Here's their first descriptions of the first 3 beers. I've already picked them up, I'll probably take pictures and try one of them tonight. We are doing my sons birthday party today so I can't be blitzed for that, then going to see Dead pool.
For your reading pleasure.
The beers are at your fingertips!
The first Alpha Hop release starts this Saturday, February 13, and will run until February 29 (hooray for Leap Year!). The beers are arriving at each location as we speak.
Were incredibly excited to share the beers in this release. They are some of the most interesting and complex beers we have ever produced. These are one-time-only bottlings and wont ever get into the general marketplace. If you love the beers, please let us know. Send us an email, review the beer on sites like BeerAdvocate.com or Untappd, and share photos on Facebook and Twitter. If we dont hear from you, well never know if you liked the beers or not, so please drop a line!
To get your bottles in Chico and Mills River, simply come into the Gift Shop and ask at the register. In Berkeley, walk inside and talk to the folks behind the counter. Any time were open, the bottles are available for pick up. Bring your ID, card, or keytag and itll speed up the process. If not, an ID will work.
Now, on to the main event:
Barrel-Aged Stock Scotch Ale
Great barrel-aged beers have as much to do with blending as they do with the initial brewing of the original beers. In this case, we used two beers that are on our occasional production roster as the starting point for this unique beer. The base beer for this bottling is a blend of a Scotch-style wee-heavy and a smoked imperial porter aged in brandy barrels from Louisvilles Copper and Kings Distillery. Copper and Kings is famous for their brandy and absinthe, and these barrels definitely show some influence of both spirits. With a rich and intense malt body, this beer has notes of dark chocolate, fig, date and molasses in the forefront, with a sweet dark fruit character from the brandy and a unique herbal quality that weve never found in another beer. Reminiscent of the notorious green fairy, this beer has notes of black licorice which presents like a Good and Plenty candy with a mild mint-chocolate-like finish.
Barrel-Aged Pentuppel with Chilies
The pentuppel is a beer style of our own creation. It started when we considered the typical Belgian abbey model: Belgian table beer (single)low alcohol and light colored; abbey dubbelslightly stronger and dark; abbey tripelstronger and light colored; and abbey quaddarker still and stronger. Why not go beyond, making a Belgian-inspired abbey ale and making it stronger and light colored? Its bigger than a quad, so maybe a fivetuppel? We settled on Pentuppel (penta=five).
The beer was originally designed to be part of the Ovila Abbey Ales series, our collaboration with monks at New Clairvaux. After dozens of trial brews, we were never quite happy with the results. The yeast would quit at a certain alcohol percentage, leaving the beer too sweet and too heavy to really hold on to the Belgian tradition. We shelved the concept but saved some of the original pilot batches to put into bourbon barrels. After more than a year, we tasted the beer and, while it still remained sweet, it had taken on an entirely new charactersort of like a Sauternes wine flavor with a touch of Oloroso sweet sherry note. Meanwhile, one of our barrel team members had filled another barrel with a blonde pale ale into which he dosed hot peppers grown in his gardenGhost Chilies, Habaneros, and Hercules peppers added great flavor, but the beer was spicy!
We needed something to cut the sweetness of the Pentuppel and the heat of the chili pale ale, so we started making benchtop blends and found the perfect balance of heat and sweet with this one-of-a-kind beer.
American Wild Red Ale
We are lovers of sour and wild ales, but have always been reluctant to brew one due to the dangers of bacterial contamination in our non-wild beers. Pale Ale, and several other of our year-round and seasonal selections, are bottle conditioned, meaning that they spend their time in a warm warehouse while the living yeast in the bottle consumes the fermentable sugars in the bottle. In short, the perfect place for unwanted bacteria to thrive and flourish, potentially destroying or contaminating scads of already packaged beer. For us, sour/wild ales were simply not worth the risk.
Over a year ago, we invested in some improvements in our barrel storage facility, not far from the brewery. We built a special room and a separate bottling line to experiment with wild ales. This beer is our first efforta straight, non-fruited beer brewed with the flavors of the great Belgian-style lambics in mind. We primary fermented with a strain of Brettanomyces bruxellensis and then added a cultured bacterial mix (Pediococcus and Lactobacillus) into second-use red wine barrels. During secondary fermentation/souring we added the dregs of several traditional Belgian-style lambics to further infuse the beer with the perfect microflora. After more than a year of aging and tending, we were able to blend several barrels together into the perfect wild red ale. Its smooth and round tartness evokes notes of lemon with an earthy-spicy background, and it has just enough body to pull it all together into an amazingly complex yet refreshing beer.
