Georgetown Beer is very much a local brewery, and a true micro brewery with their beer only available at the brewery in Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood, or in select bars and restaurants in Washington and Idaho. Right now, they produce three beers all year round, Chopper's Red Ale, Roger's Pilsner (named after one of the two brewery co-founders) and Manny's Pale Ale, named after the other of the brewery's two co-founders. They've been known to produce seasonal or occasional brews, as well as a few custom brews for particular restaurants.

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I've already made it clear that I'm a New Belgium Brewery fan. The search for a hoppier beer is always on my mind. Sure, the local brewpub Boundary Bay serves some lovely IPAs with that hop-tastic flavor I crave, but what to do when I'm out of town? Or when I forget to pick up a growler in advance, and I don't want to get stuck sucking down chilled cans of Pabst out of some other guy's cooler? (Not that there's anything wrong with that...)

Well, Colorado's New Belgium Brewery has provided the perfect solution to that quandary in their Ranger IPA. New Belgium says of their Ranger Ale:

 

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Mothership Wit, named affectionately after the New Belgium evangelists, the Beer Rangers, who refer to the Fort Collins brewery as the "Mothership" is a fairly new brew at New Belgium. It's inspired by the traditional Belgium Wit or White beers of Belgium. "Wit" is Dutch, and Flemish, for white, and refers to the "white" or cloudy appearance of the beer; because the beer is made with a combination of barley and wheat, and is top-fermented. In the middle ages, such beers were traditionally made with spices (typically coriander, cloves, and sometimes, orange peel or essence of orange) instead of hops, or, later, in addition to hops. Belgian wit beers are cousins of Lambic and and Hefeweizen.

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A friend picked this up thinking it was a different beer; it's not the beer she remembered (which was something boar, but was a "big" beer) but this is a lovely summer brew. Weinhard's Blue Boar is an Irish-style light ale. It's double-hopped, and the malts used give it a slightly sweet finish, with a pronounced citrus note. Blue Boar is perfect for a softball game, though I note while this is quite enjoyable in the bottle, it does look very attractive in a glass and the colored glass makes the color hard to see. At a mere 4.6 ABV, you can afford to have a session at your family barbecue this weekend. I think Blue Boar is a super companion for grilled ahi or salmon. I note that Weinhard's Blue Boar won a bronze medal at the 2008 Great American Beer Festival.

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A seasonal brew that's only available from April through August, Weinhard's Summer Ale is a German Kolsch style ale. In Germany, Kolsch is an apellation protected just as fiercely as France protects the wine appellation of Champagne. German Kolsch beers are produced in and around the city of Köln, better known to English speakers as Cologne. Traditionally, Kolsch is a light summer beer, one that looks very much like a Pilsner; it's light gold in color, clear, and made with pale malts, and less bitter than a Pilsner. Sometimes wheat is used in the brewing process. Traditionally, Kolsch brews are warm fermented (sometimes called top fermenting), unlike lagers, though modern breweries even in Germany sometimes finish the brewing with a brief period of lagering, or chilled fermentation.

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New Belgium's Mighty Arrow is a lovely golden amber in the glass; this is truly a strikingly attractive beer with a thin but discernable head. The aroma is hoppy, with a hint of something almost floral. The taste is bitter with hops at first, but there's a mellow sweetness underneath; this is definitely a pale ale. I note that the New Belgium Website refers to Mighty Arrow being made with Amarillo and Cascade hops, and having a "fetching honey malt base," which I suspect I'm ignorantly perceiving as floral, with a sweet aftertaste. This is another seasonal, available in spring, from February through April.

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The New Belgium Abbey Ale was so amazing, that when I saw a "Folly" pack of 12 New Belgium beers on sale for $12.00, I decided to try 'em all.

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This Fort Collins, Colorado brewery is probably best known for their Fat Tire amber. And at some point, I really truly will get around to trying it, but while Fat Tire is readily available locally in the bottle, I know that it's on tap at a couple of places, so I keep putting off trying Fat Tire until I'm somewhere where it's on tap. New Belgium makes a lot of beer though, and is one of the first generation of commercially distributed American craft breweries, going all the way back to 1991; it's now the third largest craft brewery in the United States. The New Belgium Abbey Style was a new beer at one of the local stores, and on sale.

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I was listening to the song "Jackson" written by Jerry Leiber and Billy Edd Wheeler, and sung by Johnny Cash and June Carter. Near the end there's a stanza that refers to a "pony keg":

But they'll laugh at you in Jackson, and I'll be dancin' on a pony keg. They'll lead you 'round town like a scalded hound,
With your tail tucked between your legs,
Yeah, go to Jackson, you big-talkin' man.
And I'll be waitin' in Jackson, behind my Japan fan.

I confess that before this song, I'd never even heard of a pony keg. It is in fact a beer keg, one that's half the size of a regular keg, and holds 1/4 of a barrel, or about 29 liters, or 7.75 gallons of beer. That's enough for 62 pint glasses of beer. I note that this is not the same as the "refrigerator kegs" made by Heineken and others.

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