Stone Pale Ale: The Surprisingly Smooth Session Beer

There are a handful of breweries in America that have built a reputation on outdoing each other with the biggest, most flavorful, most Xtreme beers that thirsty tongues can crave. We all know the names and the players: on the East Coast, we expect our senses to be assaulted by giant brews from Dogfish Head. In the plains states, by outrageously intense brews from Avery, and on the left coast, by those purveyors of better bitterness, our friends over at Stone.

Stone brews some tasty IPAs, no doubt about it, so when the bottles of Stone Pale Ale lined up on the shelf in my beer fridge started beckoning to me like a Siren calling Ulysses, I just had to give in and obey my inner thirst. So, without much ado about nothing, let's figure out what's what with this beer and where it belongs in the scheme of modern American brewing...


What I Really Want in an American Pale Ale...
American pale ales have a firm malt base with a little bit of complexity, but the real key is in the hops. These are hoppy beers. Not quite at the IPA level, well, maybe not at the American IPA level, though some of the best American Pale Ales do have more hop flavor and aroma than many British IPAs. American pale ales differ from IPAs mostly in degree: they're a bit lighter in body and in hops than your typical American-brewed India Pale Ale, and they differ from British pale ales in that the hopping is often bigger, and the hops flavor and aroma typically carry a payload of grapefruit aroma and flavor. This strong grapefruit character is the product of several hops varieties grown in the United States, especially Cascades and its cousins and offspring, such as Centennial, Columbus, and such.

In a good American pale ale, I want plenty of citric hop character in both the nose and the flavor. Color, mmm, maybe a deep golden to a light amber (not too much over 10 on the SRM scale, please). The body should be neither thin nor fat, but rather, reflecting a beer with a starting gravity of just over 12 degrees Plato, maybe plus but not minus 2 degrees). Anyway, I want a drinkable pale ale with lots of citric hop character....that's what I really look for in this style. Let's see what Stone looks for...


A Tall Cool Glass of Stone Ale...
Nothing shows off a good pale ale better than a clean, smooth pint glass, so let's pull one down, pop the top...pssstttt...and pour...glug, glug, glug.

Appearance:
Deep amber color, almost a rusty red, with deep yellow at the fringes. The beer pours with a vigourous, rocky white head and the foam takes its own sweet time to settle down to an edge that trails fingers of lace all the way down to the last sip. A beautiful pint of ale!

Aroma:
Mmmmm.....hops! The glorious scent of citrus wafting softly on a bed of fresh malt, redolent with sweetness and a light toasted sweetbread character.

Flavor:
Smmooooottthh and balanced with lots of malt in a firm soft base to back up that bigger than normal hops punch. The malt base is a clean, dry, pale malt flavor, but with some soft caramel and toffee to give it added depth and sweetness. The hops kick in with vigor, but on my tongue, they seem to hit me with more resin and pine flavor than the citrus that I was hoping for. Swirling the beer around on a second swig, the beer again impresses me more with its malt than with its hops, which is a bit of a perversion of the natural order of things when it comes to APAs. As the beer warms, it develops a bit of fruitiness, but that malt still seems to dominate to me.

Overall Impression:
This is an APA that's a smooth-drinking session beer with plenty of malt smoothness to offset the generally on-target hops bitterness (though I'd really like to see a bit more intensity on the hops in the flavor, and perhaps different varieties that would back off on the pine a little bit). All things considered, I'd probably not choose a Stone Pale Ale over a pint of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (my benchmark APA), but I'd very happily quaff a second pint of this well-crafted, very smooth, malty, and balanced APA.


About Stone Brewing...
Stone Brewing Company is the brainchild of California brewers Steve Wagner and Greg Koch, who opened their microbrewery in an industrial park in San Marcos in 1996. The brewery has developed something of a reputation among beer lovers for their big, assertively flavored ales, particularly India Pale Ales, of which they've brewed several outstanding versions (their Double B*stard Ale is a case in point, and at 10% alcohol, an extreme beer for the most demanding palates). Big beers for bold drinkers. That oughta be the slogan of Stone --- it suits them (and me too).

In fact, Stone has such a reputation for bigness and boldness, that drinkers accustomed to the intensity of a typical Stone ale might find it a bit tough to step down to a mere APA. Certainly I thought I'd be getting a bottle that was perhaps a bit closer in hops to Sierra Nevada, but Stone Pale Ale is no SNPA clone. It's its own thing.


More Reviews About Stone Beers...
Can't get enough of the big bold beers from our friends at Stone? Me either! Here's a couple more reviews that might sate your thirst for a little while...

* Stone IPA
* Stone Arrogant B*stard IPA
* Stone Old Guardian Barleywine