Sipping Beer

As a true beer guzzler I find something to appreciate in most every beer. You will find everything from NA to monsters in my frig. There really is a time and place for almost any beer. That said, I still have my favorites. I have always found the most to appreciate in a delicately balanced beer that can be consumed in fairly large quantities without instant liver damage. I have had a great time tasting some of the crazy brews. I even went so far as to make a pilgrimage to The Stone Brewery in San Diego where alcohol contents below 9% are rare. I just could never figure out where they fit in to social events. Am I supposed to bring them to a party after work and be known as the drunk guy who couldn’t drink two beers. I don’t know a bartender in their right mind who would want a bunch of customers slugging back 10% beers all night, much less the janitor. I had to appreciate them from a distance.
That all changed when the nice fellows at Boulevard in Kansas City invited me down to visit the brewery. Mike Utz showed me around his new, amazing facility and kindly ushered me into the tasting area at the end of our talk. I was greeted by the head brewer and several other brewery workers who guided me through several new beers they were brewing for what became their “Smokestack Series.” In the tasting area all the beers were on tap. I tried several and began to get a very warm comfortable sensation that told me I wouldn’t be driving for awhile. I enjoyed all the beers, but had the same old feeling of “What would I do with these?”
A couple months later I was invited to join the fellows again for the release party for the new series. Once I saw how it was packaged and displayed I finally got it.
These aren’t “extreme” beers, they are sipping beers. I had been thinking of this thing wrong the whole time. I had pictured some 30 year-old guy who had fried brain cells and taste buds to the point he had to drink 10% beer with two pounds of hops per pint just to get started. Boulevard and several others taught me that these beers are on purpose. It is not just a brewer who got sick of having poorly stored beer go bad and decided to pickle it with alcohol and hops, it is balance and art.
This new wave of products has even encouraged me to change my guzzling. I can sit with the fellows after a hard day at the brewery and patiently drink one of these in twice the time as a session beer because there is so much to enjoy. As a matter of fact, they even changed the way we brew. Every commercial batch we make now loses its first 15 gallons to our “reserve” batch that gets heavily hopped and is naturally higher in gravity.
In case you are still a bit afraid to take this to your next party, there is an easy solution. Just bring one 750ml bottle and offer it to several friends. You can talk about what a trendsetter you are and with an empty glass that used to contain 10% alcohol your friends will agree. After that, get back to the tried and true and you will be a hero. There is a wonderful world of new flavors out there, we just need to learn how to use them.