Our Bottlecraft North Park manager, Gene, selects his favorite beers of the week. You can stay up to date on our beer shop favorites through our news feed and also through our Instagram. This week’s theme is California Collaborations.
Bottle Logic | Green Cheek | Birds of Paradise | Rum Barrel-Aged Sour Beer, 14%Certainly one of the more experimental beers to grace our pages of late, this is the fruit of two of the finest breweries operating in Orange County at the moment. Green Cheek is already justifiably exalted for their pitch-perfect hoppy beers and devotion to lagers, while Bottle Logic has changed the terms of the conversation with regard to barrel-aged stouts and barleywines. Birds of Paradise thus represents a bit of a departure for them both, but what innovation! Inspired by tiki drinks (mostly notably the Jungle Bird, with its inclusion of aperitivo bitterness), this high-ABV sour ale was aged in used rum casks from Barbados before being conditioned on the peels of grapefruits and oranges and finally topped off with lime and pineapple. If you dare, do as instructed and pour this beer over ice (yes, really)!
Mumford Brewing | Pure Project | Trippin’ in The Desert | Hazy DIPA, 9% Mumford Brewing has carved out a loyal following in downtown Los Angeles and seems largely content to send their beers only within California. Wiegand Family Distribution. the eponymous LA-based firm headed by Scott Wiegand, is to thank for Mumford’s continuing availability in San Diego. This hazy Double IPA is intensely dense, brewed in conjunction with our local Pure Project and featuring one of the latter’s favorite hop-blends. The combination of Mosaic (pineapple-esque) and Cashmere (coconutty) leads to a piña colada in beer-form, ideal for sojourns into the sands to the east.
For well over a decade, my father has been happily drinking Moonlight beer. The famously reclusive one-man operation in Santa Rosa has been putting out flawless black lagers, pilsners and others in the bottom-fermenting family of beers for many years now. Historically only available on draft – and even then only to select accounts around the Bay Area – recent developments have caused cans of Moonlight to materialize at my father’s neighborhood grocery store (Berkeley Bowl, for those of you keeping track at home). A visit home is now somehow incomplete without picking up some four-packs of Death & Taxes and Reality Czech for the house. All of the above is intended to provide some background as to how excited I am personally for the latest incarnation of Enegren’s American Reinheitsgebot series. Seeing as Moonlight rarely collaborates with anyone, their mark on the can is a badge of honor. A malty (but not heavy!), toasty and altogether toothsome offering from two breweries at the top of their respective niveaus.
