Beer

Photo by PoPville flickr user ekelly80

Jack Van Paepeghem works at Meridian Pint and is a Certified Cicerone® You can read his previous post about travels in Germany and Belgium here.

Sea Change is not a political statement. It is about beer. Sea Change Pale Ale is the latest addition to the 3 Stars Brewing Company’s flagship lineup and its inauguration is today. Sea Change is about the turning of the tides: the transformation of a wrecked auto body shop into an artisanal craft brewery. Sea Change is the evolution of homebrewers to full time brewmasters. The beer is not about Tom Selleck as a lush of a cop and the reopening of a homicide case, but of a super fresh and local American pale ale.

The pale ale was originally a British creation which broke out after maltsters nailed down the formula for indirectly kilning partially germinated barley to a point where it was pale, rather than dark and smoked or crystalized. This means that the barley, now transformed to malt, still maintained much of its sweet and sugary capacity while still being lighter in body and color when made into beer. Breweries like Bass and Fullers released the most popularized versions of the pale ale and defined the style. American homebrewers sought to recreate this beer using local malts and hops and a new style was born.

The first batch of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale was released on November 15, 1980 in Chico, California. While the beer uses perle and magnum hops for bittering, the emphasis is on the cascade hops used towards the end of the boil which delivers the huge piney, grapefruit, and floral character which has come to define American hop varietals. Coupled with an aggressive yeast which dries the beer out and two-row pale and caramel malts, Sierra Nevada finishes clean and drinkable for having a 5.6% ABV. SNPA became ubiquitous through the 80’s and 90’s and can be found in all 50 states and even overseas. The problem is that because of massive distribution, it is easy for retailers and bar accounts to let it sit in dirty draft lines and unknowing customers won’t say a thing.

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From the Chimay tasting room

Jack Van Paepeghem works at Meridian Pint and is a Certified Cicerone® You can read his previous post about Oktoberfest here.

I promised you an update and with just one week left I want to leave you with some musings from the road. I have been traveling Europe, specifically Germany and Belgium for the past two weeks with my Pint cohort and fellow beer enthusiast (nerd, if you will), Mike in search of great beer among other things. I am sure most of you out there in PoPville are well traveled so I will spare you the “European beer guide” type post. My takeaway from all of this is nothing much of an epiphany, but a steadfast reinforcement of one popular idiom: respect beer.

I’m writing this from the couch of my long lost Belgian cousin, Daniel, as we watch the Belgium vs. Serbia soccer match on television and i cant help but to continue recalling the events of the afternoon. We spent the entire day touring the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Scourmont, better known as Chimay, the most recognized Trappist brewery in the world. Our host and contact Fabrice walked us through just about every nook and cranny of the abbey, brewery, and packaging facilities. We tasted a 16 year old cellared bottle of Grand Reserve (better known as Chimay blue), dined on grilled veal kidneys, moules frites, the Trappist’s cheese selection, and other extravagant things which may begin to run counter to my claims here. I first tasted Chimay as a sophomore in college at a time when I was getting into craft beer and discovering my own Belgian heritage and I never looked back. Chimay has the most accessible and approachable lineup of Trappist ales and because of this, tends to be denigrated as pedestrian or unrefined compared to sexier beers like Orval or Westvleteren. Chimay became an afterthought, another beer dwarfed by the growing selection of rare and unique Belgian ales as I went further down the rabbits hole, as they say. Eventually I gained appreciation for the beers of Chimay but never went out of my way to drink one. Having the beers fresh and served properly threw me for a loop as I forgot how amazing they could be. It also made me think a little further into the context of this trip and how we approach beer in general. On the grounds of the abbey where the beer is made and life is lived in simplicity and austerity Cistercian monks pray seven times a day. These are my seven meditations, and while common sensical for most, they may serve as a reminder for others.

Meditation One:
Respect the classics, the originators, and then the pioneers. Think back to when you had your first Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Boston Lager, or Chimay for that matter. It is probably the reason why you are even reading this post, because it was a life changing experience and you haven’t looked back. Don’t forget about these beers. Beers like Old Rasputin and Sierra Nevada Bigfoot still hold a place in my heart and I know when all else fails I can always come back to them. Without them, we would have no craft beer culture as we know it today.

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