For tonight’s post-tsnownami snowmageddon snowpocalypse -blizzard update,* I thought I’d pull one of the fun beers out of the fridge, happy that 1) it isn’t still snowing, 2) my car seems so far in good working order, and 3) we still have functional heat and electricity. Given the low tonight is in the -10 area of the Fahrenheit scale, that last one deserves particular celebration.
Here is the chosen beer, in its gloriousness:
Basic Info:
Name: 30th Anniversary – Grand Cru (which I keep mistyping as cry). There were actually four 30th Anniversary beers released from what I can tell, so if we go by wine standards, the Grand Cru label means I managed to snag the best of the bunch.
Origin: Sierra Nevada, Chico, CA
Style: American Strong Ale
ABV: 9.2%
IBU: couldn’t find it, but it was WAY up there.
I drank this: at home, with a cat in the background. The cat, who was refusing to play along and look at me, is Jamie.
The 30th Anniversary Grand Cru I have seriously typed cry every time is a blend of Oak-Aged Bigfoot (Sierra Nevada’s Barleywine), Celebration Ale (the Winter Seasonal Fresh Hop IPA), and “fresh” Pale Ale (i.e., the Sierra Nevada with the bright green label that y’all had better already know by now). They took this lovely mishmash, dry hopped the bejeezus out of it, and then bottled it. The result (once we managed to get the cork out of the bottle, which was a lengthy feat involving gnashing of teeth, twisting of bottle, breakage of cork and eventual deployment of corkscrew) looks like this:
You can see the wire cork cage peeking out behind the glass if you can avert your eyes from the pretty copper color of the beer. Corked beer bottles: when you care enough to snazz it up like wine.
Anyway, the actual beer is flipping fantastic and easily one of the top 10 I’ve had in years. It starts with the awesomesauce fresh, resinous hop scent of the Celebration Ale, with a touch of caramelly-sweet malts in the back. The head that you can see on the beer is lovely – thick, creamy, and around for the whole glass.
Flavor-wise, it was roughly what I was expecting when I saw the combination of beers they listed. It’s primarily a hophead’s dream beer, yet it also has a strong malty backbone. To start with the malts (before I go into hophead spasm): the malts are primarily caramelly and sweet and toasty, held up by oak-aging (read: more toast) and the high alcohol volume – the combination works to create what is easily the smoothest, creamiest mouthfeel I’ve ever experienced in a beer this hoppy. This is one of those beers that is the mouthfeel equivalent of drinking heavy cream: I wouldn’t want it in July, but if it’s going to be minus supercold degrees out tonight, I’m all over it.
While I tend to go more strongly for the bright, clear, citrus-style hops most of the time, this beer isn’t in that kind of mood – it’s a resin-bomb. It’s the sort of resin that screams “wet hop” – rich and piney and bitter, almost mouth-coating. And STRONG. *insert happy gurgle noise here*
Honestly, what happened, and why I’m so unabashedly in love with this beer over so many others that I’ve had, is that it confused the hell out of my tastebuds. What I mean by this is that if there’s any truth to the idea that tastebuds are “mapped” to emphasize certain tastes in certain areas (i.e., the tip of the tongue tastes sweet, the back bitter, the sides sour and salty), this beer redrew that map. I could map out specific areas of my tongue that were tasting specific sorts of flavors, but it wasn’t the normal map: the alcohol/caramel sweetness came on the sides of my tongue, the dry toast flavor at the back, the hoppy bitterness more at the tip. So, like, everything was backwards. It’s *fascinating* (<—– with jazzhands).
The closest comparison I can come up with for those of you in the 30th Anniversary-deprived sectors of life is a Stone Double Bastard, but with a heavy cream mouthfeel. This was excellent, and I’m glad I got to enjoy it.
Keep up the awesome brewing, Sierra Nevada!
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*It appalls me that “tsnownami” and “snowmageddon” were both accepted without question by the spellchecker on this program. I thought I’d made up that particular spelling of tsnownami just then (my brilliant addition being the t at the beginning of the word – I hadn’t seen that yet). Poo.
Oddly, despite the program’s acceptance of the words I just mentioned, even this program won’t accept the word “snowpocalypse.” I think it must be over it too. So seriously, by next winter we really need some new bad snow puns to work with.
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Boulevard Chocolate Ale: the saga
Posted in Beer, tagged a history of boulevard chocolate ale, Boulevard Chocolate Ale, editorial comment, what went down on February 17, 2011 | 3 Comments »
I would feel remiss as a blogger if I didn’t relate to you people what happened with the Boulevard Chocolate Ale. Because the situation surrounding this beer qualifies as a “what happened” rather than a “standard limited edition beer release.”
Basically, the whole of Kansas City went berserk.
For those of you not familiar with the area, Boulevard is KC’s biggest and favoritest brewery, and the chocolatier they worked with, Christopher Elbow, is a local legend for making Beyond the Impossible-level awesome chocolate.* People were excited, with good reason. It’s like everything that’s awesome about Kansas City’s food scene (except the BBQ) rolled into a beer.
There was a lot of chatter before the beer’s release (which kept getting pushed back due to some kind of issue surrounding the label) – heavy anticipation, lots of beer geeks bugging each other online and calling into the store I work at wanting to know if the release date was set, that sort of thing. The longer we waited, the more we talked; the more we talked, the more excited we became.
When the Chocolate Ale finally appeared, the people that had been talking went out and bought it. Quickly. Thanks to the power of twitter and FSM knows what else, most liquor stores in the metro area sold out within hours of receiving their Tuesday-ish shipments.
The sellout happened when the only people aware of the new beer were the city beer geeks, who had been excitedly discussing this stuff for months.
But then it got worse. On the post-release, post-sellout Friday after the Tuesday beer buy-a-thon, the Kansas City Star (our local paper) stoked the fire by running a front page story about Boulevard Chocolate Ale, thus alerting the entire non-beer-snob populace to the existence of this grand and glorious collaboration of brewery and chocolatier.** Sensing something fabulous, the citizens of my fair metropolis reacted to this beer like 13 year old fangirls presented with the prospect of a concert featuring a triple header of Justin Bieber, the Jonas Brothers and Hannah Montana.
Unfortunately, the story was too much, too late. I think it mostly served to piss people off by letting them know that there had recently been awesome beer to be had, and that they had missed it. Furor ensued, filled with indignant complaints from people who hadn’t managed to find any Chocolate Ale. It went
a littleoverboard.***Boulevard, caught WAY off guard, spent a few days figuring out what to do (I cannot imagine what working there must have been over the past week and a half), and ended by posting an apologetic (if taken aback) letter on its website, promising to make another batch next year. I think they’ve been pretty much 100% fantastic about all of this, given the insanity they’ve had to deal with.
At this point (9 days post-release), Chocolate Ale is going for $50 on craigslist and apparently higher on ebay, and twitter is alight with twits telling one where one can find a pint of the elixir.
I found some tonight. Here we are together:
Here’s my review, if you’d like to read it.
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*Christopher Elbow chocolates look like this:
**To be honest, I think the Chocolate Ale got more news coverage in the paper that day than did everything going on in Egypt, but this may be faulty memory on my part. I forgot the rest of the news of the day the instant I saw the article because I was so
horrifiedstartled to see it in print days after the beer was already gone.***Some people
13-year-old fangirlshave zero sense of scale. I mean, it’s sad not to get some really cool beer, but it’s fundamentally just beer. It isn’t the last supply of oxygen left on the planet, so calm down. Please.Make this viral:
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