#block 15 brewing

[thepourfool]

Fort George, Reuben's, and Great Notion: The Nation's Best IPA?

Fort George, Reuben’s, and Great Notion: The Nation’s Best IPA?

There are breweries out there, in that ever-expanding ocean that is American Indie Brewing, that are quite content to make a core of maybe eight or ten – sometimes even fewer! – beers and call it good. And if those six, eight, fourteen beers are good enough and their clientele is rut-inclined and undemanding, those producers can survive and even prosper.

But some, Thank God(!), are never…

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[whatchudrinkin]

Cosmic

There are a million ways to add coffee to your beer. You can add coffee beans right after boiling. You add fresh brewed coffee right before you bottle it. You can let the beer sit on beans during secondary fermentation. You can do whatever you like. The most popular move these days is to add cold brewed coffee. Cold brewing brings out all those roasty toasty flavors you want without the added acidity and sour finish. And of course, good beans lead to good flavor. 

Anyways. I got stuck in coffee making land last night when I was sipping Block 15 Brewing’s latest, Cosmic Cold Brew. It’s made with Ethiopian Zonegediyo Gedeb coffee from their neighbors at Bespoken Coffee Roasters – funny story: the people behind Bespoken were once our neighbors at Sterling Coffee, but that was two apartments ago. Where was I? RIght. The fancy Ethiopian beans are cold extracted for twenty-four hours before being added to Block 15′s Nebula Stout. 

The result is an interesting sort of beer. It’s coffee flavored, of course, but it has layers of nuance. It’s not simply coffee. It’s sort of fruity? It’s really light and bubbly, not as dense and creamy as a usual coffee stout. In fact, it’s not like drinking stout so much as drinking super fancy coffee. You know with descriptions that read like weird salad recipes. And then you taste it and by god! This coffee tastes like blueberries. It’s layered and weird and utterly fascinating. And it's carbonated.

[whatchudrinkin]

Mystery Solved

I was having trouble deciphering exactly what Sticky Hands tastes like. Fruity, sure. But what sort of fruit? It’s a little tropical, a little herbaceous, a little spicy even. 

That’s it! 

It’s a sweet pepper. The kind you see in jars between the olives and the cocktail onions. A banana pepper? Something like that. Like a sweet Italian pepper soaked in orange juice. Or like a pickled mango? Nah, it’s a pepper. A sweet and sour pepper.

Alright. That’s settled. On to the next strange flavor. 

[whatchudrinkin]

It’s a Sign

I love the sound of car tires on wet pavement. After two weeks of sun and high temperatures, the clouds rolled in and the rain fell. It was glorious. The wind battered the windows and the puddles filled once again. It doesn’t seem right to drink light beer in this weather.

Fortuitously, I found a bottle of Block 15′s quadrupel, the Prophecies, on sale last week at Imperial. Half price is the right price. The beer is a dense, deep brown color with an active, fizzy head. The Prophecies offers a sweet cola flavor upfront; the middle falls flat; but the finish has a nice rum bottle warmth. The flavor is a little hollow at first, but further into the glass, new notes emerged, like yeasty fruit and a hint of roasted malt. 

[whatchudrinkin]

Shaking Hands

Block 15 Brewing is making some of Oregon’s most lauded beers. But the brewery isn’t located in Portland, or even Bend. Block 15 just opened a production brewery in Corvallis, a small college town in the middle of the state. From this tiny outpost, Block 15 has created a following for their wild ales as well as their hop fueled IPA. Their Sticky Hands double IPA is packaged in sixteen ounce cans, but I’ve never seen it on the grocery store shelf, and four-packs are regulated even in the bottle shops. People are nuts for this beer.

I was lucky enough to snag the latest “tropical slam” edition of the beer at Saraveza last week. This version of Sticky Hands was brewed with Apollo, Galaxy, Mosaic, and Citra hops for a more intense hop experience. The scent is big and heady. Dank grass, pine cones, and mangoes. Cedar chips dips in orange juice. This is powerful stuff. But it is remarkably balanced and finishes quite dry. I don’t think it’s worth a road trip, but I think I’ll be looking out for releases to come.

[shuabrewing]

I drank my first bottle of this the other day. Belmont Station 15th anniversary ale from Block 15 Brewing. Planning on aging the other for a year or so. To put it simply this was just amazing. Completely worth the $15 per bottle. Its a Scottish style ale aged in bourbon barrels and then blended with Oud Bruin. Starts out Acidic and wonderful, then moves into some great malty complexity, and ends with a very slight bourbon note. Just fantastic. Very few brews can you pick out each part so easily while also finding it all blends together for an amazing complexity. I find that many whiskey/bourbon aged beers are to pronounced. This one was completely different, at the end you get a hint of bourbon but more so it finishes just like a bourbon finishes, hard to explain though. You can read more about it here. Overall this beer just proved why they are one of my favorite breweries around. I stop in whenever I can and they never disappoint.