The History of Burning Bird Pale Ale

 

The Sonoran Brewing Company is now known for brewing it's signature beers, like our Flag Ship Burning Bird^TM Pale Ale. In 1996, we opened with 2 products, Desert Amber and Westside Wiesen. We did not add  a Pale Ale to our lineup for some time. The first Pale Ale we released was part of our Top Down ^TM series. Top Down Gold^TM Pale Ale, like all the products in the Top Down ^TM series, featured a sleek classic convertible car with a beautiful Sonoran Desert background. Top Down Gold^TM we introduced well before the trend of Pale Ale's had started. Crisp golden color, it focused on it hops characteristic but was very modest, when compared to most of the Pale Ale's we know today.

The Top Down ^TM series was short lived and Top Down Gold^TM was replaced by Phoenix Pale Ale, which was the first time we connected the "Phoenix" to our Ale. The Sonoran Brewing Company was founded in the city of Phoenix Arizona, which got it's name from the Legend of a mythical bird called a Phoenix. We wanted our Pale Ale to have a local connection. However, the name Phoenix was not as catchy as we had hoped. Wanting to keep the local association without using the name Phoenix, we played on the the Legend of the bird itself.

The Myth of the Phoenix:*

"The phoenix bird symbolizes immortality, resurrection and life after death. In ancient Greek and Egyptian mythology, it is associated with the sun god. According to the Greeks, the bird lives in Arabia, near a cool well. Every morning at dawn, the sun god would stop his chariot to listen to the bird sing a beautiful song while it bathed in the well. Only one phoenix exists at a time. When the bird felt its death was near, every 500 to 1,461 years, it would build a nest of aromatic wood and set it on fire. The bird then was consumed by the flames. A new phoenix sprang forth from the pyre. It embalmed the ashes of its predecessor in an egg of myrrh and flew with it to Heliopolis, "city of the sun," where the egg was deposited on the altar of the sun god. In Egypt, it was usually depicted as a heron, but in the classic literature as a peacock or an eagle."*

Like the phoenix of old, Burning Bird^TM Pale Ale has been reborn from the time when fabulous hoppy brews were more than mere myths. The Phoenix rising up form the flames of it past lives holding hops branches symbolizing its rebirth as a hoppy world-class American Pale Ale. Even though it only has 33 I.B.U.'s, this beer is all about the fresh hops aroma. Burning Bird^TM as the very first Sonoran brew to utilize a "Hop-Back". A hop-back is a specially designed tank that allows wart to flow through fresh flower hops, collecting all the great aromas as it passes through, without allowing the hop flowers themselves to pass through. This is the secret to Burning Bird's signature hop profile.

 

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