I’ve been on something of a tear with the new beers the past couple of weeks. I’ve racked up quite a slush pile of beer notes and comments. Here’s one for a beer I sampled back on May 6th: Liberty Ale, which is put out by the Anchor Brewing Company in California.This beer is listed in Michael Jackson’s Great Beer Guide: 500 Classic Brews and I’m pleased to be able to add it to my list of “bagged” beers. You’ve all got a beer list, right? My list is basically anything from Jackson’s book and while I’ll never add all the beers in this book to my list of beers tried (since some of those listed are evidently unavailable now) I’m having a fun time tracking down those that I can find.
I’ve struggled with acquiring this beer for a year or more. Seems I never have the book when I see an Anchor Brewing product in the store and I could never remember which Anchor products are listed in the Great Beer Guide (Liberty, Old Foghorn and “Our Special Holiday Ale” are the beers listed in the book). I got lucky during a recent scouting trip and found six packs of Liberty at the local Trader Joes and the Old Foghorn at AJ’s Fine Food. Needless to say, I bought examples of both – life’s short friends.
I like beers with history and beers dedicated to history and while Liberty Ale only dates back to 1975, it came about in commemoration of Paul Revere’s famous ride in 1775. That’s pretty cool. I wonder what sort of drinking fellow Paul was.
The Tasting
Heavy smell of hops in the bottle, yielding a medium head from an under aggressive pour with light beading. Appears amber to dark orange in color with light lacing on the glass. A very dry beer with a simple beer taste (my novice taste buds fail me here). This beer just tastes like you’d think a beer would taste! I’ll be a customer again.
Don’t take my word for it
Anchor Brewing’s Liberty Ale page is here:
http://www.anchorbrewing.com/beers/libertyale.htm
Here’s the listing on Rate Beer:
http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/anchor-liberty-ale/47/
The Disgruntled Chemist rates it 8 out of 10 here:
http://thedisgruntled.blogspot.com/2008/03/beer-blogging-anchor-brewing-liberty.html
Finally, the group at Beer Advocate
http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/28/665/
(I'm off for Grand Canyon tomorrow and will be gone a couple days - don't know what beer stories I'll pick up while I'm gone, but I'm hoping for the best.)
2 comments:
Last year Meat and my beer wish list was the beer advocate top 100 list.
beeradvocate.com/top_beers.php
As it's a continually changing list, we found a website that had a top 100 list from may 19 2006, and tried to have as many of those as possible.
I wound up finishing the year with 81 of the 100 beers. Some were impossible to find without going to California (not easy from Illinois). But we got most.
There were some that we tried that were hard to drink, but the list seems to be a lot of stouts, so that's easy.
If you find you can't locate some of the western state's beers, shoot me an email and I'll see if I can't find them and ship them to you as singles - there's a lot of California beers here in Arizona.
I know what you mean about trying beers that are "hard to drink." I guess we can't love every beer we try but the fun's in the trying, right? Thanks for dropping in!
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