East End Brewing Organic Single-Malt Single Hop Belgian Pale For 2013 Steel City Big Pour

Every year, we brew a special beer for release at the Steel City Big Pour. That’s less than a week away, so I’m a bit late in posting something here about it. But BigHop Harvest, and all the wet hop handling hijinks that come with it… well, they have a way of taking over. But now that the last of the fresh hops are in the tanks, I can get caught up!

Since way back in our early days, we’ve been interested in the notion of brewing organic beer. The good news is that over the last 9 years as we have been dreaming about it, the improved selection, availability, and quality of organic ingredients has been nothing short of astounding.

But "Organic" means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, which is undoubtedly responsible for the controversy, and significant administrative red tape and disproportionately high cost associated with getting a small batch of beer to be "certified organic", and labeled as such… if that was our wish.

I’m sure it’s mostly because we’re a generally draft-only operation, but I’ve always been WAY less interested in making an organic label claim, than I am in just brewing an organic beer. So, we’re taking a simple approach to all that regulatory stuff, in that we’re just gonna skip it. Kind of the same way our Grandparents thought about organic food. Or as they liked to call it, food.

None of this will be on the label, but we will know it, and since you’re reading this, so will you. And that’s good enough for us:

The barley is a single variety of Organic Pale Ale Malt from Crisp Malting, the hops are also a single variety Certified Organic Bravo from US growers, and the water is the typical free-range, cage-free, carbon filtered Pittsburgh City Water that we use in all our beers here at East End Brewing. And of course, there’s no stabilizers, preservatives, or other nonsense in this beer, or for that matter, in any other beer we brew.

Organic ingredients, organic certified… these are obviously positive things.  But if the beer isn’t spectacular in the glass, none of that stuff really matters. So what’s going into your glass?

It’s a single-malt, single-hop, Belgian Pale Ale.  It’s probably technically a bit too hoppy for the style, but I think the hop character of the Bravo Hops fit in wonderfully with the dry flavor profile we get from this Farmhouse Ale Yeast.  Brendan conjured this one up, and did a wonderful job on this beer.  He also gets credit for putting the notion of organic ingredients back into the front of our minds here.

We haven’t given this beer an official name yet, and I was hoping to have something come to me after getting to the end of this entry, but I’m not feeling it just yet. Maybe after a glass or two, later in the week. For now, it’s simply "2013 BigPourBrew". In keeping with tradition, we will tap this beer at the midpoint of each session of the Steel City Big Pour, and at BOTH our Brewery and Growler Shop locations at 1:30pm that same day, Saturday, September 7th.

Some will also appear at "select tap spots" around town in the weeks ahead, but we’ve got just 20barrels of it to go around, so it won’t last forever. Once it’s gone it’s gone, so grab some while you can.

Cheers -Scott