Last Christmas I brought a bottle of beer to a gathering that I consider to be undeniably delicious, if not exactly revolutionary in the beer world. Yet when party guests tried Other Half’s Veldrijden Love—a chardonnay barrel-aged saison—their eyes lit up. Effervescent, winey, slightly funky and complex—most people in the room hadn’t realized beer could taste like this. But most people in the room hadn’t ever tasted barrel-aged beer before.

Before stainless steel tanks and kegs were invented, storing beer in barrels was simply a necessity. The crucial difference is that these (mostly) oak barrels were lined—often with pitch, a type of tar—so as not to impart any other flavors to the beer. Germans, Czechs, English and even Americans used this storage method well into the 20th century to little fanfare.

It wasn’t until 1992, when Greg Hall of Goose Island Beer Co. put one of his stouts into an emptied Jim Beam barrel that a new generation of barrel-aging was born. But while his Bourbon County Brand Stout may have invented a new genre of beer so complex and boozy that Hall would often claim, “One sip has more flavor than your average case of beer,” it didn’t immediately start any trends. The 14-percent ABV monster existed as a tap-only special occasion beer at Goose Island’s Chicago brewpub until 2005, and even five years ago the pricey bottles would gather dust at my local Whole Foods. Now, rarity-craving beer geeks—whose hearts flutter at the words “barrel-aged” on a label—line up yearly to land some of the celebrated stout and its even more limited variants.

Other breweries began following Goose Island’s lead by 2005, typically aging rich imperial stouts, whose hefty malt backbone is able to withstand the potency of the bourbon wood infusion. The style’s quintessential cocoa and coffee notes also play well with a barrel’s vanilla, caramel and oak compounds. Some early successes were Founders KBS (Kentucky Breakfast Stout), first bottled in 2003; The Lost Abbey’s Angel’s Share, launched in 2006; and The Bruery’s decadent Black Tuesday, which exploded onto the scene in 2009.

For nearly a decade, the hottest trend in beer making flew below the radar. “Bourbon barrel aged beer” doesn’t even appear on Google Trends until 2013; two years later, just about every brewery on earth is bourbon barrel-aging something or other.

Just as quickly, bourbon barrel-aged beer has become passé in the eyes of beer geeks, presenting a certain sameness of flavor across the board. Sure they’re all still “good,” but after the pinnacle of perfection that is, say, a Bourbon County Brand Stout (or a KBS or a Black Tuesday or a Firestone Walker Parabola), where is there left for breweries to go?

The answer is, obviously, other barrels.

The Third Wave of Barrel-Aging

I like to think we’re now entering what I’ll call the Third Wave of barrel-aging. If bourbon barrels were the Second Wave, the First Wave was traditional Belgian lambics and gueuzes from breweries like Cantillon, Drie Fonteinen and Oud Beersel. These brewers have been aging their spontaneously fermented beers in unlined wooden barrels and giant vats (“foeders”) since about the mid-1800s. Unlined barrels allow oxygen to permeate the vessel and microbes to breed inside, which in turn produces sour, tart brews. In turn, a current class of American “wild” ale makers like The Lost Abbey, Russian River, Allagash, Jolly Pumpkin, Cascade, Side Project and de Garde, are taking them as inspiration, using not just oak but wine barrels to create their sour ales.

Third Wave barrel-aging is trying to figure out what else might be possible. The problem is that aside from bourbon and wine, so few other barrels seem to work well. Molly Browning, the barrel program manager at Brooklyn Brewery, oversees a 2,000-square foot warehouse filled with some 750 barrels and has been integral in helping the brewery produce some recent barrel-aged classics like Hand & Seal (a bourbon-barreled barleywine) and K is for Kriek (a Belgian-style ale aged in bourbon barrels with cherries).

“Some barrels—for example, tequila barrels—are certainly trickier than others,” says Browning. “Generally, though, I think all barrels can make good barrel-aged beer, but you need to be mindful of the beer you are putting in there.”

Sweeter spirit barrels seem to produce the most enjoyable end products. Founders had one of their biggest hits ever when they aged an imperial stout in bourbon barrels that had previously also held maple syrup to produce CBS (Canadian Breakfast Stout), while the recent emergence of rum barrel-aged beers (Avery Rumpkin, Prairie Artisan Ales Pirate Bomb!, Hardywood Park’s Rum Barrel Gingerbread Stout) has been met with success as well.

If smooth and sweet barrels make the most sense for barrel-aging, I’ve conversely found barrels that once housed really intense spirits—like, say, single-malt scotch—don’t work quite as well. While the harsh, smoky flavors of scotch may taste great on their own, they don’t seem to mesh well with beer. It was a surprise, then, when Browning and Brooklyn Brewery found some success last year with another smoky spirit’s barrels. The brewery aged their Local 1 Belgian golden ale in a Del Maguey mezcal barrel for six months, creating San Luis Del Rio, a smoky yet fruity offering unlike any beer ever produced. Unfortunately, brewmaster Garrett Oliver was only able to land a single mezcal barrel, so the beer never saw distribution and exists only as a “Ghost Bottle” served at special tasting events.

That’s another reason the Third Wave of barrel-aging is taking so long to take off. As tough as it’s become to get bourbon barrels, getting “other” barrels may be even more difficult. What many people don’t realize is that most spirit barrels actually start as bourbon barrels. By law, bourbon makers are only allowed to use their barrels once, so afterward they are sent to scotch, rum, tequila or, yes, mezcal distilleries. That aforementioned Del Maguey mezcal barrel actually started its life as a Buffalo Trace bourbon barrel, and the only reason Brooklyn Brewery was able to secure it was because Oliver has a friendly relationship with Del Maguey founder Ron Cooper.

For younger breweries without the right connections, getting the obscure barrels they want has proven to be a tricky—and expensive—endeavor. Firestone Walker brewmaster Matt Brynildson summed it up nicely: “Dragging barrels across the border, speaking to guys on the phone in another language, not being able to use barrel brokers like you can use to acquire bourbon barrels—it’s difficult.”

Brynildson’s Paso Robles, California, brewery has managed to work around these challenges to become one of the most innovative brewers in barrel-aging. He’s not only found major success in bourbon barrels, but has recently completed a new facility exclusively for crafting wine barrel-aged “feral” beers (what they call their wild ales) and is exploring everything from mezcal barrels sourced from Fidencio to vanilla-laden amburana wood barrels previously used to age cachaça.

What’s Next?

“A great barrel-aged beer is not a gilded lily,” said Garrett Oliver. “There should be something about the barrel character that actually completes the beer.”

In other words, there’s nothing wrong with wild attempts to create something unique—as Brent Cordle, the barrel aging manager at Odell Brewing Co., told me, “Sometimes you have to roll the dice and trust your gut”—but that doesn’t mean everything odd is praiseworthy.

If the next great barrel for aging beer is to be discovered, it will probably happen at FoBAB, or the Festival of Barrel Aged Beers. Inspired by that first Goose Island stout, the Chicago festival is set to enter its 12th year with this November’s two-day event. There, many of America’s top barrel-aging breweries will unveil their latest attempts at defining the state-of-the-art.

In recent years, the festival has presented beers aged in barrels that have held gin (Off Color’s Papillon), absinthe (Spiteful Brewing’s Klutzy Buffoon), aquavit (Breakside Brewery’s Aquavit IPA), mead (Northdown’s Majestic Emu) and even Tabasco (Ten Ninety Brewing’s Tabasco Imperial Porter). Last year even saw an imperial stout aged in barrels that Utah’s High West distillery had once used to age bottled Boulevardier cocktails (Temperance Beer Might Meets Right).

Most of these are so small batch most will never get the chance to try them. However, in the unyielding search for novelty, the chance to try something truly unique is of paramount importance—even if many of these beers are surely nothing more than disappointing curios. Because this instinct is common to the beer geek world, I’ve begun to wonder if this barrel-aging arms race has caused modern American brewers to be more interested in making an “interesting” barrel-aged beer than simply a good one.

What surpasses fad to become future will be the beers from brewers who choose barrels based on their ability to truly improve a beer, rather than merely differentiate it. Or to put it another way: those who manage to find purpose within seemingly endless possibility. As Brynildson joked, “One of the problems in barrel-aging is focusing in on what to actually focus on.”

In 2013, Slate published a story by Adrienne So entitled, “Against Hoppy Beer.” Like many of the other reductive craft beer stories that have appeared in the national media over the years, beer nerds were poised to dismiss it. But then a funny thing happened: The article went viral.

Sure, the piece hinged on dubious claims like, “We’re so addicted to hops that we don’t even notice them anymore” and “beers overloaded with hops are a pointless gimmick,” as well as a clear lack of understanding brewing techniques. “Hops are a quick way for beginning brewers to disguise flaws in their beer, by using the hops’ strong flavor to overcome any possible off tastes,” the piece protests. “Do you regret throwing those juniper twigs in the boil? Did you forget to sterilize a piece of equipment and are now fretting about bacteria? Quick! Hops to the rescue!”

Still, it struck a nerve. A sampling from the comments section revealed an overwhelming majority in agreement with her premise: “I’m just glad this stupid hop fad is finally fading. Let’s get back to normal beer, shall we?,” read one. “Hops have become to beer what peppers have to spicy food. An arms race to the most extreme point where it’s about being able to survive the product, not enjoy it,” wrote another. And finally, an impossible request: “Give me a beer without a drop of hops in it!”

The article lived on my social media feeds for days, and at the time of this writing, it’s been shared on Facebook some 324,000 times. After it ran, I started paying closer attention to how people ordered beer and I was shocked by how many times I heard someone say, “I don’t like ‘hoppy’ beer,” as a means to explain their taste preferences. What’s more, these were often well-informed diners and drinkers who knew about wine, cocktails and craft beer. But over and over again there was one thing many of them absolutely refused to drink: India Pale Ale.

In simple terms, “IPA” has come to mean a generously hopped pale ale that demands to be drunk fresh. But even though hops are by definition a bittering agent to keep beer from being too cloying, it doesn’t necessarily mean all hoppy beers taste bitter. But I suspect that it’s bitter beer that So was actually railing against.

According to current Stone brewmaster Mitch Steele, “There was a period where putting 300 IBUs into a beer was the thing. Now, brewers are exploring more nuanced ways to use hops.” With the ever-expanding number of hops varieties and, thus, expressions of IPA on the market, the once-ubiquitous “MOAR BITTER!!!” battle cry of the IPA has been a thing of the past for at least the last half-decade.

Truth is, her stance would’ve been more defensible back in the aughts when there was indeed an arms race to brew the bitterest of “hop bombs.” This era kicked off in earnest in the summer of 2002, when California’s Stone Brewing Co. bottled their first double IPA. That beer, Ruination, was so loaded with certain strains of hops that its bitterness was literally considered “ruinous” to a drinker’s palate. The coming years would bring more painfully bitter beers, many with provocative names like Palate Wrecker and Tongue Buckler. By 2010 we’d reached peak bitter with Mikkeller 1000 IBU, supposedly the bitterest IPA ever produced. (IBU stands for International Bitterness Units, a mostly theoretical metric. Typical IPAs are said to reside around 75-100 IBUs.)

According to current Stone brewmaster Mitch Steele, “There was a period where putting 300 IBUs into a beer was the thing. Now, brewers are exploring more nuanced ways to use hops.” With the ever-expanding number of hops varieties and, thus, expressions of IPA on the market, the once-ubiquitous “MOAR BITTER!!!” battle cry of the IPA has been a thing of the past for at least the last half-decade.

Saying you don’t like “hoppy” beer nowadays is like saying you don’t like “grape-y” wine. Hops is one of four integral ingredients in beer, and surely the most prominent one in most modern American craft beers. But they don’t just taste like one thing. Today, Hopunion, one of the world’s largest suppliers of commercial hops, offers over 120 different varieties. Some are exclusively used for bittering purposes, but the majority are used to add unique flavors and aromas. These can run the gamut from tropical and citrusy to herbal to earthy, with countless flavors in between.

Still, the fallout from the “bitter is better” era is still pervasive in the minds of most drinkers. In fact, just last week I was drinking at Hell’s Kitchen’s Pony Bar with a fellow writer friend who enjoys everything from sour Belgian lambics to sherry, but claimed to not like IPAs. I was certain that, for someone who cared so much about flavor, there was no way this was actually true.

I asked her if she liked freshly-squeezed orange juice. (Of course.) I encouraged her to order Threes Brewing’s Unreliable Narrator. Threes popped up in my Brooklyn neighborhood in late 2014 and I’d recently tried the IPA at their Gowanus brewpub. I was floored by how crushable it was, packed with pure aromas and flavors of oranges, mangos and peaches. She took a hesitant sip, expecting a bitter blast—the sort that fueled an entire Keystone Light ad campaign in the mid-1990s. Instead, a smile came across her face. She liked it.

After finishing that beer, we played another game. I asked if she liked the smell of just-picked flowers and herbs. Again, she said yes. Feeling more confident, I ordered her a glass of Alpine Duet. Alpine Beer Company is, for my money, the West Coast’s finest IPA-producing brewery. Duet is one of their flagship IPAs, made with Amarillo and Simcoe hops, which both lend a distinct florality to the aroma and flavor of Duet. The beer is bitter, but unlike those aforementioned beers with cheeky names, not bracingly so. She took a more aggressive sip this time, but now seemed confused.

“Maybe I…don’t hate IPAs?”

I’m now of the belief that most IPA haters don’t truly hate the IPAs of today. Back in the 1990s literally any craft beer would have seemed bitter to a Keystone Light drinker (and before you ask, yes, even light, factory lagers have some hops in them) and it’s true that into the aughts there weren’t exactly a diverse range of hoppy beers. But now great IPAs encompass a wide berth of flavors and aromas—even weights and textures.

If, for example, you’re the more traditional aughties-bred IPA drinker, there are Chinook or Columbus hops. Both are notable for that dank, resin-y, marijuana-like aroma and flavor prevalent in such IPAs as Lawson’s Finest Chinooker’d and Hill Farmstead Harlan. Along with Cascade and Centennial, these are some of America’s oldest and most common hop varieties. Thus, these are likely the hops most neophytes encountered when they swore off to anything “hoppy” forever.

On the other end of the spectrum, however, are beers like the Unreliable Narrator, which uses Citra, Centennial and Chinook to get that great fruit juice taste. Also within in this lighter, citrusy profile is the more tropical Galaxy and Zythos hops and the lemony Sorachi Ace. And between these more nuanced hop varieties and the famous “C”-hops (Chinook, Columbus, Cascade and Centennial), there is everything from the flowery Crystal to the earthy Willamette to the herbal Zeus.

To add to the ever-expanding spectrum of flavor expressions that now fall under the umbrella of “IPA,” there are also a number of “microstyles” popping up, too. The Session IPA is perhaps the hottest style of the moment, which is often just as fragrant as your full-blown IPA, but is lower in ABV, lighter in body and often devoid of a sharp bitterness. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are now white IPAs, wheat IPAs, rye IPAs, red IPAs, sour IPAs, coffee IPAs (really) and India Pale Lagers, plus a slew of more oddball IPA spinoffs that beer writer Brian Yaeger categorized as “India Silly Ales.”

As if we need more proof that IPAs aren’t what they used to be, last month Stone Brewing announced that Ruination—that beer once so bitter it “ruined” palates—was being taken off the market. Now too bitter and one-note when placed in context of the diverse (and generally more refined) IPAs of today, consumers had slowly stopped buying it. Even Stone has perhaps come to understand what today’s costumer wants, releasing a slew of complex and off-beat IPAs in the past few years such as the fruity Go To IPA, the lemon-y Delicious IPA and a green-tea infused IPA.

“It takes a prohibitively massive ego, a stymied lack of vision, laziness, ignorance and/or delusion,” wrote the brewery’s communications specialist Brandon Hernández, speaking of Ruination, “to create something and expect it to remain an exemplar until the end of time.”

It’s inevitably coming. Soon just about every food or drink-dabbling website will release their “Best Summer Beers” listicle. Some lists will have five entries, some could have 50, but one thing will be similar: Every beer will be light, drinkable … and made in a completely different style.

The Beer Judge Certification Program defines 28 distinct styles of beer, and “summer beer” is not one of them, even though seasonal beers like Oktoberfest and Christmas/winter beer are defined. Likewise, every September the Great American Beer Festival awards prizes in nearly 100 categories and, again, summer beer is not one. In fact, Garrett Oliver’s 960-page The Oxford Companion to Beer only manages to mention “summer ale” three times, all of minor consequence.

So what exactly is summer beer?

The first self-identified summer beer was brewed in 1984 by San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing. Anchor Summer Beer was clean, crisp and light, due to a then-atypical use of wheat. “Nobody had made a wheat beer in America for 60 or 70 years,” claims Bob Brewer—yes, his real name—a longtime rep for the company. “So we thought that that would be fine to resurrect the style,” a filtered version of the classically cloudy, overtly yeasty German hefeweizen.

Anchor’s newfangled wheat beer kicked off an indefinable, know-it-when-you-see-it summer beer style for years to come. Yet, because there’s never been an officially recognized definition of summer beer, the “category” has taken on a life of its own. A BeerAdvocate.com search finds 1153 beers currently in their database with “summer” in the beer name. Yet the website doesn’t include summer beer amongst its 104 categorized styles, filing most beers labeled “summer” in the American Pale Wheat Ale category.

Today, the most famous American summer beer is undoubtedly Samuel Adams Summer Ale, which entered the marketplace in 1996. It’s become an immensely popular offering—“Samuel Adams Seasonal” is literally the best-selling craft beer in America, according to IRI market research—even if many hardcore beer geeks don’t particularly care for it. (A sample review on BeerAdvocate: “Smell is very citrusy with what I would say as ‘dish liquid’ undertones.”)

Like Anchor’s bellwether, it’s a light wheat ale, but differs in that, instead of just simulating citrus flavors via hops and grains, lemon peel and grains of paradise are actually added to the recipe, ushering in a new approach.

By the dawn of the aughts, just about every brewery began making their own barely-definable summer beer, and like Sam Summer, most have added citrus (or citrus “flavors”) to them.

“The idea of brewing beers to match the seasons actually dates back for centuries,” says Jennifer Glanville, Samuel Adams’ director of brewery programs. “Brewers used the freshest ingredients on hand, from fruits to herbs and spices, which reflected the flavor of the season.”

Beyond the citrus, though, today’s summer beers can be anything from a pilsner (Sierra Nevada Summerfest) to a kölsch (Harpoon Summer Beer) to a session IPA (Narragansett Summer Ale).

“I think any beer you could happily be drinking at a BBQ, outside, with friends would qualify,” notes James Godman, a brewer with Hop Back Brewery in Britain. “I guess you probably want something with enough flavor so you can still enjoy it cold; bitter enough to be refreshing, but not too dry; something with a hint of sourness can be nice, too,” he paused, then laughed. “I’m not too sure on ‘summer beer’ being a defined category, as you can probably tell.”

Which is indeed funny, as his brewery released the immensely popular Summer Lightning in 1989. A low-ABV blonde-like bitter, according to Godman, it’s “deceptively drinkable.” In fact, it was such an instant hit that Summer Lightning became a year-round offering, and is still selling well to this day.

It’s clear that drinkers on both sides of the Atlantic want something with “summer” on the label to be light, drinkable and citrusy — a simple desire that has also led to the current popularity of the shandy and radler, essentially light, drinkable citrus juice and beer hybrids.

In a testament to this trend, this year MillerCoors changed the name of Coors Light’s Summer Brew to Citrus Radler without changing the recipe whatsoever. Since “Summer Brew” is a common term for a made-up style, while radler is a real style that’s still fairly obscure, one has to wonder what the marketing geniuses at one of the world’s largest breweries were thinking.

“With the variety of summer beers in the market today, ‘Summer Brew’ wasn’t communicating the flavor of our beer as accurately as it could,” Anna Tsurkis, senior marketing manager at Coors Light, told me. “Navigating an ever-more crowded summer beer market, we made this change to ensure we were effectively communicating the beer’s identity and flavors.”

The fact that the category has grown beyond the simple wheat beer Anchor pioneered 26 years ago is a testament to how broad, and ultimately up for interpretation, the concept of summer beer is. I’ve ultimately realized it’s less a distinct style than an effort to translate a feeling into 12 ounces of liquid. A feeling of the hot sun on your face, the sand tickling your toes, the sudden desire to eat more hot dogs than is ever advisable. In this spirit, below is a list of the beers that are my summer beers, whether they bear “summer” on the label or not.

Five “Summer Beers” to Try

Carton Dune Fruit — My most anticipated summer release is from my friends in nearby New Jersey. This low-ABV (3.9 percent) Berlinerweisse is made with prickly pear paddles from the state’s Sandy Hook Dunes. Some say prickly pear is a hangover cure. Win, win.

Crooked Stave St. Bretta Citrus Wildbier — Denver’s Crooked Stave releases a new version of St. Bretta each season, using whatever citrus is fresh. This year’s wild ale is brewed using blood oranges, making it delicately tart.

Green Flash Hop Odyssey Citra Session — Truly hoppy beers often get ignored once swimsuit season starts, but this is about as drinkable as it gets. Citra hops give this beer a burst of lemon, orange and grapefruit.

Prairie Somewhere — Nothing says summer like saison, which is no surprise given these Belgian farmhouse beers were traditionally brewed in winter to be drunk in summer. Look for any offerings from Prairie Artisan Ales or Saint Somewhere Brewing — two of America’s best saison makers. Or better yet, look for this summer’s collaboration between the two.

Westbrook Gose — Just a few years ago, even most beer geeks hadn’t heard of the gose style, a traditional German salty/sour wheat beer. Since then the style has made a major comeback, fueled by this very beer.

What happens when you take ancient Greek and Roman dining concepts, an Austrian count by way of Holland, of-the-moment celebrities and some of the most groan-worthy wordplay a new millennium had ever seen? You get the brief era where beds in bars were the hottest thing going in American nightlife.

“This’ll never work in Miami,” thought nightlife impresario Michael Capponi after his friend Oliver Hoyos flew him out to the Netherlands in the late-1990s to visit something called Supperclub. “Everyone was smoking pot, lying around in beds, it was that kind of scene.”

An Austrian count—seriously—born to a line of wealthy European bankers, Hoyos had found great success in the 1990s organizing raves in Amsterdam. He was now looking to set up his first nightclub. “The millennium was nearing. Y2K. It was already August of 1999 when I asked my friends, ‘What do you want to do for New Year’s?’”

No one had any ideas, but Hoyos had a grand one: A nightclub built, perhaps, for one night only. “If it works, great, we’ll keep it open,” he recalls telling them. “If it doesn’t, who cares? It will still be the greatest party ever!”

With $700,000 of his and his friend’s money, Hoyos arrived in Miami on August 13th knowing nothing about the city’s nightlife codes. He quickly found real estate, though, in a rectangular shitbox on the 9th Street block of Washington Avenue where countless other bars had already gone belly-up in the past decade.

“It looked like a nuclear test site,” recalls Hoyos. “No one had been inside in a few years, and the previous tenant’s furniture was still set up.” New Year’s was now just 13 weeks away, and he immediately went to work redesigning the inside with cheap plywood and $3-a-foot, high-density foam, taking interior inspiration from his beloved Supperclub.

It appears one thing was expressly forbidden at B.E.D. Yelp reviewer Edie H. recalls accidentally dozing off only to have a bouncer rouse her with a stern admonition: “Ma’am, you have to wake up, or we’ll escort you out. There’s no sleeping in the beds!”

Amsterdam’s Supperclub opened in 1991 as, according to The Guardian, “an anarcho-artists’ collective with bug-eyed radicals squatting on mattresses plotting to overthrow multinationals.” (Hoyos claims it was really just four very wealthy friends of his who wanted their own private space to party.) Not surprisingly, the club was popular with Amsterdam’s elite, but it was not exactly profitable—anarcho-artistic ambitions rarely are—and the place was nearly bankrupt when textile magnate Bert van der Leden purchased it in 1997. Van der Leden’s vision? Keep the same underground vibe, but turn Supperclub into a legitimate restaurant… with beds.

Soon, the gay-friendly, retro-futurist, three-roomed spot had become famed for its dominatrix waitresses with trays of slurpable oysters served between their legs, performance artists, pole-dancers, fortune-telling penis “readers” in the bathrooms, a cross-dressing American maitre d’ named “Howie” and, most importantly, stylish diners eating multicourse dinners off trays placed in the center of stark, white beds.

Supperclub was (and remains) the first bed-in-a-bar establishment. In modern times, that is. Hoyos was familiar with ancient Greek and Roman concepts like the triclinium, a formal dining room in which three chaise-lounge-type seats were arranged around a table. (Picture a hedonistic, Etruscan emperor in a toga laying on his side as nude slaves fed him grapes and poured goblets of wine into his face.)

Amazingly, according to Keith Bradley, the Professor Emeritus of Classics at Notre Dame, this style of dining was considered refined at the time. “The Romans’ style of dining was supposed to be relaxed, not formal,” he says. “It was to promote a time for stimulating, intellectual discussion, and was generally a mark of good standing in society.”

Opening on December 29, 1999, Hoyos’s Miami outpost cheekily called itself B.E.D. The club’s “mattresses” were actually made from that cheap foam, cut into long shapes to fit along the club’s walls, sheer curtains hanging from the ceiling dividing the “beds.” Total design costs were around $600. With the acronym standing for Beverage, Entertainment, Dining, Hoyos tried his best to honor each letter. Entertainment would come from hip-hop artists like Nas, R. Kelly and Fat Joe who were always guaranteed to be blaring over the speakers as video jockeys projected psychedelic images on big screens. There was also some serious effort put into the B and D.

Each night would see four different seatings—“layings,” as the club officially called them—where bedded customers could drink Champagne and dine on French chef Vitor Casassola’s high-end dishes like Pan-Seared Chilean Sea Bass and Australian lamb in a mustard-tarragon sauce. (The only item Casassola refused to ever prepare for B.E.D.? Soup.)

As Rick Marin of the New York Times declared in an early review, “You can’t just open a restaurant anymore, as any leisure impresario desperate for attention knows. You’ve got to create a scene, a gimmick.”

Nevertheless, such a strange gimmick was still going to need a major boost to get off the ground in a place like Miami Beach. Luckily, after witnessing the organic success of the club in its early days, Michael Capponi was finally willing to jump into B.E.D by the start of 2000.

Only 27 at the time, Capponi had already found great success in his short life as perhaps the area’s top club promoter, having been a major fixture on the scene since he was just 16 years old. Page Six’s Richard Johnson called him “The godfather of Miami nightlife” while the Miami Herald had already anointed him “The SoBe Prince.”

Capponi decided to organize a signature weekly party to firmly put B.E.D. on the Miami Beach map. Soon, his “Wednesdays in B.E.D.” was the hottest event of Miami’s club week, with early-aughs A-listers like Paris Hilton, Busta Rhymes, Johnny Knoxville and Britney Spears frequently hitting the scene. Florida Marlins pitcher Josh Beckett even partied at B.E.D. just a few nights before his Game Six win in the 2003 World Series. In fact, Wednesday night was so legendary it even spawned a briefly famous doorman, Fabrizio Brienza, an Italian sometimes model/sometimes softcore porn actor, described by the Miami New Times as “a door god.” (His terse policy: “Scumbags out; cool people in.”)

With beds in a bar, though, there was always the high potential for shenanigans—which was, to some degree, exactly the point. “Asked if things ever gets out of hand at B.E.D.,” noted the New York Times in 2001, “(Hoyos) said nothing goes on that does not fall ‘within the legal limits of the state of Florida.’” Though, it appears one thing was expressly forbidden at B.E.D. Yelp reviewer Edie H. recalls accidentally dozing off only to have a bouncer rouse her with a stern admonition: “Ma’am, you have to wake up, or we’ll escort you out. There’s no sleeping in the beds!”

Capponi’s Wednesdays in B.E.D. ran for six solid years. “Club trends only run five, six, maybe seven years before fading out. But that night really revolutionized everything in Miami,” recalls Capponi fondly. By early 2001, Hoyos realized the time had come to expand the empire to other destinations, namely, New York City: “We were holding onto a freight train going at full speed!”

Like most hip things happening in New York at the time, it was Samantha Jones who alerted the nation’s rubes to this phenomenon. In a Season 6 episode of Sex and the City you’ve definitely seen, “The Post-It Always Sticks Twice,” Carrie Bradshaw laments the end of her relationship to Berger (Ron Livingston) after he broke up with her the night (and episode) before via Post-It note.

To get over this unexpected breakup and give her a “fantastic” night out, Samantha decides to take the foursome to opening night at B.E.D. Cue Ms. Bradshaw’s voiceover: “Since people often go to bars to get people into bed, it was only a matter of time until people cut out the middleman and put beds in bars.” While shirtless guys shake up drinks and sexy women in satin bathrobes serve them in a nightclub that looks more like their Silvercup Studios set than an actual hip nightclub, a series of har-har puns and bad double entendres follow. (Miranda slips and falls into a male diner’s bed: “I didn’t even have to buy you dinner.” Carrie unexpectedly runs into one of Berger’s friends and flips out on him: “I just learned you should never go to B.E.D. angry.”

Amazingly, though, that episode ran in August of 2003, a good 15 months before New York had its first bed in a nightclub. Hoyos had told the episode’s writer that New York’s location would be up-and-running by then; instead, he’d been delayed by both the events of 9/11 and a shady business partner.

By 2007, both B.E.D. and Duvet were being bombarded by the hoi polloi. The official Sex and the City Bus Tour had made driving by B.E.D.—which didn’t even have a marquee—a designated stop along with Magnolia Bakery and the sex toys shop where Charlotte once purchased the vaunted “Rabbit” vibrator.

Finally, in December 2004, two equal behemoths in B.E.D. and Duvet appeared in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Hoyos had decided to team up with Dirk Van Stockum, a New York nightlife veteran (Life, Float, crobar) for New York’s B.E.D. Set on West 27th Street in outer Chelsea, it would be bigger and better than Miami’s—not to mention one of the largest dining establishments in all of Manhattan. The sixth-floor venue featured 23 custom-built mattresses sponsored by TempurPedic, able to accommodate up to ten patrons per “laying.” In fixing a problem from the Miami locale, guests were now presented with a pair of designer socks—in either black or nude—so as to not be forced to lounge barefoot.

“The women at B.E.D. seemed more comfortable than the men, zipping off their boots and curling up like cats while their dates kept shifting into various self-consciously cool reposes,” the New York Times noticed.

Meanwhile, the 20,000-square-foot, two-level Duvet opened a half-dozen blocks away—it’s motto: “Upscale dining, while reclining”—serving Asian-inspired dishes and sugary cocktails with names like Sweet Dream, Pillow Talk and the signature White Satin Mojito. It had a staff known as the “Pajama Patrol” and an Andrés Escobar interior design that included Venetian plaster walls, silver leaf-speckled ceilings and a colorful lighting arrangement that infused the entire club in constantly-changing pink and teal hues.

Soon, beds were popping up at other various hotspots around the city. By early 2005 there were five Manhattan spots where you could fully drink and dine in bed. There was Highline a little further downtown where, according to Newsday, “white damask sheets cover(ed) Swiss Thermapedic mattresses.” There was Jeffrey Chodorow’s Ono in the Gansevoort Hotel and Underbar in the basement of Union Square’s W Hotel. There was even a French-Vietnamese restaurant in the West Village, Hue, which placed beds in its VIP rooms.

Even so, in Bon Appétit‘s January 2005 “What’s Hot, What’s Not, What’s Next?” issue, bed bars and restaurants were placed firmly on the “What’s Not?” list. Nevertheless, B.E.D. started expanding to more cities. The third spot was Atlanta, where a B.E.D. opened in the downtown Glenn Hotel in February of 2006.

Supperclubs had also now sprung up in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Istanbul and even on a cruise ship. Then, came the copycats like BED Club in England, Bed Nightclub in Northern Ireland and The Bedroom Nightclub in Brisbane. The two bed bar icons’ names were merged for a knock-off called Bed Supperclub, which became wildly successful in Bangkok. There was even The Bedroom VIP Lounge in lovely Baltimore, of all places.

All signs seemed to indicate that the bed bar bubble was near. But for the fiscal year of 2006, B.E.D. brought in gross sales topping $22 million with net profits of over 20 percent, with reports of Hoyos and his partners planning nearly a dozen more B.E.D.s across the planet, in cities such as Los Angeles, Las Vegas, London and Dubai.

He’d never get around to them.

By 2007, both B.E.D. and Duvet were being bombarded by the hoi polloi. The official Sex and the City Bus Tour had made driving by B.E.D.—which didn’t even have a marquee—a designated stop along with Magnolia Bakery and the sex toys shop where Charlotte once purchased the vaunted “Rabbit” vibrator. Now visitors to B.E.D. and Duvet during this era were all of the sudden becoming a little less… cool.

A peek at Yelp reviews from 2007 paints a sad but frequently similar picture. A sample: “Ok I confess, my girls and I went to BED because we wanted to do that whole Sex and the city [sic] themed NY trip … complete with our own designated counterparts (I’m Charlotte :p).” Still, such an explosive concept like B.E.D. was never going to merely fizzle out. It would take tragedy to put an end to the dream.

In February of 2007, a inebriated Bronx man celebrating his 35th birthday got into a skirmish with Granville Adams, a manager at B.E.D. During the ensuing fracas, Adams slammed the man against the club’s elevators, accidentally causing them to open, and sending the clubgoer headfirst down the shaft. Adams, a part-time actor who had once portrayed prisoner Zahir Arif on the HBO show Oz, was charged with criminally negligent homicide (the charges were eventually dropped).

His empire becoming too much trouble for him to rule over any longer—not to mention the possibility of lawsuits growing ever more concerning—Hoyos immediately closed New York and Atlanta’s B.E.D. for good and sold his interests in the Miami locale. He went back to Europe to stay at a friend’s house in Spain where “I basically sat still for six months not even speaking,” he recalls. “After shaking probably three millions hands in the previous decade, I’d lost my social battery.”

Hoyos now lives in Frankfurt, Germany, where a few years ago he opened a popular fast-casual joint called Burger Baby. He’s glad he’s out of the nightclub business, though still remembers his B.E.D. days fondly: “I’ve been to bed with over two million women. Not even Casanova can say that!”

Later in 2007, Duvet also faced tragedy when rapper Fabolous was reportedly on the scene as a childhood friend of his was fatally stabbed outside the venue. The New York Post reported that over the next two years, the cops were summoned to the club 42 times. Then, in December of 2009, a Duvet bouncer (who was incidentally an ex-con) sexually assaulted a woman in one of the club’s bathroom stalls. The State Liquor Authority voted unanimously to shutter the joint—which had recently taken the unfortunate name “Club Climax”—for good.

In the summer of 2011, B.E.D. Miami finally whimpered to a close. According to Page Six, the final straw was when a Season 2 episode of the Jersey Shore filmed in the once-chic nightclub, “put(ting) a sour taste in the mouths of South Beach elitists.” (The nightclub’s website is still online for whatever reason, some optimist apparently still footing the GoDaddy bill.)

Today, Washington Avenue has become a place hip locals rarely visit any more. It only has a few remaining major nightclubs like Mansion, and the two-lane street is now mainly packed with tacky T-shirt stands, coffee shops, convenience stores, a Burger King “Whopper Bar” and even a pole-dancing studio.

“B.E.D. came at a very unique time in Miami Beach history,” recalls Capponi, now the founder of InList, a smartphone app designed to help average Joes get inside the ropes at today’s hottest nightclubs. “When real money got here around the millennium, a lot of wealthy Europeans came with it. That was where Oliver was from. They were trust fund kids from old money Europe—the real jet-set Monte Carlo crowd mixing with models and celebrities,” he says. “I’ve been involved in South Beach nightlife since basically its inception—1989—and that was the best clientele we’ve had in any cycle. Those were truly the glory days.”

Though a few international bed-in-a-bar concepts still remain, the former sites of America’s B.E.D.s have sat vacant for years. Manhattan’s B.E.D. locale was empty and dormant until 2011, when a British theatrical company turned it into a performance space called The McKittrick Hotel. Fittingly, they now put on a popular immersive play called Sleep No More.

Illustrations: Natalie K. Nelson

In 1903 the Wright Brothers out of Dayton, Ohio built the world’s first successful airplane. By 1965, 20 percent of Americans had flown commercially and tens of thousands of stewardesses were stationed in urban hubs like San Francisco, Chicago and New York. Due to strict airline criteria, most all these women were unmarried, trim and under the age of 30.

In 1960 G.D. Searle & Company out of Skokie, Illinois, first submitted to the FDA for approval a new product they had developed called Enovid, better known as the world’s first oral contraceptive. It was an instant hit and, by 1965, 6.5 million American women were on “the pill.”

Also in 1965, Alan Stillman, a 28-year-old essential oils salesman in New York City, was trying to figure out a better way to meet single women in his neighborhood. “It was an extremely parochial time, even in New York. It wasn’t easy to meet women and get into bed with them,” Stillman told me over the phone. “Believe me, it wasn’t easy for women either.”

Stillman lived on the far east side of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which was a popular neighborhood for younger people—particularly flight attendants, as the nearby 59th Street Bridge gave them a quick exit to Queens’ two airports.

“There was a building on East 65th they called the ‘Stew Zoo.’ Girls would fly in and out, in and out; it was a real ‘hotbed’ place. You might have six stewardesses sharing a three-bedroom apartment,” says Stillman with a laugh. “Back then, we joked the laundry room in that building was surely the easiest place on the Upper East Side to meet single women.”

In fact, New York Magazine claimed 90 percent of the 15-story building was occupied by stewardesses—maybe 400 attractive single women in one location, by Stillman’s estimation. (An article from 1966 about this part of the Upper East Side was titled “The Girl Ghetto: Manhattan’s Swingiest Square Mile.”) Unfortunately, these flight attendants didn’t drink at bars.

Before 1965, your average couple met each other via setups from friends or family, they had been high school or college sweethearts, maybe even co-workers or fellow churchgoers. But they almost certainly hadn’t met in a bar. Stillman wanted to change that and, in doing so, would inadvertently change dating in the latter part of the 20th century.

Stillman was a regular at a bullet-riddled, 1st Avenue saloon called Good Tavern. He’d hit the dive after work for an occasional beer and, annoyed there were never any women around, one day suggested to the owner that he might want to clean the place up and start serving the kind of food and drink that would attract a female crowd. The owner didn’t like that idea, but did like Stillman’s offer to buy the bar for $10,000. Even if he didn’t realize it at the time, Stillman’s idea to make a bar friendly to women was revolutionary.

Thank God It’s Friday!—then a popular expression with college kids—opened on the northeast corner of 63rd and 1st Avenue on March 15, 1965. Stillman painted the building bright blue with red-striped awnings and stocked the interior with Tiffany lamps, stained glass, brass rails and a floor lightly brushed with sawdust. He had his waiters wear loudly colored soccer jerseys and offered a menu both affordable and enticing to a younger person—burgers and fries, cheap beer, Long Island Iced Teas and Harvey Wallbangers.

“Immediately, it was like someone had set off a release mechanism,” says Stillman. “I opened the door on day one and, just like that, 60 people were inside. It was like nothing anyone had ever seen, a bar so obviously meant for young people. [They] were like, ‘Whoa, we can actually go out and drink beers, meet people?’”

Stillman may have invented the singles bar, but he never used the phrase to refer to T.G.I. Friday’s—indeed, it doesn’t seem to have entered the American lexicon until around 1968, when, according to the O.E.D., it appeared in a Washington Post article. Nevertheless, a new kind of bar had officially been created.

By the summer of 1966, that small stretch of 1st Avenue was flooded on Friday nights with the police having to close down the street from 8 p.m. until midnight due to hordes of singles bouncing back and forth between bars like spaghetti-chasing tourists on Mulberry Street. By 1968, there were a whopping 85 bars on the Upper East Side, most of them singles bars. By the early 1970s, 20 to 25 percent of American couples had met at a bar, according to Stanford University research.

Within 18 months, several more “singles bars” were opened on 1st Avenue. A rare male tenant of the Stew Zoo—not to mention a light-hitting, backup shortstop for the Yankees—Phil Linz opened Mr. Laff’s up the block. Then came Gleason’s, owned by four brothers from New Jersey. And Hudson Bay Inn, started by an ex-Pan Am PR flack who cleverly used his mailing list of 2,200 stewardesses to find potential customers.

“Everybody was young,” notes Stillman. “But we weren’t sophisticated restaurateurs.”

That group also included Warner LeRoy, grandson of a Warner Bros. founder and son of a Wizard of Oz producer. LeRoy was a flashy, 270-pound, off-Broadway producer who had owned Toto the dog as a child, favored paisley-patterned suits and sometimes wore a replica of a silk cape he’d once seen on a circus elephant. He opened the massive Maxwell’s Plum a block from Friday’s in 1966.

“What the Beatles were to rock and roll, (Maxwell’s Plum) was to eating and courting,” auctioneer William Doyle recalled to the New York Times in 1989.

By the summer of 1966, that small stretch of 1st Avenue was flooded on Friday nights with the police having to close down the street from 8 p.m. until midnight due to hordes of singles bouncing back and forth between bars like spaghetti-chasing tourists on Mulberry Street. By 1968, there were a whopping 85 bars on the Upper East Side, most of them singles bars. By the early 1970s, 20 to 25 percent of American couples had met at a bar, according to Stanford University research.

Stillman may have been inexperienced when he started, but he was no dummy any more. “I took one look at what was going on,” he claims, “and, thought, ‘If I’m gonna fool around with this, I might as well try to make some money.’” By 1971 he had found partners in cities like Memphis, Dallas and Houston, where other, larger locations of Friday’s were opened. Copycats were now springing up everywhere.

Chicago had one bar that also initially dominated the singles scene. Opened in 1968, Mother’s was located just down the street from Carl Sandburg Village, a just-built apartment complex full of single women, again, many of them stewardesses. The concrete-floor, live-music basement bar was also one of the first in Chicago to start employing female bartenders once 1970 hit, something that had been illegal in the city until then.

Soon, other bars on that Division Street block got into the act, like the Hangge-Uppe, which is still open today and in 2010 offered a souvenir condom celebrating “40 years of hooking up.” Simultaneously, the West Coast took notice, with one man realizing that, to have a singles bar, all you really had to do was soften the decor a bit.

Enter the softest bars of them all, fern bars. Opened in San Francisco in 1969 by Henry Africa (real name: Norman Jay Hobday), an upstate New York farm boy with no extra money to decorate, Henry Africa’s iconoclastic look—defined by an abundance of cheap, potted plants sitting in wicker baskets hanging from the ceiling—was born out of necessity.

Fern bars would quickly replace Friday’s as the dominant singles bar model of the 1970s. Soon, copycat joints were popping up across the country, with names like Shenanigans and Bananas!. These highly welcoming places served fried foods and cheesy “for the ladies”-type concoctions like Lemon Drops, Piña Coladas, Bahama Mamas, Mudslides and, of course, white wine spritzers—the same crowd-pleasing drinks you still see offered on the laminated, spiral-bound picture menus at many chain restaurants today.

But even as singles bars was getting more inane, they were also getting sleazier. Cocaine and other drugs were becoming prevalent on the scene while the AIDs virus was also looming, first identified around 1983. “There’s this whole dark decade that no one wants to talk about,” says Martin Cate, owner of San Francisco’s famed modern tiki bar, Smuggler’s Cove.

In the 1981 year-end issue of New York Magazine, a cover story, “Single in the City,” detailed a Friday night of bar-hopping at spots like Adam’s Apple, Grass and Boodle’s. These singles bars all of the sudden looked a bit different from the cheery Friday’s of yesteryear, with the story’s author Richard West noting: “For many single New Yorkers, singles bar rank unfavorably with the Hawaiian leper colony—‘body shops’ and ‘meat racks’ they’re called, containers of rubbish ranging from tourists to Mr. Goodbars.”

“Mr. Goodbar” was a reference to the 1977 movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which starred Diane Keaton as a teacher who enjoys hitting seedy singles bars for unsavory one-night stands and who is eventually raped and stabbed to death by a bar pickup. (It was based on a Judith Rossner novel of the same name, about a real-life incident from 1973.)

Throughout the 1980s the singles bar continued to be recast in pop culture as a genre of bar that had gone from safe to seedy. And a new kind of bar was emerging. In early scenes of 1988’s Cocktail, bartender Brian Flanagan (Tom Cruise) works at that original T.G.I. Friday’s location on the Upper East Side. Eventually, he becomes an archetypal ’80s hot shot, the co-owner of the raucous, multi-leveled Cocktails & Dreams, where he confidently stands atop the bar encouraging rowdy single patrons to order drinks such as the Sex on the Beach, the Orgasm and the Ding-a-ling.

Flanagan’s quick change in scenery is a fitting analogy for how single bars had evolved in New York City. The unattached of the ’80s were now enjoying nights out at conspicuous consumption-type downtown spots. These were loud, large, often highly superficial joints like the Palladium, Nell’s and Tunnel, whose owner, Rudolf, told New York Magazine in 1986, “There is no (singles) ‘scene’ anymore, it’s just a bunch of people who go out, uptown or downtown, and look well.”

The 1990s would eventually come to reject the previous decade’s glitz and decadence. If Three’s Company’s Jack Tripper was going to the Regal Beagle to pick up foxy chicks in the ’70s, by the ’90s single characters were hitting coffee shops (Friends) and dumpy diners (Seinfeld) instead. Even from our modern lens, think how weird it is that such proudly promiscuous characters as Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer never went to bars. To a certain extent, who could blame them? By this era single people needed beds in their bars to make a night out seem exciting.

“These days, there aren’t singles bars; there are bars where there may be a lot of singles,” says Thomas Edwards. Think of the characters on How I Met Your Mother congregating at McGee’s Pub, hardly a singles bar yet somehow always full of single people. Edwards, who calls himself The Professional Wingman, spends his nights in bars helping clients meet potential partners. Since bars don’t call themselves singles bars anymore, the trick is knowing which bars are likely to be full of “singles looking to mingle.”

I think of NYC’s Murray Hill today. Go to bars like the Joshua Tree, Brother Jimmy’s, Bar 515 and Mercury Bar on a Friday or Saturday night. Though not “singles bars” per se, they will undoubtedly be packed with young, drunk and mostly single people. I met my wife at one of those Murray Hill dumps. Yet, we’ve never been back to the bar since our initial encounter. Why would we?

As brand strategist Dain Dunston posits, perhaps the insane success of singles bars was why they eventually declined. “The success of the Friday’s concept lead to a boom in marriage licenses, suburban homes and baby clothes,” he says. “And, as their customers moved to the suburbs, so did Friday’s.”

Today, the original T.G.I. Friday’s is now a sports bar called Baker Street. Maxwell’s Plum has become another Duane Reade—though one can still view its large, mahogany island bar at Tribeca Grill, which purchased it in 1989 for a mere $9,500. Mother’s is now the Original Mother’s but remains otherwise unchanged, with live music on the weekends and a “Naughty Little Cabaret” on Saturday nights. Henry Africa’s closed in 1986.

Of course, other things have radically changed since the singles bar’s heyday. In fact, most of the current generation can’t believe such a thing as a “singles bar” ever existed. Living in a world where a mere swipe of a smartphone is a pickup opportunity—an astonishing 35 percent of couples now meet online—the idea there once needed to be designated places for such a thing is hard to imagine. But it doesn’t mean we’ve surpassed a use for them for good.

With singles numbers higher than ever before—around 125 million Americans 16 and older (50.2 percent of the population), some 1.5 million singles between the ages of 21 and 35 in New York City alone—Tinder may not be enough.

Last month noted Williamsburg restaurateur Joe Carroll opened Oleanders, a somewhat serious, somewhat ironic fern bar. Plants line the walls, while Tiffany-style lampshades provide a glow that frames loaded potato skins and Dale DeGroff-composed drinks, including “improved” takes on the Long Island Iced Tea and Rob Roy. Meanwhile, Jenny Oz LeRoy, daughter of Warner, now owner of the LeRoy Redux restaurant group, is trying to reopen Maxwell’s Plum, this time in a 21,000-square-foot building in the singles-deluged Meatpacking District.

“I have always said, singles bars may dwindle at times,” says Stillman. “But as long as there are single people, they will never, never, ever disappear.”

For the bulk of brewing history, from, let’s say, Mesopotamia all the way up to about a decade ago, defining farmhouse brewing was easy. A farmhouse brewery was a farm where beer was brewed using local ingredients, usually in the countrysides of northern France and southern Belgium. While farmhouse ales were always refreshing, unintentionally funky pale ales, the term “farmhouse ale” often acted as an alias for saisons or the occasional bière de garde.

Saison is French for “season” which is important because these were seasonal beers—brewed in the colder months when a farm had fewer chores and ready for these same workers (as well as the part-time “saisonniers”) during hotter months. Bière de garde means “beer for keeping,” and, in an era before refrigeration, these beers were also brewed when it was chillier so heat wouldn’t affect the delicate yeast during the months of fermentation. Likewise, in an era before hops production was so widespread—even today, European hops mainly come from Germany and the Czech Republic—spices were often used for preservation purposes.

Brasserie Dupont is probably the quintessential commercial farmhouse brewery—opened in 1950 and located on a farm that also produces breads and cheeses—and their Saison Dupont is still a classic example of Belgian farmhouse ale. Highly carbonated, with a cloudy, straw yellow hue, it beautifully shows how four simple ingredients—hops, malt, water and yeast—can manifest themselves into a highly complex beer. You could see a sweaty Wallonian field worker sipping it from a leather flagon, but just as easily imagine a fine dining restaurant presenting it with flair.

Today, however, Brasserie Dupont is something of a rarity. Since most saisons and bière de gardes were never intended to be sold, there aren’t exactly a lot of “true” farmhouse breweries still left in Europe. In fact, many Belgian breweries—like Brasserie St-Feuillien, who began making a canned offering in 2009—have started producing less-than-traditional saisons simply to satisfy the American market’s recent thirst for them. Even more to the point, it’s America that has picked up the mantle—this country’s aughties renaissance helping to revive the then-nearly-extinct style. In doing so, American brewers have also redefined what “farmhouse ale” actually means, making saisons that are often hoppier and boozier than tradition calls for, usually loaded with local fruits, obscure spices and sometimes even barrel-aged to add even more sourness and tartness to these once-simple beers.

Today it seems that there are now more “famous” farmhouse beermakers in America than there currently are in Europe, some of whom are trying to brew in the old tradition of the farmhouse breweries of Europe, and others who are brewing farmhouse-style beer in alternative spaces. Farmhouse ale-makers without the farm, one might say. Whatever the case, here are ten American breweries that have helped bring back the farmhouse funk.

On the Farm

Brewing beer in America has long been industrial work, but, of late, brewers are finding beauty in leaving the big city and heading to hard-to-access rural areas. The following are some of the best American breweries currently located on farms, mostly using local ingredients—often those growing on their own properties—to create beers both traditional and wholly unique to this country.

Hill Farmstead Brewery (Greensboro, VT)
Set on owner Shaun Hill’s 220-year-old family dairy farm—he still lives there—this tiny rural operation has become one of the most esteemed breweries in the world. Hill doesn’t actually grow ingredients on his farm, but everything he sources still passes through his hands, and he believes adamantly that his output should be consumed as fresh and close to the brewery as possible. He rarely puts his beer in bottles, and kegs only escape Vermont when Hill is feeling generous, occasionally landing in a few lucky New York and Philadelphia bars. Beers are named after Hill’s farming ancestors like Ann, Flora and my favorite, Aaron, a barrel-aged barleywine. While availability remains limited (Hill caps production at 150,000 gallons per year), the brewery just underwent an expansion, adding larger fermenters and a tasting room.

Jester King Brewery (Austin, TX)
Jester King might be America’s most traditional farmhouse brewery. They use water from a well on their sprawling property, mill and malt locally-grown grains and utilize the wild yeast lingering in the hot Austin air. All their beers are unfiltered, unpasteurized and 100-percent naturally carbonated, leading to not just complex, but also visually interesting offerings that are hazy and turbid. That, though, is where tradition ends and things get avant-garde. Beer geeks have gone crazy for beers like Atrial Rubicite, an ale refermented in oak barrels with native yeast, souring bacteria and fresh-picked raspberries. These more limited beers—one per customer—are so coveted people have resorted to disguises for making multiple purchases.

Logsdon Farmhouse Ales (Hood River, OR)
While the Rocky Mountains on a Coors Light can are pure artifice, the farmhouse painted on the label of all Logsdon bottles is anything but. That’s the actual red barn on founder Dave Logsdon’s 10-acre family estate in Hood River County—a small valley in the shadow of Oregon’s Mount Hood. Logsdon proudly claims he’s “putting the ‘farm’ back in farmhouse ales,” and indeed his property has cows and horses, hop fields, Schaarbeekse sour cherry trees—even a hillside cave for aging beers. As the former founder of the famed Wyeast Labs, Logsdon also knows a thing or two about manipulating microflora, which are combined artfully with locally-grown macroflora (like peaches) in the best of Logsdon’s beers. Still, even life on a bucolic farm isn’t always bucolic—this summer, founding brewmaster Charles Porter left the operation after Logsdon sold a portion of the brewery to Uptown Market, LLC.

Oxbow Brewery (Newcastle, ME)
Set on wooded farm just two miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean, Oxbow has managed to add a true New England twist to the saison scene. Brewing out of a renovated barn, the brewery attempts to use strictly local ingredients, including fruit from an orchard on their 18-acre property that grows cherries, raspberries and strawberries. And while they aren’t exactly farming seafood there, what Maine brewer worth their sea salt wouldn’t want to incorporate that most locally-identified foodstuff into their rustic beers? Indeed, Oxbow did that just last summer when they released Saison Dell’Aragosta, a farmhouse ale brewed with locally-caught lobster.

Plan Bee Farm Brewery (Fishkill, NY)
While the most urban parts of Brooklyn and Queens are currently undergoing a massive brewing boom, one of the area’s hottest breweries is a 10-station Metro-North ride up the Hudson River. Opened in 2013 by a former Captain Lawrence brewer and an environmental non-profit worker, Evan and Emily Watson are working to create a 100-percent sustainable brewery. Their farm came with two beehives on the premises, and their honey now carbonates each and every beer. And since this honey is unpasteurized, the outcome of each beer is often unknown, with offerings only assured to achieve some levels of funkiness, tartness and sourness. Beers are made with 100-percent New York State ingredients, including everything from rose hips to grape must.

Off the Farm

You don’t exactly need a farm to make farmhouse ale these days. There are also terrific American “farmhouse” breweries brewing out of warehouses, industrial parks, urban and suburban neighborhoods and even right off a major highway.

Allagash Brewing Co. (Portland, ME)
Long set on the iconic “IndustriALE” Way—an incubator for Portland-area craft beer-makers—Allagash was the first brewery to really introduce Belgian styles to the American masses. By now, Allagash White is one of the most ubiquitous tap handles in all of America. But while that beer is a bit of a farmhouse ale for beginners, Allagash has plenty more “advanced” offerings. Many are produced via coolship—an old-fashioned open fermentation tank that allows those so-called “bugs and critters” in the air to inoculate their beers into something tart, funky and usually wonderful. My favorite is Resurgam, a spontaneously-fermented gueuze as good as anything from Pajottenland.

de Garde Brewing (Tillamook, OR)
About an hour-and-a-half west of Portland, in the cheese-loving town of Tillamook, you’ll find one of America’s most unique farmhouse breweries. Only two years old, de Garde relies exclusively on local microflora to ferment and flavor their beers. Like Allagash, they utilize a coolship, but being on the opposite coast means an opposite microclimate with different yeasts and bacteria. Their best offerings are in the “Bu” series, fruited Berlinerweisses called Berry Bu, Peach Bu, Cherry Raz Bu and so on. These necessitate aging in barrels—sometimes up to three years, with a good five percent of beer going bad and having to be trashed—before they are ready to drink. Not exactly a sound business strategy, but an incredibly flavorful one.

Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales (Dexter, MI)
When Ron Jeffries opened his iconic brewery just over a decade ago, America’s beer landscape was vastly different. Did the average drinker know about barrel-aging? Did he or she realize bacteria in beer could be a good thing? Had he ever heard the word “Brettanomyces”? Jeffries made these things a little more mainstream, releasing numerous farmhouse classics that still stand the test of time. Beers like the light and cloudy Bam Biére, their autumnal saison Fuego del Otoño and my favorite, the sour red ale La Roja. Best of all, Jolly Pumpkin’s farmhouse offerings are much easier to find than most beers mentioned here. (And if you’re wondering whether they make a pumpkin farmhouse beer… of course they do.)

Prairie Artisan Ales (Tulsa, OK)
It’d make sense that a state full of farms would play host to one of America’s best farmhouse breweries. But the thing is, Prairie doesn’t brew on the prairie. In fact, in the early years when brewmaster Chase Healey was first garnering acclaim for his farmhouse offerings, he didn’t even have his own brewery. Today Prairie brews out of a metal warehouse on a dead-end near the Arkansas River, where Healey cranks out truly Americanized farmhouse beer, like Prairie Hop and his “Midwest farmhouse ale,” Eliza5beth, all packaged in playfully labeled bottles (Healey’s brother Colin does the artwork.)

Sante Adairius Rustic Ales (Capitola, CA)
I’d heard brilliant things about a brewery right off the Pacific Coast Highway just south of Santa Cruz. As I neared Capitola in a rental car, I expected to see a cute farmhouse atop a cliff hugging the California coast, where I’d sip saisons overlooking Monterey Bay. Instead, I found a typical microbrewery, set in a soulless industrial park near an Italian motor scooter dealer and a mobile home retailer. Somehow, though, even without the farmhouse, SARA, as they’re known, is able to use their “house microbes” to add a unique funk to their beers. Opened in 2012 by Adair Paterno and Tim Clifford, these yeast geeks have already produced neo-farmhouse classics like West Ashley, a saison aged in pinot noir barrels with apricots.

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I remember one of the happiest moments of my childhood: I was ten and attending Oklahoma City’s largest annual baseball card show. I walked the convention center with my buddy, stopping at booths manned by tubby man-children in ill-fitting replica jerseys, scanning their glass cases, thumbing through cardboard boxes, looking for anything cool. Then, in one booth, I spot my white whale: Darryl Strawberry’s 1982 Jackson Mets minor league card.

As a kid, I was a massive collector of everything. I had the biggest baseball card collection in the neighborhood. I collected comic books and action figures, vinyl and Wheaties boxes. There was even a regrettable pogs phase. All of this eventually segued into DVDs and classic movie posters and books on Alfred Hitchcock by the time I was in college. And then I became an adult, entered the real world and started collecting the ultimate passion of my life: drinking.

You can’t collect drinking, one might say. But beer geeks have a term for it: “ticking.” Ticking is a manic compulsion to try everything good, everything rare, even just an ounce. The word isn’t in the OED, but, if it were, the definition might include this sample sentence: “There was only a sip of Toppling Goliath’s KBBS left when I got to the bottle share, but at least I got the tick in.”

We tickers hit bottle shares and beer festivals and plow through dozens of tiny samples, counting our ticks like Wilt Chamberlain notched sexual conquests via Untappd check-ins—mostly just to say, “Yeah, I’ve had Tree House Good Morning. Sure, I’ve tried Focal Banger.”

Some might consider this kind of compulsive ticking to be some form of drinking problem. But I’m not an alcoholic; I’m a completist. How else am I going to know what’s best if I don’t try them all?

And I am certainly not alone: So prevalent is this silly behavior, a British documentary about tickers was released in 2009. “It’s a form of trainspotting,” explains one man in the film, somehow making it sound even nerdier than it already is.

When I visit a new city, it’s imperative that I hit every spot on both Draft and RateBeer‘s top beer bars lists. (And why not drop by every cocktail joint on the World’s 50 Best Bars rankings, too?) “This bar is great; why do we have to go to another bar that might not be?” my wife often wonders. A valid question, but as a collector of drinking experiences, I’d much rather learn an acclaimed bar sucks while ticking it off my list than spend the whole night enjoying myself at just one place.

This compulsive need of us beer geeks to collect, or tick, often mimics similar behaviors from childhood. Almost always, the beer geeks I know—usually men—obsessively collected something as a kid. One beer friend, Anthony, collected Starting Lineups and mini football helmets as a boy. Another, Derek, stockpiled GI Joe figures, while David amassed “Magic: The Gathering” decks. Joshua Hatton, co-founder of Single Cask Nation, used to collect guitar pedals.

I’m not an alcoholic; I’m a completist.

But unlike baseball cards in their hard plastic holders and comic books in their polypropylene bags—unable to ever be touched—alcohol is inherently meant to be unwrapped, popped, consumed and then trashed. It’s the rare collectible that’s completely ephemeral. Once consumed, it only exists in our memories (and that Untappd check-in). Perhaps that’s why so many of us are loathe to crack those special bottles gathering dust on our shelves. So we just keep acquiring more, the act of building a killer “cellar”—and the resulting braggadocio it affords us—becoming almost as fun as ever drinking the alcohol. In fact, it’s looking more and more like the only difference between beer geeks and wine collectors nowadays is that most people can still afford rare beer.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long for big money to impact hobbyists’ simple enjoyment of collecting these rare and beautiful objects, snatching at accessibility, driving up prices. Just as baseball cards were ruined by outside speculators inflating values and card companies adding “chase” cards, whiskey now stands at a similar crossroads. So-called flippers snap up bottles of Pappy Van Winkle and the Buffalo Trace Antique Collection and other “LEs”—nerd parlance for “limited editions“—just to make money on the secondary market, with no plans to ever drink the liquid inside.

Beer’s black market is booming, too, with rare beers selling for well over their retail prices via sites like My Beer Cellar. This year, for the first time ever, I noticed men in sharp suits buying cases of Goose Island’s Bourbon County Stout. Are these masters of the universe interested in drinking this limited stout, or has it become a luxury bauble to own? Yet another item to possess and brag about in the same way their baby boomer bosses treated wine, as a means of cementing their economic status?

But the actual beer tickers are just as guilty of creating this mania, even if their compulsions typically come from a more honest place. I frequently hear the angry refrain that rare beer is treated nowadays like kids used to treat rare Pokemon cards (one thing I’m too old to have ever collected, thankfully), with beer geeks snatching them up as mere assets, hoping to leverage them for something they actually want to drink one day.

Well, of course it is. We all used to be those kids. Coveting and collecting, buying and trading—that was almost as fun as actually playing with the cards or reading the comic books. Or drinking the beer.

Which is maybe why it seems today’s beer events are hardly any different from baseball card shows or Comic-Cons (minus any weird cosplay)—all burly, neck-bearded men in branded t-shirts, one-upping each other with arcane knowledge and experiences. The one thing that makes our hobby seem somewhat more “adult” than dressing up like Boba Fett is that at least everyone is getting drunk.

And regardless of the one-upmanship that’s become part of beer (or wine or whiskey) ticking culture, it’s still a type of collecting that can innately bring people together. No beer geek I know spends most of his drinking time alone, staring at his cellar, like so many lonely comic book collectors might have as children. And even if bottle shares and beer festivals are often nerdy, they’re still undeniably fun—at least a lot more so than wandering the aisles of a convention center looking for some obscure baseball card.

Finding that rare Darryl Strawberry card was one of the best moments of my childhood, but there’s another memory I return to often: It was the final day of middle school and we were going around getting classmates to sign our yearbooks. One cool kid, instead of writing the requisite “Have a great summer!”, mocked my well-known hobby by Sharpie-ing into my yearbook: “Trade you my Ken Griffey card for your Barry Bonds.”

Ironically, that cool kid now owns a bar that opened last fall. Over Facebook, he invited me to check it out, surely hoping to get some press. It seems like a nice enough place, but I can’t imagine taking him up on his offer. I’ve already ticked his entire beer list.

Upon landing at St. Louis’ Lambert International Airport, I immediately had my Uber take me to an old Coca-Cola syrup plant in the sleepy Carondelet neighborhood. Nowadays, the 14,000-square foot facility is home to Perennial Artisan Ales, a terrific brewery that first opened in 2011. But I wasn’t there for them.

“Is Cory here?” I asked a Perennial employee hosing down the floor. I didn’t need to offer a last name before being led through the warehouse and into one dark corner where a burly man with an orange beard sat in a small fork-lift, moving barrels around.

That man is Cory King, founder, owner, brewmaster, fork-lift driver, impromptu tour guide and everything else for Side Project Brewing, his one-man show that leases a 1,000-square-foot portion of Perennial’s space. (King was formerly brewmaster for Perennial and still serves as a consultant).

King primarily makes barrel-aged saisons and wild ales like Fuzzy, his famous blonde ale inoculated with spontaneously-captured yeast and bacteria as well as his house wild yeast blend. It’s then aged in chardonnay barrels alongside white peaches from King’s family farm. Around a thousand bottles of it are produced every few years, inciting an epic outpouring of beer geeks on release day.

Side Project’s miniscule size is surely one of its biggest assets. As King notes, “less overhead, less responsibilities” allows him to focus on just one thing: fully pursuing his vision for what great beer should be. Luckily, the way he defines great beer is similar to how many beer connoisseurs and tastemakers also define it, and Side Project has quickly become one of the most acclaimed breweries amongst the cognoscenti.

It’s somewhat self-evident that letting a massively talented man pursue his vision unencumbered would lead to greatness, but I was actually in St. Louis because I had been wondering whether the opposite also held true.

An hour after I left Side Project I was six miles north in St. Louis’ historic Soulard neighborhood. There, my black SUV drove through the security gate and onto the 189-building, 118.6-acre “campus” of Anheuser-Busch. The sheer size of it is impressive, though it’s hardly the soulless factory you might imagine. There are handsome sculptures (mainly of bald eagles, natch), a stable for those iconic Clydesdales and Romanesque buildings made of a gorgeous red brick, some dating back to the brewery’s opening in 1852.

Many beer drinkers, even fervent beer geeks, have long subscribed to a truism that the big breweries could brew the finest in IPAs, imperial stouts—even wild ales like Fuzzy—if they truly felt like making them. That is, if the higher-ups in suits, sitting on the board of directors, weren’t worried about their 1.6 billion shareholders, or the fact that a double IPA would surely cost more to make and ultimately not sell as well as the light, corn- and rice-packed lagers that bring in zillions in yearly revenue (AB InBev’s market cap currently sits around $200 billion).

Great beer is bold, it’s risky, and it’s usually challenging. It takes drinkers places they’ve never been before—it’s not just a facsimile of something that has already been proven “great.”

To a certain extent, it seems feasible. Macro-breweries—and I don’t use that word pejoratively—like Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors, even Heineken own the finest equipment in existence. They have access to top grains and hops from around the world, and many of them even own the actual fields from which these ingredients are sourced. Most importantly, they have some of the highest-skilled and well-educated brewers in the business.

One of these brewers is Anheuser-Busch’s Rob Naylor. Baby-faced, clean-shaven and always wearing the requisite piece or two of AB-branded clothing, he looks more the “company man” than classic hirsute craft brewer. About as well educated as one can be in brewing—with degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering, among other qualifications—he’s been with Anheuser-Busch since 2002 working in various brewing capacities in both St. Louis and a satellite brewery in California. He now serves as brewmaster of AB’s Research Pilot Brewery (RPB).

The space, which first opened in 1981, actually doesn’t look much different than a craft microbrewery like Perennial—just an ordinary 15-barrel brewhouse with a few small tanks and fermenters. (If anything, the Anheuser-Busch gift shop seems bigger than the RPB.) Here Naylor and seven full-time employees innovate for the brand, conceiving the beers that may one day be the next, say, Lime-a-Rita or, in theory, some avant-garde wild ale. Last year, the team brewed nearly 400 different beers.

“The resources I have here? We’ve brewed literally everything you can think of,” Naylor tells me, chuckling. “Sometimes it’s even difficult to come up with something new we haven’t tried here—you name it, we’ve brewed it.”

That night over dinner, Naylor shared some of his team’s recent creations. The bottles have quotidian labels, computer printouts that merely list the batch number, ABV, bottling date and basic name of each beer: American Pale Ale, Single Hop – Mosaic, Cranberry Sour, Mesquite Rauchbier, Smoked Chipotle English Ale.

Add some goofy names and put them in slickly designed 16-ounce cans, and these beers wouldn’t seem much different from the offerings you’d find from an of-the-moment craft brewery. The beers are good—no world-beaters, but I’m particularly fond of the Single Hop – Mosaic; it’s flawlessly executed, almost as good as a similar offering making Brooklyn beer geeks go crazy at the moment.

But it, and the rest of the beers we tasted, will likely never hit the market. In fact, I may be one of the few non-AB employees to ever try them. When I wonder why, Naylor reinforces the idea that the RPB is more about testing things out for corporate than trying to nail an obscure hit that might not appeal to average drinkers.

“We’re trying to brew what consumers want. We can’t just hit that 0.1 percent of the population,” says Naylor, presumably referencing beer drinkers like me.

The next day I had lunch at the campus’ public “biergarten” with Jill Vaughn, a friendly, elegant woman who is currently AB’s Brewmaster for Innovations. When I first talked to Vaughn several years ago she was working on a series of food-based beers, looking to design one inspired by the offbeat cuisine of St. Louis. Attempts at a cream cheese-infused gooey butter cake beer and a toasted ravioli ale (seriously) had been flops, but we sipped on one that had become a real success story.

Shock Top Twisted Pretzel Wheat was designed to taste like (and indeed it does) the great pretzels made just across the street from the brewery. It’s a cool beer, something you could easily imagine Dogfish Head or The Bruery attempting. Nevertheless, though it sells well as a winter seasonal offering, it’s not something that excites beer geeks, currently logging a mediocre 79 percent score on BeerAdvocate. Which raises another point: Even if Big Beer could make great beer, would anyone admit it?

“When we buy wine, we don’t just buy it for taste—we buy it because we like to think that it tells us a story about ourselves,” wrote Jennifer Fiedler in a recent article on PUNCH. It is, as she writes, “consumer theory 101.” The same notion applies to beer. Just as “anti-establishment wine—bottles made by disruptors, the rock ‘n roll, red-pill-in-the-Matrix wines—tells us that we’re smarter than the rest of the consumers who get suckered by flashy scores and faux chateaux,” the disruptive, alternative narrative around craft beer is essential to its allure amongst beer geeks. Thus, these particular consumers are naturally inclined to pooh-pooh Big Beer and its attempts to play the craft game.

Yet while AB approaches experimental beers mainly as a way of figuring out the craft trends they can translate to more commercial offerings, another corporate behemoth is actually trying to reach Naylor’s aforementioned 0.1 percent of beer drinkers.

Tucked within literally the largest brewing facility in the entire world—Coors’ Golden, Colorado, headquarters—is AC Golden, a brand incubator tasked with finding the next products for the big brewery to release nationally. Launched in 2007, AC Golden found early success with some more by-the-book offerings, but co-founder and president Glenn Knippenberg also wanted to make a few, as he calls them, “credibility beers.”

“We had a real need to build credibility,” Knippenberg tells me. “So we started introducing beers we thought could win awards and get acclaim from craft beer drinkers.”

These offerings are part of what is called the Hidden Barrel Program, which isn’t even mentioned on AC Golden’s website. Unlike the beers brewed at the RPB, most AC Golden beers actually make it to the local marketplace.

I first became aware of these beers two summers ago while beer shopping near Coors Field. A store employee—noticing my interest in his state’s more obscure offerings—asked if I wanted to try “the best sour in Colorado,” presenting a $30 bottle of Hidden Barrel Kriek.

Its base beer is made with 100-percent Colorado ingredients, which are put into wine barrels that already have a well-established microflora within the wood. “We have some barrels we’ve used for seven to eight years. It’s kinda like a sherry solera program,” explains AC Golden head brewer Jeff Nickel, sounding a whole lot like Cory King discussing his beers.

That aforementioned microflora includes two strains of Lactobacillus, not to mention Pediococcus and Brettanomyces. The beer is aged for about a year in these barrels before going to a fermentation vessel where locally grown fruit—sour Montmorency cherries in the case of the Kriek—is added. After one to three more months, the beer is put into bottles and conditioned with Brett to add even more funkiness.

“Because of our ownership, some people are biased when they judge our products. We have to overcome that,” Knippenberg says. “Some close-minded people might prefer not to ever drink MillerCoors beers. But they aren’t drinking the ownership, they’re drinking the bottle. So many people tell me, ‘I really didn’t want to like this beer—but it’s magnificent.’”

He’s not just being blustery. AC Golden’s barrel-aged offerings are certainly closer to being “great”—most score in the high 80s on BeerAdvocate, while their Framboise Noir sports a 91. Still, though undoubtedly delicious, they are not quite in the class of, say, a New Belgium La Folie or Crooked Stave Nightmare on Brett. Those are two truly sublime Colorado-brewed sours, both of which push the envelope to places Big Beer—even very good Big Beer—seems afraid to fully go.

La Folie, for instance, is a brown ale that is foudre-aged for a whopping three years, giving it a prickly, almost pungent acidity. It’s also inconsistent in its flavor profile year-to-year, with new batches often tasting quite different from previous vintages. Some years I’ve loved La Folie, while other years I have found it bordering on unpleasant. But those are often the boundaries a brewer has to broach if he’s going to swing for the fences and strive for ultimate greatness.

Great beer is bold, it’s risky, and it’s usually challenging. It takes drinkers places they’ve never been before—it’s not just a facsimile of something that has already been proven “great.”

I also believe, just like with film’s auteur theory, that great beer needs to come from just one or two people making the creative decisions, not a committee. Maybe that’s why the brewers with ambitions to truly make world-class beer are usually doing it all by themselves. Guys like Shaun Hill at Hill Farmstead, Vinnie Cilurzo at Russian River, Troy Casey (who, incidentally, used to work at AC Golden) at Casey Brewing and Blending and, of course, Cory King.

Fuzzy is released when, and only when, it’s perfect to King, economics be damned. He brewed 400 barrels of beer in 2015, but only released around 200 of them. (Comparatively, the RPB brewed 3,800 barrels last year, while AC Golden brewed 11,000.)

Ultimately, though, success almost always leads to expansion. Even King is currently acquiring space to build his own brewery and is soon planning to hire his first employee. He remains cautious, though. “Hopefully we can still maintain what Side Project is and has become,” he says. “Just on a slightly larger scale.”

If only it was so easy.

Back in the early-2000s, when I was still in my nascent days as a beer geek, there was one brewery whose beers I yearned to try more than any other’s. California’s Russian River may have had a miniscule distribution footprint, but they were already receiving national acclaim for their uber-hopped IPAs and barrel-aged Belgian ales. But before the days of online trading and a flourishing secondary market, you basically had to fly to California to drink Pliny the Elder and Supplication. Without the loot to book a flight to the West Coast, I was mostly shit out of luck.

That remained true until 2006, when Colorado’s Avery Brewing—a larger brewery that distributes to New York—partnered with Russian River for what was being dubbed a “collaboration beer.” Collaboration Not Litigation Ale, my first chance to taste anything Russian River had a part in making, is now widely considered the collaboration beer that launched a thousand collaboration beers.

A decade later, it’s hard to find a brewery that hasn’t released one. Every March, Denver hosts a Collaboration Fest with hundreds of participating breweries. For big breweries like Avery or Sierra Nevada, collaborations are a chance to show they still have one foot in with the little guys—like an A-list movie star “slumming it” for scale on an indie film. The reverse also holds true: A small brewery can be elevated into the national consciousness after collaboration with one of America’s big boys.

In recent years, collaborations haven’t even necessarily been between breweries. Brewers have teamed up with cideries and meaderies, famous chefs, rock bands, sports teams, clothiers—even TV shows, in the case of Ommegang’s Game of Thrones series (though I’m guessing George R.R. Martin doesn’t show up at the Cooperstown brewery on brew day). Last year First We Feast produced a series in which Dogfish Head’s Sam Calagione brews beers with off-beat collaborators like rapper Mac Miller and NBA hoopster Chris Bosh. Hill Farmstead, perhaps America’s best brewery, even has a subsidiary brewery—Grassroots—specifically set up for the task of collaborating.

Yet if you follow many of these aforementioned breweries on social media, “collaboration days” often look more like an excuse for brewers to visit fellow brewing friends, spend all day drinking, then write off the little vacation as a work expense (while selling the brewed results to suckers like me).

Even if it’s mostly about shooting the shit, you’d think getting two talented brewers together would have all the potential to produce a great beer. Unfortunately, too often the beers created are uninspired, standard styles with by-the-book execution. I suppose this isn’t a surprise—why would a brewery waste a great idea on a shared one-time project?

But there are exceptions. Of the countless collaboration beers to hit the market, there are those few that have indeed been greater than the sum of their parts. Below, some of the collaborations that have defined craft brewing history and the best recent examples of the trend.

Collaboration Not Litigation Ale (2006)
Russian River Brewing (Santa Rosa, CA) and Avery Brewing (Boulder, CO)

Generally identified as craft brewing’s first collaboration beer, the joint effort arose through an unfortunate coincidence: Russian River and Avery discovered that they each had beers called Salvation. But instead of one of them relinquishing naming rights, they decided to blend, respectively, their Belgian strong dark ale and golden ale into something palatable. They obviously liked the result; since 2006, Collaboration Not Litigation has been produced regularly by Avery and released nationally.

Isabelle Proximus (2008)
Allagash Brewing (Portland, ME), Avery Brewing (Boulder, Co), Dogfish Head Brewery (Milton, DE), The Lost Abbey/Port Brewing (San Marcos, CA) and Russian River Brewing (Santa Rosa, CA)

One of the few masterpieces in collaboration history started with a group trip. In 2006, Dogfish Head’s Sam Calagione was researching his book Extreme Brewing and wanted some brewing buddies to join him in Belgium, where he planned visits to famed lambic producers Cantillon and Drie Fonteinen—breweries that, at the time, didn’t quite have the cult following they do today. Inspired by their classic Pajottenland offerings, the group (who were cheekily referring to themselves as the “Brett Pack”) decided to brew an homage to lambic upon returning home. Utilizing barrels and house sour cultures from each participating brewery, they blended together 17 different barrels for their 2008 release of 3,000 bottles. It was a massive hit, and still stands as one of craft beer’s all-time whales. Rumors continually abound that a sequel is in the works.

Infinium (2010)
Boston Beer Co./Samuel Adams (Jamaica Plain, MA) and Weihenstephan (Germany)

Sam Adams might not be the first name that comes to mind when thinking of an American upstart capable of disrupting Germany’s staid brewing industry. But in 2010, one of American beer’s true pioneers partnered with literally the world’s oldest brewery in Weihenstephan (first opened in 1040). Though the resultant beer followed Germany’s stodgy Reinheitsgebot purity law—in which only hops, malts, yeast and water may be used—a new type of beer was created, one never before brewed in Germany. While it’s undeniably one of the most important beer collaborations of all time, the Champagne-like offering—the obscure style is called “Bière de Champagne”—was pilloried by many beer drinkers (unfairly so, in my opinion).

Brooklyn Brewery’s European Collaborations (multiple)
Brooklyn Brewery (Brooklyn, NY), G. Schneider & Sohn (Germany), Amarcord (Italy) and Carlsberg (Sweden/Norway)

Even more so than Sam Adams, Brooklyn Brewery has aspired to introduce Europe to American craft beer via collaboration. In the mid-aughts, they teamed with Germany’s famed Schneider for a stellar series of weizenbocks. A couple years later, brewmaster Garrett Oliver assisted a small Italian brewery, Amarcord, in producing a table beer using Sicilian orange blossom honey and water from springs that, “date to Roman times.” Biggest of all is Brooklyn’s ongoing collaboration with the Carlsberg Group, which has helped set up American-style craft breweries, not just beers, in Sweden and Norway.

Class of ’88 (2013)
Deschutes Brewery (Bend, OR), Goose Island Beer Co. (Chicago, IL), Great Lakes Brewing (Cleveland, OH), North Coast Brewing (Fort Bragg, CA) and Rogue Ales (Newport, OR)

Fifty-five microbreweries hung their shingles in 1988, right as the industry was about to begin its climb to prominence. Only 12 of those 55 remained 25 years later, five of them—Deschutes, Goose Island, Great Lakes, North Coast and Rogue—among the breweries that define the industry today. In 2013, Deschutes decided to celebrate their fellow classmates by brewing a beer with each of them. From a barleywine with North Coast to a golden ale with Goose Island (now owned by InBev), this series proved that the esprit de corps the American craft beer movement was initially built on still persisted—even if these five breweries were now 100 million dollar companies.

The Stone Collaborations (multiple)
Stone Brewing (Escondido, CA) and various other breweries, homebrewers and minor celebrities

If there’s one brewery you wouldn’t expect to collaborate with the little guy, Stone might top that list. One of the ten biggest craft breweries in America, they’ve long promoted themselves with massive bravado—their marketing materials dotted with slogans like “You’re not worthy” and “Arrogance is good.” Which makes it almost hard to believe that Stone boasts the brewing industry’s largest commitment to collaboration beers, with dozens released every year. While these collaboration are mostly humble partnerships with small breweries you might not have heard of (Monkey Paw) and talented homebrewers you certainly haven’t (Juli Goldenberg), the results are almost always more adventurous—and often better—than Stone’s regular offerings. A popular, now-yearly release, w00tstout, is brewed with celebrity homebrewers like Wil Wheaton and Aisha Tyler.

Beer Camp Across America (2014 and 2016)
Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. (Chico, CA) and countless others

One of the most intriguing collaborations ever—and it’s still ongoing—has been between Sierra Nevada and, well, pretty much every brewery in the country. In 2014, Chico’s pioneering brewery teamed up with a dozen different American brewers to produce 12 beers for a boxed mix-pack. Sierra Nevada decided to up the ante in 2016, partnering with 30 more breweries. For many Americans in far-flung places, these well-priced, readily available box sets have provided an opportunity to try offerings from small-timers like Wicked Weed (North Carolina), Trillium (Massachusetts) and Funky Buddha (Florida).

Wild Friendship Beer (2015)
Brasserie Cantillon (Belgium), Allagash Brewing (Portland, ME) and Russian River Brewing (Santa Rosa, CA)

Cantillon’s beers are so coveted they hardly need the buzz a collaboration provides. But the famed Belgian lambic maker’s beers are in high demand precisely because of America’s immense love affair with them. Thus, perhaps as a show of thanks, Cantillon teamed up with the two American breweries making the closest thing to a stateside lambic. (Like Champagne, lambic is a location-based term, long thought to be a style impossible to replicate anywhere else until breweries like Allagash and Russian River proved that theory wrong.) Each brewery contributed a portion of their own spontaneously fermented beers for two ballyhooed blends.

Green Street/Street Green (2015)
Other Half Brewing (Brooklyn, NY) and Trillium Brewing (Boston, MA)

Anticipation flooded the message boards when Instagrammers noticed Other Half was brewing at Trillium. The brewers jokingly labeled the beer an “Obvious Pale Ale”—as there was obviously only one style these famed hoppy beer-makers would even want to produce. Green Street, released first, was a super juicy, New England-style IPA. The second version, Street Green—which was brewed at Other Half in Brooklyn—was released to a line of beer geeks that stretched around several Carroll Gardens blocks. For what it’s worth, Other Half truly seems to work well as a “better half,” as their collaborations with Tired Hands and Bunker have also produced fantastic beers.

Leaner (2016)
Casey Brewing & Blending (Glenwood Springs, CO) and Side Project Brewing (St. Louis, MO)

Rarely has a collaboration become an “insta-whale,” as the nerds say, but when two of America’s best small-scale, barrel-aged sour makers teamed up, it was almost predestined. Brewed last summer and released in early January, Leaner is a boozed-up version of Casey’s house saison, fermented with both breweries’ wild yeast cultures and then aged with Colorado peaches. Beer drinkers have already crowded the ISO/FT message boards, looking to land a bottle of what could end up being one of the top beers of 2016. (A Side Project-based version of Leaner is set to come out later this year.)

“I could go fly an airplane!” Steven Soderbergh shouts at the end of our first night drinking together. We’d been at it steadily for four hours straight, a group of us having bar-crawled Brooklyn. And that’s kind of the joke—Soderbergh truly believes the product he’s hawking, Singani 63, has different intoxication effects from every other liquor out there.

“It only affects you from here…” he told me at the start of the night, putting a flat hand up to his eyebrows like a soldier preparing to salute—“…to here”—then raising it to the top of his head. “It never makes you slur or stumble or anything.”

Writers are always leery when a celebrity endorses a new spirit. Does the world really need another rapper-endorsed vodka or actor-backed tequila? Celebrities like Diddy and Clooney are rarely booze aficionados, yet they’re always so certain their stuff is the best. But Soderbergh doesn’t claim to be any sort of beverage geek; he’s just a passionate drinker.

The second time, we meet under quieter circumstances. Soderbergh, clad in a black hat and peacoat, arrives on time to The Roxy Hotel without an assistant, and he’s almost insulted that I’m surprised he’s traveling solo. He promptly orders himself a Singani Mule, and I ask him if he’s read the recent New York Times interview between Quentin Tarantino and Bret Easton Ellis where Tarantino notes he probably shouldn’t drink during interviews. (He had not.)

Soderbergh—the famed director of everything from Erin Brockovich to Magic Mike—grew up in Louisiana when the drinking age was still 18. (The “63” on the bottle references his birth year.) He spent a lot of his early years in Baton Rouge at The Bayou, the same bar used in his first film, Sex, Lies, and Videotape. “It was a great bar—a dive, but great. And I was there a lot.” It burned down in 2002.

Soderbergh skipped college, which means he also skipped those years of drinking cheap keg beer. “I went through a Wild Turkey phase that went away when I drank so much of it one night and got so violently ill that, if now I even smell it, I have a physical…” he trails off. He has a similar relationship with tequila. He was a Gin and Tonic drinker in his late-teens (“I don’t know what I was thinking”); from there, he went to dirty Martinis before settling on vodka on the rocks—going from Stoli to Grey Goose to, finally, Ketel One.

“I really thought… That’s kinda it. I just need the hard stuff to get me into the end zone,” he says—the “end zone” being his colloquialism for getting drunk.

Soderbergh’s drinking life changed dramatically when he headed down to Bolivia in 2007 to shoot his epic Che. His local casting director welcome-gifted him a bottle of something called singani, the national spirit. He quickly became obsessed with the grape-based distillate, asking the man to get him enough to last through the entirety of the shoot. Nights in Bolivia were thus spent holed up in his hotel room drinking singani as he edited dailies. By the end of the shoot, he was determined to export the product to America.

GUSTU, Singani & La Paz's Booming Drinks Scene

La Paz, Bolivia, is experiencing a drinks renaissance, from a high-profile bar established by a Noma co-founder to the recent discovery by foreigners of singani, the region's unique local spirit. Mark Johanson on why it's time to pay attention to this city in upper reaches of the Andean valley.

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“There will come a point where I won’t be able to do everything with Singani I’m currently doing now,” he tells me, and he’s being serious. He claims to spend entire days on the booze beat, handling everything from haggling with government agencies like the TTB (Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau) to finding importers and distributors to even writing much of the marketing copy. Of course, he also has the ability to hit up Hollywood buddies for an easy product placement or two.

Singani 63 appeared appeared most recently in the TV show Billions and the film Gone Girl, as Ben Affleck’s crisis companion. “I’d really love to have some bad guy crack a bottle of it and then slice a guy’s throat! Pull in on the bottle: Singani.” He uses his hands to mime a blood-soaked Singani label appearing on screen.

I bring up how drinking scenes in movies always feel phony—the bars overly lit and never nearly as noisy as they truly are. But there are notable exceptions, we both agree, like the famous bar scene from his Out of Sight, where bank robber George Clooney seduces the U.S. Marshal (played by Jennifer Lopez) pursuing him. “You can tell they are really drinkers,” he says. He likewise admires David Fincher’s directing of the club scene in The Social Network. “That was so amazing of him, to just keep in all the background noise,” he says. “You can barely hear Justin Timberlake.”

While he used to spend his days with the Damons and Pitts of the world, his foray into the booze business has found him hanging with a whole new type of celebrity. He’s now friendly with many of the country’s famous bartenders, like Ivy Mix and Jim Meehan, and is well versed in the city’s cocktail culture (just three weeks before, he’d attended the friends and family opening of Seaborne, Sasha Petraske’s final bar). But he admits that he still prefers being a regular at a few favored spots in his Tribeca neighborhood, like Brandy Library.

“When I find places I really like, I get very entrenched,” he tells me, noting how he’s a real creature of habit. “I’d be the easiest person in the world to assassinate,” he jokes, as we spin through the hotel’s revolving doors, and head back into the Manhattan winter.

Frank Zappa once claimed that you can’t call yourself a real country unless you have your own beer. Today, it’s hard to think of any country that doesn’t have a singular offering dominating local barrooms, billboards and television commercials.

Have you heard of Snow? It’s literally the best-selling beer in the world, and it’s only sold within China, usually in liter form. Or how about Baltika #3, a Russian lager that comes in plastic bottles à la Mountain Dew. There is Toña in Nicaragua, Mythos in Greece, Kalik in the Bahamas—even teeny tiny Monaco has its own beer, fittingly called Pils de Monaco.

Of course, in many cases this nationalistic beer fame is based more on what’s on the bottle than in it. These beers sport labels with iconography or typography that is now indelible—the silkscreened Blackletter font of Corona, Imperial’s emblematic eagle, Singha’s royal Garuda—so recognizable they’ve become powerful symbols of national identity, not to mention a source of outsider nostalgia. How many times have you heard a friend come back from Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic, eager to share a story about pounding Medalla or Presidente all week long? That’s why they are mementos in and of themselves—fond reminders of both a certain time in your life and an aspirational wanderlust for a place you’d rather be.

The great irony is that, nowadays, most of these “local” beers are seemingly indistinguishable offerings owned by the likes of AB InBev, SABMiller, Diageo and Heineken; you could easily dismiss them as “Bud in different bottles.” They’re generally all corn- and rice-packed lagers brewed to be as inoffensive as possible, not to mention highly drinkable, mainly thanks to their meager ABVs. These are light beers essentially designed as local bastardizations of classic German and Czech pilsners—often a result of those countries’ immigrants having spread across the world in the last century.

But I couldn’t help but wonder: Did each of these national beers have a truly local character before they were bought up by the multinationals? And how exactly did they first come to be?

Skol (Brazil)
Slogan: “A cerveja que desce redondo” (The beer that goes down round)

Started in 1959 in Great Britain (where a 2.8 percent ABV version of the lager remains popular), a series of brewery mergers soon led to Skol landing in Allied Breweries’ Canadian, Belgian and Swedish-owned hands. (The name Skol was derived from the Scandinavian toast “skål.”) Soon after, the company began brewing the beer in several European countries, as well as Africa and Brazil. An immediate hit in Brazil, Skol was snapped up in 1980 by its main Brazilian rival, Brahma, which then merged with Antarctica in 2000 to form AmBev, which then merged with Belgium’s Interbrew in 2004 to become AB InBev. Improbably, this well-traveled lager is now the most popular beer in Brazil and is most closely identified with that country, despite the fact it is still brewed the world over.

Quilmes (Argentina)
Slogan: “El sabor del encuentro” (The flavor of getting together)

With packaging that resembles the country’s tri-band flag, Quilmes, too, serves as a national symbol. But Quilmes was actually started by a German immigrant, Otto Bemberg, who, in 1890, began brewing the beers of his homeland, Quilmes, a city within the province of Buenos Aires. But in 1953, during a period of strong anti-Semitism, former Argentinian president Juan Perón seized Quilmes and ran the Bembergs out of Argentina. The brewery was eventually returned to the Bembergs, and their German-style offering now accounts for an astonishing 75 percent of the country’s market share. Quilmes’ brewery Cervecería y Maltería Quilmes is currently owned by a Luxembourg-based holding company that is controlled by AmBev (InBev’s Brazilian subsidiary).

Presidente (Dominican Republic)
Slogan: “The true taste of the Caribbean”

There’s surely no other national beer named in honor of its country’s most ruthless dictator. First released in 1935 courtesy of Cervecería Nacional Dominicana (which was sold to a local cigar company in the 1980s and then AmBev just a few years back), this pale pilsner honors Rafael “El Jefe” Trujillo. The original incarnation of Presidente, put forth by an opportunistic American industrialist named Charles H. Wanzer, was actually a dark German-style schwarzbier. Unfortunately, that beer was too “heavy” for local tastes and didn’t sell very well. Following Trujillo’s assassination in 1961, Presidente became the light beer we know today.

Imperial (Costa Rica)
Slogan: “La cerveza de Costa Rica”

“Imperial” typically means big and bold—often double or triple the strength and flavor of a standard beer—but not here. This light lager’s name actually refers to the iconic imperial eagle of the Roman Empire that adorns bottles, cans and countless billboards throughout the country (the beer is colloquially known as “Aguilita”—or “Little Eagle”). The beer has been manufactured since 1924 by the oddly named Florida Ice and Farm Company—a public Costa Rican food and beverage company—whose Ortega Brewery was aiming to make a German-like offering for the isthmus nation.

Corona Extra (Mexico)
Slogan: “La cerveza mas fina” (The most refined beer)

Mexico is fervently devoted to pale lagers: Sol, Tecate, Pacífico, Modelo, Dos Equis and, of course, the most iconic vacation beer of them all, Corona. This fizzy pilsner first appeared in 1925 courtesy of the country’s Grupo Modelo, long the biggest brewery in Mexico. From the beginning the beer was packaged in clear longnecks, but nonetheless became an immediate hit despite its high propensity for “skunking.” First imported to the U.S. in the late 1970s, “Corona-mania” became a thing in the ’80s. The brand is now America’s best-selling foreign import and a staple of male tank top-wearers. Acquired fully by AB InBev in 2012, Grupo Modelo is owned by Constellation Brands in America due to anti-trust legislation. In fact, pretty much any Mexican beer you’d ever find yourself drinking is owned by InBev and Heineken.

Red Stripe (Jamaica)
Slogan: “Hooray beer!”

Those popular commercials are so damn gimmicky, it’s hard to believe Red Stripe is anything but faux-Jamaican. Indeed, a recent lawsuit was filed in U.S. federal court alleging the brewery uses deceptive phrasing—the “Jamaican Style Lager” claims it contains the “taste of Jamaica” on every bottle—to cover-up the fact that stateside Stripes come from a brewery in Pennsylvania. Amazingly, though, at one time Red Stripe really was a Jamaican beer—sort of. Desnoes & Geddes (D&G) was incorporated in Jamaica in 1918 as company that manufactured soft drinks, among other products. In 1928, one of the founder’s sons, Paul Geddes, decided to move to Chicago to learn how to brew, and by 1938 his Kingston-based Surrey Brewery was producing Red Stripe lager. Diageo purchased the brand in 1993, and Heineken acquired it in 2015.

Mahou Clásica (Spain)
Slogan: “The original taste”

Created by the offspring of a Frenchman, the unwieldily-named Hijos de Casimiro Mahou, Fábrica de Hielo y Cerveza (The Sons of Casimiro Mahou, Dedicated to the Production of Ice and Beer) opened in Madrid in 1890. They label their flagship beer a “National Standard” stylistically—it’s just a no-frills pale lager—and changed its name from Mahou to Mahou Clásica in 1993 as more brands were introduced. Mahou has long battled it out with Estrella Damm and Cruzcampo as the country’s best-selling beer—though the former has become more of an international success and the latter, a Heineken International product, mainly dominates within Andalusia. In 2000, Mahou acquired a Filipino brewery to form the Spanish-owned conglomerate Mahou-San Miguel. They now own a portion of one of America’s finest craft breweries: Founders Brewing in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Singha (Thailand)
Slogan: “The real Thai beer”

After doing extensive research into the operations behind German breweries, Boonrawd Srethabutra opened Boon Rawd Brewery, Thailand’s first, in 1929. By 1933, he was ready to release bottles of Singha to the public, each with an official depiction of the holy Garuda on the neck. That symbol is rarely issued, as it’s only granted to companies that have long been of service to the royal court—thus, in a way, Singha was royally blessed by King Rama VII. Compared with most of the other lagers mentioned here, Singha was for years a fairly flavorful six percent ABV offering. But, in 2007, the ABV was dropped to five percent, putting it in line with most every other country’s best-selling brew. The brewery still retains its Thai ownership, and even exported Singha is brewed in Thailand.

Mythos (Greece)
Slogan: “The most famous Hellenic beer”

This “authentic” Greek beer actually has its roots with a local importer of German beer. That original company, Henninger Hellas S.A., after decades of bringing in Deutschland’s finest fizzy lagers, finally decided to start producing their own. The Northern Greece Brewery introduced Mythos in 1997, hoping to create a genuine national product. The gambit worked, and Mythos quickly became the country’s most prominent beer. In fact, the brand’s rise was so meteoric that within ten years it was acquired by Denmark’s Carlsberg Group.

Medalla Light (Puerto Rico)
Slogan: “El sabor que nos mueve” (The flavor that moves us)

You’d think because Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, you’d find its beach bars full of classic American swill. They’re not; canned Medalla Light is the beer of choice here (and if you’re wondering if there’s a “heavy” version, there isn’t). Produced by one of only two breweries on the island, The Compañía Cervecera de Puerto Rico was founded in 1937 by Puerto Rican-born, Manhattan-raised industrialist brothers. The brewery’s second most successful product, Malta India, is a non-alcoholic barley soda. The company remains privately held.

Peroni Nastro Azzurro (Italy)
Slogan: “Birra superiore d’Italia” (The top beer of Italy)

While its ubiquity in American pizza parlors might raise a few red flags, Peroni actually has a legitimate Italian heritage. Founded by the Peroni family in 1846, the company has been operating in Rome since 1864—six years before that city had even become the capital. Their most famous offering, “Nastro Azzuro”—a salute to a blue ribbon-winning Italian ocean liner that had once crossed the Atlantic fastest than any other ship—wasn’t released until 1963. The refreshing lager, which uses locally-grown corn, is not just Italy’s best-selling beer, but is sold the world over, owing to SABMiller taking control of the brand in 2003.

Carib (Trinidad & Tobago and other Caribbean countries)
Slogan: “Real beer is Carib”

Somehow, Carib has become the beer of ubiquity when you’re in any country where the term “all-inclusive” is guaranteed to come before any meal. A British man, Sir Gerald Wight, established the Caribbean Development Company Limited in Trinidad & Tobago in 1947; today, it remains the only brewer on the entire island. The company has owned satellite breweries on Saint Kitts and Nevis and Grenada since then, further explaining the beer’s island-life omnipresence. Amazingly, even though CDC produces both Heineken and Smirnoff Ice under licenses, the brewery itself is not owned by a foreign conglomerate, but a local Trinidadian company.

Kalik (Bahamas)
Slogan: “Beer of the Bahamas”

You’re relaxing at a resort on Paradise Island, eating some conch fritters and sipping a Kalik. Life is good. But just as Paradise Island itself is artifice—it was actually called Hog Island until luxury resorts starting popping up there in the 1960s—Kalik is hardly a traditional, homespun product, either. Named after the sound a cowbell makes, Kalik emerged in 1988 after Heineken International set out to create a light lager that mimics the “mellowness” of the country’s people.

The first weekend in February brought thousands of beer fans to Boston’s Seaport World Trade Center for the annual Extreme Beer Fest (EBF), “the ultimate throwdown of craft beer creativity.” Despite the presence of such ballyhooed breweries as Florida’s Funky Buddha and California’s The Rare Barrel, when the gates opened, the vast majority of folks stormed for booth #28 in the back corner. There they found Tree House Brewing Company serving the first-ever pours of Give Me Truth, an imperial stout aged for nearly two years in Buffalo Trace bourbon barrels. Despite the fact that each festival-goer was given a mere two ounces in a plastic cup, by Monday morning the beer had been reviewed on Untappd over 600 times, clocking in with a glossy 4.6 (out of 5) rating.

While wine ratings are now seen, at least by the cognoscenti, as the metric of the mainstream, beer ratings have long been a measure of geek appeal. Perhaps that’s because they are generally user-generated and, thus, sourced from the geeks themselves. Or perhaps it’s because, at this point in beer culture’s development, it’s pretty much the only option: There really aren’t professional beer critics (more on that in a bit), which means that if you’re looking to find out whether a beer is considered “great” or not, your best option is to check how it’s currently scoring on a rating platform like Untappd or BeerAdvocate.

“Even though a thousand people might say a beer is ‘meh,’ I might like it. And vice versa,” notes Todd Alström of BeerAdvocate, the website he and his brother Jason started in 1996 (they are also the long-time hosts of EBF). “So, trying a beer for yourself is always the best method.”

That’s a funny bit of advice coming from a guy who has essentially built an empire based on other people’s beer ratings. BeerAdvocate’s user-generated scores are often cited as gospel amongst American beer drinkers. BA shelf talkers grace displays in countless stores, and the site’s ever-changing Top 250 Beers list has pretty much become a cheat sheet for what beer geeks are rabidly pursuing at the moment. I’ve spent well over a decade consulting these ratings to inform which beers I should seek out—and which I should avoid.

But why do drinkers like me care so much about these ratings—especially when we have no idea who is really doing the rating?

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The weekend before EBF, RateBeer—BeerAdvocate’s chief online ratings rival—held their first-ever awards banquet. At the ceremony, medals were presented in such categories as Top New Brewers, Best Beers in the World and Top Reviewers of 2015. Amateur users reviewed nearly one million beers on RateBeer in 2015; this year’s top reviewer was someone named “fonefan” who had logged an astonishing 4,785 of them.

“I love beer with a passion and beleive [sic] there is no such thing as a bad beer, so if you like it, drink it and don’t let someone elses [sic] opinion keep you from trying something new,” he writes on his RateBeer user page.

Fonefan is actually Jan Bolvig, a 55-year-old Danish business owner who enjoys frequenting beer festivals and tasting events. At each, he typically sips a couple ounces of countless new beers, then meticulously records his tasting notes to later enter on RateBeer’s website. He has reviewed over 40,000 beers since he first joined the site in 2006. (Yes, he’s a ticker par excellence.) Fonefan’s reviews are downright thorough 200-word dispatches that touch on each beer’s color, aroma, body, texture and, of course, flavor. These reviews aren’t exactly poetic (“Body is medium, texture is oily to watery, carbonation is soft”), but they do give fellow users a bare-bones account of what they might want to know.

RateBeer’s executive director Joe Tucker thinks people like Bolvig offer ratings that are every bit as good as any professional’s. “The person whose opinion meant the very most in wine, Robert Parker Jr., would sit down to taste 400 wines in a single sitting,” Tucker told Hot Rum Cow in 2014, back when Bolvig was at a mere 30,000 reviews. “So when people say the quality of what our raters are producing isn’t good, I think it probably is pretty good. Or as good as what counts as the best possible opinion in the wine world.” This amounts to a pretty heavy dose of flawed logic: Quickly rate a ton of beer samples and you, too, can become the next Parker!

Robert Parker Jr. of The Wine Advocate, who is indeed the world’s most famous professional wine critic, popularized the 100-point scoring system that greatly influenced wine purchasing (and making, for that matter). But a new generation (and a growing chunk of the former) is maturing beyond this scoring system. In fact, many believe it misses the point of wine discourse altogether, treating bottles more like consumer appliances—which is fitting, considering Parker actually started The Wine Advocate in the late 1970s with the intention of it being nothing more than a consumer guidebook. If wine drinkers are outgrowing this particular shorthand of ratings, they now seem to care more about in-depth criticism.

As of yet, no user-generated app or ratings site has taken off in the wine world the way Untappd has amongst beer drinkers. Sure, there’s CellarTracker, with over 410,000 users, and Delectable, which is popular amongst an important portion of the wine crowd (including critics, sommeliers and winemakers, who are identified by name), but those ratings don’t carry the same weight in the wine world as, say, a BeerAdvocate or Untappd rating does in beer. The spirits world has a few crowd-sourced ratings systems of its own, most notably Distiller, but with 200,000 downloads it’s still minuscule compared to Untappd, which currently touts three million users and over 255 million beer check-ins.

“We hope that we take a big part in telling users if a beer is good both with overall ratings [and] with the social data of their friends,” explains Greg Avola, one of Untappd’s co-founders. “[Users] can look at both ratings from the community, but also segment them into ratings from just their friends.”

Of course, the beer world’s reliance on this insular, friendly world of user ratings inherently has its own problems, which have, of late, lead to a backlash amongst more seasoned drinkers.

The biggest problem is that limited releases generally tend to get rated better than more mainstream offerings. Tree House’s beers absolutely dominate the ratings websites, which is one reason why they’ve had such a meteoric rise to success. The same thing holds true for breweries like Decorah, Iowa’s Toppling Goliath and Greensboro Bend’s Hill Farmstead—small-town breweries making great beer, sure, but fairly limited beer as well. Those three breweries nevertheless account for a total of 40 beers on BeerAdvocate’s top 250, a number that seems unfathomable considering there are over 10,000 other breweries in the world. In clear cases like this, where it is so obvious that rarity is causing a bias, perhaps the beer world could better benefit from the maturity and seasoned palate of a professional critic.

“Why don’t major food publications have full time beer critics?” asked Almanac Beer’s co-owner Jesse Friedman last year in an op-ed for Eater. “An expert who can decode all of the complicated, jargon-laden beer-terminology to customers, and help imbibers sort good beer from bad.” When I asked John Holl, the editor-in-chief of All About Beer, about this at a recent beer festival, he was almost offended. As the editorial head of America’s longest-running beer magazine, he believes he has published plenty quality criticism from such industry luminaries as Charlie Papazian and Ray Daniels. He fondly recalls the days when the British writer Michael Jackson loomed so large, his criticism helping introduce the world to breweries like Dogfish Head and The Lost Abbey.

“He died in 2007, and the beer world has grown so rapidly since then, it’s almost tough to accurately remember where things were a decade ago,” Holl notes. “I think if he was still alive, he’d be a great force, and brewers around the world would be seeking his opinion, but he’d have the same problem that the rest of us do—keeping up with all the change and new brewery entrants.”

Professional beer criticism remains somewhat of a rarity, certainly on a mainstream scale. And I think that’s mainly because of the esprit de corps that American craft beer was initially built on and still prevails today. Craft beer attempts to portray itself as one happy family, with brewers drinking with bar owners drinking with writers. I personally count many brewers as actual friends. It’s not unethical; it’s life. But I also know many beer writers and would-be beer critics who have no interest in actually reviewing their friends’ work, for fear of angering them.

Don’t believe me? When Will Gordon, ostensibly a beer critic for sardonic sports website Deadspin, had the audacity to criticize the much-acclaimed Cantillon brewery last year, beer geeks went after him on social media, including Shaun Hill of Hill Farmstead, who tweeted that he was “annoyed by (the) beer ‘industry’ and the people that ‘work’ without really working at all.” (Gordon’s response to the haters was a pointed “I’m a fucking REVIEWER, man, not a cheerleader. Sometimes reviews are negative.”)

In order for professional critics to embed in beer culture, there first has to be a belief that real criticism, even if it doesn’t always favor you, moves the industry forward. But that kind of discourse might still be a ways away from mainstreaming. When I asked Alström, of BeerAdvocate, if beer needed more professional critics, he offered a swift and blunt, “Hell fucking no.”

I’m 37 years old. I go to bed most nights before ten and wake up most mornings around six. I live in a quiet brownstone in family-friendly Park Slope, Brooklyn. And, on a recent Thursday night, I had my pregnant wife duct-tape two bottles of Olde English 800 to each of my palms.

Subtract a decade and a half in age—and that pregnant wife—and you’ve got a solid portrait of a new millennium’s college drinking culture. The game is Edward Fortyhands, and UrbanDictionary.com’s top definition—composed by user “Dj Skeet” in 2006—is all you really need to know about playing it:

“When you tape a 40 [-ounce malt liquor] to each hand and can’t take them off until you are finishied [sic] drinking them.”

The earliest internet mention of Fortyhands actually came three years earlier from a fledgling blogger, DrunkCyclist, detailing the inherent problems with having 40-ounce bottles restricting the use of one’s hands for a good hour.

“You can’t piss, you can’t answer the phone. You can’t run game with the ladies. Or, maybe you can, I don’t know. Just as long as you’re drinking like a mother fucker. ’Cause a forty will get warm as a mother fucker if left unattended for to long. And you can imagine the pain when you got two of these big ass bastards stuck on ya like flypaper.” [sic]

CollegeHumor showed that the potential pratfalls could go even further than that. The site addressed Fortyhands a couple months after DrunkCyclist by posting the mere image of a ralphing man, bottles still sadly taped to his paws as he hugs his porcelain throne. CollegeHumor was the early-aughts Congressional Record on higher-education hijinks—and college is so obviously where this game must have started.

But which college, and when, exactly?

I reached out to Colin Joliat, perhaps America’s foremost expert on elbow-bending tomfoolery as the brains behind the website Boozist. His first exposure to Fortyhands was in late 2001 in the basement of the Theta Chi house at the University of Michigan. “I was initially nervous, given my possession of a petite bladder,” he tells me, “but that just encouraged me to drink faster, which is the goal after all.” Still, he’s pretty sure his college hadn’t originated the game.

About a week later, I stumbled upon a 2004 Harvard Crimson article telling of a student who was, at the time, hosting seniors-only Fortyhands games in his four-room suite. There’s a history of drinking games created by Ivy Leaguers (see: beer pong and Dartmouth); perhaps he was the inventor? I connected with him over LinkedIn—he’s now a successful doctor—and, though he was more than happy to talk, he insisted on keeping his anonymity.

“I don’t remember if it was specifically a hazing-type thing, but my first memory of playing it was around the beginning of sophomore year,” he told me. A member of Harvard’s rugby team, he believes they might very well have invented this great game right around the turn of the millennium. Though, in emailing with his former teammates and classmates this week, none of them think any one individual deserves full credit for Fortyhands’ invention.

“I’m guessing it was more like the group going, ‘Hey, we got all these 40s—and this is what we gotta do with them,'” he jokes.

Clearly, pinpointing the exact origins of Fortyhands is tricky. The true pioneers of drinking games are typically too busy toasting their own drunken genius to be bothered with historical documentation. We can, however, presume the game is not any older than Edward Scissorhands, Tim Burton’s 1990 gothic rom-com about a Frankenstein-esque weirdo (Johnny Depp) inexplicably designed with scissors for hands. My own nutty belief, though, is that Fortyhands actually sprung from Edward Penishands, the follow-up satire porn about a hard-luck dildo salesman who meets the titular character she’s certain will help jumpstart her flagging career. I like to imagine some bro watching a VHS copy of Penishands—and then having his greatest epiphany:

Hmmm… scissors for hands… penises for hands… forties for hands!

If that was the line of thinking, then it’s not surprising the game starts off lowbrow and silly—“Here, tape these Colt 45s to my hands!”— moves to dare devilish and hysterical—“Uh oh, I need to go to the bathroom, like, soon”—eventually becoming torturous,  then maybe even disastrous.

“One night of Edward Fortyhands may seem like a fun way to spend a few hours, but it can quickly spiral out of control and land your teen in the hospital—or the morgue,” writes Joseph A. Califano Jr. in his 2009 book How to Raise a Drug-Free Kid: The Straight Dope for Parents. Despite the former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare’s sensational claims, it’s hard to find any proof there’s ever been a Fortyhands fatality.

One thing’s for sure, though: By the mid-aughts, the game had become a countrywide phenomenon. In 2007, the New York Times reported that Judd Apatow’s repertory crew of Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, et al. enjoyed playing it in their spare time. FunnyorDie lampooned Fortyhands in 2010. A year later, in September of 2011, How I Met Your Mother tackled the game when an adult attempt at Fortyhands causes Marshall (Segel, again) to potentially ruin some job prospects. (That’s also when Google search traffic for the term peaked.)

It would be easy to say the game had jumped the shark once a CBS sitcom had addressed it, and yet, miraculously, it only gained momentum. There were soon spin-off versions like Edward Ciderhands—usually played with liter bottles of English “scrumpy”—and the less elegantly named Amy Winehands. Spencer’s even started selling “MugCuffs” in 2011, allowing drinkers to masochistically handcuff plastic steins to their wrists.

Speaking of masochism, I only got through half a right hand’s-worth of O.E. before I realized that I’m too old for this shit and had my wife un-tape me. Nevertheless, it confirmed my belief that as long as the world continues to produce cheap 40-ounce malt liquor, sturdy rolls of duct-tape and young adults with an insatiable urge to find the craziest way possible to get blitzed, Edward Fortyhands will remain eternal.

If “whales”—those ultra-rare, ultra-tasty beers—reside on top of the modern beer geek’s perceived quality spectrum, then “shelf turds” would sit at the other end. While whales can only be purchased after trekking to some brewery in the middle of nowhere, lining up overnight and swapping your kidney for a case, shelf turds are widely distributed offerings that can actually be found on store shelves—the kinds of beers that the most snobby of beer geeks wouldn’t deign to drink. But lack of availability does not always translate to quality, and vice versa. Some of the best brews in the world are currently sitting at your local Whole Foods.

This, it turns out, is particularly true of wheat beers, a category that is itself commonly dismissed by your classic beer snob. It’s the beer suburban dads sip on at “date night” at Applebee’s, or tank top-clad bros look to pound glass boots of at their local bierhaus. But it’s actually more than the sum of its more unfortunate fans.

I spent a few days this past winter in Munich, a city where it is nearly impossible to drink modern. There, great Bavarian breweries like Augustiner, Paulaner and Hofbräu make beers with literally the only four ingredients needed to make beer: water, hops, malt and yeast. Yet these seemingly simple beers exhibit such complexity, such precision, such flavor, that they are truly some of the most extraordinary offerings the world has ever seen. I had gone to Munich wanting to recalibrate my palate, to return to appreciating subtlety in brewing and to quit chasing the latest beer trends on my side of the pond. I’d fallen in far too deep with the brashness—and hype—of American beer today.

German wheat beers represent that counterpoint for me; they’ve been around so long, they’re already yesterday’s news—several centuries-worth of yesterdays, in fact. Still, a perfectly crafted German wheat beer is a transformative experience—an explosion of banana-y esters and sweet graininess, backed up by the balancing bite of hops and that hallmark yeastiness. There’s a reason Germans typically serve these beers in liter-sized steins—they are inherently designed to keep you drinking. And yet, ipso facto, that’s why they are considered mundane.

“Beginning with the extreme beer craze and a shift towards bolder, more aggressively flavored beers, modern beer geeks are always on the hunt for what’s new and crazy,” says Jeremy Danner, ambassador brewer for Boulevard Brewing Co. Nowadays, this long-time Kansas City brewery is busy delighting the geeks with extreme bottlings like Love Child, a boozy, oak-aged wild ale. Remarkably, though, they made their bones with a simple wheat beer. In fact, Boulevard Unfiltered Wheat, an early bellwether in the craft beer movement when it was first released in 1994, still accounts for around 50 percent of the company’s sales.

“We, as brewers, can’t really blame anyone but ourselves and certainly can’t fault beer geeks for that as it’s been something we’ve created and fostered,” says Danner of the push toward more bombastic styles of beer. “In doing so, we’ve made very approachable, drinkable beers somewhat less attractive to the vocal, whale-seeking minority.”

Case in point: Last week, The Boston Globe sent a self-proclaimed “beer snob” to Germany with the hopes he would finally get over his long-held notion that pilsners, dunkels and, yes, wheat beers are dull. He spent his whole time bemoaning the country’s lack of IPAs and calling the local beer “fine to drink after lawn mowing or during an all-day music festival, but it’s nothing close to an American craft beer.” I’m sure many American readers nodded their head in agreement, even if they’ve never fully explored Germany’s beer scene themselves.

That why I think it’s important to revisit what we’ve all neglected in the process of seeking the Next Great American Beer. What can be learned from beers like Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier or Schneider Aventinus, widely considered the best hefeweizen and weizenbock on planet Earth? Or, their new-age American counterparts, which offer a kaleidoscope of deviations, even if they aren’t always improvements on the genuine thing?

“We’re going to see growing interest in a return to more sessionable styles if we want craft beer’s market share to continue to grow,” says Danner, revealing that Unfiltered Wheat sales are actually starting to go up again. “Sure, it’s possible that we’re going to hook a few new folks with a crazy double IPA, but it’s far more likely we’re going to get new craft beer drinkers with approachable styles like wheat beers.”

Five Wheat Beers to Try

I’ve been a part of many epic beer tastings in my life, but I certainly have never devoted an entire afternoon to focusing on wheat beer. I’m guessing few people ever have.

We tasted a dozen iconic German wheat beers alongside American attempts at the classic styles. The panel examined everything from lower-ABV German hefeweizens and new-age American wheats up to the boozier dunkelweizens (darker wheats), weizenbocks (boozier wheats) and even one iconic eisbock (ice-brewed, super concentrated).

For the tasting, I was joined by PUNCH’s Editor in Chief, Talia Baiocchi; Contributing Editor, Megan Krigbaum; Managing Editor, Bianca Prum; Associate Editor, Lizzie Munro; Editorial Assistant, Chloe Frechette; and my buddy Michael Pomranz of Food & Wine magazine.

Out of 20 beers tasted, here are five standouts:

Andechser Weissbier Hell | 5.5 percent ABV
While Weihenstephaner—the world’s oldest brewery (since 1040!)—makes a more famous and archetypal hefeweizen, we preferred this offering from a Benedictine monastery. It was fizzier and brighter, with a little more complexity.

Sierra Nevada Kellerweis Hefeweizen | 4.8 percent ABV
Flavor-wise, we found this California hefeweizen equal to the best German offerings, but texturally, it was quite different—silkier, even oily. It was perhaps a tad more hop-forward than you’d expect from Bavaria, too, with a hint of mustard seed on the finish.

New Glarus Dancing Man Wheat | 7.2 percent ABV
This Wisconsin wheat was liquidized Bubblicious. Called a hefeweizen by the brewery, the ABV and intensely fruity esters are actually more befitting of a weizenbock. Talia was stunned that it wasn’t too “blowsy,” all things considered. Whatever the case, it was a sparkling outlier.

Schneider Weisse Tap 6 Unser Aventinus | 8.2 percent ABV
This is a real classic that still delivers every time, despite its acclaim. The standard of style for a double wheat, it was hard to find much fault with this one, even in the slight soy sauce note on the nose. And, at 8.2 percent ABV, it felt “light on its feet,” thought Megan, probably due to its soy-sauce tang and the higher pressure of its carbonation.

Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier Weizen | 5.2 percent ABV
The only smoked wheat beer we tasted—the final beer of the day, befitting its status as a potential palate-wrecker—this was a total surprise. It offered strong scents of smoked meat on the nose and a pleasant, biting finish to balance things out.

Breckenridge, Colorado’s annual Ullr Fest, a week-long celebration honoring the Norse god of winter, is intentionally goofy. There’s a viking-themed parade, a Christmas tree burning, a frying pan toss, even a polar plunge into nearby Maggie Pond. At the 2013 Fest, 192 adults lined 313 feet of Main Street holding 64 bolted-together skis adorned with three shot glasses apiece. After a megaphoned countdown, everyone lifted the skis, simultaneously took 192 shots of mint schnapps and broke a world record.

A “shotski,” as it’s called, involves several shot glasses placed equidistant apart across the deck of a discarded downhill ski, allowing several folks to concurrently down a shot. Shotskis are the sizzling fajitas of the barroom—you can’t help but notice when someone orders one. There’s the ceremony as the ski is pulled off the wall (when was the last time that thing was washed?), the anticipation as the bartender fills the glasses, the excitement as participants belly up.

During a 2013 episode of The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon claimed (jokingly, I think) that he and his wife invented the shotski, sending social media into a frenzy. He was wrong, several hundred Facebook users avowed. Everyone knew the real place of its birth:

“The miners in Park City, UT invented it nearly 100 years ago!”

“Not true the shot ski was around in the 50s and 60s at mount hood according to my mother who did the shot ski with friends then.” [sic]

“The first shot ski was in Sun Valley it was first done by Hemingway and his friends. The ski is still in the Sun Valley lodge.” [sic]

“According to my French ski instructor friend—it came from La Plagne (or nearby) in the Alps.”

“It was invented in Munich at the Oktoberfest in 1967 (I was there).”

I followed up on all of these rumors, searching for the truth. But none of this social media-driven hearsay ever checked out. Two rumors, though, stood out as more pervasive than any others.

The first was that the University of British Columbia ski team had originated the shotski. Clearly, college is the place where drinking shenanigans usually originate, so I reached out to Jack Hauen, coordinating editor of UBC’s student-run newspaper, The Ubyssey. But all he could tell me was, “I remember seeing one in someone’s basement or something, but that’s about it.” He did add that the university’s Ski & Board club does still like to party, and the shotski would definitely “fit with their vibe.”

“Shotskis are definitely a part of the après-ski and ski town lifestyle,” Grace Gabree, the marketing coordinator for Breckenridge Distillery, told me. It was her company that sponsored that record-breaking shotski. She speculated the earliest days of après-ski culture must have quickly lead to this silly mountain ritual.

Drinking and partying after a long day schussing, usually while still in your gear, was created by Europeans—with the first recorded use of the term “après-ski” appearing in French ski magazine La Revue du Ski in November of 1938. Ski historian Morten Lund, in the terrific 2007 article “Tea Dance to Disco: Après-Ski Through the Ages,” cited post-skiing revelry as first appearing in Norway in the mid-1800s, before spreading throughout the Alps by the turn of the century.

Of course, even if Norway did invent skiing and après-ski, there was one thing missing: the shot glass. The OED cites “shot-glass” as first being mentioned in 1955 (though it also appears in the New York Times in 1951), but they’d begun popping up as brand promotional items a few decades prior. Take après-ski and the shot glass and toss in the Alps’ hardest drinking nation, and voila: the likely birthplace of the shotski.

Ace Mackay-Smith notes in Mountain Life that, “In Austria, the shot-ski is traditionally known as a schnappski,” the portmanteau adding schnapps, the ubiquitous fruit brandies of that Alpine land, to the fray. “Austrian old timers didn’t bother with power tools or glue,” she explained. The classic schnappski method is to simply place the glasses atop a ski, and then rely on adept teamwork to get the ski (and schnapps) from table to face. “It’s riskier,” Mackay-Smith writes, “but skiing has always been about risk, just read the back of your lift ticket!”

Still, Mackay-Smith and other believers in the Austrian origin story had no real proof. I asked the only Austrian I know, Bernard Praschl, an occasional spirits journalist in Vienna, about the theory. A drinker of whiskey and rum, he’d never even heard of the sport (and gave me a look that said, “What are they teaching you in American schools?”) Whatever the case, even if Europeans started it, Americans figured out how to monetize it.

Dave Paulick is a partner in Shot-Ski, a Wisconsin outfit that was the first company to commercialize the shotski. He first encountered one at Big Powderhorn Mountain in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula: “It was a primitive version with glasses that were glued onto the ski.” Yearning to improve on the technology, in 2005, he started his company, offering a high-end apparatus with metal brackets and rubber grommets that held the glasses on.

Companies like his, Shotz Ski and InstantShotski—which allows customers to turn literally anything long and flat into one in under a minute—have helped the shotski find a place well beyond the slopes. Today, it’s primarily a staple of bro’d out binge-drinking joints, like America’s ersatz Hofbräuhaus franchises and, well, Hooters. But every now and again, the shotski pops up in the most unlikely of places, like a lakeshore (where shots are are often affixed to water skis, naturally) and, notably, on the set of Watch What Happens Live, where a shotski gifted to host Andy Cohen by Fallon has met the mouths of countless celebrities.

It’s high-brow and low-brow, for booze-hounds and drinking neophytes. So perhaps the question is no longer “Who invented the shotski?” but rather, “Why do I want to do one?” Or, as Martha Stewart asked Andy Cohen before hoisting one herself: “Where did they get the ski?” 

Just five years ago, no one would’ve predicted that the gose would go full Hollywood. In fact, until recently, the style was so obscure, so nearly extinct, that in 2011 it didn’t even merit an entry in Garrett Oliver’s encyclopedic, 960-page The Oxford Companion to Beer.

Created more than a millennium ago in the German town of Goslar, gose is a wheat ale brewed with salty water, spiked with Lactobacillus via open fermentation and seasoned with coriander. There’s a reason hardly anyone on planet Earth outside of Goslar and, later, Leipzig—the modern home of gose—drank this beer for the last thousand years. But then a weird thing happened.

In the late spring of 2012, South Carolina’s Westbrook Brewing Co. released a canned version of the style, sans the usual stateside flourishes. Tangy, low in alcohol and showing just a hint of coriander spice, it became a massive hit, setting in motion a trend that would lead to the release of dozens of American riffs on the style. Just like when Otto Hahn discovered nuclear fission, the Germans had inadvertently launched an arm’s race on U.S. soil.

Craft brewers love to celebrate their own ingenuity, but they follow trends just as much as the macrobreweries do. Thus, Westbrook Gose’s massive critical and financial success gave birth to plenty of imitators. But in many cases, these were goses in name only. Too often the trademark salinity and spice was lost in the shuffle, and the balance between sourness and that hazy softness so indicative of wheat beers was tipped too far in one direction or the other. Some, however, have found a way to pay homage to standard bearers like Leipziger and Original Ritterguts Gose, while still, in true American fashion, introducing positive tweaks to the style.

In order to get a feel for the current state of the gose craze, we blind-tasted 20 American attempts at the style. For the tasting, I was joined by PUNCH’s Editor in Chief, Talia Baiocchi; Associate Editor, Lizzie Munro; and Editorial Assistant, Chloe Frechette. The pendulum swung quite widely between offerings that stuck close to the German archetype (with a few notable flourishes) and others that were nearly unrecognizable departures. Here are the five that were both undeniably gose and undeniably American.

Five Goses to Try

Lost Nation Gose | 4.5 percent ABV
A no-frills, traditional offering from rural Vermont, this canned crusher rounded out the expected tartness, salinity and coriander spice with notes of candied citrus, white flowers and a notable yeastiness. “If you could make a beer version of Gewürztraminer,” said Lizzie, “this would be it.”

Stillwater Gose Gone Wild | 4.3 percent ABV
Stillwater’s Gose Gone Wild is Westbrook Gose pumped up with Citra and Amarillo hops and Brettanomyces. The fruity hops and wild yeast round the beer out, making for a less biting and herbal version of the Westbrook.

Grimm Super Going | 4.8 percent ABV
These Brooklyn gypsy brewers make a series of intriguing goses, but this is their finest effort. One of the few wood-aged goses around, lightly toasted white oak counters the aggressive tartness of the beer, while dry hopping with German Mandarina Bavaria and Huell Melon, alongside orange zest, lends tropical aromas and flavors, all amplified by a notable salinity.

Modern Times Fruitlands Apricot | 4.8 percent ABV
We tasted goses fruited with everything from cranberries to cherries to mangos to cactus (is that a fruit?), but this was the only one we truly loved. The San Diego brewery calls this a “fruit-filled asteroid of flavor,” and while it indeed delivered on flavor, it was the beer’s restraint that impressed us. The funk of dried apricots melded perfectly with its sour notes and generous kick of salt.

Lost Nation The Wind | 4.5 percent ABV
The brewery’s more Americanized take on gose was easily the best beer we tasted all day—in fact, it’s one of the best beers I’ve had so far this year. This limited-release, corked-and-caged offering is Lost Nation’s standard gose put into stainless steel casks for a week with fresh grapefruit and Citra hops. Bright, explosive notes of fresh hops and sweet grapefruit carry over to the palate, where the yin and yang of juiciness and tartness are in perfect balance.

At last month’s TalkBeer Charity Bottle Share in Edison, New Jersey, there were countless rare offerings, like Deschutes Jubel 2000, 3 Fonteinen Hommage, even a 1999 vintage of Rodenbach Alexander. A raffle offered prizes that included even more limited releases: “Uli’s blend” of Lambik Ohrwal and Cigar City’s “BeerZareGewd” Marshal Zhukov. Still, the most coveted item at the entire event may have been the glassware these beers were sipped from—otherwise known as “glasswhales” amongst craft beer’s most devoted ilk.

“When we called our glassware a ‘glasswhale,’ we did it more sarcastically, or in jest,” admits Os Cruz, one of the organizers of the event. Cruz’s friend Emily Ragle designed the handsome Harmony adorned with cartoon images of hearts, hops and other beer glasses—each Bottle Share attendee received one with their $100 entry fee. “We know they are going to be sought after, and since we ran a very small batch, the glasswhale term will be thrown around jokingly.”

Still, it was the first time I’d heard the word.

For much of time, American craft breweries’ branded glassware was pretty standard fare. These were bought-in-bulk shaker pints—stackable, sturdy and logoed, they were a quick way for microbreweries to make a little extra loot in their gift shops. Customers could grab one for around five bucks after a brewery tour, a nice memento of that time you dragged your girlfriend or boyfriend to some warehouse in a sketchy part of town. But something has happened in the last few years: Glassware has become just as desired, collected, traded and hoarded as the limited-release beer “whales” being drunk out of them.

My neighborhood brewery, Brooklyn’s acclaimed Other Half, releases several new beers every other Saturday morning, causing an outpouring of tri-state geeks to queue up for hours just to land some cans. It’s no coincidence that each release day they typically also throw a potential glasswhale into the mix, something that can tack another 12 dollars onto your bill. Befitting the longstanding Belgian tradition, these glasses are often designed and branded not just for the brewery, but for each new beer release (all the better for assuring one is always drinking from #properglassware). And these glasswhales are hardly the shaker pints of yore.

These are tulips and tekus, snifters and nonics, even repurposed wine glasses. An inveterate collector, I didn’t need much prodding to start accumulating them myself a couple years back. My first were balloons from Hill Farmstead and Willi Belchers from The Alchemist, bought on a Vermont road trip in 2011. In Baltimore that same year I grabbed a chalice from The Brewer’s Art. From Copenhagen, in the summer of 2012, I took home oversized wine glasses from Mikkeller and, from Brussels in winter 2013, lambic glasses from Cantillon. Kitchen space in Brooklyn is limited, yet my glassware collection now takes up three of our six available shelves, with even more tucked away in a buffet.

“I have seen some crazy stuff,” says Luke Schmuecker, co-founder of The Beer Exchange (BEX), one of the internet’s top resources for trading rare beer. “We are now seeing a lot of ‘glasswhales’ being traded.” Go through The Beer Exchange’s Facebook page and, amidst the beer swaps the company was actually built for, there are indeed geeks trading glass.

“Will either of these glasses get me the de Garde Bu cat glass? I need that glass!!” writes one BEX user, his accompanying photo displaying some fairly standard Lawson’s Finest and Trillium glasses. (“I doubt it,” writes another user in response to the offer, “(those) can both be bought online.”)

Beyond BEX, there are now entire glasswhale groups on Facebook, with GLASSWHALES counting nearly 2,000 members. Take a deep dive into these private groups, and you may soon see that aforementioned de Garde tulip selling for around $150. Or that certain Cantillon glasses are going for upwards of $500. I’ve seen my Hill Farmstead balloons sell for a cool $75 (and surely rising, as the brewery has reportedly quit selling stemware). But do collectors even drink from these vaunted vessels?

“I would probably be shot by beer bros for saying this, but I don’t care how much of a ‘whale’ the glass and the logo are—if it’s not a quality glass, I’m not going to use it,” Schmuecker tells me. Lacking in storage space at his Newport Beach home, he intentionally keeps his cabinets “brewery agnostic,” preferring to sip most everything from high-end, unbranded Zaltos. Still, Schmuecker wanted to find a playful way to capitalize on this emerging glasswhales culture.

Earlier this month, BEX released a limited edition Rastal teku. On it was a gold-printed, wrap-around image of Megaptera Novaeangliae—better known as the humpback whale. The $18 whale glasswhale sold out in just a few hours.

By 2:50 p.m. on a recent Friday, there was already a line snaking out the entrance to Brooklyn’s Threes Brewing and onto Douglass Street. The growing crowd had come for the first-ever canned beer release for Threes Brewing, the wood-heavy and marble-rich, 5,000-square foot brewpub that opened in the Gowanus neighborhood in late 2014. This kind of culty canned beer release has become de rigueur in the industry. In fact, three other New York breweries—Other Half, Finback and Grimm Artisanal Ales—also released cans that same weekend, all in the most geek-coveted of styles: IPA.

Threes was releasing an IPA that day, but its other canned release, a light pilsner called Vliet, was also drawing crowds. Crisp, clean and crushable, the only thing that made Vliet any different from many of the best-selling, mass-produced beers throughout the world was the fact that it sold out in just a few hours. The situation was perplexing: Why was anyone lining up for this sort of beer? And why had brewmaster Greg Doroski, noted not just for his IPAs but his complex farmhouse ales, made such a seemingly ambitionless beer?

“Because that’s what I like to drink!” he tells me. “It was also a…”—he playfully unfurls his middle finger—“to what you’d expect.”

Craft beer went extreme during the 1990s and aughts in an attempt to differentiate itself from the flavorless “lite” stuff coming from the Buds, Millers and Coors of the world. Independent breweries, like Stone, Dogfish Head and The Bruery, were built on a model of strictly producing IBU-shattering hop bombs, boozy imperials stouts and painfully acidic sour ales.

Of course, over the last half-decade, macro-breweries started making faux-micros to gain back that lost market share. Soon, “crafty” beers like Blue Moon and Shock Top were coming from essentially the same pipes producing Coors Lite and Budweiser, all in the hope of seducing the craft drinker’s palate. Now, an even stranger reversal is afoot: Craft breweries have begun intentionally devolving. Yes, unbelievably, a good number of micros are trying to make beers that channel the innocuous macro lagers they once derided.

Take California’s House Brewing. It sounds like your typical, 2010s-era craft brewery, started by 20-something surfer bros with a recipe conceived in a Los Angeles garage, except that the brewery’s location in Venice Beach is nothing more than office space. And the only beer the company makes is House Beer, a “Premium Crafted Lager” sold in an understated can that cleverly manages to evoke a retro, big brand while also feeling entirely modern.

“The big guys were marketing to us with blue mountains or this can that has a wider lip . . . and who had that cheesy Vortex bottle?” Brendan Sindell, House Brewing’s founder and president, asks me. “Then, on the other end of the spectrum, you had gargoyles and those super crafty guys with huge mustaches. That’s not us either.”

What Sindell is, is a guy who grew up pounding macro beers in Malibu and then at UC Santa Barbara, where he was captain of the lacrosse team. But those soulless beers don’t exactly speak to his generation anymore. When he noticed no one was really bridging the gap between craft and the major domestics, he figured he should be the one to do that.

“It was a crazy idea,” Sindell tells me. “People looked at us, like, ‘Good luck. That’s not where the industry is headed.’”

Sindell launched the company in 2013, using a recipe he’d commissioned from brewers at the famed Maltose Falcons homebrew club. It’s produced off-site at Sleeping Giant Brewing Company in Denver, a contract brewery launched by two former Coors brewers. (Sindell tells me House uses “some adjuncts, but not nearly as much as the big guys,” referring to the corn syrup and rice that corporate breweries so often use to both cut costs and lighten the beer, which craft breweries have long eschewed.)

“We aren’t going to sway the ‘I only drink IPAs’ crowd,” Zeitner tells me. “If you don’t like our beer, I take no offense; if you already have a PBR in your hand, though, I might have a longer conversation with you.”

Not a macro and hardly craft, House Beer exists as somewhat of a Potemkin microbrewery, one built mainly to capitalize on a perceived hole in the marketplace. And it’s working; House Beer is selling around 8,000 barrels a year, mostly in 12-pack can form. Though it has just expanded to New York—and soon to Denver and Austin—for the moment, the bulk of its sales are in SoCal, long one of America’s preeminent craft beer destinations.

Unsurprisingly, Sindell’s not the only entrepreneur to identify the potential here. “It’s every kid’s dream to start a brewery, but there’s a lot of craft breweries already. We had to do something different,” Chad Zeitner tells me in his languid, ski-bum drawl. He’s co-owner of Montucky Cold Snacks, another one-beer brewery in Bozeman, Montana.

Packaged in garish azure and ultramarine “pounder” cans meant to evoke a 1990s Montana license plate, their four-percent ABV pale lager entered the market in late 2012 and is now in seven states. Unlike your typical adjunct lagers, Montucky actually uses 100-percent six-row barley in their recipe. The beer is indeed better than our country’s most famous macro-lagers, though only by the slimmest degree. An IPA lover himself, Zeitner is first to acknowledge that his brewery is not releasing anything discerning connoisseurs will geek out over.

“We aren’t going to sway the ‘I only drink IPAs’ crowd,” Zeitner tells me. “If you don’t like our beer, I take no offense; if you already have a PBR in your hand, though, I might have a longer conversation with you.”

The original intent was to strictly go after those PBR types, hoping to steal just a quarter of a percentage point of that macro market within Montana (which would, amazingly, be enough to be successful). With craft beer now sold everywhere from gas stations to Applebee’s, it’s easy to forget that around 85 percent of the $250 billion worth of beer sold in America every year still comes from macro-breweries, and most of it is of the watery lager variety.

“We’re a small alternative to the big guys,” Zeitner explains. “We catch that swath of drinkers that wants to drink local, that wants to support small companies, but [doesn’t] like the heavy beers like most craft breweries serve.”

House Beer and Montucky Cold Snacks are hardly names amongst the craft cognoscenti, but the other breweries getting into the micro-macro game, like Stone Brewing Co., Carton Brewing, Surly Brewing Co. and Oskar Blues, certainly are.

For the past 20 years, California’s Stone has built a brand on Big Beer-bashing, adorning their bottles, T-shirts and delivery trucks with the brash motto “Fizzy yellow beer is for wussies.” So it was quite the surprise when, late last month, Arrogant Brewing (Stone’s newest offshoot) released Who You Callin’ Wussie, a light pilsner. Stone claims this beer—their first-ever lager—will bring “salvation and righteousness” to “this once vaulted style [that] has been slowly and methodically gutted . . . while [the macro-breweries] have spent billions on advertising to convince the unwitting public that their fizzy yellow end result remains legit.”

The dirty little secret of the brewing industry, according to Augie Carton of New Jersey’s Carton Brewing, is that if you get a bunch of brewers together, all they want to drink are these simplistic, pilsner-style beers. It’s what inspired Carton’s avant-garde brewery to quietly make the corn-crammed Carton Canyon—shamelessly described as an American Adjunct Lager—that’s become a favorite among his brewers. It joins Surly Brewing’s light lager #Merica! (made with flaked corn to achieve its light, easy-drinking profile) and a slew of American craft breweries making macro-style cervezas, most notably Oskar Blues with Beerito, a light-bodied amber lager akin to Dos Equis.

“People want a decently built light beer that’s not made by a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate,” 21st Amendment’s founder and brewmaster Shaun O’Sullivan told FWx’s Mike Pomranz earlier this year. His San Francisco brewery finally decided to can El Sully Cerveza, a flaked maize Mexican-style lager, last year after testing its appeal for the previous five years.

It’s hard not to see parallels to the cocktail industry in these inclinations. For so long it shunned flavorless vodka, only to bring it back after realizing, you know what, many customers actually want it. Craft breweries likewise won their early salvos in the beer wars—and completely changed the way the macros do business in the process—so why not admit that drinkers don’t always want to drink the most ambitious beers?

Whether House Beer or Wussy Pils, these micro-macros hail a return to easy drinking, to actually enjoying a beer as opposed to pontificating over it, and then bragging via Untappd. And craft beer bars—though they wouldn’t deign to sell a legitimate macro lager—have also started realizing having something “lite” on draught could probably bolster their bottom line.

Back in Brooklyn, this micro-macro tug-of-war may have finally reached synchronicity. On yet another recent Friday, Threes Brewing put on tap a hoppy, corn-backed beer described as the world’s first “American Adjunct IPA.”

Fittingly, it was called Touchy Subject.

Back in 1996, your average beer drinker might have guessed “IPA” was an abbreviation for the Independent Pilots Association, perhaps the Institute of Public Accuracy. The general public had not yet fallen for the bitter India Pale Ale that would come to define, and then dominate, the burgeoning craft beer scene.

As usual, though, Sam Calagione was already way ahead of the game. The owner of a new brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, Dogfish Head, he proposed making his company’s first ever hoppy beer, a fruited IPA, something that had heretofore never been attempted. Aprihop, as it was to be called, would have the bitterness of its Amarillo hops balanced by the fruity undertones of real pureed apricot.

“I remember distinctly taking shit for making it,” Calagione tells me. “I brought it to a beer dinner at the Brickskeller in D.C., got up on stage and talked about the beer in front of 100 beer lovers. A brewer/owner of another mid-Atlantic brewery got up after me to talk about his English Porter and started his talk with a memorably snide comment: ‘I believe fruit belongs in your salad and not in your beer.’”

Still, that didn’t deter him. By 2004, Aprihop was being bottled and today remains a signature spring seasonal release for the brewery. It was good, well-regarded by geeks and everyday drinkers alike, but it hadn’t really changed the beer world in any measurable way. Over a decade later, however, fruit IPAs are red hot (Dogfish Head even has a new one, Flesh & Blood, that came out this summer). And, you know what? I can’t stand most of them.

I’m generally amenable when it comes to current craft beer trends—the gose and Berliner weisse revolution, barrel-aging a go-go, hazy IPAs as thick as Italian dressing. Things become popular for a reason, and all those aforementioned stylistic offshoots are generally delicious. But I must admit to not really getting the fruit-infused IPA trend. You see, a modern IPA is already fruity, owing to today’s tropical hops like Citra, Mosaic and many others. Paradoxically, when real fruit is added to a beer, most of its sugar content (and, therefore, flavor) is eaten away by the yeast. Thus, you often get fruit IPAs that are less “fruity” than something like, say, Tree House Julius, a “regular” IPA that tastes like straight O.J.

One might assume that the fruit IPA is a training-wheels introduction to IPA, but these beers actually offer a ruder introduction to the style than most. The aroma of fruit tricks the mind into thinking that flavor and mellow sweetness carries over to the palate, but instead, it collides with the shock of hop bitterness. While in theory that might make for an interesting flavor journey for the already initiated, too often these IPAs feel disjointed—the fruit failing to fully integrate with the hop aromas and flavors. But that surely has not kept them from finding a following.

If your grocery store has stacks upon stacks of one beer nowadays, it’s probably a fruit-flavored IPA from Ballast Point. Improbably, beers like Watermelon Dorado, Mango Even Keel, and especially Grapefruit Sculpin, have become some of the best-selling craft beers in America, even if beer geeks aren’t all too jazzed about them. But lest we forget that just three years ago, they were. Back then, Grapefruit Sculpin was a tap-only offering, a limited release variant of the San Diego brewery’s top IPA that was reportedly made with hand-zested grapefruit peel. It was delicious, the fruit rind creating a citrus-y harmony with the hops.

Nowadays, six packs of it are for sale at my Duane Reade and the grapefruit flavor tastes artificial to me (in our blind tasting, the group guessed that it was “chocolate-covered cherry” flavored). I can’t abide it any more, much like I can’t wrap my head around the majority of the fruit IPAs I’ve tasted, most of which are made not with fresh fruits or zests like Dogfish Head and Ballast Point had once-employed, but with the omnibus “natural fruit flavors.” But I’m always willing to have my mind changed.

In order to see if there were any fruit IPAs actually worth seeking out on repeat, we blind-tasted 20 attempts at the style. For the tasting, I was joined by PUNCH’s Editor in Chief, Talia Baiocchi; Contributing Editor, Megan Krigbaum; Associate Editor, Lizzie Munro; and Editorial Assistant, Chloe Frechette. We came into it with an open mind, but the tasting did reinforce some of the issues we’ve all had with the style: too few beers felt harmonious in their integration of fruit and hops and too few actually tasted like the fruit they purported to be made with. But there were a few bright spots, like Schlafly’s bracing, juicy Grapefruit IPA and Tired Hands’ Watermelon Milkshake IPA, which makes you wonder why more brewers aren’t pairing fresh fruit with the hazy, juicy style of IPA now en vogue; when done well, it’s a natural fit.

Four Fruit IPAs to Try

Schlafly Grapefruit IPA | 5 percent ABV
This was Easily the favorite of the group, simply because it delivered the kind of refreshing drinkability that you’d hope for from a citrus IPA. High in acid, juicy and full of well-integrated fruit flavor (which is unmistakably grapefruit in this case), it offers pleasant herbal notes from the hops—a mix of Citra, Cascade and Chinook.

New Belgium Citradelic Tangerine IPA | 6 percent ABV
A “mystical marriage of tangerine peels and Citra hops,” as the brewery describes it, this is indeed mystical in the context of fruit IPAs. This isn’t a complex beer by any stretch, but it is well integrated, juicy, eminently drinkable and avoids the fake-fruit flavors to which so many of the beers seem to have fallen prey.

Tired Hands Milkshake IPA (Watermelon) | 7.2 percent ABV
One of the few beers in the tasting that sought to marry the hazy, lactic style of IPA now in fashion with fruit, this is firstly an excellent IPA that just so happens to show flavors of fresh-cut watermelon on the finish, adding to a beer that is already inherently juicy.

Stone Enjoy By Tangerine IPA | 9.4 percent ABV
The beast of the bunch (unsurprisingly), Stone’s Imperial IPA is high in alcohol, with ripe tangerine flavors approaching marmalade, its sweetness balanced out by fresh hop aromas and bracing bitterness. This is not for the faint of heart, but is an excellent example of fruit well-integrated into this style.

Even just a decade ago, yeast was an afterthought for most American beer drinkers. Malts, hops, water—sure, but festishizing the particularities of fermentation was more the domain of wine. Even if your average craft beer enthusiast generally knew you needed yeast to actually make beer, there was little chance he was aware of the fact that Saccharomyces cerevisiae or Saccharomyces pastorianus was probably that yeast. And, indeed, even most American craft breweries hadn’t really begun exploring yeast outside those domesticated strains until a group of adventurous brewers decided to try and corral something called Brettanomyces—or, more affectionately, Brett.

But why would they want to do that?

For the longest time, Brett was a bad word in the industry, something that unwittingly infected beers due to poor sanitation methods. (In wine, most consider the presence of Brett character to be a defect as well, while some argue that it can be part of the essential character of a wine, like in the case of Château de Beaucastel.) Present in the wild on the skins of fruit, Brett was first identified around the turn of the 20th century by brewery scientists trying to figure out what exactly was causing that unintentional, slightly funky note in Britain’s oak-aged stock ales.

Meanwhile, in Belgium, many brewers owed Brett their livelihood—they just didn’t quite know it yet. When these brewers made their lambics and gueuzes and, yes, farmhouse ales, too, they used an open fermentation method, which exposed their unfermented beer (known as wort) to the air where, you guessed it, Brett was secretly lingering, ready to pounce.

While the merits of Brett character in beer are still debated, one thing everyone can agree on is that Brett is brilliant at fermenting beer. The yeast works its magic quite slowly, attacking many sugars that Saccharomyces cannot, often resulting in not only a drier beer, but one that shows a funky, “barnyard” aroma. And while some mistakenly identify Brett as a souring agent, it’s most often the presence of two lactic-acid bacterias, Lactobacillus and Pediococcus, that causes those flavors.

There are at least four species of Brett, each imparting different notes that range from horse blanket (Brettanomyces bruxellensis, aka “Brett Brux”) and “goaty” (Brettanomyces naardenensis) to cherries (Brettanomyces lambicus) and pineapples (Brettanomyces claussenii, aka “Brett C”). In the late 1990s and early aughts, some more adventurous American craft brewers, like Vinnie Cilurzo (Russian River), Ron Jeffries (Jolly Pumpkin) and Tomme Arthur (The Lost Abbey), had the cockeyed notion to experiment with these strains of Brett, hoping to mimic the Belgian beers they adored, like Orval and Cantillon. After years of working with beers that were far easier to control and master, the unpredictability of Brett—its ability to totally transform their beers in ways they hadn’t even planned for—proved to be an irresistible challenge. And in true American fashion, many of them added their own twists, from fruit additions to dry-hopping techniques to domesticating Brett itself in order to make 100-percent Brett-fermented beers, something that would have certainly been impossible a century ago.

Nowadays, you’re no longer a firebrand if you use Brett, and most all top-notch breweries have at least a few beers prominently featuring the yeast. There’s Prairie Artisan Ales’ Brett C; Crooked Stave’s multiple lines of Brett-forward beers, like their witbier, St. Bretta, and dark wild beer, Nightmare on Brett; and The Bruery, who has released a series of single-strain Brett offerings in their Elements of Funk series. Breweries like Firestone Walker have even built completely separate facilities for these types of beers, simply to assure Brett never comes into contact with their “clean” beers. In some cases, these breweries are now even utilizing the yeast with styles not accustomed to going “wild”—notably, IPAs. Brett IPAs have become particularly popular of late, with Brett’s pineapple notes often melding beautifully with certain fruitier hops. 

In order to see what this most famous yeast can do, we blind-tasted 28 Brett-backed beers, trying to focus mostly on beers where Brett was the intended star (it’s often used in mixed fermentation beers alongside Lactobacillus and Pediococcus). For the tasting, I was joined by PUNCH’s Editor in Chief, Talia Baiocchi; Associate Editor, Lizzie Munro; and Assistant Editor, Chloe Frechette. While wild ales, both domestically and abroad, are the styles most commonly associated with Brettanomyces, we also looked at Brett saisons, Flanders reds, pales and IPAs, an old-world English porter and even a coffee beer. Here are the six that were worth their Brett.

Six Brett Beers to Try

Kent Falls Dekkera | 4 percent ABV
Kent Falls’ table beers offer the perfect way to fully examine the flavor Brett imparts on beer, unadulterated by any other bells and whistles. This delicate offering is floral and slightly musky on the nose with an orangey, overripe pineapple flavor profile in a package that’s full-bodied for the ABV, and highly drinkable.

Logsdon Oak Aged Bretta | 8 percent ABV
A true farmhouse brewery—not just an industrial warehouse pumping out saisons—Logsdon Farmhouse Ales has a plethora of Brett fermented beers. The Oak Aged Bretta is essentially a barrel-aged version of their flagship Seizoen Bretta, which picks up vanilla and wood notes after a prolonged period of aging. Extraordinarily dry and very easy-drinking, its high acidity reminded us of an excellent Norman cider.

The Lost Abbey Red Poppy Ale | 5 percent ABV
Famously, over the entryway to one of The Lost Abbey’s barrel rooms is a sign reading “In Illa Brettanomyces, Nos Fides” (loosely, “In Brettanomyces, we trust”). Produced since 2006, Red Poppy is an homage to Flanders reds. It’s aged in French oak wine barrels with sour cherries added, the result tart and refreshing with a distinct spicy cinnamon flavor and aroma (which Talia rightly pegged as “Hot Tamales”).

Captain Lawrence Rosso E Marrone | 10 percent ABV
Captain Lawrence was an early Brett adopter, and their experience comes through here. While Cuvee De Castleton and Flaming Fury are two top-notch Brett offerings, Rosso E Marrone is their masterpiece. This Flanders oud bruin is a high-ABV brown ale aged in oak alongside red wine grapes and Brett. This was easily the most “wild”—read: tart, tangy, complex—of the beers in our lineup.

Allagash Midnight Brett | 7.3 percent ABV
With all of the up-front notes of coffee, chocolate and perceivable tannin, we were nearly certain that this beer was bourbon barrel-aged. In actuality, this almost-black beer was brewed with Midnight Wheat, a bitterless black malt, then aged in stainless tanks and inoculated with the brewery’s house Brett strain. Tart, with an intriguing mix of sour cherries and medium-roast coffee.