Sierra Nevada Anniversary Ale

Enjoyed both draught and bottle example of this beer. Pours to a beautiful, deep golden to amber color, with a thick, creamy, white head, and a good bit of carbonation. The nose on this beer is outstanding, with lots of fragrant and zesty piney and citrus hop aroma, paired with crisp pale malt aroma. The palate is solid with good pale and biscuit malt flavor, and touches of caramel. This beer finishes with more good pale, and caramel malt up front, then ends with a long, dry, zesty, citrus and piney hpp bitterness that lingers. Fantastic, drinkable AIPA. This to me is what defines a great IPA. A beer with lots of hop aromas, good malt flavor, and then excellent hop bitterness. A wonderful aperitif beer, great with spicy fare, and a great beer to relax and more than a few of.

This is an exceptionally good, exceptionally potent [in terms of hop flavor] IPA. It has all the things that makes the style one of my favorites, and the nice high ABV is like gravy.

I am a little surprised that this beer is not rated better than it is, but I love this beer. This is another winner in my book! Sierra Nevad used to have one or two good beers, a great seasonal beer [Celebration Ale] and several decent beers. Not anymore ... they are creating some real winners! This beer has a great hop aroma, if I didn’t know better, I would say this tastes as if they dry hopped it [most likely with Cascade hops ... possible Centennial hops]. They pulled out all the stops in hopping this beer a time when hops are relatively rare and quite expensive! The body of this beer is perfect, the maltiness is balanced perfectly against the hop bitterness [which is fairly bitter]. It is hopped like a bigger IPA than it is as far as my impression goes, but it is lighter in body [yet balanced] .... they made this work with a very precise choice of aroma hopping. Truly excellent. This beer does not show much in the way of caramel notes, and I think that is probably a good thing for an IPA [and for most of Sierra Nevada’s beers, they stick to light caramel malts if they use them]. I think the color of the beer is a little off .. I don’t know what it is, but it doesn’t have a "rich" color to balance the flavor of the beer [this does NOT affect my enjoyment of this beer in anyway]. The beer holds a good head, so their is a fair amount of protien ... so many American brewers do an unnecessary protien rest on their ales and ruin the body [and the head]. Great job Sierra Nevada!

Wow. What an unreal beer. Perhaps I have just been stgarving for a beer like this for a while. Thanks to Piscator for the bottled sample.

This tastes like a cross between a sweeter and milder IPA and a wet-hop harvest ale. Extremely drinkable, could be a top-notch session beer.