via Sierra Nevada
When Terence Sullivan, the seasoned Product Manager and Brewery Ambassador for Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., talks about their famed Celebration Ale, he cuts to the chase: “It’s a really damn good beer,” reflecting the straightforward, no-nonsense ethos of a brewery that has not only pioneered, but also set the benchmark for the craft beer industry.
Terence started at Sierra Nevada in May 1994. He doesn’t have to mince words when it comes to Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale. He knows how excited beer geeks like myself get for Celebration Ale every year. According to Terence, that excitement starts at the brewery itself and seems to work its magic into the suds itself.
Just like yuletide celebrations themselves, Celebration Ale is contagious like that.
“My first year working here, I saw the excitement in my co-workers’ faces,” Terence recalls. “They were all looking forward to it. It was August and we started planning for Celebration…”
First brewed in 1981 by founder Ken Grossman, Celebration Ale, or “Cele” as the brewery team fondly refers to it, has become more than just a seasonal favorite—it’s a testament to the brewery’s commitment to consistency, mixed with just the right amount of seasonal surprise from the character of the fresh hops and dry-hopping process. “It’s incredibly consistent year-to-year,” Terence adds, “which I think adds a layer of excitement. People get a kick out of guessing: ‘Oh, I wonder what this year’s will taste like?'”
Sierra Nevada’s iconic holiday craft beer is a hops-packed seasonal staple, down to the cozy illustration of a snowy cabin in the mountains.
In keeping with holiday cheer, Terence helped me unwrap some of the Celebration Ale’s red-labeled mystique, straight from the horse’s mouth. Here are seven little-known nuggets about Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale, in the spirit of the season.
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Celebration Ale is rooted in home brewing tradition
Terence shares his fondness for Celebration Ale and its early roots at the founding of Sierra Nevada: “It’s one of my favorites, and you’ll see why. The history goes back to the very start, Ken’s home brewing days, looking to create something special for the holidays. That’s how Celebration Ale began in 1981.”
He details the careful selection that honors the brew’s legacy: “It’s all about the hop selection. We select for the year, focusing on getting the best cascades and centennials. My first year, I joined in on this tradition.”
Recounting a memorable hop sourcing trip, Terence recalls: “With Ken Grossman, Melanie Miller, Steve Dressler, our brewmaster, and Bart Whipple, we scrutinized the cascades. Ken decided, ‘You’re choosing this time,’ putting the decision on me.”
He expresses the anticipation that permeates the brewery: “That excitement among us, the build-up to hop selection, is something special. We have our team, our routine. And when the hops arrive, it’s like grandma greeting you; the back of the truck opens up and it’s bales of hops and the smell and the whole process of it. They’re in, and brewing starts straight away. Everyone knows, that’s when ‘Cele’ begins.”
Celebration Ale debuted before many modern craft beer styles were even developed
Think back to the beer industry in 1981, when Celebration Ale was first brewed. Craft beer, as a category, didn’t exist. It was just the big breweries mass producing cheap American lagers and pilsners.
Terence reflects on the trailblazing roots of Celebration Ale, noting its place in craft beer history: “It’s really just the hop character that really kind of drives a little bit of that, like, oh, and the maltiness. It wasn’t a West Coast IPA back then when Ken developed that recipe, there was no West Coast, there was no such thing as a West Coast IPA.” He details the beer’s influence on the American IPA category, “It was just English style and pretty much him and Anchor Steam with Liberty Ale and a few others really invented the American IPA category.”
The beer is a toast to the hops harvest
“We use 100% whole cone hops,” Terence explains. “Ken likes to say it’s like fresh spices like going out and you’re cooking and you’re going to, you got your spices right off the plant.”
TerenceTerence speaks to the heart of Celebration Ale, underscoring its fundamental purpose: “I mean Celebration Ale is obviously a celebration, and it comes out and it’s celebrating literally that year’s harvest of fresh hops.” He reflects on the beer’s identity and public perception, “As the beer evolved, like us old timers, we still call it Celebration Ale. But it’s Celebration Fresh Hop IPA.”
Terence adds a note on the exclusivity of certain hops, “But every once in a while we’ll go, ‘oh man, these would be good. How much can we get?’ And we’re gonna put that 100% in Celebration Ale.” He confirms the unique character of each batch, “But just to answer your question, no, really it really, it does have seasonal variation.”
Celebration Ale is one of the first American Style IPAs, using a labor-intensive dry-hopping process
Terence spills more about the process, highlighting the brewery’s traditional yet innovative technique used to infuse the beer with its distinctive hop character: “We do the dry-hopping in a unitank… We got a stainless steel chain and we put the bags on the chain and we winch it up and we seal the tank.”
This craft, carried out with pillowcase-sized bags filled with kiln-dried fresh hops, honors the authenticity of the brewing process while ensuring the complex flavor profile that fans expect. The Sierra Nevada refers to this process as “the old fashion way,” noting that it’s one of the most labor-intensive beers they made.
The commitment to this method, where bags are manually filled, loaded, and removed, reflects the brewery’s dedication to the art of beer making.
Celebration Ale helped Sierra Nevada doubling down on flavor and invent a new year-round beer
Celebration Ale was born out of a double down on a style that Sierra Nevada was already popularizing. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, the company’s green label flagship made exclusively with Cascade hops, paved the way for more innovation in the IPA category.
Terence recounts how Sierra Nevada’s quest to satisfy the growing demand for Celebration Ale inadvertently led to the creation of a year-round favorite: Torpedo Extra IPA, an American IPA that uses the brewery’s “Hop Torpedo” approach, which helped revolutionize dry hopping beer.
“Torpedo was actually invented mainly because it’s such a great beer, but it was also part of our efforts to make more Celebration Ale.” He describes the early challenges: “We just had the brewery in Chico with these dish bottom tanks… that was how much we could produce.” The solution came through innovation: “We couldn’t produce enough Celebration Ale for national distribution… we invented the Torpedo. We’re like, ‘What if we make this external vessel?’ So, the first year we did Torpedos, it was Celebration Ale… It was damn good beer. It got such a loving response from consumers that we thought, oh we can actually now make another beer called Torpedo and it’s 100% using the Torpedos. So that’s actually how that beer evolved.”
via Sierra Nevada
Celebration Ale is full of subtle seasonal nuances
Terence shares his insights on the distinctive character of Celebration Ale:
“Oh yeah, absolutely. Definitely one of the ones that I’m a huge fan of Centennial hops and also too it’s cascading centennials. There’s some chinooks in there, but mainly for bitter but the aroma side of it, the Cascades and the Centennials, it’s obvious that. I mean to me that there’s little nuances that are a little bit different.”
He continues to describe the sensory experience, “Centennial Hops tend to have for me at least, I get a very rich dranial characteristic, which is Rose and I love it. It just reminds me of my youth. My mom always had these rose gardens around the house, and we had to go pick roses as kids to bring them in. And I stopped and smelled them too [laughter] And so when centennials are popping they have that big rose character like this year it’s a little semi-muted a little bit from other years. But sometimes if it’s overwhelming like a couple, I wanna say like two years ago or three years ago, the centennials were through the roof.”
Terence explains the consistency in brewing, “We still use the same volumes. We don’t adjust, we don’t like on the fly, like, oh wow, the rose character’s pretty high on this. We just do it. It’s the recipe stays the same. The caramel malt adds that rich kind of multi toasty caramel toffee type characteristic to the beer. I think it rounds out. It really, this little residual sweetness kind of mellows the bitterness out a little bit on it or just makes it palatable and really nice and in some ways almost easy drinking. It’s at least it’s easy drinking for me because I love it so much.”
It’s not a Christmas beer
Sierra Nevada’s Celebration Ale may come wrapped in holiday cheer with festive winter packaging, but contrary to popular belief, it’s not spiced with the flavors of Christmas. No hints of clove, ginger, nutmeg, anise, cardamom, vanilla, or cinnamon are added. Terence clarifies, “A lot of people didn’t know it was an IPA, many thought it was a Christmas beer, and there are still rumors about it containing spices. It’s all just the character of the hops.”
Celebration Ale’s demand has skyrocketed over the years
Terence reflects on the growth of Sierra Nevada and the evolving process of selecting hops for Celebration Ale: “When I started working here, we had just surpassed 100,000 barrels. And of course, we do a million barrels now and it’s spread out over many different beers.” He delves into the intricacies of hop selection, “But we started to learn like, oh, you can’t just pick the best cascades we find because there might only be like 25 bales or 30 bales. And so we try to select as we’re going to different growers and different brokers we’re looking for an even keel flavor profile.”
A seasonal beer with a cult-like following
There’s little doubt Celebration Ale is a seasonal beer, especially if you look at how many people look forward to the release every year in online beer communities like Reddit. Depending on where you are, that demand continues to surge well past the holidays.
“Because the one downfall of celebration that we found over the years was that it’s really tied to the season. It’s Thanksgiving, it’s Christmas. After the new year, people were like, ah, screw it.” Yet, he notes the robust regional enthusiasm for the brew: “But in northern California, we had a pretty great following. Any excess, like all the ski resorts up in Tahoe, would want Celebration Ale, and they’d pour it all the way through January.”