Favorite lesser seen style?

While I can get saisons, baltic porters, goses, dubbels, and quads fairly regularly, I really wouldn't mind a little more variety. As far as styles that I rarely see, I'd have to go with rum barrel aged anything. Only had a couple different offerings and got a craving for others. Don't see a whole lot of Oud Bruins around either.

 

Kellerbeer

 

The dunkel seemed solid in my limited experiences

 

I can't get enough Kristallweizen - It tastes great and is quite elegant looking.





... and Schweinshaxe- I can never get enough of that style of pig.

 

Munich Dunkel

Also there's a serious lack of English ales coming to AZ that aren't Samuel Smith's or Fullers (nothing at all wrong with Fullers but I'm not a huge fan of Samuel Smith's aside from their Taddy Porter)

 

Love Amber/red ales like Tree House MA, Maine Zoe, Maine Red Wheelbarrow. I do not consider Nugget nectar, hop back Amber, etc to be the same either.

 

It's a bit more complicated than that. The ATF ruled on "ice beers" - "removal of up to 0.5 percent of the volume of beer through the removal of ice crystals is customary industry practice and results in a product which may be considered beer" back in 1994, but the regulation -27 CFR 25.11 - on which that ruling was based dates back to the early 1960s when Union Carbide and Miller Brewing Co. developed a method to make "beer concentrate" which would be shipped to other bottling facilities for "re-constitution" - now a legal process, but one seldom, if ever, used after that*.

* At least, I've never seen a beer labeled as "...from Concentrate". High gravity brewing obviously accomplishes the same thing, but skirts the law by not having to remove water to begin with.

Phila. beer blogger, Joe Sixpack, did an examination of the rules back in 2010 in his Ice bock: Frozen out in the U.S.A., stating that:

Adding that:

But there's no record of any further TTB ruling on the topic that I can find since then.

As others noted, some of the imported ice beer, like Brewdog's TACTICAL NUCLEAR PENGUIN have been labeled as Class/Type 699 - OTHER SPECIALTIES & PROPRIETARIES (and, so, taxed at the higher rate of$13.50/proof gallon?)

The TTB's Pre-Import Basics pdf claims that even imported ice beers have to meet the "Not more than 0.5% of beer can be removed as ice crystals" rule (pg 47).

​

 

Sure, pay the bills first and all that. I agree there is a circular go round where consumers follow the trend and brewers follow consumers. Craft beer is a relatively new movement and as it grows I believe we will see greater acceptance of traditional styles. Just needs a little consumer confidence which will come with time.

 

Biere de garde

 

Bumping my question from further up the thread:


I only have a loose understanding of the issue, but from what I remember reading the problem stems mostly from the fact that freeze concentrating is considered distilling and would be federally regulated that way. Correct? If so, I wonder if breweries that also have licenses to distill (Ballast Point, New Holland, etc) would be able to make an eisbock and release it not as a beer, but as a distilled product. Maybe that would be prohibitively expensive though?

Could a licensed distillery theoretically produce an eisbock but release it as a distilled product rather than a beer?

 

Gruit

and still too difficult to find a Gose, Berliner, or Hazy APA at your local high-end bottle shop.

 

I second that.

 

Weizenbock for sure. I've been looking for another Weizenbock ever since I had Weihenstephaner's interpretation but I just haven't had any luck.

 

Another vote for Altbier done well.

 

Weizen-Eisbock - http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/72/1934/

 

Yeah, it seems like that would be possible. Not much different than true applejack (which probably doesn't exist commerically) other than the base beverage - beer vs hard cider.

Brewdog's "freeze-distilled" products were imported by Preiss Importers, which is part of The Griffin Group, which owns Anchor Brewing Co. (also a licensed distiller, of course) and a minority share of Brewdog.

Is there such a thing in the modern beer market?

 

I am all about the Dunkel!

 

Any of the German styles. Drop the mediocre reds and put on a good rauchbier!!

 

Scotch Ale....Don't ever like to be without some Old Chub in the house.

 

Wit