Kona Fire Rock Pale Ale
All the way from the country of Hawaii comes this Kona beer. Kona has been making inroads in Massachusetts and New Hampshire lately. There was even a rep in the beer store offering taste samples when Lon and I went to pick up this and the UFO White on Saturday.
David tells me this is because it's also being brewed and bottled here on the continent. It's still a little strange to see Hawaiian beer on the shelves in sunny New England.
Fire Rock gets its name from where the lava is cooling and it lives up to that name in the color. It's a bright red color, which is nice and quite like my own Red Menace Pale Ale. This color can be achieved from a very small addition of dark malt to an otherwise normal pale ale recipe. Otherwise, this beer is about what you would expect from a pale ale in the Sierra Nevada tradition of the style. It's more aggressively hopped and therefore more bitter and more hoppily aromatic. Nothing wrong with that at all. In fact, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's also a more full bodied pale ale so you're probably not going to sit down and drink four or five in a row. The more I think about it, the more this reminds me of my homebrew but in a commercial setting. I guess I must be on to something.
