This Friday’s drinks recommendation is an old favourite – Stone & Wood’s Pacific Ale. It routinely scores either first or second place in those “best beers” lists that come out each year, so that should indicate how good this is.
A delicious, refreshing beer, this is effectively the retirement plan for the three guys who own Stone & Wood. They could make Pacific Ale forever and sell heaps and heaps of it because there’s just no way you can get sick of it. Some beers I’ve tired of the further along the Good Beer Road I’ve travelled, but the Pacific Ale isn’t one of them. I still love this beer.
It’s got some wonderful delicate tropical fruit aromas and they follow through in the flavour when you start drinking. What I like is the subtle nature of that flavour. It’s there just enough for you to notice it but then it skitters away, leaving you wanting to chase it.
On a warm afternoon, I’d be hard pressed to think of a better beer to drink than a Pacific Ale. Not that you have wait for one of those – any time is great. And, after a time when this beer was hard to find – apparently because the Byron Bay brewery was having trouble keeping up with the huge demand – it’s now appearing in bottle shop fridges again.
So if you haven’t tried it yet, go buy some tonight on the way home. If you have tried it, go by some on the way home anyway.
Categories: Friday drinks
BEER IS YOUR FRIEND 
Okay I will.
It’s a good drop.. certainly worth trying.
So I took you up on your offer and bought a couple of Pacific Ale’s to share with a friend. We sipped on them while we were brewing up an Imperial Vanilla Milk Stout – sort of my first All Grain.
The Pacific Ale is really good! to the point where I’m now compelled to try to recreate a similar Ale. Galaxy hops are the go apparently…
Glad you liked it Drew. And I was also inspired to try and make a homebrew version of it.
Two in fact – one when I started out which was just a kit and kilo recipe and one more recently when I moved up to extract brewing and was able to boil the hops.
I liked the second version much better than the first. But neither captured the hop subtelty of the Pacific Ale.
Interesting to know. What was your hop schedule?
Did you have any ideas on how you’d tweak it to get it closer?
No doubt you ended up with a drinkable beer though 🙂
Definitely had a drinkable beer, so much so that I reckon I’ll make it again some time. Not sure how to tweak it as I’m not that clued up about what exactly makes the S&W taste like it does.
I’ve got the hop schedule in my brew book at home. I’ll try and remember to have a look at it tonight and let you know the hop schedule.
Hey Drew,
Looked up the hop schedule for the Pacific Ale clone. I did a half-hour boil with some carapils I’d mashed in.
The Galaxy additions were as follows
25mins – 5g
15mins – 15g
5mins – 15g
Flameout – 15g
And then I dryhopped with 35g of Galaxy.
Hey thanks heaps for looking that up for me.
The recipe I was playing with had much lower quantities and a simpler schedule. I think I’ll find a middle ground and then just dive in. What could possibly go wrong!
Cheers.