Sierra Nevada Alpha Hop Society

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ABSTRACTlegend

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The Alpha Hop Society (AHS) is Sierra Nevada’s rare beer club for the adventurous palate. It is a small, secret group gathered to garner access to our most coveted beers, small-batch creations and extremely limited barrel-aged bottles. AHS membership is a year-long pass jumping you to the front of the line for what’s next at Sierra Nevada. Most of all, AHS is a backstage pass for the beer-obsessed and your ticket into the weird and wonderful world of small-batch beers at Sierra Nevada.

What is the Alpha Hop Society?

For Alpha Hop Society members we hand-select 12 of our most limited, experimental and small-batch beers available nowhere else. Bottles will be limited to AHS members for pickup at one of our brewery locations: Chico, California, Berkeley, California or Mills River, North Carolina. AHS members also get access to guided tours and tastings during one-on-one visits to the brewery. Members will get to pull nails from barrels and see what’s hiding in the dark corners of our experimental barrel beer programs and a sneak peek into what’s next. To top it off, you’ll get a growler and some AHS swag to help you fly your Alpha Hop colors.

Annual AHS package:

  • 12 750Ml bottles of extremely limited barrel-aged beers (350 bottles or fewer!)
  • Alpha Hop-only access to quarterly cellar tours, barrel tastings, Pilot brewery samplings, and other beer-focused events
  • A first taste of new beers from Sierra Nevada
  • Early access and invites to Sierra Nevada events and festivals
  • Access to vintage and other exclusive beers
  • AHS t-shirt
  • Monthly newsletter detailing the Alpha Hop beers and other small-batch events at Sierra Nevada
  • AHS membership card

All for $250 per year.


Quarterly AHS Beer Pick-Up Dates:

  • Q1: February 13 through February 29
  • Q2: April 16 through April 30
  • Q3: July 16 through July 31
  • Q4: October 15 through October 31
What’s the beer lineup?
All 12 beers are brand-new creations brewed, blended, and bottled specifically for Alpha Hops.


We’ll choose AHS beers quarterly and hand bottle them in time for release.


All beers will be extremely limited production runs of 350 bottles or fewer and only available as part of the AHS program. AHS members can influence what we make in the future. If one beer is a favorite, we may re-release it to a wider audience in the future.


Beer selections subject to change at brewer’s discretion.


Quarter one:

  • American Wild Red Ale
  • Barrel-Aged Stock Scotch-style Ale—Aged in Brandy and Absinthe Barrels
  • Barrel-Aged Pentuppel with Chilies


https://www.eventbrite.com/e/alpha-hop-society-registration-18458114718?aff=snwebsite

I'm just wondering do you guys think this would be worth it?
 
ABSTRACTlegend said:
The Alpha Hop Society (AHS) is Sierra Nevada’s rare beer club for the adventurous palate. It is a small, secret group gathered to garner access to our most coveted beers, small-batch creations and extremely limited barrel-aged bottles. AHS membership is a year-long pass jumping you to the front of the line for what’s next at Sierra Nevada. Most of all, AHS is a backstage pass for the beer-obsessed and your ticket into the weird and wonderful world of small-batch beers at Sierra Nevada.

What is the Alpha Hop Society?

For Alpha Hop Society members we hand-select 12 of our most limited, experimental and small-batch beers available nowhere else. Bottles will be limited to AHS members for pickup at one of our brewery locations: Chico, California, Berkeley, California or Mills River, North Carolina. AHS members also get access to guided tours and tastings during one-on-one visits to the brewery. Members will get to pull nails from barrels and see what’s hiding in the dark corners of our experimental barrel beer programs and a sneak peek into what’s next. To top it off, you’ll get a growler and some AHS swag to help you fly your Alpha Hop colors.

Annual AHS package:

  • 12 750Ml bottles of extremely limited barrel-aged beers (350 bottles or fewer!)
  • Alpha Hop-only access to quarterly cellar tours, barrel tastings, Pilot brewery samplings, and other beer-focused events
  • A first taste of new beers from Sierra Nevada
  • Early access and invites to Sierra Nevada events and festivals
  • Access to vintage and other exclusive beers
  • AHS t-shirt
  • Monthly newsletter detailing the Alpha Hop beers and other small-batch events at Sierra Nevada
  • AHS membership card

All for $250 per year.


Quarterly AHS Beer Pick-Up Dates:

  • Q1: February 13 through February 29
  • Q2: April 16 through April 30
  • Q3: July 16 through July 31
  • Q4: October 15 through October 31
What’s the beer lineup?
All 12 beers are brand-new creations brewed, blended, and bottled specifically for Alpha Hops.


We’ll choose AHS beers quarterly and hand bottle them in time for release.


All beers will be extremely limited production runs of 350 bottles or fewer and only available as part of the AHS program. AHS members can influence what we make in the future. If one beer is a favorite, we may re-release it to a wider audience in the future.


Beer selections subject to change at brewer’s discretion.


Quarter one:

  • American Wild Red Ale
  • Barrel-Aged Stock Scotch-style Ale—Aged in Brandy and Absinthe Barrels
  • Barrel-Aged Pentuppel with Chilies


https://www.eventbrite.com/e/alpha-hop-society-registration-18458114718?aff=snwebsite

I'm just wondering do you guys think this would be worth it?
Click to expand...
I'm on the fence. The mills river location is too damn nice, and every time I've had some barrel aged weirdness I've dug it (although I admittedly skipped the line stuff everyone hated). It is steep though - time to pitch to the family for Christmas haha
 
I'm in. The initial set of beers isn't super compelling to me as written, but the recent Trip In The Woods stuff was fantastic and if I can get a few more beers of that quality plus some cool private-ish tours at SN, it'll be worth it to me. Plus I'm no longer in any other societies and was feeling like a neglectful beer nerd.
 
So is anyone on here going to be picking their beers up at the NC brewery? I would be down to hang out with some fellow TB'ers.
 
Some details from Bill over on BeerAdvocate:
All three beers are packaged and on trucks to the three respective locations as we speak. I'm confident that the beers will be ready in time, but as-of-today we haven't heard about state approval for NC. We submitted months ago so we're pretty sure the beers will be good in-time.

Member hard goods (T-shirt, card, and keytag) were mailed yesterday ... Growlers will be given out at the first pickup. There will be a new newsletter out today with RSVP links for Q1 events at all three locations.
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Anyone else get their stuff today? Maybe I am being picky but I wish the "membership card" was actually hard plastic and not a paper business card. Looking forward to the first 3 beers though!
 
Mine just showed up! I agree about the card, but the keyfob is a pretty cool alternative. Anyone else going to the Torpedo Room party on the 21st?
 
Details on the beers from e-mail:
Barrel-Aged Stock Scotch Ale
Great barrel-aged beers have as much to do with blending as they do with the initial brewing of the original beers. In this case, we used two beers that are on our occasional production roster as the starting point for this unique beer. The base beer for this bottling is a blend of a Scotch-style wee-heavy and a smoked imperial porter aged in brandy barrels from Louisville’s Copper and Kings Distillery. Copper and Kings is famous for their brandy and absinthe, and these barrels definitely show some influence of both spirits. With a rich and intense malt body, this beer has notes of dark chocolate, fig, date and molasses in the forefront, with a sweet dark fruit character from the brandy and a unique herbal quality that we’ve never found in another beer. Reminiscent of the notorious “green fairy,” this beer has notes of black licorice which presents like a “Good and Plenty” candy with a mild mint-chocolate-like finish.

Barrel-Aged Pentuppel with Chilies
The pentuppel is a beer style of our own creation. It started when we considered the typical Belgian abbey model: Belgian table beer (single)—low alcohol and light colored; abbey dubbel—slightly stronger and dark; abbey tripel—stronger and light colored; and abbey quad—darker still and stronger. Why not go beyond, making a Belgian-inspired abbey ale and making it stronger and light colored? It’s bigger than a quad, so maybe a fivetuppel? We settled on Pentuppel (penta=five).
The beer was originally designed to be part of the Ovila Abbey Ales series, our collaboration with monks at New Clairvaux. After dozens of trial brews, we were never quite happy with the results. The yeast would “quit” at a certain alcohol percentage, leaving the beer too sweet and too heavy to really hold on to the Belgian tradition. We shelved the concept but saved some of the original pilot batches to put into bourbon barrels. After more than a year, we tasted the beer and, while it still remained sweet, it had taken on an entirely new character—sort of like a Sauternes wine flavor with a touch of Oloroso sweet sherry note. Meanwhile, one of our barrel team members had filled another barrel with a blonde pale ale into which he dosed hot peppers grown in his garden—Ghost Chilies, Habaneros, and Hercules peppers added great flavor, but the beer was spicy!
We needed something to cut the sweetness of the Pentuppel and the heat of the chili pale ale, so we started making benchtop blends and found the perfect balance of heat and sweet with this one-of-a-kind beer.

American Wild Red Ale
We are lovers of sour and wild ales, but have always been reluctant to brew one due to the dangers of bacterial contamination in our non-wild beers. Pale Ale, and several other of our year-round and seasonal selections, are bottle conditioned, meaning that they spend their time in a warm warehouse while the living yeast in the bottle consumes the fermentable sugars in the bottle. In short, the perfect place for unwanted bacteria to thrive and flourish, potentially destroying or contaminating scads of already packaged beer. For us, sour/wild ales were simply not worth the risk.
Over a year ago, we invested in some improvements in our barrel storage facility, not far from the brewery. We built a special room and a separate bottling line to experiment with wild ales. This beer is our first effort—a straight, non-fruited beer brewed with the flavors of the great Belgian-style lambics in mind. We primary fermented with a strain of Brettanomyces bruxellensis and then added a cultured bacterial mix (Pediococcus and Lactobacillus) into second-use red wine barrels. During secondary fermentation/souring we added the dregs of several traditional Belgian-style lambics to further infuse the beer with the perfect microflora. After more than a year of aging and tending, we were able to blend several barrels together into the perfect wild red ale. Its smooth and round tartness evokes notes of lemon with an earthy-spicy background, and it has just enough body to pull it all together into an amazingly complex yet refreshing beer.
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The non-spicy part of the pentuppel sounds really interesting...
 
Upcoming releases:
* Raspberry Barleywine—Barleywine with Raspberries Aged in Chardonnay Barrels
* Islay Black Ale—Stout Aged in Islay Single Malt Scotch Whisky Barrels
* Dry-Hopped Farmhouse Ale—Saison Aged in Rye and Bourbon Barrels with Mosaic and Galaxy Hops

Torpedo room event is the 16th and barrel-room tasting in Chico on the 29th... unfortunately I'm out of town for the 16th and can't really commit to getting to Chico by 6:30 on a Friday (...and then getting home). Excited for the Islay Black, though, particularly given my positive experiences with scotch-barrel Bigfoot.
 
jedwards said:
Upcoming releases:
* Raspberry Barleywine—Barleywine with Raspberries Aged in Chardonnay Barrels
* Islay Black Ale—Stout Aged in Islay Single Malt Scotch Whisky Barrels
* Dry-Hopped Farmhouse Ale—Saison Aged in Rye and Bourbon Barrels with Mosaic and Galaxy Hops

Torpedo room event is the 16th and barrel-room tasting in Chico on the 29th... unfortunately I'm out of town for the 16th and can't really commit to getting to Chico by 6:30 on a Friday (...and then getting home). Excited for the Islay Black, though, particularly given my positive experiences with scotch-barrel Bigfoot.
Click to expand...
Sierra managed to make a beer I'm interested in -- that farmhouse beer sounds exactly up my alley. But I will probably be sad if I'm expecting a HF Dorothy or sleepydave hoppy funky joint...
 
I haven't been impressed with the customer service of the club.

Previous quarter they at least responded to my emails saying, "no, we can't do that (switch pick up locations, pick up 1 week early bc I was in the area, damn Bistro festivals always 1 week before pickup window etc. . . )

Now they don't even respond. :(
 
Yeah, based on the BA thread I gather it's just SNBill doing all the communication, and he's found it a little overwhelming (not really an excuse, but I'm guessing they're finding out why so many breweries discontinue this type of program). If you need a pickup/ship from the Torpedo room, hit me up.

drgarage said:
Sierra managed to make a beer I'm interested in -- that farmhouse beer sounds exactly up my alley. But I will probably be sad if I'm expecting a HF Dorothy or sleepydave hoppy funky joint...
Click to expand...

We can def open that one once I pick it up. Maybe do that and the pentuppel blind...
 
Further details on the beers:
Barrel-Aged Raspberry Barleywine.
This is one of the beers we’re most excited about. It has been in barrels for more than two years mellowing-out and developing flavor. This started life as a non dry-hopped version of our Bigfoot base beer, but even after months of ageing, the initial hop assault was still too strong. We tucked the beer into barrels, and last January, pulled some out for sampling. The bitter bite had tamed and mellowed nicely, leaving the beer with a slight vanilla note, and a bright woody fruit-forward tang from the barrels themselves.
To each barrel, we added several pounds of raspberry puree and let it sit some more. As a result, this magenta / amber beer has a nicely complex flavor of malt, with honey and vanilla notes from the barrels and a bright fruity wallop of raspberry in the finish.

Islay Black Ale
The island of Islay (pronounced “EYE-lah”) is the southernmost part of the Inner Hebrides archipelago off of Scotland’s west coast. It has become a major center for the production of single-malt Scotch whisky, and especially famous for the ultra-smoky, seafaring qualities of several of the brands produced there.
We got ahold of some (extremely wet) barrels formerly used to age one of the island’s most popular whiskies, and aged a rich, inky, imperial stout in them for about 8 months.
Boy-oh-boy, if you like the peaty, smoky, saline Scotch whiskies, this is the beer for you.
It has notes of wood smoke up-front that back-off into notes of rich baker’s cocoa and espresso from the base beer, blended with the flavors of earthy peat and some additional smoke on the finish. The richness and sweetness of the beer make a great backbone for the spirit flavors to carry through the palate. This would be the perfect match for a windy, rainy night and a nice cigar (if you’re into that sort of thing.) This is the beer that Brontë’s Heathcliff would drink (if he were not a fictional character.)
Sláinte.

Dry-Hopped Farmhouse Ale
We’re big fans of beers in the Belgian / French farmhouse tradition—saison, bieres de garde, and other rustic beers. We appreciate the layered complexities of the malt flavor and the yeast character in a beer that remains drinkable and pairs well with food.
That was in the inspiration for this release. An ultra-complex barrel-aged beer that retains an easy drinkability. The base beer is a robust farmhouse ale, roughly in the saison tradition, with a bready, grainy malt flavor and dry finish. We placed the beer into two types of barrels: some formerly used to mature bourbon and some American rye whiskey.
After nearly 7 months in barrels, the beer was blended into a tank and then dry-hopped with Crystal and Citra hops. The resulting beer is amber in color with a deep woody flavor with notes of coconut and vanilla from the barrels, coupled with a bold tropical fruit and floral hop aroma from the copious amounts of dry hops. This is a really flavorful beer that will be a great choice this spring.
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Sounds like they also have enough extra of these that folks going to the events will be able to sample them.
 
Crazy fruit time:
* Barrel-Aged White Ale with Cherries
* Barrel-Aged Orange Currant Imperial Stout
* Barrel-Aged Passionfruit Double IPA

The White Ale with cherries is a strong hopped-up Belgian-style Wit aged in bourbon barrels with fresh cherries added into the barrels.

The Orange Currant Stout features dried red currants and orange peel added into the bourbon barrels containing a chocolate-forward stout

The barrel-aged Passionfruit Double IPA is a dry-hopped double IPA that was aged with hops in bourbon barrels, then blended into a tank, where it was dry-hopped a third time and blended with hundreds of gallons of raw, natural passionfruit puree.
Click to expand...
 
CommanderofAwesome said:
How have the previous releases turned out?
Click to expand...

Flanders Red was quite good, though not specifically remarkable. Nicely restrained sourness which is always an unexpected surprise in an American sour these days.

BA Pentuppel with Chiles was actually kind of good, up until the heat. Dry-hopped Farmhouse was... excessive. High ABV you could definitely taste, somehow amplified by both the oaky barrel flavor and the dry hopping. Interesting but definitely not pleasant. BA Scotch ale was quite good though the anise note mostly made me think of a too-young Thomas Hardy's.

The Raspberry Barleywine and Islay Black are still lying in wait, though I'll probably open the Islay next week with a friend.

drgarage said:
I feel like they're specifically trolling me.
Click to expand...

Happy to be the bearer of unsettling news! I'll bring the Bourbon-Barrel-Aged Passionfruit Dry-Hopped DIPA your way :D
 
jedwards said:
Flanders Red was quite good, though not specifically remarkable. Nicely restrained sourness which is always an unexpected surprise in an American sour these days.

BA Pentuppel with Chiles was actually kind of good, up until the heat. Dry-hopped Farmhouse was... excessive. High ABV you could definitely taste, somehow amplified by both the oaky barrel flavor and the dry hopping. Interesting but definitely not pleasant. BA Scotch ale was quite good though the anise note mostly made me think of a too-young Thomas Hardy's.

The Raspberry Barleywine and Islay Black are still lying in wait, though I'll probably open the Islay next week with a friend.



Happy to be the bearer of unsettling news! I'll bring the Bourbon-Barrel-Aged Passionfruit Dry-Hopped DIPA your way :D
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They always add at least two too many process steps into what they're making for this, leading to a really creepy result.
 
drgarage said:
They always add at least two too many process steps into what they're making for this, leading to a really creepy result.
Click to expand...

Agreed, so far the Flanders Red is the only one I'd go back for more of, though at least for me they've all been fun to try. Particularly given how well-executed the Trip In The Woods series has been so far, I was hoping for a more... restrained approach. But if they make an ice-jacked Bigfoot matured in Tokaji Eszencia barrels for the fall release, all will be forgiven.
 
jedwards said:
Agreed, so far the Flanders Red is the only one I'd go back for more of, though at least for me they've all been fun to try. Particularly given how well-executed the Trip In The Woods series has been so far, I was hoping for a more... restrained approach. But if they make an ice-jacked Bigfoot matured in Tokaji Eszencia barrels for the fall release, all will be forgiven.
Click to expand...
Most of them seem to be:

1. We took a fairly standard beer style (Sure, fine)
2. Then we put it in a bourbon barrel (Usually OK)
3. Then we aged it on a suspicious ingredient (Huh?)
4. Then we blended it with a poorly matched other beer (What?)
5. Then we dry-hopped it with a fruit puree that clashes with all of the above.
 
I really liked the farmhouse whiskey barrel beer.

With that said, I had plans to pick up my Q3 beers on Day 1, modeled the end of a week long vacation around that pickup date. Then they changed the pickup window just a few days before.

Guess I'll pick it up when I pick it up at this point.

I belong to 3 beer groups (Bruery, FiftyFifty, SN). Good chance its only 1 in 2017. **** only makes me hate beer more.
 
Passed on this one last year, how are you all liking it so far? Seems like the Bruery Preservation society, do they offer any other allocations beyond the ones included in the membership?
 

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