Drink-a-Pint

There’s something about food made with local ingredients. If you’ve ever seen an episode of Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares (on BBC America, much better than U.S. version!), you know what advice he seems to give almost every under-performing restaurant. Other than telling them not to serve raw food which might kill the few customers they have, he always tells them to add dishes to the menu with local ingredients. Amazingly, it usually seems to do the trick. Hell, whenever I’m outside of the Garden State and there’s beer involved, the first thing I usually look for is something local that I usually can’t get back home.

So, if localism is a key to success, then Sierra Nevada should be selling plenty of Chico Estate Harvest Ale because it really is”fresh from the field to the glass with no stops along the way.”

Chico Estate Harvest Ale is a beer made with hops grown just feet from the brew house. They grow the hops themselves, pick them, and put them directly into the beer. That’s something you expect from a winery, so why not from a brewery?

Chico Estate will use all of the hops grown in the brewery’s fields for one big batch of beer. Typically, hops are collected and dried for use throughout the year, but as they dry, the oils and resins break down and some of the big flavors can become muted. With Sierra Nevada’s Harvest Ale series, the brewery’s using only “wet” or undried hops to add not only bitterness, but a reportedly fuller range of character and flavors than similar brews made with dry hops.

Previously only available on draft as “20th Street Ale,” Chico Estate Harvest Ale will be bottled for the first time and available in limited quantities at the end of August.