s floral and citrus characteristics are highly prized by brewers and if you’ve ever had a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, then you my friend have tasted cascade hops. I already have a cascade growing in my backyard but I picked up another cascade rhizome as well as centennial (I think). We’ll be putting these into the dirt this weekend and I’ll take some pics to share with everyone.

Easily finding a seat, Sammy and I settled into the festival to enjoy ourselves the brief time we were going to be there. I ordered Russian River Brewing Company’s (RRBC) Pliny the Elder and Sammy ordered Green Flash’s Imperial IPA. I spent many minutes looking over the board of beers at the Bistro thinking if I should have ordered another beer other than Pliny. It’s not the Pliny is a bad beer, quite the opposite really, it’s just that I should make an effort to always try something new and then go back to my favorites.

Sammy, on the other hand, looked a bit overwhelmed by the Green Flash Imperial IPA. My wife is not a hoppy beer loving person but she tends to gravitate toward Imperial (or double) IPAs because of their increased sweetness. In what I would consider a good Imperial IPA, the beer should have balance. The hop flavors are aggressive but not overpowering and there should be a strong, malt backbone to support all those hops. Having that strong, malt backbone gives this style a surprising sweetness one would not necessarily expect. This is what Sammy was expecting but instead she found a beer with aggressive hop flavors but not enough malt backbone for her liking. I tried this beer and found it very enjoyable but the hop bitterness clings to your tongue and doesn’t let go. I mean, wow, it really sticks.

Sammy and I also tried Phat Quail from EJ Phair and a barley wine as well. Unfortunately, we didn’t take any tasting notes so I don’t remember too well the Phat Quail and I don’t think I even tried Sammy’s barley wine. It was about this time that Steve and Gail from Beer by Bart showed up and we got to talking with them. I met Steve and Gail from the BJCP classes I was taking. Their website is chalk full of information about good craft breweries all accessible by public transportation. From what Sammy tells me, they are really into quality and only list bars, brew pubs and breweries that care about beer. The beers have to be good and the staff has to be knowledgeable. Basically, if Steve and Gail walk into a bar and they know more about beer than the bartender, the joint is not getting on their list. With such lofty standards one can expect the establishments they’ve listed to be top-notch.

Unfortunately for Sammy and me, we had to leave the Hop Rhizome Festival just as it was picking up. We had a prior engagement that afternoon and needed to head back to San Jose to get ready. Overall, it was a very pleasant and relaxing festival to have gone to. We talked to some good people, sampled some good beers and picked up some hop rhizomes that I hope I’ll be able to harvest and brew into a BetterBeerBlog Harvest Ale. We’ll definitely come back to this event next year but with more time to spend.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 9:39 am and is filed under Hop Rhizome Beer Festival. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.