Bush era and tasted the 2007. The sharp, vibrant esters of the beer’s younger days had softened into something bittersweet, with distinct notes of marmalade.
Then we stepped back three years and found in the 2009 bottle a fudgier, thicker version of the last. We started with the 2012 Old Stock Ale, and we noted the 12-percent alcohol beer’s bright and fresh youth, with its sharp and brassy scents of prunes and sherry. In a vertical, the drinkers taste multiple bottles of progressively older vintages of the same beer (or wine) in order to observe how the beverage grows and matures (or, if it happens to be the case, deteriorates) through the years. Years plodded by, the Chinook salmon industry crashed, whales migrated past going north, then south, then north again, and one American president replaced the next-until finally, on a recent afternoon in August, five aged bottles of Old Stock Ale saw daylight. I was lucky enough to be there, along with the brewery’s owner, Mark Ruedrich, and the company’s two brewers, Patrick Broderick and Ken Kelley, for a very special event: a vertical tasting. North Coast Brewing Company, Fort Bragg. In a dark cellar at North Coast Brewing Company, the beer bottles endured the slow crawl of time.
While Oregon’s craft beer market may be nearly saturated with foamy brew, which flows from nearly 60 brewpubs in Portland alone, breweries in Northern California are fewer and farther between-with just enough beer taps to sate one’s thirst and spark interest but far enough apart that one arrives at the next one thirsty for another pint-especially travelers on bicycles. North Coast towns with breweries include Eureka, Ukiah, Blue Lake, Fort Bragg, Boonville, Healdsburg, Sonoma and Petaluma, and here are several worth pedaling for.
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