Anyone surveying the beer case at most package stores across the Valley can attest to Berkshire Brewing’s courage in trying new varieties.
The distinctive rainbow spectrum of regular and seasonal varieties with charming illustrations and often funny names suggests a brewery devoted to the joy of innovation and discovering new, tasty things to drink. The hues of their rainbow change often; they seem to always be up to something.
But in many years of keeping track of what’s new from Berkshire, I’ve never seen them stray from their lone variety of Indian Pale Ale, the Lost Sailor IPA. Until a couple of weeks ago, when I spotted, in a light-green bottle, their new Saint of Circumstance India Pale Ale. The illustration featured the brewery founders, Chris Lalli and Gary Bogoff, looking puzzled over a newly opened package.
The Lost Sailor is a fine beer, but to this hops fan, it’s always seemed a little off-course. Since I enjoy many of the brewery’s other offerings, though, I eagerly bought a bottle of the new stuff.
As with the Lost Sailor, the new Saint of Circumstance resists the common impulse to overpower the beer with a barrage of the sharp, citrus-infused hops flavor that’s been made popular by many West Coast brews. The more earthy, grassy hops flavor is but a voice in the choir. There’s a note of smoke and an underlying taste of burnt sugar. Overall, I found it to be more robust than the Lost Sailor with a cleaner finish—I was quite taken with it. But I still had questions.
The beer’s name and illustration puzzled me. The bottle explained that it tasted like what an IPA may have been like in the 1800s, but I wasn’t clear why.
Berkshire brewer Jason Hunter set me straight.
“We use a rare hop that’s a key component in our Lost Sailor IPA,” he said in a recent phone interview. “But in the shipment we got to make our latest batch, there was this one bail that wasn’t like the others. It was darker, and had a very different smell. We had no idea what it was.”
Rather than send the bail back, though, they decided to give the mystery hops a try, and Saint of Circumstance was the result. Hunter was particularly impressed by the hops’ distinctive, non-pine-like taste. He explained that centuries ago, before the grain had been popular for the grapefruit-like bitterness it adds to the beer, it had been used to prevent spoilage. For brewers of the early 1800s, it wasn’t desirable for the hops flavor to dominate the beer, and Hunter expects a more balanced flavor, like this new beer, is what they would have been after.
