The beer: Equilibrium Wavelength IPA
ABV: 6.5%
How we got it: Equilibrium’s Wavelength was announced on Instagram and Facebook on May 12 and was available for pre-order with options for curbside pickup at the brewery or delivery throughout NY, D.C., Ohio, and Nevada. $16 per four-pack. I bought it that day and got a FedEx package a few days later.
Photo by Equilibrium Brewery
What they say: “We started with oats and white wheat for a base before adding Simcoe and Mosaic to the whirlpool. To get some berry medley notes going we dry hopped with Mosaic and Citra at a 2:1 ratio. Wavelength pours bright yellow with aromas of citrus and stone fruit with crushable flavors of mango and berry with a light refreshing finish.”
What you say: The beer sports a 4.19 rating on Untapped and a 4.23 on BeerAdvocate.
What Brian says —
I’ve been drinking some of the freshest beer of my life. There’s no doubt about it.
Before the coronavirus took over our lives, I happily bought up the available IPA 4-packs at the local grocery stores based on the breweries I knew and loved. The printed dates were generally fine -- a few weeks, a couple of months, sometimes more -- and I couldn’t have complained.
Why would I?
But now that I’ve been ordering direct from the breweries for home delivery or shipped through the mail, I’m forever spoiled. There’s no chance of going back.
For instance: The Wavelength that I’m currently sipping was brewed May 12, 2020, the day I ordered it. It reached me on May 17th by FedEx. When you crack a beer that freshly canned you can smell the hops explode out and every sip feels like a cloud.
Equilibrium, a 4-year-old brewery in Middletown, New York, is a little less than a 2-hour drive from New York City. They deliver to the counties you’d expect them to, including Orange, Putnam, Dutchess, Rockland, and Ulster, but also an ever-expanding list of states — NY, OH, DC, NH, NV, and VT.
Their main pitch:
“Equilibrium Brewery combines Research and Inspiration to balance drinkability with massive flavor.”
It’s basically a brewery for supreme geeks -- its founders are two MIT graduates who use science to create kick-ass hazy brews.
So they, of all people, should appreciate how I’m appreciating them.
Equilibrium named this beer Wavelength for a reason — it’s the distance between two points.
Identical ones, yes. And sure, “in the adjacent cycles of a waveform signal propagated in space and describes the flow of Photons,” but a distance between two points nonetheless.
We’re all redefining our wavelengths now, in these constantly uncertain times.
I know I am.
In a typical world, breweries face all kinds of obstacles to get you, the consumer, the freshest brews. Packaging lines, supply chain hijinks — when you’re not grabbing your beer directly from the brewer life tends to get in the way.
A recent study by the Leibniz-Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich (Leibniz-LSB@TUM) found that craft beer like the ones we partake in should follow two important guidelines:
Keep it cool, and;
Consume it as fresh as absolutely possible
By the end of three months, the study found, the beer you stored cold has lost one-third of the “hop odorant” that makes your juicy beer smell so juicy. If you’ve kept that beer at room temperature, forget it — the concentration your hop stank dropped even further. "Anyone who prefers a beer with a strong hop aroma should not store craft beer for long," said the wise Klaas Reglitz, one of the researchers.
Want to dig deeper? Here ya go.
For the first time, the aroma researchers Steinhaus and Reglitz have quantitatively determined how the content of the odor active compound changes during beer storage. To do this, they used a highly sensitive method, especially developed for the analysis of this substance. The researchers examined both filtered and unfiltered dry-hopped craft beer. During the study period of six months, the researchers stored the beer consistently at 5 and 20 degrees Celsius.
At the beginning of the investigation, the filtered beer contained 22 ng/kg of the odor active hop compound. The concentration in unfiltered beer was slightly lower at 15 ng/kg. After three months at 5 degrees Celsius, the content had decreased to 59 and 67 percent of the original content. For the beer stored at 20 degrees Celsius, the losses were significantly larger. The concentrations even decreased to 30 and 40 percent in this case. After a further three months storage time, the concentrations in all samples had decreased even more, in some cases to only 2 ng/kg.
And then there’s the “Pope of Foam.”
Charles W. “Charlie” Bamforth, a UC Davis professor whose focus is beer, wrote the book on freshness. Literally, it’s called Freshness, and it’s got the kind of review my college self could only have dreamed of:
“Don’t let the thinness of this book trick you into believing it does not contain much information.” - Rex Halfpenny
He defines it as “beer tasting exactly as it does when first packaged.” Freshness! It makes sense! In his book, the Pope identifies “flavor instability” as “one of the most critical quality issues faced by the brewing industry.”
And what factor leads flavor instability to rear its finicky head?
You guessed it — time.
Professor Bamforth wrote a feature on “shelf life” for the Oxford Companion to Beer, which identifies time as the primary factor in making our beers go to shit. But the thing that separates most of us, the consumers, from those who create, is the ability to detect when the beer’s gone bad, he writes.
“Whereas most brewers deplore classic aged character (cardboard/wet paper flavors and aromas), there appear to be a very many customers who either don’t recognize it, don’t care about it, or even might desire it,” said the Pope. “They are used to this aroma in their beers, often because the beer has traveled a long way for a long time to reach them.”
A major challenge for the breweries, he says, is that the customers are drinking what they’ve become accustomed to, and — until now — it’s been a massive challenge to get us their pristine beers in the conditions they were created.
Until now, the average beer drinker was simply consuming a relatively stale product. But with on-demand deliveries, as one of my favorite songs goes, we've broken free, something has changed — a tear in the fabric, some tiles rearranged.