Boulevard Brewing Company

Boulevard's Amber Ale is nearly upon us! Well, nearly upon the good people of Omaha and Lincoln at least. The rest of us will have to be content with finding bottles of Amber packed into samplers for the time being. The official launch of Boulevard's amber is next week and they were nice enough to throw a couple bottles my way on the eve of Memorial Day Weekend. This is a beer I've had before, on a number of occasions... I may have had this beer more before it was officially released than Tank 7... which was on tap at some places for several months before the bottles hit shelves. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I like what Boulevard has done with their Amber Ale.

Boulevard Amber, the beer no one was begging Boulevard to make, is nearing completion and slated to hit store shelves around mid-June. Boulevard will be sneaking this beer into 12 pack samplers at first and release dedicated six packs later on. There doesn't seem to be much fanfare around this beer, I can only assume that's because it's an Amber. That's right, it seems Boulevard has made just about every interesting style of beer already so in an effort to round out their portfolio they're releasing an Amber. But seriously, it's an under appreciated style I enjoy more than I like to admit, so I'm genuinely excited for this beer.

If you're from the Kansas City area you know all about Tom Pendergast, the Democratic party boss who ran Kansas City during the Great Depression. Pendergast, though corrupt, is remembered affectionately a Robin Hood type who fed the poor, indirectly gave rise to the Kansas City jazz scene and was responsible for putting Harry S. Truman on the national political stage. What's this all have to do with beer? Well, Pendergast's faction was referred to as goats... an animal often associated with the Bock style. Bock being the German word for a "buck" or any large male animal. The correlation is tenuous at best...

It's Imperial Stout season but Boulevard seems to be running a little behind this year... In lieu of another release of their Limited Release Imperial Stout, Boulevard has bottled a modified version this year and called it the Dark Truth. A very ominous name on it's own, but if you turn the bottle around and actually read the flavor text on the back you might think Boulevard is trying to sell this beer to guys who are waaaay in to Dio and like to volunteer at the local Renaissance Fair. "He who imbibes the Dark Truth shall find himself filled with the strength of mad bear!" Ok, it's not actually that bad... but there are references to alchemy and "hidden knowledge."

It's not very often that you run across a beer like Boulevard's Rye-on-Rye and that makes it a little to set expectations. I expect this beer to be different, to push the boundaries a little and bring something to the table that other Rye beers, or other barrel aged beers, don't. I started to worry a bit when I saw the label for the Rye-on-Rye, it says that this bottle contains 33% ale and 67% ale aged in rye whiskey barrels. That's a 2:1 ratio in favor of barrel aged beer, meaning this beer is going to taste a lot like a whiskey barrel. That sounds a bit dangerous...

I first had Boulevard's Imperial Pilsner at the beer's release party in Lawrence, Kansas. In case you hadn't heard, this Imperial Pilsner is a collaboration between Boulevard Brewing Company and Orval's master brewer Jean-Marie Rock. Steven Pauwels, Boulevard's brew master, and Rock met at a conference in Tucson last year. It was there that these two Belgians hit it off and agreed to collaborate and resurrect a beer Rock had brewed some 30 years before. The style that beer most closely resembled is what we now call an American Double or Imperial Pilsner.

It's that time of year again, and the snow is still falling but it's melting much faster now. Spring may still be further off than you'd like but it's harbinger is fast approaching. The Saint Patrick's Day seasonals have already started hitting the shelves so you know the big day isn't that far off. Boulevard's Irish Ale is the first St. Pat's seasonal I've seen thus far, but that just means the others will be showing up soon. While I was excited to seen something other than a Winter Warmer in the seasonal section of the beer cooler, I was exactly thrilled at the prospect of drinking another Irish Ale...