When the team at Mother Road Brewing Company set out to make its Fourth Anniversary Ale, the goal was to create a traditional English style barley wine that was drinkable, fresh but also had the potential for long-term cellar aging. Last month, the Flagstaff brewery received word that it had also produced a gold medal winner in the process.
Mother Road’s anniversary ale received 95 points in the Beverage Tasting Institute’s World Beer Championships, putting it solidly into the gold category and on par with brews from highly regarded craft beer industry players like Stone Brewing and Oskar Blues.
Here’s what the judges had to say about the beer: “Brilliant dark copper color. Bright, fruity, citrusy complex vinous aromas and flavors of caramelized peaches and tangerines, crystallized ginger, clover honey, and delicate spice cake with a satiny, lively, spritzy, fruity medium-full body and a tingling, complex, very long orange pepper and apricot creme brulee finish. A fantastically rich, chewy, and spicy barleywine that is sure to please.”
The ranking marks the brewery’s fourth gold in the BTI contest and the highest score of any Mother Road beer yet. A gold in the barley wine category, called one of the “biggest, baddest beer styles on the planet” by craftbeer.com, is a special accomplishment for the brewery, said Campbell Morrissy, Mother Road’s production manager.
“While it is always an honor to get such high praises for one of our beers, it’s especially exciting when it’s in a style as highly regarded as the barley wine,” Morrissy said.
Bottles of Fourth Anniversary, which was released in November, are available in Mother Road’s Tap Room and will be available on tap in select bars during Arizona Beer Week Feb. 11-20.
ABOUT THE WORLD BEER CHAMPIONSHIPS
The World Beer Championships, founded in 1994, is America’s oldest international beer competition and is open to all commercially produced beers from around the world. It is a medal-based competition based on the proprietary blind tasting methodology developed by the Beverage Testing Institute (BTI) that uses a consumer accepted, 100-point quality rating scale. The reviews provide objective, third party affirmation of a beer’s quality and taste.
Instead of trying to cram the tasting of hundreds or thousands of beers into a week, or even a weekend, like other beer competitions, the World Beer Championships reviews a different category of beer every other month and carefully blind tastes no more than thirty-five beers a day with a small cadre of experienced judges from the retail, on-premise, distribution, and importing trades—all certified by BTI. Find out more at tastings.com.
ABOUT MOTHER ROAD BREWING COMPANY
Founded in 2011, Mother Road Brewing is located in Flagstaff Arizona along an original alignment of Route 66 in a 1920’s era building. The small, dedicated staff hand-crafts beers on their 15 barrel system including gold-medal winning Roadside American Pale Ale, Lost Highway Black IPA and Mother Road Kölsch Style Ale. The most recent addition to their main line beers is Tower Station IPA. For more information on the beers Mother Road produces and Tap Room hours, please visit motherroadbeer.com.
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