Sierra Nevada Adding Hazy Little Thing IPA & Southern Gothic Cans

Agreed that palates and preferences differ but I'm speaking in terms of examples where breweries and the brewers themselves indicate a given beer is at its peak x number of days/weeks after release. Ideally, they are the ones who should know their beer best, no? Just a simple comment (e.g., label, website) regarding their recommendation is all I'm asking.

 

Those that give a Best Before are for freshness, where I'd agree its to the brewer's take on the the beer. Those that give Best After are beers that, in most instances, need cellaring to get to the brewer's intent. For fresh beers, a Best After date is far too subjective IMHO, and why I bet you'll never see it on hoppy beers. Born On date is best you can hope for, and each to his own to figure our their palate/preference window for each brewer. Too many dynamic variables for anyone to tell someone when they should find peak taste/experience in a fresh hoppy recipe. My $0.02

 

Southern Gothic is available in 6 pack bottle form at the Chico brewery but not any stores in Chico. Not sure what that means for other locations/cities/states. Someone mentioned nationwide distribution but I never saw where that info was coming from.

 

You mentioned bottles.
The minimum orders for printed labels is a single box, and they already have shedloads of blank bottles in house.
The minimum order for printed cans is 200k, or a semi trailer. That's where my presumption that this is a national release comes from.

 

WIth the fickle opinionated know it all consumer. It'd be blasphemy to tell them to suffer from blue balls for two weeks before drinking something they stood in line for an hour to get.

 

And there are posts in the New England forum of brewers saying they feel their beers are at their best right out of the tank at 20 days, and Sean Hill won't even bottle his hoppy beers because he says they're best within a week.

The short answer is that different brewers have different ideas about when their beers are best, so blanket statements about what all brewers think on this issue seems presumptuous.

 

Nate and JC prefer there beers after a week in a can... HF is now canning so I wonder if Sean's stance has changed or he's finally realized he could be making more money. I feel like his statements came about because he knows those beers can't get warm and if he was packaging people would be sending them all over the world and destroying them. He's so established now and probably is just giving less F's. Kimmich has made some crazy statement like at the pub he used to think Heady tasted best at 10 weeks in the keg??

I think the whole need to drink fresh thing has gotten so blown out of proportion. Heady labeling started it and now everyone thinks these "hazy juice bombs" are too old after a week. Read some post in the Tired Hands thread where some guy didn't buy some Hop Hands at their general store cause the date was a week or two old. Ha. It has snowballed especially because you have all these lower tier breweries without the quality control canning all this protein/yeast laden garbage that has no shelf stability but it's not their fault if you drink it after 30 days and it sucks, they told you to drink it right away.

I'm alaways thoroughly impressed with how well the SN hoppy beers hold up. A testament to their production expertise! I never knew they were mostly bottle conditioned until a few weeks ago. Unfortunately they are fighting a huge uphill battle with most consumers of this style who have no idea a hoppy beer can actually taste good after 30 days.

 

It's not a rebrand, but a full-on re-brew / retweak of the recipe. We're moving from a pale ale base, up to an IPA base (6.9%) with the grist and hop bill modeled after the East Meets West IPA in the Beer Camp Across the World pack.

 

Yeah I remember those discussions. But the brewery is going to release the beer as soon as it is ready to drink/ up to spec. they're not likely going to release something that isn't meant to be consumed yet. Whether they prefer it with two weeks on it is another thing.

 

Right now, Southern Gothic is available at both breweries, and in the Asheville, NC market only (there is some draught out in the world as well.) This is a super-limited release, and will mostly stay near Asheville, NC and the near-south for the foreseeable future.

 

Most of the Sierra Nevada brands are not bottle conditioned (see list below). Bill Manley (@sierranevadabill) kindly posted on this discussion topic in a past thread:

"Thank you for saying this. We try very hard to package our beers at their best quality, for us that means ensuring there is very little oxygen at the time of packaging (TPO) and also very little dissolved oxygen in the finished beer (DO).
In my opinion, high O2 numbers is one of the principal quality problems the craft beer industry is facing today. Too much oxygen in the beer or the package causes beer to stale very quickly. When I buy beers off the shelf, the off-flavor I notice most often is oxidation. Honestly, it's a scourge.
Secondly, our hop usage helps this as well. Whole cone hops seems to have a longer stability and half-life. We believe the pelletizing process exposes more lupulin to oxygen which could be one reason (honestly, this is just a theory but the logic is sound.)
Bottle conditioning definitely helps with oxygen reduction, but Hop Hunter is not bottle conditioned. (Pale Ale, Porter, Stout, Celebration and Bigfoot are, among others)

Nevertheless, we feel that choosing the right ingredients and packaging in a nearly O2-free environment are the best way to preserve freshness and shelf-life for the longer term.

-Bill"

Cheers!

 

Most are not? He lists one that is not but quite a few that are? I know do that Torpedo is not bottle conditioned.

 

That's terrible news - almost as bad as not getting Kolsch or a Fall Pack this year.

 

The Southern Gothic news got my hopes up. Now the news that it is only a limited release sent them crashing.

 

I am right there with you.

I went from to .

Non-cheers to limited geographic releases!!

 

Southern Gothic Horror. Add me to the disappointed.

 

Sad to hear that, like others. I was looking forward to buying both of them.

 

The beers listed above: (Pale, Porter, Stout, Celebration, Bigfoot) are about the only beers that are bottle conditioned. Most of the newer brands are tank conditioned instead. We occasionally do bottle condition on some limited beers (the Barleywine, and the Vintage Ale from Beer Camp Across the World, for example, and some of the Ovila Belgian-style beers) but largely the more recent brands since about 2006 have been tank conditioned.

 

If the beer performs well, it may see larger distribution. Nothing's off the table.