Heaven is real - and it is north of Fortine

This week for Fresh Pours we made the pilgrimage down to H.A. Brewing outside of Eureka, a journey that everyone in the Valley who claims to care about good beer absolutely needs to make. Hang a right onto Grave Creek Road just north of the town of Fortine, and go 2.5 miles straight into the Whitefish Range. The brewery and taproom is housed in an outbuilding down a gravel driveway on a working farm.

This establishment embodies everything people crave in Montana brewing. One would be hard-pressed to find a more scenic setting – it even lacks cell phone service. Best of all, the quality of the beer is extraordinarily high. The brewers manage to use a blend of local ingredients like chokecherries and pie cherries in their beers while also maintaining an exceptionally high level of technical quality. Montana beer can be distinctive without sacrificing a respect for the centuries-old traditions that brought us the wonderful beverage to begin with.

Chokecherry Saison:

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A saison is a pale ale with spicy characteristics imparted from the specific type of yeast required to brew it and often features flavors that other varieties of beer are less hospitable to. In this case, the maestros at H.A. used the ultra-strong flavor of chokecherries to make this beer about as distinctive as they come. The result is nearly golden in color, a bit sour and makes you rethink just how good chokecherries taste.

Black Irish:

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Some beers force you to scrutinize the words you want to use to describe them, not dissimilar to discussing the great American novel to someone you want to impress or talking about a person you know personally and really respect. When you talk about Lebron James, any number of sweeping adjectives will do the trick. When you talk about your best friend, you tend to be a lot more thoughtful, using words that really mean things and provoke thought in others. We’re still looking for the beer that is more like Lebron James, which would be awesome, but this beer is more like your best friend, which is even cooler. What is the difference between toasted and roasted? When does it become reasonable to describe something as bitter, and what do you call the spot just before that on the spectrum? This beer is dark and only slightly rich, with bitter chocolate notes and great body.

Big Creek Porter:

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Chocolate porters are great and coffee porters are great, and pretty much everyone that agrees with those first two declarations will join me in the belief that the best porters contain strong notes of each. The Big Creek Porter fits that bill, and manages to pull off being creamy and lightly sweet while still maintaining a relatively strong six percent alcohol by volume. It’ll also make you question what the difference is between a porter and a stout, and since you don’t have any cell phone service out there you’ll best answer that question by ordering the stout next. It is also excellent.