Are these really, actually, LITERALLY the Best Beers being made in the US? NO, they are NOT. But they are EXCELLENT beers; ones that you SHOULD try if you profess to like beers at all.
This is such a pleasure to drink. It’s one of those extremely rare things you find usually only after a LONG search through the marketplace: Something For Everybody.
IMO, this is one of at least the top ten IPAs I have EVER tasted from WA state. It us STUPIDLY fine: lovely subtle fruit flavors, dazzling, fine-grained, prettily BITTER Chinook hops, great, satisfying body, pleasing finish…a bona fide masterpiece
Hair of The Dog occupies a category of One. It’s remained the very definition of what “small independent craft brewery” means and SHOULD mean.
This future is something not that we have to create, it is something we get to create; a wonderful, limitless challenge and can be enormous fun and a good living, IF we have the guts and don’t let the knee-jerk naysayers drag us off the path, into their weeds.
When something comes along that changes the paradigm of a culture or even a product class, like Deschutes Black Butte NA absolutely has done, the bar, the minimum requirement for quality moves in an almost visible way.
Echoes Brewing “Mother. Of. All. Tripels”, unless Washingtonians have even less general beer awareness than they used to, SHOULD wind up being considered a Pacific Northwest icon.
It would be nice if today’s beer fans could bother to explore some of the styles of ale that sidle up to Lager Territory (Cold IPA, Brut, and Extra Pale come to mind) and quit reflexively running back to the comfortable haven of Less Flavor.
The Pour Fool 