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There are a lot of collaboration beers out there. I write about many, usually where the beer is not what you expect but in this case it is the partners that you may not have seen coming.
Scotland and Belgium collide with this new beer from La Trappe and BrewDog. May not be one that we see stateside but be on the look out.
AleSmith has a new IPA collaborator, Alvarado Street Brewery, Oso Under a West coast IPA with hops from down “under” Australia and New Zealand hops (Galaxy, Vic Secret & Nelson).
Once of my pet peeves are label designs that use unreadable fonts but I like this beer name, How’s Your Day. The collaboration between Modern Times and Highland Park Brewery is another West Coast-style IPA, this one “loaded with Strata & Mosaic for a wildly successful intermingling of passion fruit, mango, citrus, and piney notes.”
Last time that Wayfinder dropped some of their fine beer in L.A., I had their Relapse Cold IPA. And now I can explain what that means to them, it is a hybrid India Pale Lager / Malt Liquor. And now they have teamed with the fan favorite Great Notion on a variant of that variant, named Cold Kush. A hazy with Citra and Strata hops primarily with Galaxy and Cashmere backing up. This beer also has rice and flaked wheat too. And since L.A. also gets Great Notion on occasion, maybe this beer will show up on shelves.
Whenever beer talk turns to Denver, one of the first breweries you hear about is Bierstadt Lagerhaus. Now you can taste why as they have collaborated with our own Enegren Brewing.
If that pilsner tastes half as good as it looks in that glass, then it will be a treat. Enegren is shipping in California too.
Put together two sour blenders with great pedigree and you just might come up with something like Big Mood, a combo of BarrelWorks and Sante Adairus. Then French Oak and apricots to go along with the wine grapes.
This label design goes a little Oregon settler but any time a coffee IPA hits town, I will mosey to a bar stool to try it. Especially since Modern Times does have a bit of bean roasting experience. And Stone has brewed a few hoppy beers. The only issue that exists is that this sub-style can drift too far to coffee or too far away when a happy medium needs to be found.
Yeah, Guild beers bring together a lot of breweries but I saw something more eclectic in this list for the 2020 Zwickelmania collaboration….
Allegory Brewing • Ambacht Brewing • Baerlic • Bend Brewing Company • Bent Shovel Brewing • Binary Brewing • Boneyard Beer • Breakside Brewery • Buoy Beer Company • Coin Toss Brewing • Deschutes Brewery • Ecliptic Brewing • Gigantic • Golden Valley Brewery • GoodLife Brewing Co. • Grixsen Brewing Co. • Heater Allen Brewing • Hopworks Urban Brewery • Laurelwood Brewing Co. • Leikam Brewing • Little Beast Brewing • Lucky Labrador • Ninkasi Brewing Company • Running Dogs Brewery • Sasquatch Brewery • Stickmen Brewing Company • StormBreaker Brewing • Vanguard Brewing Company • Von Ebert Brewing • Wild Ride Brewing
There are (3) breweries based in my college town of McMinnville on this list. You have old school like Lucky Lab and Ninkasi. You have super new like Leikam, Binary and Grixsen. Keep in mind, Oregon has a lot of breweries and to get this type of size and style and geographic diversity is excellent. I will be looking for this beer when I am in Oregon this month.
The clock has struck 8 and Sierra Nevada and Russian River are releasing the 2020 version of Brux, a Wild Domesticated Ale. This is a treat to see this get the yearly release special treatment. If you have not had this before, this will be a fun taste experience.
For those who have not had Utopia from Sam Adams, well this is new collaboration with business partner, Dogfish Head might be a close approximation for you to try. Not that World Wide Stout is something to sneeze at.