This beer takes hops to the ridiculous. Back when our buddy Vinnie Cilurzo was the brewer at Blind Pig, he brewed mega-hopped IPAs to celebrate their anniversaries. Well, since Vinnie isn't at Blind Pig any more, we figured we'd pick up that ball and run with it. This is the same recipe as our already wonderfully hopped IPA, with a crazy level of actual hopping. We brewed just a single batch, so…
"This beer takes hops to the ridiculous" is what we wrote ont he back of our 2nd Anniversary IPA. This year, I wasn't exactly sure how to describe how far we have taken hops. So when brewer Lee walked by as I was writing this label I called out, "Hey Lee! Tell me something I can say about the 3rd Anniversary IPA." Lee stopped for a moment, leaned against the door (it had been a long day of…
"This beer takes hops to the ridiculous" is what we wrote on the back of our 2nd Anniversary IPA. And on the 3rd Anniversary IPA bottle we wrote, "Pucker up baby, this brew packs one heckuva hop punch (and then some!)." See, in comparison to our original Stone IPA recipe, we doubled the bittering hops for the 2nd anniversary, and we tripled 'em for the 3rd. So what do we have to say for ourselves…
It's late July as I write this. Weather's been great. Good San Diego weather–nice and hot, but not too hot. The days are like a warm burrito accented by the salsa fresca of the afternoon's cool ocean breezes. Perfect beer drinking weather (admittedly, I think ALL weather is perfect beer drinking weather). August is knocking on the door. September and our 5th Anniversary Open House is just around…
An ode to density, viscoSity, and the unbearable opaqueness of being...
Considering that we were barreling down on a beeline path in what might have seemed to be a ruinous (get it?) direction with previous Anniversaries' IPA offerings to the hop god–hops are not a real religion, but perhaps they should be? Already a large and ravenous throng is ready and willing to offer their palates up on…
Ahh, the annual hullabaloo. The time for my relentless soliloquy to banish the quotidian summer ennui, midst simultaneously imbuing a rich obfuscation upon the part of the poor reader (alas, felicitous imbiber) who must certainly promulgate a healthy gumption to attempt to forage through this precisely 7.7 point font work. No, not for the nebbish most definitely. The conundrum? What is the…
This year's 8th anniversary is, like all previous Stone Anniversary Ales, an adaptation of a previous Stone Brewing Co. release. This year we set out to make an "Anniversary-ized" version of Lee's Mild, a limited-release beer from 1999. For this beer we used some of the same malts that we had used in Lee's Mild, added more hops, less water (to bring the alcohol content up), and found a tasty…
As has been a tradition, we have “Anniversary-ized” a recipe from our history by cranking it up, making it stronger and more assertive. With this year’s anniversary we decided to look back at a wheat beer that we released a couple of spring/summers a few years ago: Stone Heat Seeking Wheat. While it was a plenty tasty beer, we ultimately decided that it wasn’t that reflective of what Stone was…
Series 5 of 14
Jim Moorehouse, Nate Albrecht and Brad Zeller, of Aleman, once placed first at the Iron Brew homebrewing competition in the Windy City (judged by none other than Greg Koch and Jason Ebel of Two Brothers Brewing, among others). Their style-bending IPA artfully married the assertive tropical bite of Citra hops with the amazing flavor and aromatics of coffee to…
Series 12 of 14
In the lexicon of craft beer, there are special release beers that are hard to obtain and then there are 'whale' beers that are the stuff of legend. Unobtainium. Beers that can't simply be bought. One must favor a friend who knows a brewer that can get it for the right trade and a bit of luck. For some craft diehards this is silly. For others it's a…
