Professor Good Ales

This spring, my fiance and I took a trip to Asheville, North Carolina, a beer destination we’ve visited numerous times in the past. Asheville is a beautiful little hub for beer, filled with breweries both large and small, all striving to find a niche for themselves in both the local craft beer community and the greater national beer scene. It’s an excellent place to take stock of national trends, and see how they’re playing out in the microcosm of one intensely beer-focused city. It’s also an excellent place to hike and eat doughnuts, but that’s beside the point.

Sitting on the riverside patio of a large regional brewery in the area (okay, it was New Belgium), on a very lovely day, in the middle of a very lovely vacation, my fiance took a sip of her hazy IPA, and her face scrunched into a disapproving pucker. Bear in mind, this is a woman who loves craft beer, and whose favorite style throughout her life has often been India pale ale. Nor is she opposed to hazy, NE-IPA, either. She wasn’t reacting with dissatisfaction because of an inherent opinion she had about the style—she ordered that hazy IPA fully expecting to enjoy it, as we have many others. But what she said next perfectly crystalized one of the biggest issues in modern craft beer.

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“Nugget, Citra, Azacca, El Dorado, Chinook…”

“2-Row, Munich, C15, Golden Naked Oats…”

“5% ABV…”

“40 IBU…”

“Juicy…!”

Mundane details. Every beer’s got ’em. Many go on for pages, like the fastener list for a space shuttle. But only ONE word matters, in choosing a beer, and it’s none of those. Quantity, in beer ingredients, does NOT = Quality, in any sense.

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The Brew is Out There!

One problem with us sitting here and giving our brewing advice – you never get to taste our beer! While we can’t ship everyone a beer, you can finally hear Denny’s feedback about Drew’s canned IPAs. We’re tasting Drew’s 45th Birthday IPA and Cape Point New South African Hazy IPA.

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Over twenty years had passed since I stopped off briefly in Bamberg en route between Prague and Heidelberg with an old friend on a crazy road trip in my grandma’s rickety Renault 5. On that sunny afternoon in the early nineties, we snapped the requisite photos of the Altes Rathaus straddling the River Regnitz before heading off for a Bamberger specialty that a fellow traveler in Prague had told us was absolutely de rigeur: Rauchbier. I still remember the light breeze that cooled that midsummer’s day as we sat down to a meal of Weisswurst and a taste of this fabled beer. For the life of me, I can’t remember where we ate, but I do remember that first perception-altering smell and sip of Rauchbier: this was possible in a beer?

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In a few short day’s time we will joyously re-release one of our most sought after creations, The Original 006 Hazy Double IPA. This little beauty has gotten us some great press this last year, being named among both the top IPAs and beers period in the USA by Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine, Thillist, and Forbes to name a few. But, it will only be sold in-house through our Tasting Gallery. Why you may ask? Because the brewing industry is fucking crazy and it’s almost perfectly engineered to make earning a profit as elusive as a North Korean travel agent.

This beer has prompted lots of questions over the years. For example people ask us all the time, “Why don’t y’all make this beer year-round?” Now people will inevitably clamor, “Why are you assholes not sending this out to the market and keeping it only for yourselves! We want it in our stores! We want it in other states! Pitchforks and torches! Rabble Rabble!” The answers to both these questions might give you some visibility into how the brewing industry works, and especially the game-within-the-game – hop contracting.

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