Here Come The Hops!

Monday, October 29 marks the anticipated return of our award-winning Big A IPA!  After a five month hiatus, The Great British Beer Festival award-winning double IPA returns for a limited engagement.  We can only brew 100 barrels a month from October through January, so supplies of twelve ounce four packs and kegs will be limited, but available, throughout our distribution.  Tell your local beer store or beer bar that you need to see for yourself why the New York Times named Big A the top IPA in America and Men’s Journal picked it as one of the top 25 beers in America!

Here are the vital stats:

9.7% abv  120 IBU

Malts: North American 2-Row, British Pale Ale

Hops: Bittering: Magnum and Cascade

            Flavor: Magnum and CTZ

            Dry: Cascade, Nugget, Sterling, CTZ

Recommended Food Pairings:
Vietnamese, homemade guacamole, spicy scallops, tandoori chicken and spicy biryanis

Champion Firkin Friday!

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?  We've all heard this philosophical quandry and yet the answer is still profound: the tree doesn't make a sound.  

Well, after Big A IPA was named the Best American Beer at the Great British Beer Festival, we thought it would be best to make a sound in our own town.  

This Friday, September 10, our friends at the Portsmouth Brewery will be hosting a special Firkin Friday.  David Yarrington, Director of Brewing Operations will be tapping a firkin of Big A at the Portsmouth Brewery at 4 PM.  This cask was dry-hopped with Santiam, Simcoe, Centennial, and Cascade hops, the exact same ones that were in the winning cask.

We hope to see you all at the pub on Friday so we can share this special beer with you.   Since Portsmouth Little League didn't have the same success as in years past, we hope that this provides a fun, if slightly more adult alternative to celebrating a hometown champion. 

L'Chaim!

Working through the Hops Shortage

So it seems that the experiment with strategic hopping of our Big A IPA worked out well. I think that beer came out great and we’ve been hearing real positive feedback. I’ll be heading down to the Publick House in Brookline for the 5th Annual HopHead ThrowDown this Saturday to personally see how the Big A stands up to this countries best DIPA’s. Man, do I ever stop working? It’s tough, but dern it, someone’s gotta do it.

Luckily we got our creative hop juices flowing as we’re starting to make some changes to our Finest Kind as certain varieties become scarce. After dropping an obscene amount of money we were able to secure an extra amount of Magnum so our bittering addition hasn’t changed too much. We’ve decided to use some Super Styrians as a substitute for the Simcoes we were adding with the Magnums in the bittering addition. This was mostly done to save the Simcoes for the flavoring additions where that hop can really shine. As Simcoes are incredibly tight right now we’ve starting blending some Centennials into the flavor additions. We’ll run out of those and start to look at Summits, Glaciers, and Nuggets depending on what kind of horse trading (or straight up theft) we can do. Our whirlpool addition changed a bit as well as we’re now blending Cascades, EKG’s with the Santiams we’ve always used. The dry hopping has remained the same with Amarillos adding their distinctive aroma. The first batch is tasting great and should be out in the stores in the next few weeks. As we get closer to harvest and supplies run low we may have to make some other changes. It’s certainly been a challenging year but thankfully early indications are pointing to a great hop harvest this year. Maybe even a bumper crop. Hopefully that happens but we’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed.

DY

Note, Dave's post was originally written in mid-July. Recent signs point to an excellent hop harvest, which is taking place at this very moment, but there is still a good deal of uncertainty in the market. Stay tuned...