“The beer goes back to 1981,” says Brian Grossman, chief brewer and second-generation owner of Sierra Nevada. “The world has definitely changed.”
When it comes to Celebration IPA, however, not a lot has changed—and its fans across the country know what they’re going to get when they see its familiar label reappear late in the year, every year. Grossman wouldn’t have it any other way. “It’s really just your classic C-hops that were available to brewers” in the 1980s, he says. “Those are such great hops. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
That’s not to say that Sierra Nevada hasn’t made refinements over the years—including the dry-hopping technique.
“This was a traditionally dry-hopped beer,” Grossman says. “We’d use pillowcase-sized tea bags and hook them up on chains in our dish-bottom fermentors.” Eventually, the team noticed that the middle of the hop bags would often remain dry—not only poor utilization, but a waste of hops.
Enter the torpedo. Sierra Nevada created torpedo-hopping to get as close as possible to 100 percent utilization. Beer from the fermentor continuously flows through the torpedo-shaped unit—jam-packed with hops—extracting as much aroma and flavor as possible. Grossman says it was Celebration that helped inspire the team to develop the torpedo process.
Besides the torpedo, however, Grossman says that when it comes to Celebration, Sierra Nevada wants to pay homage to what has always been. While the team has implemented an array of innovative processes at its brewhouses over the years, they usually reserve those for other beers. “That’s why we have a variety of brands,” he says.
Hitting the Fresh-Hop Target
To make Celebration, Grossman says, “We always start with an end point in mind.” That’s somewhat more complicated than it used to be.
These days, Sierra Nevada has three very different brewing systems working at its two locations. The facility in Chico, California, has two brewhouses–a 1960s-era, 100-barrel, copper-bottom brewhouse that Grossman says produces more Maillard-type flavors and a more modern 200-barrel system. (They’re nicknamed Eastside and Westside, respectively.) In North Carolina, there’s a modern 200-barrel system—but the elevation is higher than Chico’s (2,000 feet vs. 200 feet), and the water there is much softer.
With all that in mind, Grossman says the team always follows Celebration’s final flavor as its spec, not a technical number. That matters because the star of this beer is its classic, fresh-hop flavor, and those hops can change from year to year.
To select the hops, Sierra Nevada sends a team up to the Pacific Northwest every year to rub hops specifically for Celebration. Hop farmers select the fields, get the hops off the vines, and dry them, so that Sierra Nevada’s team can choose which hops to use and immediately drive them to California and North Carolina. “The whole idea of [using] fresh hops is to get them into the beer ASAP,” Grossman says.
The team spends a few days combing through the hop fields in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, looking for the very best Cascade, Centennial, and Chinook hops that fit the profile. “Centennial rose on the nose, as well as classic Cascade—that’s pretty much Celebration IPA in the bottle for me,” Grossman says.
The brewery benefits from its relationships with hop farmers that can go back more than 40 years, allowing it to get first choice. “We’re one of the largest consumers of whole-cone hops,” Grossman says. “Our farmers … take really good care of us.”
The Celebration season starts when those hops are ready, and then the team is on the clock. Refrigerated trucks loaded with fresh hops embark on their journey back to the breweries. Grossman says there’s always a lot of excitement for the beer back at the brewhouse. “Anyone who is not dedicated to a shift will pretty much wander to the loading docks when the truck shows up,” he says. They start cutting into the bags right then and there, allowing those powerful, rose-like hop aromas to fill the air. “It’s so great,” he says.
Brewing the Celebration
Then it’s time to brew. The classic malt bill is 90 percent two-row, 10 percent crystal at 60° Lovibond. The Chinook hops go in early for a strong bittering component and hefty dose of pine, complemented by later additions of Cascade and Centennial for citrus-grapefruit flavors.
On the cold side, the team hops exclusively with Cascade and Centennial, bringing out the beer’s signature floral-rose character. They still dry hop in the old-fashioned way, too, but only about 25 percent of the cold-side hops go in the bags like they used in 1981. The rest go into the torpedoes.
Some drinkers expect spices in a holiday beer, and so they think they taste them in Celebration. Grossman says that some will say, “You put nutmeg and cinnamon in it,” or “This year’s nutmeg is great.” However, one thing that Celebration does not have—and has never had—is spices.
Yet there is a twist of sorts, for a lucky few. Every year, the production team kegs a small batch that literally comes out of the dry hops. Once they empty the tanks of Celebration, they hang up the giant hop bags and let them drip into the empty fermentors. That liquid becomes what the team calls Celly Drippins—a cult favorite that originally was available only to brewers. These days, they serve it in a limited fashion. “It goes very fast,” Grossman says. “We’ll get phone calls asking when it’s coming.”
Sierra Nevada ferments Celebration IPA with its famous Chico strain at 62°F (17°C); the typical full pitch rate is 14 million cells per milliliter per degree Plato. Once complete, they crash it to 30°F (−1°C) and package-condition it to 2.65 volumes of CO2. (For more details about their process, see “Package Conditioning for Beers that Live Longer,” brewingindustryguide.com.)
The production and packaging teams also work hard to ensure that oxygen levels are low in the packaged beer. “We’re fortunate to have our own CO2 recovery plant,” Grossman says. That makes a difference because recovered CO2 is pure, while the manufactured kind often contains low yet impactful amounts of oxygen that could shorten the beer’s shelf life.
When It’s That Time Again
Sierra Nevada brews about 30,000 barrels of Celebration IPA each year, though that number can change from year to year. Forecasting sales can be tricky for a beer like this, but the team plans well in advance.
“Generally, if we’re seeing good [demand] for Summerfest, … we’ll have pretty good excitement for Celebration as well,” Grossman says. “All the seasonals really play together to support one another.”
Unofficially, there’s also an end to Celebration season. “We’re in a pretty finite time period, from off-the-vine to basically January 1,” Grossman says. “This isn’t a Christmas beer, but you notice a change in the drinker’s palate right around then.”
In a world and a brewing industry that is far different from the one in which Brian’s father Ken Grossman launched the beer, the importance of process is more crucial today than ever before. Today, brewers can use any number of specialty hop products, including some that are primed to lock in fresh-hop flavors. With so much hop-forward competition, the team at Sierra Nevada can’t afford to rest on their laurels. They aim to dial in and execute each part of Celebration’s process flawlessly, from field to bottle, even while ensuring it retains its familiar character.
All so we can crack open a bottle and taste peak freshness … with a side of nostalgia.