Tag Archives: Session IPA

Beer Industry Commentary

Budweiser Superbowl Commercial Makes fun of Craft Beer in an Ironic Way

Leave a comment

It is no surprise to see a Budweiser Commercial be a huge part of the Superbowl. They have been one of the big spenders for years. But what is surprising is their choice to shift away from the ads focused on the masses that don’t show you a single thing about beer to something that proudly trumpets their Macro beer status and mocks craft beer at the same time.

There are many things wrong with this ad, but most of all is the suggestion that craft beer drinkers only care about sipping and dissecting their beers and not about actually drinking and enjoying their beers. There are many different styles of beers, from the easy-drinking session IPAs, brown ales, and pale ales, to the more sipping-friendly double IPAs, barley wines, and imperial stouts. Though tasters are a common part of craft breweries, they exist not to promote sipping but to give beer drinkers a way to try the different types of beers available at a brewery without having to order a pint of each.

What the craft beer movement shows is not that craft beer is meant to be sipped but that there are many different types of beers available for all kinds of fans. If you want something lighter, and equivalent to Budweiser, there are plenty of delicious local Blondes, Session IPAs, and Ambers that are meant to be enjoyed all day long. If you are looking for something with a little more punch, there are plenty of West Coast style IPAs that are a bit stronger but still can be enjoyed over time.

Finally, there are the barley wines, imperial stouts, double IPAs, imperial reds, and other sorts of beers that are best enjoyed slowly either because of the rarity or the high alcohol. These beers are not fussed over, though. Instead, they are enjoyed for all the flavors they present.

The ad is also ridiculously ironic considering AB In Bev is currently on a buying spree, picking up craft breweries. Most recently this includes 10 Barrel out of Oregon and Elysian out of Seattle, Washington. For a company to simultaneously make fun of craft beers while buying up new breweries to promote it is hard to tell what the focus is. Either way, it is a sad attempt to attack the craft breweries that have been winning over the public’s appreciation lately.

UPDATE: Craft Beer response to the Budwesier ad is below. Totally nailed it.

Paul McGuire

Paul McGuire is a craft beer enthusiast. He likes to travel with his husband and enjoy the great outdoors. In his day job, Paul is a divorce attorney serving clients in San Diego California.

More Posts

Follow Me:
TwitterPinterestGoogle Plus

Beer Reviews

Live Blogging on Twitter

Leave a comment

One of the interesting things about the Beer Bloggers’ Conference was getting us to write about beers as we taste them. But for those of you who weren’t following along on Twitter, lets take a look at how this looked to someone following the feed.

One thing I enjoy doing is comparing a beer on tap vs the bottle. Even though I had already tried the Citra Session from Green Flash, I hadn’t had it in the bottle.

I say that the flavors are balanced here because so many sours to me are a little too intensely sour.

I found it a bit hard to jump between styles as you can see from the two tweets about pilsners. The lack of consistency between beers shared made it hard to truly try everything.

The Lost Abbey Deliverance was an amazingly delicious beer. It combined two different styles of beers and had one of them aged in bourbon barrels. If you want a chance to drink those bourbon-barrel-aged beers at home this might be worth the extra high price.

BBC14 10

I have been asking the servers at Rough Draft for quite some time when six packs of the session IPA would come out so this was very exciting for me.

The Mexican Hot Chocolate style stout really tasted very different than all the other stouts Stone has put out so far. Stone brought this for us in their modern-looking growlers you can now get at the tasting room. This collaboration beer will be available in 22oz bottles in stores starting September 8, 2014.

BBC14 11

BBC14 12

We were blessed with so many breweries showing off their bourbon barrel aged beers. I have seen this becoming popular lately but I am not sure that you can easily go back to more subtly flavored beers after something so strong.

If you enjoyed my post about live blogging, consider following me on Twitter where you can see all the photos I take on Instagram and possibly catch my next live blogging attempt.

Paul McGuire

Paul McGuire is a craft beer enthusiast. He likes to travel with his husband and enjoy the great outdoors. In his day job, Paul is a divorce attorney serving clients in San Diego California.

More Posts

Follow Me:
TwitterPinterestGoogle Plus

Uncategorized

Beer Roundup – Round One

Leave a comment

In this first in a new series of posts I like to call beer roundups, I will explore some of the interesting beers that I have tasted over the past week or two. The beers featured here will primarily be ones that you can purchase in the store in 22oz bottles or six-packs. My hope is to provide you with some helpful advice about whether you should pick up that interesting beer in front of you enticing you with its unique (or boring) design. After all, it is better to drink from the comfort of your home so you don’t get a DUI.

This beer roundup series is part of my effort to explore different ways of writing for the audience here. Some people like the format of quick short posts about what I am drinking. If this is you, please follow me on Facebook. Others prefer to read a more lengthy explanation of what was good. Most of these beers showed up on my Facebook page at some point. By gathering multiple reviews into a single post I can make sure everyone has access to the same content even if they don’t want to use Facebook.

This beer roundup will examine the following beers: Pizza Port Brewing* Sessionable IPA, Ska Brewing Modus Hoperandi IPA, Modern Times Brewing Phalanx IPA, and Ballast Point’s Bavarian Hopped Double IPA (on tap only).

*Pizza Port Brewing should not be confused with Port Brewing/Lost Abbey. The two are distinct breweries both making fresh beer throughout San Diego. It is understandably a little confusing because the logos do look very similar.

Pizza Port Brewing Sessionable IPA
I was not very excited by the look of this beer so I might have avoided picking it up if I hadn’t been recommended it by someone working at BevMo. Session IPAs are all the rage now and this one fits in nicely with others in the same style. At a mild 4.5% it is perfect for your  first beer on a Sunday and yet it has plenty of fantastic hop flavors like I have come to expect. This one is heavy on the citrus side and has a medium bitterness. I especially like that it was released in six-packs of pint cans because I am really starting to like these pint cans. This has many similar hops to the Fortunate Islands Hoppy Wheat from Modern Times and satisfies me just as much. This is a great one to turn to if you can’t find any Fortunate Islands.

Pizza Port SIPA (left), Modus Hoperandi (right)
Pizza Port SIPA (left), Modus Hoperandi (right)

 

Ska Brewing Modus Hoperandi IPA
I wasn’t familiar with this brewery at all before I saw this beer in the store but who can resist the design of this can? Gangsters, FBI lingo, and bountiful green hop buds call out to me like none other I have seen. This IPA has plenty of strong citrus and pine flavors with a smooth caramel malt backing. I really liked how well the caramel malts worked with the hops featured here. Though I typically don’t like darker maltier IPAs, the malt flavors are subtle enough that they don’t overpower the rest of it. Modus Hoperandi is sold in six-packs of 12-ounce cans. I might have a new favorite here.

Modern Times Brewing Phalanx IPA
The Phalanx IPA is originally only available at the brewery and most likely you will have to go there to get a bottle. I stopped by so that I could give it a taste before I bought some and ended up leaving without any bottles to take home. That isn’t to say that the beer is bad, it just didn’t hit the flavors I crave so much. This is an IPA that grows on you because it doesn’t immediately attack you with potent hops. It shares some dank characteristics with the Modern Times Blazing World (one of my favorites) but focuses the hop flavors more heavily on flavors described by the brewery as juicy. This juicy flavor comes through as a sort of extra sweet ripe melon. The hops in here taste like they are related to the ones Stone used in the recent Unapologetic IPA.

Bottles of Phalanx at the brewery.
Bottles of Phalanx at the brewery.

Ballast Point’s Bavarian Hopped Double IPA
The Bavarian Hopped Double IPA is only available at the Little Italy Ballast Point location in San Diego and probably won’t stay on tap for long with the unique flavors it displays. When I stopped by the brewery for a taste I was immediately struck by how sweet and flavorful this beer was without any significant bitter flavors. I would place the IBUs of this beer somewhere around 40 if not lower (which puts it about as bitter as the Fortunate Islands by Modern Times). Most of the flavors I noticed reminded me of ripe tropical fruit. This might be the double IPA to get your friends to try if they are scared of the bitter hop-bombs that have become regular around San Diego.

Tasters at Ballast Point. Bavarian Hopped Double IPA is on the left.
Tasters at Ballast Point. Bavarian Hopped Double IPA is on the left.

Paul McGuire

Paul McGuire is a craft beer enthusiast. He likes to travel with his husband and enjoy the great outdoors. In his day job, Paul is a divorce attorney serving clients in San Diego California.

More Posts

Follow Me:
TwitterPinterestGoogle Plus

Tasting Room

Main Street Brewing – Vancouver BC

3 Comments

Main Street brewing has been around even less than Brassneck. They opened in June of this year so they had only been open a month when i stopped by. They weren’t as crowded as Brassneck but still had a good number of people around when I stopped by. Main Street differentiates themselves with their four casks. Unlike most breweries that can only have one beer on cask at a time, they have room for four different casks. I tried the pilsner, session IPA on cask, brown ale on cask, southern hop IPA, and brown ale on tap.

Vancouver Beers 13

The pilsner was pretty much what you would expect from the style. The Session IPA on cask had some added Australian hops. It was a nice light citrus beer. The brown ale on cask was very delicious, perfectly smoothed out for an easy-drinking beer. I compared it with the tap version thanks to someone sitting next to me and noticed immediately the added bitterness and hop flavor from the tap version. The regular brown ale had just enough hop flavor that it was pretty much a delicious ESB. I ended up ordering more of this one once I was all done.

Vancouver Beers 14

Finally, the southern hopped IPA was pretty mellow with a light amount of bitterness and some small citrus flavors. It was a bit lighter on the flavor than I might expect from a 6.5% IPA but it wasn’t bad. I still preferred the brown ale with the perfect balance of malts and hops and overall great flavor.

Main Street’s four casks help draw people back into the brewery regularly. Casks tend to only last two days before they have to be taken off so with four different casks, there are many ways they can mix things up to get people to keep coming back. I was not expecting to like the brown ale so much but I am always glad to find a brown ale that hits the right flavor profile. Considering the how short this brewery has been open, it was quite impressive. I hope they stick around.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post indicated that the brewery was older than Brassneck but they were in fact opened more recently. Thanks to Mike for commenting and clearing that up.

Paul McGuire

Paul McGuire is a craft beer enthusiast. He likes to travel with his husband and enjoy the great outdoors. In his day job, Paul is a divorce attorney serving clients in San Diego California.

More Posts

Follow Me:
TwitterPinterestGoogle Plus

Brewery/Restaurant

Portland Beer Adventures Part 2 Deschutes Brewing Round 1

Leave a comment
This was probably the brewery I was most looking forward to visiting in Portland, so I naturally went there first. I ended up with two flights for a total of twelve beers while there. For some reason the majority of breweries in Portland want to only sell flights in certain pre-defined groups. This sometimes meant I had to try a few more beers than I was expecting. This was certainly the case with Deschutes.

For my first set of tasters I got the Two Step IRA, Fresh Squeezed IPA, Hop in the Dark Black IPA, Session Obsession Session IPA, Smooth Hoperator Experimental Hop Pale, and Inversion White IPA. The Imperial Red Ale was pretty much a nice strong red with a light hop flavor. The Fresh Squeezed IPA was one I expected to love and possibly even order a pint of. It had a nice bright citrus hop bite and wasn’t overly bitter but it didn’t seem to have the same intense flavor that I am used to in San Diego.

Portland Beer 05
The Hop in the Dark Black IPA was not particularly hoppy or bitter and mostly had flavors of smoky roasted malts. It didn’t impress me on either the dark flavors or the hop flavors. I don’t expect it would seriously satisfy hop heads or those into stouts. The Session IPA was a solid presentation of the now-popular style. It had some solid hop flavors without the bitterness of other sessions. Still, the hop profile wasn’t grabbing me.

The Experimental Pale Ale was quite nice for a lighter color pale. The hop flavors were largely towards the pine. It was a beer I would have enjoyed to buy in a six-pack. The Inversion White IPA was surprisingly malty tasting for the style and not particularly hoppy. Overall, it seemed to be a nice balanced brew but didn’t have the hop flavors that I have come to expect.

At the end of Round 1 of Deschutes, I was starting to wonder if I was going to find anything that blew me away. In Round 2 I explore the second set of six beers I tasted while visiting Deschutes.

Paul McGuire

Paul McGuire is a craft beer enthusiast. He likes to travel with his husband and enjoy the great outdoors. In his day job, Paul is a divorce attorney serving clients in San Diego California.

More Posts

Follow Me:
TwitterPinterestGoogle Plus