BetterBeerBlog

A few weeks ago, Sammy and I were in Windsor for the long weekend. While up there, I made plans to meet up with Mario from Brewed for Thought to hang out and drink some beers. I initially wanted to do a pub crawl of downtown Santa Rosa with one of the “locals” but instead, we were treated to a very chill, and relaxing kölsch tasting at Mario’s place.

While I initially wondered why Mario decided to do a kölsch tasting, all those thoughts burned off along with the warm Santa Rosa afternoon. Kölschs ended being the best thing to drink that afternoon after all.

Well, what is a kölsch anyway? According to the BJCP style guidelines, a kölsch is:

Kölsch is an appellation protected by the Kölsch Konvention, and is restricted to the 20 or so breweries in and around Cologne (Köln). The Konvention simply defines the beer as a “light, highly attenuated, hop-accentuated, clear top-fermenting Vollbier.”

Expanded further, it is one of the lightest ales you will ever have, when brewed correctly. The strength of the kölsch style isn’t that it’s a big beer, ham-fisted in all ways. Instead, a good kölsch is all about subtlties. The aroma should be light with only the slightest of hint of fruity esters. This is a brilliantly clear beer, pale to light gold in color with a white head. The flavors should showcase a soft, fully attenuated malt characteristic with very, very slight fruit characteristics. This is a balanced beer in which neither the malt nor hops dominate. The beer should finish smooth and crisp, medium-light in body and medium/medium-high in carbonation. If this beer sounds like a lager, it often gets confused for one.

Now that I’ve familiarized you with the kölsch style of beer, let’s get with the three beers in review.

Reissdorf Kölsch, 4.80% ABV

According to the BJCP Guidelines for this style, Reissdorf is a classic example of a beer brewed in this style. In the past, I would’ve just overlooked lager-looking beers like this and moved onto more robust ales. Since passing my BJCP test, I have become more open to trying all the different kinds of beer.

This beer pours a brilliantly clear, light gold with white head. The aroma is clean with subtle amounts of sweet malt, spicy hop and fruit esters. Despite the subtlety of the aroma, this is a flavorful beer. I can taste the pils malt sweetness and a slight fruit character that reminds me of pear with a moderate level of hop flavor and bitterness with a slightly dry finish. This is a medium-low bodied beer with a medium-high level of carbonation that lends this beer and spritzy and effervescent quality.

Alaskan Summer Ale, 5.3% ABV

I’ve actually already had this beer. In fact, I’ve featured it in one of my beer and food pairing menus. As it is with those events, I never have enough time to do a formal tasting while planning the menu. This particular pairing was well received.

The Alaskan Summer Ale pours out a crystal clear gold with white head. The aroma is sweet malt, spicy hop and some fruit esters; very similar to the Reissdorf. The flavor is more of the same. I am able to taste the sweetness of the pils malt and flavor and bitterness of both the European and American hops. This beer is medium/medium-low in body with medium-high/high level of carbonation that is tingly on the tongue and effervescent overall.

While this beer’s description may echo the Reissdorf, rest assured they are not the same beer. Both beers have a very similar flavor profile. By contrast, the Alaskan is just more malt flavor and aroma, has more hop characteristics and more fruity esters. Where the Reissdorf was all restraint and subtleties, the Alaskan “let’s it hair down”. Of course, coming from an American brewery, more of everything is to be expected, even from a style based on subtleties. Not a bad beer by any stretch of the imagination, in fact it’s one of my new favorites.

Drakes Blonde Ale, 4.8% ABV

I am a little perplexed why Mario included this into the kölsch tasting. The Blonde Ale is a category unto itself according to the BJCP style guidelines. Yet, according to  Drakes website, this beer is brewed as a kölsch-style ale. Go figure. Working in marketing, I could never understand why you’d want to mis-label something.

Anyway, this beer pours out clear, a slightly pale gold in color with a white head. The aroma smells a bit off with this beer. All the kölsch characteristics are there but there is a minerally aroma that permeates and even dominates the rest. This continues well into the flavor. The blonde is medium-low in body but high in carbonation. Really high. That’s when it hits me that the off-flavor I’m tasting is the carbonation. This beer is overly carbonated and I can’t help but think I’m drinking carbonated water. I’ve never had this beer prior so I have nothing to compare against.

As my initial exposure to Drakes line of beers, it’s a disappointment. Still, I won’t let one bum beer stop me from sampling more. I’m hoping it’s an isolated case but we’ll see.

Big thanks to Mario for inviting me over and letting me sit in on this tasting. While it’s very nice to be able to taste a range of beers, I find that you really understand the what a beer style is supposed to be when you do a horizontal tasting like this and compare the same style beers as brewed by different companies. I think I’ll be doing more of these for different styles myself.

The Double IPA festival at The Bistro is the kickoff event of Beerapalooza 2008. The Mrs. and I sent out an invitation to our beer loving friends to join us but in the end, we ended going up by ourselves. To be truthful, I was hoping to have my other beer buddies along with me for the festival. As much as I love my wife, hoppy beers are just not her bag of tea and I was afraid that she’d have a lousy time there as I sampled beer after beer. Lucky for me, I couldn’t have been more wrong!

We got a late start to the say and arrived at the Bistro about 3pm. By then, the place was at capacity. There was a crowd of people outside of the place, a crowd of people inside, and a crowd of people at the side where the majority of the beers were being served. Normally at these beer festivals, you pay a fee to participate. For some reason, I was led to believe that the fee for the double IPA festival was $25 with 5 drink tickets along with a commemorative sample glass. The fee ended up being $25 but you got 10 tickets instead of the five I thought you were going to get and the commemorative glass we got was from a previous beer festival as they ran out of the mini-pilsner style glasses. Instead we got mini-snifters which I thought were really cool in their own right.

One of the cool things about this festival was that we were given score sheets to rank the beers ourselves. Not only was this a way to keep track of what beers we liked but they also had information on the beers we were drinking as well. They listed the brewery, the beer, where they’re located, the brewery name, the ABV, IBU and blank spots for us to fill in appearance, aroma, flavor, mouthfeel, overall impression and totals. Since I am taking the BJCP class, I decided to score the beer according to the BJCP model.

Here’s how I scored the beers in alphabetical order (out of a total possible 50 points):

• 21st Amendment - Double Trouble (9.3% ABV, 100+ IBUs): 40
• 21st Amendment - Hop Crisis? (11.8% ABV, 100+ IBUs): 41
• Anderson Valley - 20th Anniversary Imperial IPA (8.7% ABV, 100 IBUs): 42. Sammy found this to be a very drinkable beer.
• Drakes - Denoginizer (9.7% ABV, 100+ IBUs): 43. If I remember correctly, this was a beer with a very pronounced hop flavor. It had a very nice nose and smooth, long lasting bitterness.
• Firestone Walker - Union Jack (8% ABV, 70 IBUs): 42
• Full Sail - Slipknot Imperial IPA(7.8% ABV, 80+ IBUs): 39 This one was probably my least favorite beer of the day but even then, a 39 makes it right there with most of the other beers I drank that day.
• Lagunitas - Hop Stoopid (8.4% ABV, 94 IBUs): 44 Our second favorite beer of the day. This beer has wonderful, floral hop aroma and a very pleasant, smooth hop flavor that was prominent, lasting but not overwhelming.
• Moylans - Hopsickle (9.2% ABV, 120 IBUs): 43 When Sammy first tried this beer, she said it made her head hurt because it was soo bitter. Knowing what to expect this time around, she found the beer to be much more enjoyable. Maybe because we had been drinking bitter beers all day, she wasn’t floored by the 120 IBU rating of this beer.
• Pizza Port - Hop 15 (7.8% ABV, 28 IBUs): 40 I really can’t believe this is beer was listed as having a 28 IBU rating. Looking on their website, I can’t find an exact number. Maybe they’re keeping that exact number under wraps for some reason?
• Russian River - Pliny the Younger (10.61% ABV, 60 IBUs): 47 The wife and I found this beer to have been the best. From what I heard, it ended up being “Best of Show” as well. Double Dog by Flying Dog ended up winning “Best of…”. Awesome nose, just as awesome taste. Really worth picking up if you can find it.
• Schooners Grill - Alpha Avalanche (9.5% ABV, 130 IBUs): 41 Sammy felt that this beer had a creamy body to it. What makes this beer notable for me is that this is the first beer where we had our tasting glass filled to the brim. Whenver I would go and pick up a tasting, I’d come back with my mini-snifter only half filled. Whenever the wife would come back, they’d have her topped off. After this, I had her go and get all the beers. See, being married does have a few perks.
• KC Jones - This is a beer that was recommended to us by Brendon, a fellow hop head we met at the Bistro. He said this was one of the hoppiest beers he had tried that day. Truth be told, we really didn’t like this beer. The aroma wasn’t memorable and the hop flavor was really sharp and long lasting. This beer was also cloudy in appearance, if I remember correctly, because it was cask-conditioned.
  

I learned about this event through the BJCP class. I was expecting more people from the class to have shown up but I only saw three others not including myself. There was Dave (who I mistakenly called Steve), Steve and Gail who also happen to run the website Beer by Bart (where they find good beer within walking distance from BART). We also made friends with a cool dude from El Cerrito named Brandon, Tom, Cherry, Chris and friends from Johnson & Johnson. Hopefully we can run into them at next week’s Barley wine festival at Toronado.

To end the evening, Sammy and I headed over to Buffalo Bills Brewing Company. This place is just a block away from the Bistro and for whatever reason, I had no idea they made their own beer until we got there and I noticed all the brewing equipment. What I also didn’t know was that they are the company responsible for one of the more popular pumpkin beers available. I really wanted to try their Blueberry Winter Warmer but to my disappointment, it was out. So was their Orange Blossom Cream Ale. In the end, I got their Tasmanian Amber Ale. I didn’t particularly enjoy the Tasmanian Amber Ale but to be fair, it really didn’t have a chance. My palette was still reeling from all the double IPAs I just had and anything short of another double IPA would’ve just tasted bland.

Sammy and I found the restaurant to be very clean and family friendly. The service was quick and attentive without being too attentive. We ordered the BBQ Devil Wings and the Buffalo Combo pizza. Despite being baked in a “spicy Tasmanian Devil, garlic chipotle sauce”, the wings had only a slight spicy heat to them. Sammy didn’t particulary enjoy the texture of the wings but I found them “okay”. The Buffalo Combo pizza wasn’t just “okay” as well. The flavors weren’t robust enough but maybe that’s because we’ve been drinking double IPAs all day and our palettes may have been shot. I’d like to give this place another try.

In any case, this was a supremely enjoyable day and we are looking forward the next beer event we go to. Until then, enjoy some pics from the event below.

2008 Bistro Double IPA Festival (click for photo gallery)