Another Smokestack

I'm taking a beer/water break from working on Twitchy (surprises abound with that silly car). Yesterday I bought another of Boulevards Smokestack series named: The Sixth Glass Quadrupel Ale. It sits at 10.5 % at only 22 IBU. Malts malts malts. This beer is also adjuncted with brown sugar, dark sugar and corn sugar (dextrose). The result is a surprisingly light body beer that'll knock ya down pretty quick. It comes in a 750, so it's basically the same as a cheap bottle of wine (similarly priced at 9.50). This beer is delicious. You don't get the adjuncty (new word) off flavors of an american rice lager, but you do get some of the richness from the brown sugar. The finish is ever so slightly sticky, so maybe a touch more hops would clean it up, but part of this beer's charm is the lack of hop flavor.

I've been thinking of my most adventurous beer yet, and it's far enough along the process I'm ok with describing my plan. There is a beer I've run across (can't remember what it was though) that bragged about using hops that start with "C." A lot of the very good American hops out of the northwest have C names (centennial, citra, cascade, etc.). That beer had 4-5 hops, but there are around 10 different C-hops out there, so I've been wanting to do a IPA or DIPA with all 10 of them. I mentioned the idea to Sean and he brought up the idea of doing a collaboration 10 gal all grain batch on his system. At this points, it looks like it's definitely going to happen, and pretty soon after the fresh harvest gets processed and available. I'm not going to go into the hop/grain bill because it's still in the air, but it's looking like a heavy single IPA with somewhere around 7% ABV and a touch over 100 IBU. It will definitely be dryhopped on citra, which will make for a smoother finish than the stats indicate (invariably raising the PDI).

The name is something I love as well. We're going to call this brew "The Seaward." It combines alliteration, humor and history. It sounds like "The C-Word," which would both allude to the C-hops, but also be a double entendre which would be a bit obscene (this will be my "Ice-bitch" brew). The label will have an old square rigged ship with the name being prominent. This would allude to the history of IPAs being overly hopped in order to survive the shipping journey to India from Britain. It's perfect.

-J