2015 New Glarus upcoming beers

I like the way NG does it. It's a lot of fun to see the line-up change from year to year.

 

If I ever build a house, I think my front porch will have heating tubes in the cement.

 

Or a bottle shipper sized "milk chute" next to the front door.

 

Agree with the idea of the line-up changing year to year. The Annual beer vote is a great thing (assuming they actually take our votes into consideration).

The issue at hand is that the quality and variety of the Thumbprint series has gone down of late. Year-round Thumbprints are new this year, and it seems (from what I can tell) that most here are not a fan of the year-round concept for the series (especially when Scream on the shelf is at least a month or two old). And the "seasonal" Thumbprints have been either reruns from the recent past (Enigma, Berliner Weiss) or (in my opinion) kinda boring and not worthy of being a Thumbprint (Milk Stout).

If it's a money grab, I'd prefer they just up the price on the Thumbprints and give us six interesting beers that are new each year (or reruns from the distant past).

Four R&D beers was nice and all, but Wild Bitter didn't really live up to R&D expectations (for me anyway). [Have not yet tried Golden Ale.]

 

The biggest challenge seems to be that NG doesn't really want to change up their pricing- if they would just introduce a premium 6-pack and update packaging to accommodate this they could then shift beers like Scream and Berliner to that premium sixer line, freeing up a bit of shelf space (and maybe even brewing space) for more adventurous Thumbprints. Central Waters, Bell's, and Founders all do this and it works well.

I do think that common styles like Milk Stout don't really fit into what the Thumbprint series was initially designed to be.

A premium 6 pack would also help with slow sales on beers like Scream, which seems to have old batches hanging around quite a long time. 6 bottles instead of 4 and they would have 1/3 less packages to sell.

NG is caught in a weird place with the R&D beers. Dan doesn't seem to want to commit to sour-only R&D releases (which is kind of strange, given that he built a facility dedicated to wild ales), and they seem to have given up on sour Thumbprint releases. I'd like to see them change the bottle limit based on style and perceived interest. Fruited sour, two bottles. Golden Ale, maybe 4-6 bottles. Why wouldn't they want to sell out during the releases, if at all possible?

 

One thing to keep in mind is that the Wild Ale part of the facility is only a couple years old. Remember most good sours are blends of one, two, three year old and older. Once the NG "fruit cave" or whatever you'd like to call it hits about 4 years old, I'm guessing we'll see a good amount more sour ales once Dan has enough different vintages to blend them to his liking. Patience...I'm sure we'll see more Thumbprint sours. (hopefully)

 

I literally laughed out loud at that last night when I read it. Guy's obviously clueless.

 

Agreed.

To be fair, Oud Bruin, Enigma, Cran-Bic and Berliner all came out in the last year and a half or so. On the other hand, all were repeats but one, I'd like to see more new offerings and no year round Thumbprints.

 

Because the place is packed during the weekends. When I picked up my Golden Ale on the weekend after the release I couldn't believe that I had to park way in back on the gravel. Just another weekend at New Glarus...

 

Gotta agree with this very strongly. There are no longer any repercussions for posting completely ludicrous trade requests. In the past at least you had to deal with public shaming. Which to mean, seemed like a very reasonable punishment.

If you can't take the heat get yo a$$ out the kitchen!

 

It's not just the lack of repercussions; with the comments gone, depending on the experience level of the poster there's a good chance they may not even know that they've posted a completely ludicrous trade request.

Back on topic: My understanding is the Milk Stout is a Thumbprint rather than a regular six-pack because this is the first time that NG has done a beer w/ lactose.

 

Yeah, makes sense. I don't think it's an amazing milk stout, but it's very solid, certainly, and the lactose helps to cut out any bitterness the beer would normally have. It's one I'd never say no to, at the very least.

 

While lactose would certainly qualify as an experiment for NG production brewing, brewing with pumpkins a la Pumpkin Pie Lust seems like it would have been a significantly more complicated experiment. They have a very sophisticated pilot system and are very good at dialing in new beers (from what I understand).

 

Pumpkin Pie Lust doesn't have any actual pumpkin in it.

 

http://www.newglarusbrewing.com/index.cfm/beers/ourbeers/beer/pumpkin-pie-lust

 

Well, either the NG website is wrong, or they changed it for this year, because last year Dan Carey claimed otherwise:

 

There's discussions back on pages 5-6 of this thread regarding the change in the Pumpkin Pie Lust recipe for 2015.

 

Guess I missed the details on the new recipe when I was reading through that.

On both why Milk Stout is a Thumbprint and about Pumpkin Pie Lust not containing any pumpkins, I was just relaying what NG brewers told me. I would tend to trust their take on it, but you're very welcome to ignore that and/or draw whatever conclusions you want.

 

I heard the Lust is not real either but it is actually artificial Lust extract. This is according to my co-workers uncle's Filipino neighbor so take that with a grain of salt.

 

I my dog took the Hardhat tour and they said that used real Lust this year, so you better check your source on that.