This week we start our India Pale Ale or IPA series with Thunderhead IPA from Pyramid Brewing Company.
News
A little labeling news this week. Apparently, the TTB, which is the Federal agency that regulates alcohol products, is proposing some new labeling requirements for said alcoholic beverages. The new rules will require alcohol to be labeled with nutritional analysis and things like serving facts labels, like you would typically see on the back of a Pepsi. Now the rub here is, this has kind of been in the rule making process for a couple years, so who knows how long it will take to become a regulation or if it ever actually does, but who know you could soon see that familiar little square on your beer as well as your bag of Fritos.
IPA – What do those letter means?
- When we talk about IPA’s we are talking about India Pale Ales. But, Jim, you may ask, these beers aren’t from India, why are you calling them India Pale Ales? Good question thoughtful listener, good question. You see, IPA’s originally came from Great Britain, like a lot of other Ale style beers.
- You see, around the 1790’s, Great Britain was pretty much ran India and longed for the great taste of a British beer to go along with their domination. However, brewing in India was tough because it was too hot, the water supplies sucked, and basic ingredients were not available. Oh what is an Englishman to do.
- They couldn’t ship the beer because the trip would take 4 months and before refrigeration and modern techniques, it was tough to keep the beer fresh. And by tough I mean impossible. It ended up tasting like crap when it got there.
- So, what could they do. Well they just added more hops. See, hops work as a preservative, and the beer when it got to India tasted fairly normal because of the large amounts of hops added.
Pyramid Thunderhead IPA
- Pyramid Brewing Company, which you may remember us mention briefly from one of the hefewiezen shows, is based out of Seatle Washington, and has fairly good distribution, so you should be able to get this stuff pretty much anywhere. Founded in 1984 as Hart Brewing Company in Kalama, Washington, the company has gone through several changes since that time, including buying Thomas Kemper Brewing of Poulsbo in 1992 and changing its name to Pyramid in 1996.
- The brewery makes a bunch of good beers including a hefewiezen as mentioned and an apricot beer which actually isn’t too bad either.
- This beer however is a little bit different from an apricot beer. Thunderhead IPA weighs in at 6.7% abv and is a fairly hoppy IPA.
- This guy pours a copper color and doesn’t really have too much of a head, or at least not when I poured it. You can’t really smell hops like you could in some of the APA’s the last few weeks, its actually a pretty mild aroma.
- The taste however is not a mild APA taste. You get hit with that bitter and hops pretty quickly. Now this is not the hoppiest beer out there, but it is most certainly something that may take a little getting used to. The malt does add a little sweetness if you roll it around in your mouth like you do a good wine (yes you can do that with beer too) but the hops are really what brings this beer to life.
Our next show
Next weeks show we will be hopping the pond again to England and the origin of the IPA with Fullers IPA. This will be the next step up the ladder as we take a deeper look at the origin of the species.
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