When Has Sierra Nevada Ever Let You Down?

I still look forward to Celebration Ale every year.

 

What was in that one again? Did it have Kellerwiess?

 

I bet if they were wax dipped or corked and caged it would be a different story.

 

I think Vienna came afterwards. Maybe in the 2017 or 2018 Fall pack? I was very disappointed when the Kolsch returned with the different hops. Why do breweries ruin great beer sometimes?

 

True of many things in life.

Cheers!

 

Sierra Nevada has always put out a solid enjoyable beer. I can't come up with anything negative to say. They just make a very consistently drinkable quality brew year after year.

 

SN was my gateway brewery into craft beer. I would still buy Torpedo and Pale Ale but I have quit trying to find any of the beers fresher than 3 months old here in central Texas. Their distributor sucks, and SN has let me down by not making sure their beers are well represented here.

 

FWIW I have similar issues in my area, too many old Sierra Nevada beers on my local beer retailers' shelves.

I would do my best to thwart this situation by purchasing seasonal mix-packs but Sierra Nevada decided to stop producing these so...

Cheers!

 

You mean, "developed in the UK", doncha? Developed in the1920s by Professor E. S. Salmon at Wye College in England, by the mid-1930s it (along with other similar varieties, Brewer's Favorite and Bullion) was being grown in both NYS at the Geneva Experimental Station by J. D. Harlan (who hoped the hop's resistance to downy mildew would help revive New York's hop industry) and in Oregon at their experimental station in Corvallis as well as on the E. Clement Horst hop ranch outside Independence.

Or, as Hoplist states:

Whoa, dude.... well, yeah, it was obviously a typo, otherwise this sentence makes little sense:

Anyway, doing some organizing, I found what I'm thinking is the earliest citation I can remember of Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale being called an India Pale Ale, in a article in Zymurgy, Winter 1987, on Holiday Beers, in which author Kihm Winship lists SNCA under "Type/Style" as:

Got me wondering and see that in 1994, SN entered SNCA as an "India Pale Ale" in the GABF where it won Silver (Gold went to Vail IPA from Dallas' Hubcab Brewpub [?]), with no Bronze awarded that year.

Yet, four years earlier, SN entered Celebration as an "Amber Ale", when it won the Bronze. "Oh," I thought, "perhaps IPA was not yet a GABF recognized style in '90..." but, no, it was - with only one medal given out for the style, the Gold to Rubicon's IPA.

And, the year before, Anchor listed Liberty Ale as an entry under "India Pale Ale", where it won the Silver (Rubicon, again, won the Gold). That year -1989 - appears to be the first time for the GABF to have an "India Pale Ale" category.

 

Few beers give me the feels like Celebration does. Some years are better than others,this year being damn good. Tough for me to think of a more reliable, affordable and much better than ok IPA than Celbration.

 

I picked up a couple at Costco, but they were soon no longer available. $26.99 a case was a good deal. I'll buy it again next year.

 

I used to live about 8 minutes away from the Chico brewery and I'm a bit of a "fanboy", but ...
I was disappointed when they stopped bottling Unfiltered Wheat (red label) and I find Orta Vez undrinkable.