Wow, I can’t believe we’re coming up on the one year anniversary of the Mise Cocktail Club!  It’s been a fun year and I got some great stuff planned for the coming year.  Stay tuned for the official schedule of events.  If you’d like a sneak peek, please come join us on October 29th for our anniversary party.

September’s meeting was originally schedule to be Blowing Fire with Dave Madera, but due concerns about insurance and safety issues, we will have to reschedule that lesson at a later date–and at another bar and level of sobriety altogether.  So for September I decided to talk about craft beers.  We tasted beer from two Florida breweries and two California breweries and there were definitely some major differences.

Please check out the websites of all the breweries I mention here.  They all have some great info on them about all their products.

The first Florida beer we tried was from The Native Brewing Co. out of Ft. Lauderdale.  Their Native Lager is a smooth tasting lager made from German Hops, Malts and Yeast, which yields a very easy drinking light tasting beer.  A very good light palette beer–great for the hot dog-days of summer in Florida.

The second beer from Florida was from Lukaya Beers from the Florida Beer Company.  We tasted Lukaya Two Tail Pale Ale.  Again, a very light flavored Pale Ale, which is very typical to Floirda beer palettes.  I thought it was a little light for you typical Pale Ale drinker, but a good Pale Ale for the Florida heat.

The next few beers we tried were from California breweries.  The first brewery, Lagunitas, is a brewery I visited last summer in Petaluma, CA, which is located at the mouth of the Sonoma Valley.  Fun place to take a brewery tour! Lagunitas is known for their hop-forward beers, so we started with their pilsner which is simply called Pils.  This is pilsner is a great example of the differences in tastes and techniques between Florida and California breweries; Florida brews tend to be lighter and easier to drink, whereas Cali brews tend to be stronger and more hop-forward.  Lagunitas Pils is no exception, even for a pilsner-style the hop flavor is very apparent.  Lagunitas’ best selling beer in their India Pale Ale–I’ll let Lagunitas explain this like they only can:

This is our unique version of an ancient style. A style as old as the ocean trade routes of the last centuries Great Ships. Not as old as the equator they had to cross twice enroute, nor as old as the 10,000 or so miles of Di-Hydrogen Oxide and Sodium upon which they sailed, but older than the Circulithium-4 Lentloid that binds the Lupulin Quartnate onto your taste buds. Weird. Think about it. Now stop. OK, go again, now stop. Think again, and stop. But we digress. Made with 43 different hops and 65 various malts, this redolent ale will likely float your boat, whatever planet you’re on.

Lagunitas.com/beers/IPA

The next brewery is the face that launched a thousand beers for me as a self-proclaimed beer snob.  Stone Brewery of San Diego, CA has been making big, bold brews since 1996 and my first love of their’s is a beer called Arrogant Bastard Ale.  Great bold hoppiness and a slight sweetness.  Not a beer you wanna drink all day, but a great treat between brews (never drink the same beer twice).  I also decided to try their 13th Anniversary brew and we all around thought less of it than anything else we tried.  I think we all agreed it was too sweet and syrupy for us, but I think it was the only unsuccessful beer on the evening.

Cheers!

Nathan DeWitt

Bar Manager ~ Mise en Place

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