The first Heady cans turned out to be especially vital: just two days after they began canning, the couple lost their original location to a devastating flood. Better still, the cans rolling off that ACS sported a novel request for consumers to drink the beer from the can. It still gives us goosebumps to talk about it. Aluminum cans, to be exact, with the amalgamation done on a Cask Automatic Canning System in the Kimmich’s first production/packaging brewery. How’s that for iconic?Įight years after opening, the brewery decided to conduct more of its namesake wizardry by pairing its juicy, draft-only Heady Topper with metal. Founded in 2003 by John and Jen Kimmich, the 60-seat Waterbury, Vt., brewpub lived up to its name by combining water, malt, hops and yeast into a new form of liquid magic: the New England-style hazy IPA. Somewhere along the line that more-is-better just went off that track, and it started to create a beverage that I would have a hard time calling an IPA at times.The Alchemist. There’s a reason people are drawn to that balance of bitterness and sweetness and aroma and all of that. Then it’s just like, I don’t know, candy-it’s not something I’m looking to. So not only are these beers finishing-in my opinion-outrageously sweet in terms of gravity, but add on top of that the extreme dry-hopping that emphasizes all those things. There’s a change in the aroma, that overripe tropical fruit, that squishy brown mango. “So often, when I’m trying these beers that are super-dry-hopped, and everybody talks about biotransformation, and absolutely, there’s a lot of science to that stuff, but that change in the aroma that is something that I personally associate with sweet, chalky, baby-aspirin aroma. Over the years I’ve taken it up to multiple pounds, less pounds, and I’ve found the sweet spot for me.” Like opening a jar of perfectly cured, dank, sticky nugs and that wall of aroma hits you-that’s it. Do I want to release that to the world? Probably not, but I will talk about it in the sense that what I am looking for in an aroma in my IPAs and what I love the best is that fresh, out-of-the-bag aroma, that’s what I want in my IPAs. “I have very definite ideas about what level of dry-hopping is beautiful. It makes me laugh because-you gotta be kidding me-who is doing their accounting?” It makes me sad because those beautiful little hops are just not being respected. It makes me mad because it’s a total waste of resources. It’s preposterous and it’s a complete waste of hops. When I see breweries touting things like ‘nine pounds per barrel!’ it makes me a little angry, it makes me a little sad, and it makes me laugh sometimes. “I’ve put countless hours of thought into pretty much any aspect of hopping a beer you can imagine. It’s the nature of the business that more is better, more is better. “A hazy IPA has become synonymous with soft, extravagantly soft, beers that are way beyond hazy into the realm of murky and muddy. For me, what I love in an IPA has become the middle of what people call hazy IPA and West Coast IPA.” It quickly dawned on me that that has just moved way beyond our beers and our flavor profiles. If you put in three, I’m going to put in five.’ You saw a really rapid evolution in what hazy IPA even was. You quickly saw the acceptance of haze in an IPA, and like most things in craft beer, it’s like, ‘if you put in two, I’m going to put in three. “To see how that beer and the IPAs that I brew have influenced and redirected the style of IPA-it’s a crazy thing to think about. Upon first brewing Heady Topper, it was a very, very different beer in that first year or two than people know today.” Through those years, of course, you’re talking to other brewers. So over those years of experimentation in that basement, that’s where I really developed my style and how I wanted to brew those beers. You could do anything you wanted to do simply by manipulating malt bills and water treatments. You could brew Heady Topper as a West Coast. Through those years at the pub I made so many different recipes, so many different styles. “When we got to open the Alchemist pub, that’s where I really got to have a free hand at whatever the hell I wanted to do. Some of what I don’t like about the style is what I changed through other processes and created my own mishmash.” What I loved about those West Coast IPAs was that firm bitterness and aromatic presentation of the hops. When we would travel to California and Oregon and Washington, we would try really great stuff. “Early on in my brewing career, those West Coast IPAs were outstanding.
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