Thursday, August 4, 2011 will mark the first International IPA Day. All over the world, beer drinkers are gathering on this date to drink and toast hoppy, delicious, and bitter IPA beers. But when I recently heard that an event had not been planned in San Francisco to celebrate IPA, I had to do something about it. Now, together with Rosamunde Sausage Grill and Beer 47, San Francisco has an official International IPA Event!
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
