Genesee 12 Horse Ale is back!

Good lookin out, brother! Will definitely be on the hunt for this one

 

Cool. I hope to try one

 

My dad said back in the day it was a more unique choice and he enjoyed it immensely...and by the time I was of legal age it was gone.

I will buy a Saranac mix pack of ales and compare the formula. if I read the tasting notes correctly on the 12 Horse, I have a sneaking suspicion that the 15 pack/3 types of Saranac canned ales contains one very similar to the 12 Horse. Will post later today and let ya know if the local distro still has this 12'r.

 

I have an older 12 Horse Ale wooden box that is a table holder for condiments. Going to have to dig it out of storage when I get my hands on this!

 

I checked the site. It needs to be added...

 

I failed. They sold the meager few they got. I will try one more place...maybe they got some more...otherwise I need to keep on keeping on.

 

One of my all time favorite brews from Genesee Rochester NY!!!
Chrees !!!

 

Well, as I noted in my reply to your other post re: Genesee 12 Horse Ale, it does seem that this version is based on the circa 1980 reformulation, so it dates from the dawn of the craft era (see announcement from the local Rochester paper, below/left). Also, while I was disappointed in that "new" version, I apparently did drink it as seen in the photo at my niece and nephew's Easter celebration in the early 80s.

But my loyalty will always be with the version -above/right- cases of which kept me company in the cold snowy winter of '77-78, in the Adirondacks...

It will forever amaze me that the few brewers of US ales (Ballantine XXX and IPA, Heileman's Red Cap, McSorley's and Rainier, Yuengling's Chesterfield, etc.) continued to dumb down their products even after the Craft brewers proved there was a market - however small - for traditional hoppy ales.

Well, Matt's labels their Saranac pale ale an American Pale Ale, and, at 30 IBUs, it is pretty much in the mid-range of traditional US "standard" ales of the post-Repeal period (well, until Genesee created their under-hopped Cream Ale and it briefly took off - selling over 1M bbl by the late '70s - and so many US brewers followed suit with imitations in the 1970s-1980s).

 

I just reviewed 12 Horse Ale. It is a fairly decent ale. I gave it a 3.5 with a rDev of +12.8. Much better tasting than AAL's.

 

I'm curious did the US ales of the time period when there were still hoppy US ales have a noticably different hop flavor compared with say imported English ales? I imagine differences in freshness might have been an issue here and make for a difficult comparison, but I imagine some hop flavor still came through with those imports?

I also wonder about what sort of dry hopping rate was used for those ales. In an article about the impact of dry hopping rates from 2018 there was mentioned that in the UK the 1960s they were using about 4.3 g/hl (so about 0.01 lbs per US barrel) for a low gravity draught beer and about 138.6 g/hl (so about 0.357 lbs per US barrel) for higher gravity beers. I imagine there may have been outliers but it seems like the dry hopping rates were quite modest by then. The overall hopping rate in the early to mid 60s in the UK appear to have been on the decrease, going from 0.68 lbs to 0.64 lbs. Based on those figures it seems likely to me that a large part of the hop flavor in UK ales at the time would have come from late additions of kettle hops, especially in lower gravity ales, rather than dry hopping. And there is hardly reason to believe that things improved greatly in the following decade which is the time period that you are describing as I understand it. It would be interesting to know what the numbers were for US ales, if they maintained more significant dry hopping rates by then or if they too had followed a downward curve.

 

Patrik, JK is indeed the appropriate person to pose this question to.

In the recent past there were a number of ‘reconstructed’ Ballantine beers with recipes developed by the Greg Deuhs (Pabst Master Brewer):

· Ballantine IPA

· Ballantine Burton Ale

· Ballantine Brewers Gold Ale

Unfortunately I have only had the pleasure to try Ballantine IPA (which I enjoyed very much). I actually had a 6-pack of Ballantine Brewers Gold Ale in my hand for purchase at my ‘local’ Total Wine & More store but after removing one bottle and seeing the bottling date I put it back on the shelf; I never saw fresh bottles of this beer so I never had a chance to try it.

Ballantine was a ‘fan’ of using Brewers Gold hops (American grown as I understand it). Below are descriptions of the hop aroma/flavor of this hop:

“Brewer Gold Hops are mainly used as a bittering hop, but their intense black currant spice aroma finds traction in Belgian ales.”

https://www.northernbrewer.com/products/us-brewers-gold-hop-pellets

“For brewer’s wishing to experiment though, Brewer’s Gold is still a good choice for late bittering with desirable notes of spice and blackcurrant. It is also nearly identical to sister selection Bullion.”

http://www.hopslist.com/hops/bittering-hops/brewers-gold/

I really wish I had a chance to drink the Ballantine Brewers Gold Ale since the descriptor of “blackcurrant” sounds intriguing. I would think that at least for the US brewed Ales that featured Brewers Gold hops these beers would be notably different from a flavor perspective from imported British Ales.

Cheers!

P.S. On a related note here is an old (1960’s) commercial for Ballantine Brewers Gold Ale:

 

Yeah the flavor would depend on the hops used I imagine, but there were a few potential candidates for US ale brewers, you had domestically grown varieties like Fuggles, which seem to have been the second most extensively grown hop after Cluster, for a period of time at least, in the post war period, then you had the more expensive imported hops of which central European hops made up the largest portion. I could forsee those being used as well being more expensive and thus premium. But this is mere speculation of course.

 

Yeah, while off-hand I can't think of a reliable "lbs/bbl" for dry hopping in the post-Repeal US literature, I've been surprised at the low quantities of the stats from the pre-Pro era. (Of course, dry-hopping in the US would have been done in the huge aging tanks, not the traditional UK "handful of hops in each cask".)

Brewmaster Jaime Jurado (The Lion, Courage, Spoetzl, Susquehanna, Abita) and I once had a usenet conversation in which he complained about what he considered the negative "hop oil" flavor of Yuengling's Lord Chesterfield, and Ballantine Ale and McSorley's Cream Ale of the Rheingold/Ortlieb/Schmidt's era both also used distilled hop oil (of course, not to be confused with hop extract). So, it might be many of those ales' brewers were using hop oil instead of and/or to supplement actual dry-hopping? Seems deceptive if it was used in place of when they were advertising their beers were dry-hopped.

P. Ballantine & Sons did heavily promote their use of Brewer's Gold hops for Ballantine XXX Ale in ads, even labeling their cans and bottles in the late '50s-early '60s (IIRC) but they did not market a separate brand called Ballantine Brewer's Gold Ale. That was a brand of the label's new owner, Falstaff Brewing Corp., and only lasted a few years, circa 1980. (Some internet rumors in the 1990s claimed the beer was just a blend of XXX and IPA - I could believe it.).

Be glad you put that sixpack back* - it was nothing like the original Falstaff beer, which was 7.1% abv and had 30 ibu's while the 2016 Pabst/Cold Spring product's label states 5.5% and 23 ibu's.

* I remember coming across a just-delivered case of that latter day BBGA and almost bought the entire case because I did love that Falstaff/Narragansett Ballantine Brewers Gold Ale (they - usually - dropped the apostrophe, as did Pabst). But it was already a few months old, so I just pulled out a sixpack. Man, was I glad I didn't pop for the entire case after having a bottle out of the lone six I bought.

See Ballantine's Hops for examples of labels and ads, etc, noted above.

 

So, in the above TV add the depiction of "Brewers Gold" on the beer bottle's neck label was for Ballantine XXX Ale?

Cheers!

 

And since hop aroma/favor is heavily dependent on where the hops are grown (i.e., terroir) the US grown Fuggles hops would have a differing hop aroma/flavor from the UK grown Fuggles hops. How different?

Cheers!

 

Yup. As seen on numerous ads on the page I linked to and here:

Also note the 2016 Pabst promo material that states the beer was "...first brewed over three decades ago."

 

There's a mention of it in a Journal of the Institute of brewing article from 1936 where it is said that between one eight to one half of a pound per british barrel.

I think that sounds like a reasonable development by then when one considers the mentions of 0.5-1 lbs of hops per US barrel found in Hantke's and Wahl and Henius books. One intervening variable in the post war period for US ales I guess would be the higher original gravity and abv compared with most UK ales, which might have helped to keep the hopping rate up a bit. As per another Journal of the institute of brewing article from 1965 the hopping rate for beer was given as a third of a pound while half a pound was given for ale. If those numbers were accurate, on average at least, I would expect the dry hopping rate to be lower than the overall hopping rate, so maybe a quarter of a pound up to a third or something along those lines (akin to the figure for high gravity UK ale at the time)? That is, if they were actually dry hopping the ale, some might have used oils as you say.

On a side note I guess the reason why the numbers seem low when considering the strong hopping of ales of old is that most of the hops were used as kettle hops back then for ale, back when they were using 1-3 pounds per barrel those hops went into the kettle. Whereas now the emphasis is on the dry hopping where multiple pounds per barrel seems to have become common for IPAs, amounts which I at least have not found documentation for in the old days. Even the most ho hum pale ale nowadays is probably dry hopped quite generously from an historical perspective, and that's not taking into account the lack of aging.

Could be. Though I agree that one would expect dry hops to be used if dry hopping was being marketed. I guess developments might have taken place also with hop oils, and one has to account for varietal differences, but I quite enjoy the beers using hop oil that are now on the market here in Sweden, all of which are coming from Carlsberg Sweden who seem to have really taken to it as an ingredient in new beers. I imagine they are using it sparingly as far as amounts go but still the hop flavor and aroma is noticable and I get the sense that you get alot of bang for your buck with this hop oil.