Mischief at Level 5
Here is a craft beer that can claim to have been rewarded with the most noble metal: Los Angeles International Beer Competition 2014: Gold Medal (American Belgo-Style Ale); San Diego International Beer Festival 2015: Gold Medal (Hybrid Belgian-Style Ale); Great American Beer Festival 2016: Gold Medal (American Belgo-Style Ale).
This 8.5%-ABV Mischief Belgian-Style Ale is produced by The Bruery, based in Placentia (California, USA), whose name comes from the contraction between the family name of its founder in 2008, Patrick Rue, and the term brewery.
This beer is really excellent. It’s certainly less bitter than the announced style and the aroma would suggest (except at the very end), but it’s excellent. This spicy sweet Belgian ale-like beer is well balanced and deserves to be tried — not only on a warm day.
Let’s take this opportunity to briefly mention a rarely discussed aspect: the SRM. Well, what might that mean, specifically?
The SRM is the “Standard Reference Method,” a system used to specify a beer’s color — in any case the one used by the brewery to tell us that this particular beer is Level 5. In this reference scale, 5 means between Pale Gold and Deep Gold (Medium Gold, even if not so specified by the scale).
I’m not certain that this is a fundamental reference, unlike ABV or IBU. It’s certainly very useful from the producer’s point of view (for compliance), but clearly less so for consumers. It serves as a first gauge for them, but not much more than that.
That said, here is a link to Wikipedia for those interested in this technical aspect.