Brasserie Dupont, located in the rural town of Tourpes, Belgium, has been brewing under the name Dupont since 1920 but their site has house breweries as far bas as 1844. These days Brasserie Dupont is more well known for their quintessential saison, Dupont Saison, but their entire line up of beer is off the same caliber as Saison, including this wonderful Belgian strong blond ale, Moinette.
Troublette is a flavorful yet refreshing Belgian-style witbier, or white ale, brewed by Brasserie Caracole in Falmignoul, near Dinant, Belgium. If you’re looking for an alternative to Hoegaarden, then Caracole Troublette will be a treat being much more interesting and just as refreshing with zesty notes and a balanced flavor.
During my first visit to The Great American Beer Festival in 2010 I came across the Souththeast section where I discovered The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery. The very first beer I sampled was Milk Stout and it was so delicious that I had another 1 oz. sample and another. From that moment I knew that I had discovered one of my favorite stouts ever.
I find it refreshing when I find a full flavor stout with a wonderful aroma that is not strong or imperial. Firestone-Walker Brewing has done a wonderful job in doing this with creating this superb oatmeal stout with a familiar, yet complex, aroma and flavor profile.
Deschutes Brewery calls their American-style Black Ale, also known as Black IPA, a Cascadian Dark Ale, which reflects the nature of it’s origin. This beer is a great example of what happens when you innovate to combine a hoppy, bitter IPA with a roasty, chocolatey porter.
Sculpin IPA is a delicious IPA where dominated by citrusy hops yet with an expertly crafted balance of sweetness and bitterness. Sculpin comes out of San Diego, CA from Ballast Point Brewing Company. Ballast Point was founded in 1996 after two home brewers, Jack White and Yuseff, built a brewery in the back of a the homebrew shop that White had opened 4 years prior.
Brouwerij Westvleteren is one of the seven breweries that are officially considered Trappist because the beer is brewed by monks and each under the control of a Trappist monastery. The sole purpose of brewing the beer is to support the monastery. The Westvleteren brewery is located in the West Flanders province of Belgium in the town of Westvleteren. It was found in 1838 inside the Trappist Abbey of Saint Sixtus.
Although pale ale is a staple of the craft beer industry and likely the style responsible for growing the industry in the US from 80 breweries to over 1700, pale ale is many times underrated and under-appreciated, even by yours truly. In my quest to find great session beers (to balance against the super high gravity beers), I decided to get some friends together to have a blind tasting of pale ale. The results of this party culminated in both this story as well as an article I wrote on Menuism.com about American Pale Ale.
The craft beer made by Full Sail Brewing Company is of high quality, reasonable price, and easily accessible in 27 states. In fact, I’ve seen it at every Trader Joe’s that I’ve been to in California. Their pale ale is no exception to their high standards of quality. On a coast dominated by super hoppy and bitter pale ales, Full Sail has made a beer that is a refreshing departure by being more malt-forward than hops-forward.
Southern Tier is a craft brewery out of Lakewood, New York that produces 30,000 barrels of fine craft beer each year. An excellent example of their craftsmanship is one of their special limited availability beers called Imperial Gemini Blended Unfiltered Ale. This beer is not exactly what I expected from the East Coast. It has a strong citrus hop aroma with a strong bitter bite and was made from two of their other brews: Unearthly Imperial IPA and Hoppe Imperial Extra Pale Ale. This is a beer loaded with 6 varieties of hops and four different grains. Imperial Gemini, in particular, was given to me by Josh, a friend who lives in Vermont, so a special thanks goes out to him.
Beer 47 in a Tumblr
