Gonna keep this edition short on my part due to time constraints. As mentioned a while back in The Week Ahead in Beer, several of our local breweries have joined others around the country in making Resilience IPA, a Sierra Nevada recipe, to help the victims of the terrible fires in Northern California. For every participating brewery, 100 percent of all proceeds will go to the charities helping the fire victims.

I snagged a pint at Marble Heights on Monday night, and it was quite the delightful beer. It recalls a time when IPAs still had a piney element opposite the citrus fruit sweetness that now dominates the genre, whether hazy or not. It is, in a sense, an old-school IPA, but it has more than enough malt backbone to keep it from drying out completely. It should have just the right amount of hops to please the crazier hopheads, while not going overboard for those who prefer a more drinkable IPA.

Marble is far from alone in having it available locally. A batch already went on tap before that at Rowley Farmhouse Ales in Santa Fe. Cloudcroft Brewing will have a batch on in the near future. Elsewhere in the metro area, Canteen and Steel Bender have their batches going on tap today (Tuesday). Quarter Celtic’s batch should be ready Friday. We encourage everyone to visit their personal favorites among the breweries and make sure to get at least one pint of Resilience. Heck, you can even try them from brewery to brewery and see if you can pick up on any slight variations in flavor. We would be curious to know what others find.

As for the rest of the Crew, a couple of them checked in with their recent beer adventures from outside of Albuquerque (way outside, in one case).

A “revealing” visit to a Vegas brewery

This weekend we were in Vegas for a company retreat. A group of just over a dozen of us walked from downtown to the Arts District to Hop Nuts Brewing.

Some of us had been to Hop Nuts before before and some had not. But, what was really interesting about this visit was a party that was going on there when we arrived. A group of people were having a gender reveal party to find out about a soon-to-be-born kiddo. I have never been to one of these parties, but have seen several on TV, and I know people are always trying to come up with new ways of going about the reveal moment. This one takes the “keg,” so to speak. They had dyed a keg of beer, and when it was time to reveal the baby’s gender, the bartender went over to the tap and started pouring. Blue beer came gushing out!

I was glad I did not have to drink it, though, because it was really, really, deep blue and I can only imagine what everyone’s mouths must have looked like afterward. I tried to get a picture of a pitcher as it went by, but it was super blurry. So, instead, I will just provide my picture of my own nitro stout. It was a lovely beast of a bourbon-barrel-aged imperial called Omniscient. A great time was had by all!

Cheers to beers of all colors!

— AmyO

Boardin’ and brews, part 2

Saturday was another trip to Santa Fe for snowboarding, followed by another brewery visit. I met the ole’ Santa Fe Luke at the Blue Corn Brewery. He quickly pointed me in the direction of the beers he had enjoyed at the Winter is Here Beer Dinner just a couple days earlier. I started with the Whiteout Stout. This is one of those rare stouts without a dark appearance that confuses the senses. The most recent similar beer that I could recall is the Double Sunshine Stout from Bosque, which had come out right around this time last year. DSS was delicious and so was Whiteout. It truly tasted like an oatmeal stout with a roasty finish, even though it didn’t look like one. I ordered the nachos and forced Luke to eat some of them so that I wouldn’t feel/look like a glutton. They were dynamite. At this point I also ordered the Black By Popular Demand, a dark ale that is more of a porter. It wasn’t bad, but had a hard time following up on the Whiteout.

Cheers, Blue Corn!

— Andrew