Silver City Brewery produced this year’s official Seattle Beer Week beer. It is available now in cans and makes its draft debut on May 7th with the official kickoff of the 7th Annual Seattle Beer Week. Below is the complete story of the beer straight from the brewery.
Silver City Brewery & the Seattle Beer Collective are proud to present Sieben Bräu, the 2015 Seattle Beer Week Lager
The Seattle Beer Collective reached out to Silver City Brewery to brew a “highly sessionable” traditional Lager for the 7th Seattle Beer Weekbecause, as they put it; ” Silver City is known for brewing great lagers”.
The Seattle Beer Collective consists of Washington craft beer gurus Ian Roberts, Matt Younts and Mike Baker. In 2009 they founded Seattle Beer Week to celebrate a week of craft beer exploration and indulgence. Each year they choose a brewer to collaborate with to create a beer brewed just for the celebration. For SBW 7, the group wanted to explore a traditional lager, but with a NW twist. Known for great lagers such as Ziggy Zoggy Summer Lager, Oktoberfest, Winter Lager and newly released Cold One Pilsner; Silver City Brewery seemed like a perfect fit.
Just barely into 2015, the SBC team made the trip across the Sound to visit brew master Don Spencer and the Silver City team to discuss and design the beer. As a true, authentic lager, the beer plan needed to come together quickly to allow for the extended production time for a lager beer where the schedule is not measured in hours or days, like an ale, but in weeks and months.
As the team began to discuss their individual inspirations for the beer, it was apparent how tight knit the vision was for the ultimate recipe. As Don said “The best lagers are clean and balanced. No non-sense, just simple elegance. Everything is expressed in concert. You taste the sweet, light malt-toasty notes with herbal, spicy hop aromatics playing over the top. Then a nice crisp bitterness to finish. Anyone else thirsty?” Mike Baker of SBC followed with “Yes, something I can drink a lot of, that’s nicely balanced and flavorful.”
With the recipe planned all that was left was a name. Sieben Braü, which translates in German to 7th Brew, was decided upon as a nod to the 7th Seattle Beer Week, but the inspiration didn’t stop there. There is an old German saying that suggests you balance your beer to food ratio 7:1. That is 1 schnitzel for every 7 beers. That may seem extreme by American standards of celebratory drinking, but that spirit of a beer to be enjoyed with food and celebration of the experience, is the heart of Seattle Beer Week Sieben Bräu Lager.
Silver City Brewery’s Seattle Beer Week Sieben Braü Lager is now available in cans where Silver City beer is sold and will make its debut on tap May 7th with the kick-off of Seattle Beer Week 2015.
To learn more about Sieben Bräu from the collective themselves, check the following YouTube video:
For more information about Seattle Beer Week, visit seattlebeerweek.com