Little chief

Wait until you try their latest sour!!

 

Yup. Little Chief got made props from me. The Red Hot as well! Barely missed John.

 

If it's anything like "Snipes Sour Pouch" it is divine.

 

I'll definitely be looking for this, but in the interim please explain something. You can add boatloads of hops to a beer without raising ABV 0.00001%, right? And if they're the right hops, and especially through dry hopping, you can contribute significantly to the flavor profile as well, right? (Not to mention aroma) I guess I'm trying to understand why a low ABV beer would necessarily sacrifice in the flavor dept., with the exception of malt flavor of course. Am I misreading this?

 

Correct.. hop quantity and variety have nothing to do with the ABV of a beer. The malt profile and ABV are all about the malt bill, obviously.

 

Yup. Think of it this way, say you have a 14bbl mash tun. If you are brewing a higher ABV beer you are going to need a higher malt to water volume ratio than you would for a low ABV beer. In the mashing process, fermentable sugars aren't the only things to come out of the malt. You have proteins and numerous other particles that will wind up going into the brew kettle, so it's only logical that the malt flavors and mouthfeel of a higher ABV beer are going to be more pronounced that of a low ABV beer, brewed with with a lower malt to water volume ratio.

 

Right. I always associate maltier beers with higher ABV, in fact I don't know that it can be otherwise. More sugars = more alcohol. But you can still have a very flavorful beer w/ a low ABV, it's just that more of the flavor comes from the hops. Could be lots of pine and citrus (or other qualities) from the dry hopping or extreme bitterness from adding hops to the boil, or both. You're just not going to have that heavier body that comes with a richer malt content.

 

This is spot on. My brother in law and I drank a growler of Little Chief last night. Getting through the second pint was a bit of a chore --- it's the Catch-22 of low ABV IPAs --- you want to be able to drink a ton of them but the thin mouthfeel and the lack of any significant malt backbone to hold up the amount of hops just gets tiring. Tiring is probably not the best word but it's how I felt about it last night. I switched to Double Jack and all was right with the world.

 

This seems odd to me, although I'm typically a quality-over-quantity type beer drinker. I find that the maltier beers, especially those caramelly, malty DIPAs that seem to proliferate from Colorado and points east, are more "tiring" to drink. In theory at least, lower ABV (session) beers should be easier to knock back. Just like I can sit in a restaurant and drink four glasses of water with my meal. Can you think of a reason for this Catch-22 effect? I can't.

 

I'm not really talking about malty DIPAs --- I'm talking about my favorites like Pliny, Union and Double Jack, RPM and Hop Venom, etc. While all of these are super-hopped, they also have solid malt bills that can hold up the hops. Low ABV IPAs (aka ISAs) like Little Chief and Fremont 77 Select are just too bitter for me --- there's just no malt to balance things out at all. Again, I am not a big fan of "balanced" east coast-style IPAs/English IPAs but I do want something to hold up the hops.

 

Well I do agree, I could gladly drink any of those first IPAs you mentioned all day long and never tire of them.

 

Recently had their Vaquero IPA and enjoyed it quite a bit. Snipes is one of those Washington breweries that not many folks outside the area know about, but us regional/local folks love. A "hidden gem" if you will.

 

Haven't met the new brewer Chad yet, but the great Tony Savoy at Flyer's really made some great beers when he was there (and at Flyer's too!)

 

Vaquero was solid.

 

John,
Don't you know by now...it has to be 7% or more, extra everything and double dry hopped to Hell for it to be sessionable, balanced or classified as drinkable.