Tag: Brown Ale

Beer of the Week: NW Peaks Easy Peak-an Nut Brown Ale

By Iron Chef Leftovers

The second of the seasonally themed Mountainbeers from NW Peaks is their dessert beer – a nut brown ale made with the inclusion of actual pecans, basically setting you up for the end of the meal.

From the NW Peaks Website:

 The name. The mountain. Easy Peak is not so much a mountain, but the high point on Easy Ridge, the ridge located on the other side of the Chilliwack river from popular Copper ridge. While the payoff is stupendous one must ford the Chilliwack river and ascend 3,000 feet back up to the ridge. On the ridge, I don’t know if there is a more beautiful, easy-going, completely back country experience in the N Cascades, including the hike up to the high point.

The beer. Last year we did Spickard Spice for Thanksgiving dinner, this year we moved towards Thanksgiving dessert. We brewed a nut brown as the base – a medium bodied, malty brown with a nice nutty hop (and malt) character. Per our desire to make a Thanksgiving beer, we added some pecans and pie spices, but just enough to give it a perceivable note.  The result was a nut brown that dominates the character with a nice pecan note and a barely perceptible spicy note.  With a nice brown color, the beer even has the color of a typical pecan pie, so we’d like to believe that it’s just like pecan pie in a glass. Maybe not “exactly”, but it goes down “easy as pie.”

untitle8dThe beer pours amber brown in color with hints of spice and nuts on the nose. The beer starts out on the palate with a nice mild sweetness before building into a slightly spicy nutmeg middle and then moves into deeper brown sugar and pecan nuttiness before finishing with a long, pleasant roasted pecan flavor. The beer has a small amount of perceptible pie spices, but they are definitely background flavors and work wonderfully supporting the deep richness of the nut flavors. This beer is really as close to a liquid pecan pie with great flavors of roasted nuts and I would love to see how this beer did if it got a short aging in a whiskey barrel (hint…hint). One note to add – when we drank this beer, we inadvertently left a small amount in the growler and ended up trying it a room temperature. The spice become the dominant flavor in the beer at that point, so I would say if you enjoy the nut flavor more than the spice, drink it around 45-55 degrees. If you want more noticeable spice flavor, go 55+ with your temp.

NW Peaks Easy Peak-an Nut Brown goes crazy with a spectacular 4 Carya illinoinensis out of 5.

Beer of the Week: Lantern Brewing Dubbel Abbey Style Brown Ale

By Iron Chef Leftovers

Lantern Brewing is a small brewery located in the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle. They are relatively new to the game and their beers have a somewhat limited availability (check Chuck’s Hop Shop, they usually carry a couple). Lantern doesn’t have a website (I hate that trend), but they do have a Facebook Page. It also means I can’t give you any stats on the beer.

I was in the mood for Belgian style ale recently and this one was sitting in the fridge, so I cracked it open.

The beer pours brown, like a dark brewed tea, with a dark cream head. Malt and yeast are prevalent in this been from the second you open the bottle, even before it hits the glass. The initial sip is also dominated by malt and yeast, giving way to caramel and sugar, with a short finish of bananas; exactly what you would expect from a Belgian style beer. There is a hint of hop bitterness, but it is not present on every sip; sometimes it is there and you can taste it for a few seconds, other times it is not there at all, but this is only when the beer is cold (there were no detectable hops as the beer warmed). As the beer warms, caramel and burnt sugar flavors dominate and a longer, smoother finish appears, with notes of banana and yeast. This beer reminded me of a liquid banana crème caramel – I kept thinking that I needed a burnt sugar wafer while drinking it.

This beer was delicious and a somewhat unusual style for a Seattle brewery, there are a handful making abbey style beers, but very few are doing Belgian browns. If you are in the mood for a Belgian brown, give this one a try instead of your regular one from Belgium. I think you will find that this beer holds its own against the ones made by guys in robes.

Lantern Brewing Dubbel Abbey Style Brown gets 4 beacons out of 5.