I just had a pint of Lone Pint’s Yellow Rose and well, I can’t think of a better beer to start trying to dial in on our Small Batch Sunday series here.  The last small batch was Stone IPA which is currently tasting really nice in the dry-hop keg.  I’m bottling the Stone this afternoon and tonight will start into another just amazing IPA that is as simple as they come.

Yellow Rose is now available all-year around and most recently to me, it can be had in bottles.  Hopefully I’ll be able to track down a six pack, or a bomber so I can do a side-by-side.  I don’t think this beer can really be cloned right now simply because it varies somewhat out of the brewery.  I’ve seen numerous mentions of getting radically different noses and flavor profiles from batch to batch.  The silver lining is that everyone agrees that it remains an amazing IPA.

My initial impression of this beer’s smooth malt profile that just carries the hops was one that needed a really solid base that’s interesting.  My go-to base malt for that sort of thing is always Thomas Fawcett Marris Otter, aka.  The Crutch as my good friend once told me of a remark from a pro-brewer here in Texas.  It’s hard to go wrong when putting Marris Otter in a beer at any level.  Some of my best SMaSH (Single-Malt and Single Hop) beers were 100% Marris.  What I’ve seen discussed around the net though was that Yellow Rose uses Wyermann Pilsen malt.  I can believe that since it doesn’t seem to have any crystal in it (neither in color nor taste) and lets the hop shine.  And it’s certainly easy enough to try a different base malt out next time.