We need the Professor to chime in here.
Tried a Ballantine XXX clone a while back with no success. IIRC, East Coast Yeast has the original yeast.
You can be assured that I've been following this story
quite closely. It sounds as though they are really
trying to come up with a credible re-creatiion of this great old product and you can bet that I'll be anxiously seeking it out in the coming week when it starts to show up here locally. I do indeed have a vivid recollection of the original product (including tasting notes dating back to the mid/late 1970s). Recreating as a homebrew it has been my own quest since the 80s.
From reports I've read, it looks like the current recipe is a
lot more complicated than the original likely was, and that they are most probably foregoing the long aging that the original product had (and which is a pretty important aspect of the brew they are looking to resurrect, and of the IPA style in general) but it still has the
potential for being maybe a bit better than a lot of the so-called IPAs that seem to get rushed out these days.
I'll keep an open mind. Denny's characterization of it as being "guardedly excited" is pretty much how I feel, knowing that that given some of the shortcuts being used they certainly won't replicate the old classic exactly. But if they manage to come even
close, they may have a winner on their hands. Even if it's really good, they'll need to overcome the almost guaranteed dissing by the brainwashed übersnobs who will dismiss it out of hand (probably without even bothering to taste it) just because a big corporation is behind it (ignoring the reality that some small avalanche of new breweries are releasing their own share of some less than stellar product these days).
We'll see. I'll post my (unbiased) impressions as soon as I get to try a few bottles.
Meantime, , here's a link to a pretty good (and even encouraging) radio interview with the new product's brewmaster:
http://www.wilknewsradio.com/Friday-Beer-Buzz-Blog/6986026 I just noticed that there's a punctuation typo on the new product's label (there shouldn't be an apostrophe where it says 70 IBUs!).
I guess Pabst wasn't budgeted for a proofreader.