Beer of the Week! 04/05/22

Mustang Sally Hello Newman

Regularly $14.99 / Now on Sale for $13.96
Hazy IPA

Some 40 years ago, Sean Hunt was a young man heading towards college at the University of Virginia. However, before bumming around Mr. Jefferson’s back lawn Hunt lived in Germany. There, he experienced, for the first time, both how good beer could be and also how the breweries that made the good beer could draw a community together — so different from snagging a six of Bud from the Save-Mart. The experience was a revelation.

After graduating from UVA, he worked on a boat named “The Mustang Sally” for a bit. Later in life, he would look back at this period as a time when he was carefree without a lot of worries. Eventually, though, cares and worries asserted themselves as Hunt became an engineer in McClean, VA. It was there, with a fellow engineer, that Hunt first made plans to open a brewery.

Those plans fizzled, though, and Hunt transitioned from engineering to corporate lawyering. Still, beer stayed with him as he home brewed and continued to brewery dream. Finally, decades later in 2014, Hunt shrugged off security and respectability, cares and worries and went for his dream. In 2016, he opened Mustang Sally Brewing Company in Chantilly — at that time, only the second craft brewery in Fairfax, Co.

The Hello Newman is a tasty unfiltered IPA that is dry-hopped with Citra and El Dorado hops. It features a diverting citrus nature that’s balanced enough with the malts to make the brew go down easily. (If you want some real fun, try it back-to-back with their Double NEIPA, the Pinball Lizard!)

As for the name, we don’t know. All we can say is their social media suggests that Mustang Sally is deeply, deeply into sitcoms. They feature trivia nights dedicated to The Office, How I Met Your Mother, and (no surprise) Seinfeld.

Bonus Beer of the Week (‘Cause not even we would survive a bonus week of beer!)

Brasserie Dubuisson Cuvée des Trolls

Regularly $13.99 / Now on Sale for $12.96
Unfiltered Belgian Pale Ale

In 2000 — teetering on the edge of the millennium — Mons, Belgium’s Brasserie Dubuisson opened Le Brasse-Temps (Brew Time) in Louvain-La-Neuve, a small town southeast of Brussels. After three years, they decided to move their little satellite closer to home and transplanted le Brasse-Temps to Mons. Before the move, however, Brasse-Temps created this gem of a Belgian pale ale. (Just to clear up potential confusion, the Belgian Pale Ale is a golden ale inspired by the Tripel — very different from the British Pale Ale and its child the U.S. Pale Ale.)

The Cuvée des Trolls is a tasty Belgian Pale Ale — off-dry, with a tight little malt backbone. Dubuisson adds dried orange peel in the boil to give, they say, some fruit to the aroma. However, we think we can taste just a wisp of those oranges lurking around the edge of the brew. For us, however, the real hero in this beer is the hops, which provide a quiet and delicate spicy coda to the whole experience.

Remember!

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