Details about Stone Brewing’s (Escondido, CA) 14th Anniversary are starting to surface. In a video blog posted to Stone’s website, Steve Wagner and Mitch Steele describe their upcoming release “Emperial IPA.”
Mitch and Steve took a trip to England back in February to research a book they are co-authoring on IPA’s. (Hopefully by now you know they got their start in England.) The trip gave the duo the idea to produce an English influenced IPA. This English IPA will use all British malts and hops. 14th Annversary will actually use only 1 malt – white malt aka extra pale malt. It is floor malted in England (process of converting barley to malt. Sprouted barley is kiln dryed through perforated wood floors. Not a common practice in the US.) White malt was very popular in the 1800’s in Burton, a big English IPA town. It’s not readily available in the states, it will be shipped over in 2200 lb sacks to California.
Three English hop varieties will be used – East Kent Golding, Target, & Boadicea. Boadicea is a relatively new strain of hop. The water Stone uses comes from the Colorado River. It’s way too soft to make an English IPA so Mitch and Steve will be using brewing salts to “Burtonize” or harden the water. This helped clarify Burton’s IPA’s and help them hold up longer over long shipping routes.
Emperial IPA will find it’s way on shelves in August 2010. 22oz Bottles, and draft. One time anniversary brew.
More to follow closer to launch!!!
