A beer from Moxee? No. A beer with moxie?* Maybe. A beer that is a shout out to the town of Moxee, in Washington State. Yes. 6 hours Southeast of Vancouver depending on the time it takes for the cross-border body cavity search, Officer Ben Dover presiding.
Crab Rangoon and the General Tso Chicken please.
Moxee is the birthplace of El Dorado hops and home to 4,000 plus semi-sober souls. According to Great Lakes Brewery it also has a first-class Teriyaki Bar. Good to know. But this isn’t Fodor’s Old Fogies Drinking Beer or Cranky Old Condé Nest so any travel advice from this big screen watching cold beer drinking armchair tourist would be questionable at the least, dangerous at best. What we do know is the Yakima Valley is the hop growing capital of the world, their hops found in tasty IPAs around the globe.
How did a few humble Canadians make the Yakima valley tops for hops? Glad you asked. A Scottish Canadian inventor you may have heard of, Alexander Graham Bell, and his Father -in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard (first president of the National Geographic Society) invested in the Moxee company in1886, to irrigate and farm the lands in the region. Various crops had problems but hops turned out to be their saving grace. Bell and Hubbard’s success with hops is credited to recruiting French-Canadian families to farm the crops. Culture du houblon, pas de probleme. By 1930 Moxee was the hop growing capital of the world.
But this isn’t the Hops Historical Society, we’re here for the beer. Time to pop the top on this hop crop and see if it grows on us.
A hazy golden OJ minimum pulp kinda pour, with a full head of steam, as in a two-finger froth. A tropical nose with some hops in the background. It has a smooth almost but not quite creamy mouthfeel to it. Stone fruit juicy and lots of it, with some very mild hoppiness on the finish. The juice is still juicy, and those Moxee (El Dorado) hops are starting to show up, bringing some mild bitters with them. Still a fruit forward brew, a classic east coast IPA from west coast hops. As the bitters come into play this brew approaches balance, but never quite gets there, it remains still fruit first. All in all, GLB has delivered another solid tasty IPA with moxie.*
0 Comments