Courtesy of Derek Wolfgram
San Jose-based Clandestine Brewing’s Agent Provocateur Doppelbock offers a hint of toasted bread and toffee.
While 2020 may not have been anyone’s favorite year for a host of reasons, it was a great year for California breweries at the Great American Beer Festival, with 63 of 272 medals being awarded to California breweries.
Following are a variety of medal-winning Golden State-brewed beers I’ve had the opportunity to enjoy over the past few months.
• Clandestine Brewing, San Jose: Agent Provocateur, Gold Medal, German-Style Doppelbock. Deep brown with a creamy, persistent beige head and ruby highlights, the aroma showcases rich malt complexity, with intense toasted bread and toffee character, as well as light perfumy yeast esters and subtle herbal noble hops. Similarly, the flavor is dominated by intense dark bready maltiness, while simultaneously coming across as well-attenuated and not particularly sweet. With just enough hop bitterness to p
Craft lagers and creative ale ingredients make New Bohemia a Santa Cruz destination
New Bohemia’s craft lagers include a Santa Cruz take on pilsner.
New Bohemia Brewing Co. opened in Santa Cruz in 2015, and co-founder and brewmaster Dan Satterthwaite’s education (Siebel Institute) and experience (brewing at Trumer Brewery and Gordon Biersch after honing his skills at a small family-owned brewery in Germany) led him down the path of brewing craft lagers years before those styles gained the popularity they enjoy today.
In addition to traditional German styles, New Bohemia produces a wide variety of creative takes on IPA and dark beers, often integrating unique ingredients. Japanese white peach hazy session IPA, pineapple hefeweizen and peanut butter and jelly imperial porter are a few recent examples.
Easy to find and locally made, Laughing Monk has grown from homebrew to regional staple
Laughing Monk brews in San Francisco and sells locally.
Since the pandemic has limited the number of opportunities to leave the house over the past year, I’ve taken the opportunity to drive around visiting local breweries as a way to spend a couple hours on a Saturday afternoon. One of my favorite Bay Area breweries during this time has been Laughing Monk Brewing, launched by homebrewers Andrew Casteel and Aaron Hicks in 2016 in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood.
Laughing Monk’s creative varieties of Belgian brews, lagers, pale ales and IPAs – both West Coast and hazy styles – are consistently flavorful and well made. (Another new favorite is Santa Cruz’s New Bohemia Brewing Co. – read more about it next month.)
Sweet Reckoning raspberry hazelnut mead boasts a simple yet elegant taste.
While beer, wine and spirits get most of the attention in the world of craft alcoholic beverages, San Diego’s Billy and Suzanna Beltz believe that mead’s time has come.
Mead is a beverage made with fermented honey and various adjunct ingredients, and while it is often associated with Renaissance fairs or Vikings, it has a long, storied history through many cultures.
The Beltz’s Lost Cause Meadery in San Diego just celebrated its third anniversary, but they have already earned an impressive number of awards, and their flavor creations are truly unique, using the defining characteristics of different honey varietals to pair with other ingredients to create complex combinations that stretch the boundaries of mead.