I don’t experience a lot of drainpours. If you’re not familiar with that very flexible bit of beer dork jargon, it’s what it sounds like. A beer you don’t want to keep drinking. A beer you can’t get with. A beer you let the sink finish for you. A drainpour.
WeldWerks Brewing’s Conflict Resolution was a drainpour.
I certainly wanted to like it. I like what WeldWerks does. The Greeley, Colorado, brewery has a strong portfolio of hazies, and this one had come home with me following my trip to Denver earlier this year. But it wasn’t a sure thing. A kettle-soured milkshake double New England IPA is...well, it’s a lot of words, and a lot of competing flavors. As it turns out, the beer did not successfully navigate those competing flavors as the name of the beer might imply.
This beer did not put me off my game, however, and a circuitous progressive sort of tasting flight was laid before me over the following days and weeks, like a beery Chutes and Ladders. For most of these beers, you can follow along at home.
The polar opposite of Conflict Resolution, which was also in my Denver goodie bag, was WeldWerks’ Chardonnay Brut. Brut IPAs are the beer market’s correction against the all-flavor, no-bitter, Orange Julius-style of IPA. They’re super dry, with fine carbonation, and craft brewers can’t entirely decide if they want them to be bitter on the palate or just hop-aromatic.
Chardonnay Brut doesn’t resolve the debate. It’s made with Chardonnay grape juice, which gives it a sweetness that starts to cross back over into the oncoming soft-n-hazy IPA lane. Honestly, I felt like I was drinking a Trappist single. It’s fine, but it’s not what I came here for.
Roll the dice, move forward a few spaces, land on Minnesota. Fair State Brewing Cooperative, to be specific, which has just released a mostly-Wisconsin-only brut IPA — called, brilliantly, The Brut Squad. (Yes, the name’s been used a half dozen times elsewhere already, and no I don’t care, it’s still brilliant.) Idaho 7 and Citra cryo-hops went into this one; would it be the brut experience I’m looking for?
Well, more than WeldWerks’ version, at least. Brut Squad is super dry, but the tradeoff is that I think it proved that I’m not a brut IPA guy. I want hop flavor, dammit, not just aroma. If I’m not drinking something soft and hazy, I want something that features all hoppy aspects.
The Brut Squad’s twin in Wisconsin has a little bit of that special something. It’s Feeling Good, Louis! And yes, that’s the actual name: Feeling Good, Louis! It’s basically Brut Squad, but with kiwi fruit added. It’s a swerve, to be sure, but that balance of sweet and acidic adds just what I feel like brut IPAs are missing. The fact that I’m looking for sweet and acid in my brut IPA, of course, means I’m probably not looking for brut IPAs at all…
...Which lands us on the final space of this progression: The Brewing Projekt’s Movin’ 2 Da Country. It’s hazy. It has lactose and vanilla. It has peach purée. It’s kettle-soured. And it’s a collaboration with, guess who, WeldWerks.
The flavor reference is peach ring gummi candy, and the brew even included what the breweries describe as “hundreds of pounds” of the little buggers. It’s a trainwreck of a recipe, even more of an “every soda from the fountain mixed together” vibe than Conflict Resolution; I should have hated it. It should have been a drainpour.
It was not.
I loved it. The peach flavor was sugary like marmalade, but with just enough acid to punch through the blanket of soft hops and lactose. It was what I wanted Conflict Resolution to be, and clear evidence that I’m just not the brut IPA’s target demographic. This one was far from a drainpour; I drank the whole can and can’t wait for my next turn to drink it again.
