Sunday Night Suds - Tog Brewery's HeChalutz Pale Ale

This week's Sunday Night Suds looks at Tog Brewery's HeChalutz Pale Ale.

As regular readers of this blog are aware, the KB family spent some time in Israel in late January visiting our daughter Yael who is studying there for the year. One of our family's favorite places to visit in Jerusalem is the Shuk Machane Yehuda. When I make that stop I usually visit a couple of stores in the Shuk and/or Agrippas Street where you can mix sixers (for 69 NIS) or four packs (for 45-49 NIS). It gives me an opportunity to sample the exploding craft brewery revolution in Israel where it seems that every town has at least two or three craft breweries.

The subject of this week's SNS is the Tog Brewery's HeChalutz Pale Ale. Tog is based in Be'erSheva and they brew their beer at the Beer Bazaar Brewery in Kiryat Gat. The brewery is actually the resul of the merger of two breweries – Gilad Ne-Eman's HeChalutz and Tomer Ronen's HaDag HaLavan.

I picked this beer up at the Beer Bazaar in Machane Yehuda and successfully transported it back to the US where it sat in my refrigerator until I shared it with our Shabbos company this week. When I poured it at the Shabbos table the lizard on the bottle was the subject of much curiosity. An article on the wonderful Israeli Craft Beer site (http://israelbrewsandviews.blogspot.com/2017/12/four-breweries-and-their-new-brews.html) has a quote from Ne-Eman that their mascot is "a blue desert lizard" which is on every bottle.

One of those partaking remarked that although the bottle stated that it was a Pale Ale, the beer was not "pale." I explained to him that the term "pale" does not reflect a lack of color (I think he may have been expecting a macro-lager pale gold colored beer). Surprisingly, he was able to detect the citrus, but it was rather prominent.

The beer is 5.5% abv and is certified kosher by R' Shlomo Ben Chamu of Kiryat Gat.

As always, please remember to drink responsibly and to never waste good beer unless there is no designated driver.

If you've tried this beer or any others which have been reviewed on the kosher beers site, please feel free to post your comments (anonymous comments are acceptable).

If you have seen this post being carried on another site, please feel free to click www.kosherbeers.blogspot.com to find other articles on the kosherbeers blogsite. Hey its free and you can push my counter numbers up!