Thursday, July 22, 2010

Cascadian Dark Ale

Exciting news!  Well, not new news for beer geeks and readers of BYO (are there non-Beer-Geek readers of BYO?  ... I don't think so) .

A new beer style has been created!  Wooo Hooo!

BYO talks about it in Marc Martin's article Birth of a New Style: Cascadian Dark Ale.  I do not care much for the name, and apparently it has been "changed" to "American-Style India Black Ale".  "American-Style India Black Ale" is a better name, but I do not know why they don't just call it what home-brewers have been calling it:  Black IPA or Imperial Black IPA.  The BJCP doesn't update its guidelines every year, but I suppose it will be category 10D whenever the next publish date comes around.

In case you are not a beer geek enough to follow the link above, but still care enough to know, the numbers around the new style are:
Color = 30+ SRM
Original gravity = 1.060–1.080
Final gravity = 1.010–1.016
Bitterness = 50–90 IBU
Alcohol by volume = 6.0–8.5% 
The important distinguishing factor between a hoppy porter or stout is IPA-like hops in both flavor and aroma.



My Stone Soup IDA falls right into this new category, except I probably don't quite have a dark enough color, and I guess my FG is not quite low enough.  Personally, I think my IDA looks black, so maybe my SRM calculation is off.  I still consider mine in category.  Of course, when I created Stone Soup, there was no "American-Style India Black Ale", so I just called it a Category 23:  Specialty Beer .  Now there are guidelines, I can adjust color and work on my attenuation to get things right in line.  Although, perhaps, I would rather just keep it as is.  It is SOOOOOO good.

I've been telling myself for quite some time that I need to brew up another Stone Soup batch, but now that I have a category to shoot for, I'll have to make the extra effort to "make it happen".

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