Ah, the humble, unheralded brown ale — a beer style that is
as decidedly unsexy as it is inoffensive. No one busts out the brown ale to wow
the beer share crowd. If brown ale were a person, he would be an accountant at
a regional HR firm named Phillip, not Phil, whose life highlight was a semester
playing trombone in a third-wave ska band during his
sophomore year at UB.
But like
Phillip, there’s virtue in the brown ale’s simplicity. It is a nuanced style
rife with pleasantly roasty subtleties, and Paul Guarracini at Sager Beer Works is a veritable master of
this unsung English ale. On Saturday, February 1, Sager and Manchester’s
Reinvention Brewing Company unveiled a very special brown ale, one of 20
special collaborations released exclusively for The Beer Market.
Collab AF is
a month-long celebration of collaborations between the Mount Hope-based craft
beer bar and other local breweries; it features 33 other, four-state spanning brewery
collaborations on top of the Beer Market releases. Putting the event together
has had Beer Market Beer Guru Rob Richenberg (yes,
official title), running frantically from brewery to brewery.
“This
started as just a way to set us apart, but it turned into a way to show some
more interesting combinations of things,” Richenberg
says.
Collaborations
are the life-blood of the craft beer community, in the sense that they give
brewers the opportunity to play to their strengths while giving ample room to
experiment.
“With beer,
everybody’s friendly with each other, you’ll always see brewers hanging out and
drinking,” Richenberg says.
Sager and
Reinvention’s Brown Ale is a conservative pastry twist on the classic, meant to
give a subtle hint of oatmeal cookie. A balanced, lightly roasted and slightly
sweet malt backbone is complemented by some tinges of cinnamon and nutmeg,
finishing crisp and clean. In a world where pastry beers seek to beat the
drinker senseless with hearty doses of candy and lactose sweetness, it’s a
refreshing, reserved twist on the trend.
It, of
course, may not be a beer you’ll find flooding your Instagram timeline, and
that’s okay. From much personal experience, sometimes it’s fun to be uncool.
The full
Collab AF tap list can be found at beerheadbar.com/collab-af.
Gino
Fanelli is a CITY staff writer. He can be reached at gfanelli@rochester-citynews.com.
This article appears in Feb 5-11, 2020.
