Rare Beer Roundup: Yazoo, Upland, Foothills, Block 15 + More
We were surfing a sudsy wave from January into February last week, culminating with crazy Saturday featuring 6 different bottle releases popping up from coast to coast. Another pair of lotteries also went live, as breweries continue to search for the best methods of releasing their sought after bottles sans hysteria, complaining, line cutting and other super fun activities.
First on the docket was Nashville’s Yazoo Brewing Company, who introduced the inaugural bottle in their Embrace the Funk series, Deux Rouges. Instead of the typical first come, first serve process, raffle tickets were handed out, with 150 winners receiving a special release day poster guaranteeing them the right to snag up to 4 bottles of the Merlot barrel-aged Flanders Red. Even better, the brewery has a new dedicated bottling system for all these funky sour ales, enabling them to drop even more barrel-aged nuggets later this year.
Remember the days when you could just log on to the Upland Brewing website, reserve a couple bottles of lambic and have a friendly local proxy pickup and ship out? Goodnight, sweet prince. Upland now handles all sales of their sour ales through a lottery system on Eventbrite, which tends to have a wildly low success rate for those not in their Secret Barrel Society. The latest lottery window ran for a week beginning on February 4, with Blueberry, Stawberry and Raspberry lambics all up for grabs. Production must be on the rise with these latest batches, as the brewery allowed winners to purchase 2 bottles of each, instead of just a single, lonely (albeit delicious) bottle.
Single bottle limit, 200-count releases anyone? Austin’s masters of wild, spontaneous and funky fermentation, Jester King unleashed La Vie En Rose last weekend at their picturesque taproom down in Texas. The brewery’s continued experimentation with refermenting ales with fruit continues to get rave reviews, starting with Atrial Rubicite and continuing with this latest sour farmhouse with raspberries. While batch 1 of La Vie En Rose was exceedingly tiny, a larger follow-up is expected to drop in a few weeks.
With the Pliny the Younger release lurking on the horizon; it’s only fitting that yet another sought-after West coast hop monster drops out of the sky and onto our tongues this week. Kern River Brewing Company launched another lottery to land bottles of their ludicrously popular Citra Double IPA, which will allow all the lucky winners to take home 6 bombers a piece. This was yet another beer release scene that quickly turned ugly last year, leaving many locals shut out and creating one giant collective headache, prompting the lottery system.
Attention Forest & Main locals – word is officially out. This Southeastern Pennsylvania gem boasts a quaint menu of Belgian and English-inspired ales, punctuated by the occasional barrel-aged bottle release. While previous occasions allowed people to stroll in and pick up beers at their leisure, Marius (wine barrel-aged saison with peaches and plums) brought out the largest crowd yet, resulting in 4 limit changes (started at 6 per person) throughout the afternoon to ensure everyone left with at least 1 bottle. While Tired Hands seems to garner the lion’s share of the attention in the area, look for this stellar little brewpub to make some noise in 2014.
Perennial Head Brewer Cory King continued to make it rain on beer geeks thanks to his 100% barrel-aged gypsy brewery, Side Project Brewing. Last weekend marked his 3rd bottle release featuring the debut of a brand new series intended to explore the art of blending, Pulling Nails. Incredibly complex and chock full of all that barrel-fermented fun sourheads love to flip their palates over, this was created by blending 4 different ales aged in oak barrels for varying periods of time. Expect to see the message boards chatting these up for the considerable future.
We didn’t forget about the Pacific Northwest either – another pair of releases went down in Oregon featuring Block 15 in Corvallis and De Garde in Tillamook. While the Block 15 crew was kicking off Bourbon Month with bottles of their barrel-aged imperial oat stout Super Nebula, De Garde dropped 4 different barrel-aged sour ales, including the first bottles for their 2014 beer club, The Keepers. These guys are doing some serious experimentation with lambic-inspired and wine-influenced sour ales, so don’t sleep and wait until they’re borderline impossible to land on the trade boards.
Rounding out most of the week’s action was the cult classic from Foothills Brewing Company, Sexual Chocolate. Steadily picking up steam since the first major release in 2005 (which was only 500 bottles), this cocoa-fueled imperial stout typically attracts people from across the East coast, with overnight lines and marathon-esque bottle shares going down before the 8am start time. While its super fine barrel-aged sister really stokes the beer nerd coals, there’s still no shortage of love for one of North Carolina’s most wanted stouts in 2014.
Nick Alfonse is a writer living in the Philadelphia area. Follow him on Twitter @BeerServedRare.
