Hi everybody, just back from the US (the Deep South) and, as far as beer is concerned, I can only speak highly of an Indian Brown Pale I had in a microbrewry in a town called Athens, near Atlanta. Has anyone tried to brew it?, it was excellent! And I wouldn´t mind to give it a go…
Written on a blackboard, it was described as:
“A hybrid pioneered in 1995 by John Gayer of the Blind Man Ale. The brew fuses robust hop character of an IPA with the chocolate toasted character of a brown ale. The end result is the best from both worlds!” Indeed it is…
Apart from that, nothing else really caught my taste buds. In Georgia and the southeast coast you can easily find the product of two local breweries, “Sweetwater” (based in Atlanta) and “Terrapine” (Athens). I missed the “happy hours” that the Sweetwater factory organises every thursday and friday (tour of facilities included), but really, it´s not a great loss. To me, it´s like the Budweisser of the Pale Ales, a very light PA which I suspect it´s been brewed in order to reach a wider american market.
The bottle of Terrapine Rye Pale Ale was much, much better, a bit sweeter that other PA´s but quite pleasant. I tried it on tap too and I was very dissaponted, it was flatter and the bitterness and hopiness tended to dissapear after a few sips.
There is also a brewery in Nashville, “Yazoo”, which produced Ales, PA´s, Stout, ESB and Porter. Of all of them, I´d recommend the ESB. Also in Tennessee, we went to a microbrewery called Big River, it´s a franchise I came across with in other big towns in the South. At that time, it had its own Light Lager, Vienna Lager, PA, American Brown Ale, IPA and Stout. The sampling option, which included all those plus one seasonal beer (a Pilsner I think it was) was very enjoyable…
Very little in terms of beer can be found in Mississippii or Alabama. The “big prize” here is to find a bar or a restaurant that along the usual suspects (Bud, Coors, Miller, etc…) serves Sam Adams. I´m not a big fan of it but when the offer is so limited and predictable, believe me, one of those makes you the happiest man in the world.
Particularly sad was to see the state of Dixie Brewery in New Orleans. It was severely damaged by Katrina, but I was told that owners, Joe and Kendra Bruno, are in the process of getting this historic building up and running again. In the mean time, they have authorized several other breweries throughout the US to produce Dixie branded beer in limited quantities...
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