a special time of year

It is that time of year when those wonderful, little resinous buds make their great sacrifice from the vine and begin their next leg of the journey into our glasses. I of course am speaking of hops.

I spent this past Friday evening taking up the sounds of the wonderfully gifted trumpeteer Thomas Marriot and his two posse members who I can't remember their names but were respectively two of the best drummers and Hammond B-3 players I had ever seen. The occasion? Yep, the Anacortes Jazz Festival. What a fantastic evening of great music and you guessed it, great beer at one of my favorite venues to drink it.....the Rockfish Grill/Anacortes Brewery.

Let me just fill you in a little bit here. Friday night was a special night indeed for there were not the customary one or even two IPA's on tap, but a whopping four. I know, my head was spinning too. Kevin's IPA is a very servicable 3+, sometimes a 4 on the standard beer scale. We have all come to expect that but adding the Darkside IPA and Imperial RyPA to the lineup really gave it a special boost for a special crowd. The telling tale here is that the RyPA actually was pulled from the lineup a couple weeks back during the Oyster Run and replaced with Coors Light for obvious reasons. So, it felt good to know that my kind of crowd gets rewarded with exceptional beer. Now you may be saying "wait, thats only three." Well you're right, I had to let sufficient time lapse before I mentioned the forth and final IPA. If its true that words cannot describe true greatness, then I guess I'll just have to say it and hope like hell I can at least come close to helping you understand just how good it really is.

When one makes cask beer, there is a general understanding that the outcome must meet certain high requirements. It must contain enough overall flavor to withstand consumption at higher temperatures and minimal carbonation levels. It must also be a nearly perfect batch in terms of foreign born bacteria. Any misplacement here can ruin the cask beer because imperfections are not allowed to hide behind the heavily fortified walls of cold temps and carbonation. My mouth is watering just thinking of it, but anyway, the cask offering of the IPA dry-hopped with Simcoes has come to embody the apex. I used to shy away from saying it, but it beats Boundary's IPA in my humble opinion. The flavor that comes from that particular beer in simply incredible. It is the definition of a beer that is extremely hoppy without being overly bitter. The pungicity is bright grapefruit with pine sap, nestled in a bed of flowers. Or in other words, pure alpha hop. The fine folks over at Yakima Chief really stumbled onto something with that hop. I would love to tell you about the malting but with the way the hopping comes forth, you totally forget that there is a perfectly balanced malt backbone. I don't know what Kevin does exactly, but I wouldn't change a thing and put that recipe in a vault.

So that was my beer experience this weekend, all-in-all, quite good. Right now, I'm trying to find excusses to sashay over there for another pint or two this week.....I hope its still there.

Yours truly,
Lopez Jas