Beer Session: Seattle Beer Week 2012

Seattle Beer Week concluded on Sunday, and it is because of Seattle Beer Week that carl, Scott, and I had another beer session on Saturday, just two weeks after the previous one. Specifically, one of the events during Seattle Beer Week was a workshop on blending sour beer held at the Stumbling Monk by brewers from New Belgium Brewing. Scott and carl went to that, and they wanted to share the growlers of blended beer that they brought home from the workshop. As it happened, Brouwer's Cafe's Sour Fest was on Thursday of Seattle Beer Week, so we agreed that we'd start there to see what was left. The beer menu below doesn't include what we drank at Brouwer's. I had Lompoc's Sour Willy and something from Boneyard (an Oregon brewery that I'd never heard of), neither of which was very memorable.

I'll confess that while I could taste a minor difference between Scott's and carl's blends, I couldn't describe it. carl seemed to think Scott's was better integrated. Here's the blend card from carl's (click twice and you might actually be able to read it):



And then the usual apparatus for the rest of the session:





daveon might recognize Hop Valley, which is a brewery outside of Eugene, Oregon that we stopped at on the way to Reno last summer. That Vanilla Infused Porter was very nice, as was the Brainless on Cherries from Epic, which was aged in wine barrels. I also finally got to taste Upright's Billy the Mountain, which I've loved for years just for the name (which is one of my favorite Frank Zappa songs). I suppose it could be Chunga's official beer, if it wanted to be.