GUEST TAP


An Interview with Pat McIlhenney of Alpine Beer Company A


By Viktor Sjöberg


n investigative mind, tons of perseverance and a carefully maintained, intimate relationship with his hop oils. Pat McIlhenney, owner and brew master


of Alpine Beer Company, has made his tiny hometown a top destination among beer lovers from all over the world.


You started Alpine Beer Company by contract brewing at AleSmith, and the first beer was McIlhenney’s Irish Red. What was the initial response? I couldn’t make enough of it. It was based on one of my award-winning homebrewing recipes. All of my homebrew- ing recipes were designed to be replicated commercially, by only using ingredients that were easy to come by on a larger scale. The production batch of McIlhenney’s Irish Red won a gold medal at the World Beer Cup. That showed me that it was a pretty good recipe!


The first IPA that you released was Pure Hoppiness. Released in 2000, it is one of the original double IPAs. What’s the story behind that beer?


My wife has a really good sense of taste and I would rely on her heavily to judge my homebrews. Her taste helped me refine some of the recipes and get them a little closer to where they are today. She likes hops, so Pure Hoppiness came out of an attempt to make a beer that was too hoppy for my wife.


I think you make the best IPAs in the world. How do you feel about a statement like that? That’s quite an honor, but there’s a lot of good IPA brewers around here...well, I would have to stick to the west coast, because the people that say that a beer needs to be bal- anced...they just drive me nuts. An IPA is not a balanced


beer. It is not intended to be a balanced beer. If you’ve got a nice, malty backbone for an IPA, it’s not an IPA in my opinion, it’s something else.


You want the west coast IPA to be just that. Hoppy. Light colored, as light colored as you can get it. No caramel malts at all, let your boiling take care of the caramelizing. Try to stick to an acceptable bittering level, not one that makes you pucker and makes it hard to drink. Try to get as much floral attributes as you can accomplish. That’s what a good IPA or Double IPA should be.


There’s another facet to that, and that’s the oil compounds that result in the aromas that you smell. A good hop analysis breaks down the oil compounds into percentages. The different hop oils all have their own flavor and aroma contribution and they all vary in degrees with each hop variety. And each hop variety varies a little bit from year to year, so our recipes are adjusted on a yearly basis, to keep up with what the years’ crop delivers.


You’re working on expanding Alpine Beer Company. What can you tell us about that at this point?


I have a building picked out here in Alpine. It’s quite an expensive


Alpine’s tasting room, two doors down from the pub, offers tasters and growler fills


process and I need to get a lot of things in a row to make it all come together. I’m working on a business plan and it’s extensive, so it’s taking a long time.


A lot of San Diego breweries are growing rapidly, and in the past some of the beer has suffered due to substitut- ing ingredients, like hops, for instance. Are you worried about these kinds of things?


I’m constantly worried about that kind of thing and I’ve been dealing with the hop suppliers now for that expan- sion because they are a minimum of two years out for order increases. So I started warning them about a year ago and it seems that they didn’t think I was being serious up until a few weeks ago. Yes, I’ve been serious! Let’s go!


Any new beers coming out in the foreseeable future?


The return of our Belgian kriek, Chez Monieux. I can’t give you a release date yet, it could be months away, but now is the time that we need to work on it. We’re also working on a very limited amount of Barrel Aged Odin, and our big release that is happening September 2nd is Barrel Aged Token. We took our award-winning Imperial Porter and put it in bourbon barrels for about nine months and then blended some fresh Token back in. We’re really happy with the way it turned out.


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We couldn’t have said it better ourselves! We lend out Guest Tap to someone involved in the local industry with an interesting perspective or story to tell. If you fit the bill, send an email to mike@westcoastersd.com with what’s on your mind and we’ll run it (may be edited for size, content). -Ed


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