Surly Abrasive Ale

Here's a beer with several chapters to it's tale yet so far. Begun as a growler-only offering at the brewer in late 2008, as a send-off to the era of growlers, since Surly was soon to exceed the arbitrary limit placed on breweries to allow them to sell on-site. (3500 barrels, I think. What's behind this prohibition? Let's not get into that murky discussion though. Leave such matters for another time.)

Abrasive Ale, circa 2018, with new package design.

I managed to get my share of growlers, and wrote the following almost immediately after getting home with them on December 27, 2008. (I've excised extraneous references to the situation.)
"Pours a hazed and honeyed amber, just shy of a blooming red, small but sufficient creamy head on top.


Smelling it: gorgeous bitter hop nose, but still a sweetness below, honey mixed with citrus fruit, tangerine and grapefruit, beautifully balanced. This is big, but no brute.

Tasting it: Climbs on board the mouth and takes control, move over, 16 Grit is here...sits down and starts to shine...Again, a blast of bitter that really floods the mouth, thrills the senses and drips down to enter other cavities and creep alongside oft neglected corridors. Fiercely wondrous hoppitude, not brutal, not punishing, just brilliant.

Medium to full bodied, long, ever-lasting finish, stays a good spell on the tongue, the sides, the roof of the mouth...lingers in the nostils, hangs in the back of the throat...feels strong, but not too...8%...I wouldn't doubt 10, though...hops are so huge in this...an utter delight.
They must have used a massive amount of malt, as well, because the enormous hop content is well-matched by the juicy, sweet malt."

I ended it with a plea the Todd to get some in kegs or cans soon, and this was not a lonesome plea. The beer, known as 16 Grit, named for a size of sandpaper used in the abrasives factory Omar's Dad used to run, appeared in kegs in the spring of 2009 to the delight of us all. Omar intended to switch the name to Abrasive Ale once it was released on a larger scale, to escape the obscurity of the earlier name. Heck, I'd never heard of 16 Grit, but those who had loved that appellation. ( I remember Todd telling me he didn't like the alliterative-ness of Abrasive Ale. This only makes me wonder how feels about the words I wrote for the Surly cans. "Heres what happens when substance meets smooth..." I'm all about alliteration, baby!)
Spring of 2010 brought us the return of 16 Grit reborn in cans as AA, with the following copy on it's aluminum siding:

Ah, the days of posing my beers with Star Wars
action figures and paintbrushes on my old
kitchen table, using my iPod touch. Ah......

"Sure we're abrasive. We were abrasive long before we were Surly. If you visit the brewery you can still see remnants of the industrial manufacturing factory Omar's parents ran for 35 years within those same 4 walls. Bandsaw blades, grinding wheels, and sanding discs came long before ales and lagers. But let's be honest, this is a lot more fun. Pale in color, this over-hopped, under-brewed Double IPA has almost twice the amount of hops & malt crammed in the can."

Couple of things about that: 1. very little info on the actual beer, little technical information that I would have liked, like what kind of hops, malt, the process, etc. I'm just funny that way. 2. Despite the loss of "16 Grit", plenty of storytelling about what used to happen in that building. Nothing wrong with that, just not what I care about. 3. I do like the phrase which has confused many and probably will for a long time to come: "over-hopped, and under-brewed." One person actually thought the second part meant that the double IPA style itself wasn't often brewed. Hardly. No, the first charge is one that was early lobbed at Surly and will probably always be, by some certain stick-in-the-muds. The second came from a conversation my friend Steve had at a bar early on in the days of Surly, and it was an exact quote from some know-it-all he was talking to..."under-brewed" was the gentleman's opinion. Huh? What?..and so, it became a running joke that kept popping up. I got a kick out of seeing it appear on label copy I had nothing to do with creating.

One last, no, two last things. First off, it was not clear to me until the previous batch that accompanies the first canning that a good deal of oatmeal was in the malt bill. And now it's being described as an Imperial Oatmeal IPA, not just by the brewery, but elsewhere. I'm sure I wrote that on our menu last spring. The oats make this so smooth, so anti-rough, that it leads me to the second thing. While Abrasive Ale is a great name for a beer, it's not a very accurate one for this. Highly hoppy, yes, abundantly bitter, too, but abrasive? Not at all.

And now in our tale, here we are in winter, and there's a new batch, out of nowhere, in kegs and cans, available through February, they say. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.