My buddy Scott comes through for me again. This time with New Belgium’s Eric’s Ale from their Lips of Faith series. I’m a huge fan of sour beers, what had my interest in this beer is their La Folie. La Folie, for those of you who haven’t had it, it is an exceptional sour ale and this beer is brewed with peach juice. How many beers have you had made with peach juice? Probably not many, me neither.
New Belgium beers are hard to come by in New Jersey, so when my I received these two beers in a trade, I knew I had to review them together. The Ranger IPA is one of New Belgium’s latest non Lips of Faith beers. I’ve heard some good things about this beer and it seemed to be in fairly high demand when it was first released at the beginning of 2010. I’m not sure of the age on these beers since there were no legible bottled on dates, but they were sent to me with in the last month, so they should be fairly fresh.
Got beer mail? Well I do. I trade beer with people all over the U.S. because there are so many craft beers and not all of them are distributed in my lovely state of New Jersey! This New Belgium Frambozen was sent to me by my new Beer Buddy, Scott in Colorado. I’d heard some good things about this beer so I was excited to try it.
I got my liter starter going around 8am or so, got 10.5 lbs of grain ground with the world’s worst and slowest grain crusher. This thing is so bad if I go slow it makes powder it I go to fast it doesn’t crush, you have to find the optimum handle rotation to get the grain crushed right. After what seemed like the longest 40 minutes of crushing grain, the brewing was going to have to wait, family day. 
My Biggest issue with New Belgium is they don’t distribute to New Jersey. In order to get New Belgium beer (and others), I trade yeast samples with a beer buddy in California. In my last trade I got a New Belgium Mothership Wit along with some other beers that I’ll be reviewing later.
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