Beer of the Week! 06/13/23
Väsen West Coast IPA
Regularly $14.99 / Now on Sale for $13.96
West Coast Style IPA
For the past few years, New England Style IPAs have been all the rage. Though they and their other hazy hop cousins still dominate the market, we’re seeing a fade in the furious ardor they formerly fomented. With the power of a pendulum’s swing, some folks are re-finding their desire for that old-style West Coast love if only for variety’s sake. Well, Väsen Brewing Company, in Richmond, who’ve made their name worshipping at the Altar of the Haze have heard you.
Enter the Väsen West Coast IPA, which they’ve brewed … “to create a beer that'll make you feel like your [sic] back in the 90s listening to Sublime in a Cali suburb.” Okay, slow your ad copy ardor, son. We won’t say it goes that far, but it certainly ain’t your younger brother’s IPA.
Väsen is not quite ready to say the new school is out for summer and throws some Azacca hops in this brew. Though Azacca has enough alpha acid to give you a buzz, it also delivers tropical fruit notes — ensuring the Väsen West Coast IPA has a pineapple/mango core. Don’t worry, though, Väsen surrounds that core with a big old Pacific Northwest C-hop hug from their application of Centennial, Chinook, and Citra.
Less a throwback, this is a modern West Coast Style IPA. Yes, it’s about dry grapefruit and pine, but it mixes in a bit of fruit to keep things from being one dimensional. We think that’s a good thing. It sits crisp and clean and clear in your glass, and not only is it tasty, it’s closer to hand than your old Sublime CD (which is probably in a box somewhere ‘cause no one listens to CDs anymore).
Bonus Beer of the Week (‘Cause it’s less expensive to double down on beers than on bets.)
Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald Porter
Regularly $11.99 / Now on Sale for $10.96
American Porter
And now a moment for an old shop favorite …
The SS Edmund Fitzgerald was a freighter sailing the Great Lakes, carrying taconite iron ore from Duluth, MN to industrial cities around the Great Lakes. After 17 1/2 years of service, it sank in a storm in Lake Superior. Reading about the shipwreck in Newsweek, Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot felt that the crew deserved more than that brief article and, so, wrote the most beloved song of his long career that they would not be forgotten. So, how does a shipwrecked Minnesota hauler come to be the name of a long-running Cleveland, OH beer?
By the late 1950s, the Milwaukee-based Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company was investing a lot of money in iron industries and other mineral industries. They decided to take their interest a step further, by building their own ship. The S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, based out of Duluth, was launched in 1958, the heaviest and longest ship working the Great Lakes at the time. Northwestern named it after its president and CEO (Does that mean he named it after himself?), whose grandfather was a ship’s captain and whose father ran a ship repair business. Over its lifespan, the Edmund Fitzgerald set hauling records six times.
Then, one fateful trip on November 10, 1975, the Edmund Fitzgerald set out from Superior, WS (neighbor to Duluth at the western edge of Lake Superior) to sail all the way down to Detroit, MI with 26,000 pounds of taconite ore pellets. The ship hit a severe storm that eventually produced winds blowing up to 45 knots (about 52mph) and waves cresting 30 feet. It became too dangerous to cross the deck. The Fitzgerald’s pumps malfunctioned, and it’s believed the hold took on water. It went down in the Canadian part of Superior, 17 miles northwest of Michigan’s Whitefish Bay. Either the lifeboats were damaged, or the ship sunk too fast for them to be deployed. All 29 sailors died, their bodies never recovered.
So, Cleveland sits on the north coast of Ohio, southeast of Detroit and Toledo, on Lake Erie. The Edmund Fitzgerald hauled to all three cities, and just under half of its crew (13 out of 29) were from either Cleveland or its environs. “People in the Great Lakes region, and especially Cleveland, still really care about what happened that day,” says Pat Conway, co-founder of Great Lakes Brewing Company. In fact, Conway and his co-founding brother, Dan, were childhood friends with the son of the Edmund Fitzgerald’s first mate, John “Jack” McCarthy. Also, the Porter’s history as a working class beer resonates with Cleveland’s history as a Rust Belt city. Says Conway, “it just feels right that this is a beer that comes from Cleveland.” When Great Lakes opened in 1988, they started with the Eliot Ness Lager and the Dortmunder Gold. Their next beers were the Burning River Pale Ale and the Edmund Fitzgerald Porter. (The Conways sought and received their friend’s blessing before using the name.)
The Edmund Fitzgerald is one of the most loved American Porters. Great Lakes brewmaster Mark Hunger explains, “It features a pretty complex malt bill with a mix of malt and roasted barley that you wouldn’t typically see together. We use a mixture of American and European-influenced hops that really complement the coffee, roasty, and bittersweet chocolate flavors.”
What strikes us is the approachability of this porter. For all the talk about its “roast” and about it being “robust,” what really distinguishes it is its balance. The hops are consistently present but not prominent when they mix with the biscuity, chocolaty dry malt. While porters are light-bodied as a rule, some can come across as thin. The Edmund Fitzgerald, however, builds in the mouth with a pillowy smoothness.
This brew has been a shop staple for years and remains one for good reason. When was the last time you reminded yourself how good it is?
Remember!
You can see our entire beer inventory on Untappd.com!