From the Desk of TC

Jan 28, 2025

Beer For Grown Ups: IPAs That Reflect Who We Are

Crafting Balance, Flavor, and Timeless Simplicity

That line came out of the frustration of trying to quickly make someone understand what exactly it is we do here.

Our Founding Ideal: Less is More

We’ve kept our founding ideal of less is more as a constant through line in all we do. Excluding a brief period where we “brewed” a particular style that might or might not have been capable of exploding in a warm minivan, we’ve been quietly brewing beer for grown-ups. To that end, we’ve long favored things like the lower ABV end of the style guidelines, simple and uncluttered grists, a common house ale yeast with a constant fermentation profile, styles that have stood the test of time etc. We’d like to think that while our beer doesn’t require maturity, it should display some of its own.

Point being, we make beer for grown-ups.. speaking of which: First Snow.  This beer has become, like it has for the originator, a cold weather season symbol. We make no attempt to hide, hell we said it, that we took more than just inspiration from the real thing to brew ours. This year, it feels as balanced and dialed in as ever, and it’s been a reliable, red-shouldered beer to lean on this season.

Our Approach to Hoppy Beers

To look at the choices we make about our hoppy beers is to understand us. For sure, we cover the spectrum by way of style choices – west coast, haze, DIPA, pale ale etc. It runs deeper and even more intentional than that. Within our style choices, we lean into drinkability and balance more than most other attributes. With our hazy beers, we don’t look to create only juice, we embrace the herbal dank diesel pine with our whole being. Same goes for our west coast inspired beers. Rather than recreate the IBU arms race of the past, we look for a clean fermentation, and a full expression of clean hop character with fair to mid-range cleansing bitterness. Regardless of us covering the style bases, all are approached from a common and intentional perspective.

In the end, especially with our hop forward beers, they should just sit right. Killer aroma, but not over the top hop from the bag. Saturated, and integrated hop and yeast influence, but also unafraid of an undercurrent of coniferous character. As ever, our focus is on the complex, by way of remaining uncomplicated… we hope anyway.