In Los Angeles, the old trope goes, everyone has a screenplay to show you. Every actor wants to direct, every director wants to produce. We see people doing interesting things around us, and we think, “I could do that. I could totally do that.” The janitor singing into the broom handle, the roadie noodling licks on the guitar when she thinks no one’s looking, the prep cook with a great recipe idea.
It stands to reason that brewing is no different. Brewmasters are cult icons in the same way chefs are the new rock stars. They inspire people around them. And so the world of beer is full of guest recipes and side projects, as brewery employees get a shot at the kettle and established brewers seek to try their hands at beers outside of their regular brand.
Few examples of “Here kid, you steer” experimentation are longer-lived than Lakefront Brewing’s My Turn series. Since the summer of 2012, employees from all parts of the Lakefront operation have been given a chance to create a recipe and not only see it on the shelf, but see their names on the bottle. There are 22 of these beers now. The first My Turn, a Baltic porter from Dan, was a favorite of mine. Chad’s Barleywine has had a successful second life as Lakefront’s Beerline Barleywine.
The My Turn beers, which can be submitted by any Lakefront employee, brewer or otherwise, sometimes bear little relation to the rest of the Lakefront catalog. Tom’s a production/maintenance guy, and he made a single-hop Citra IPA. Mike the tour manager crafted an imperial brown ale. But Josh — the original Lakefront tour guide — put his name on an imperial black IPA that owes its inspiration to the original Black Friday beer, back before it became an imperial stout.
Untitled Art is another local case of brewers, Isaac Showaki and Levi Funk, wanting to step outside their established brands. Octopi Brewing’s Showaki started his operation as a contract brewing facility. Under the Funk Factory banner, Funk makes spontaneously-fermented and barrel-aged wild ales (he’s not even technically a brewer). As Untitled Art, the two of them have released two batches of Juicy IPA and a pretty great Imperial Hazelnut Stout in collaboration with Mikerphone Brewing out of the Chicago suburbs.
When it comes to side projects, the actual Side Project must be mentioned. This St. Louis brewery, responsible for some of the whaliest of Midwestern whales, specializes in the wild and woody side of beer. Wild ales both fruited and not, as well as big stouts like Derivation and its Candle series all spend time in barrels at some point in their development. Side Project founder and head brewer Cory King made the company independent after starting it under the penumbra of Perennial Artisan Ales.
And now he’s created a spinoff of the spinoff. Under the Shared brand, King brews more everyday beers, ones that aren’t barrel-aged and can be enjoyed without the pressure of “Is today special enough to open this beer?” Plus, with Shared, he has encouraged his team at Side Project to be part of the effort. People like Katie Herrera.
I met Herrera while she was working her normal Side Project day job, as manager of the Side Project Cellar. She’s a great ambassador for the Side Project label and St. Louis in general. The first person hired to work with Side Project, back in 2014, Herrera was “excited to partake in [the Shared] endeavor.” She just recently shepherded J Dub Fan Club, a dry-hopped passionfruit pale ale that she brewed, to a canning run and release in the St. Louis market.
“My desert island beer is Oskar Blues Pinner. I drink Pinner 85% of the time,” she told me in an email conversation. When she and King sat down to chat about beer ideas, she wanted to create something similar while highlighting things she was “really digging right now in the beer world: biscuity and bready grain bills, lagers, low ABVs and tropical fruit flavors.”
“Truthfully,” she says, “I wanted J Dub Fan Club to depict the result of a beautiful one night stand between Pinner, a grainy pilsner and a tiki drink. I think it worked out pretty well.”
Herrera, who earned her undergrad degree from UW-Madison and master’s degree from UW-Milwaukee, was in town during Craft Beer Week and kindly brought me two cans of J Dub Fan Club shortly after it was released. (“J Dub,” she explains, “is the nickname for my good friend and badass Jen Whitney, the Oskar Blues rep and my Pinner slinger in St. Louis.”) I opened one on a lovely spring day a few days later, and I agree with her assessment. It’s crisp, but has that musky sweetness of passionfruit in both the flavor and aroma. It’s super refreshing.
Madison and St. Louis have a nice beer connection going; I have other friends in the industry down there with Madison ties, and, as Herrera describes it, “I feel like the Lou is always well represented at Great Taste of the Midwest, and I also think half of the city ventures north for the debauchery.” It’s not too difficult to get down to St. Louis, either. With Shared, there’s pretty much always something to pick up and bring home at the Side Project brewery, when once it was only on the heavily mobbed Side Project release days.
That said, both Side Project and Shared are in short enough supply -- and the brewery’s popularity is so demanding -- that it’s pretty unlikely you’ll find any of the beers up this way, even for Great Taste. But who knows, maybe someday we’ll see some the next time a UW alum comes up with a great guest recipe to brew and tells Cory, “I got this one.”
