Kyle Nabilcy
One of the best value-adds of beer calendar events like Great Taste of the Midwest and Madison Craft Beer Week are those unfamiliar breweries that show up on local shelves or tap lines for just a day or two. The brewers come into town, bring some product, drop it off at friendly local establishments, and we get to see an unusual couple of labels for a little while.
Short’s Brewing used to do this all the time, though now its beers are distributed here year-round. Indeed Brewing has been dropping product off when it visits for tap takeovers, which is much appreciated by me because Indeed beers are usually pretty enjoyable.
Lately, we’ve been seeing a different kind of beer visitor: the out-of-distribution collaborator. You may recall Funky Buddha teaming up with The Bruery for a big, weird, adjunct bomb a few months back. Funky Buddha doesn’t get very far out of Florida, while The Bruery is all over the place. That was pretty exciting.
A few weeks ago, a bottle showed up from Coedo, a Japanese brewery that just started distribution in Madison this last spring. The beer, Gattsu Pozu, was produced in collaboration with Fieldwork Brewing out of Berkeley, California. An homage to our two countries’ shared passion for baseball, the hazy imperial IPA was made with pink sugar and brown rice from Japan, with additional character delivered by hinoki, a kind of Japanese cypress.
I’ve got a friend out in the Bay Area who has expressed a lot of love for Fieldwork, and so I was pretty jazzed to see the brand appear out here in the Great Middle, where it is not distributed. The beer was well made, but kind of weird. Very herbal, botanical, with a rich body by way of the additional sugar. Worth trying once, anyway.
We’ve also had access to breweries like Forager (Minnesota), Mikerphone (Illinois), and 3 Sons (Florida) through their individual collaborations with Waunakee’s Untitled Art. An Untitled Art coffee and vanilla-infused barleywine made with Horus Aged Ales out of California should be launching soon.
In the last couple of weeks, two beers have popped up in bottle shops around town, both bearing names we don’t ever see around here, not even during those big event weeks I mentioned — from Evil Twin, a stout made in collaboration with Jackie O’s out of Athens, Ohio; and from Boulevard, itself somewhat recently returned to Wisconsin distribution, a kind of wacky oaked lager via Arizona Wilderness Brewing (Gilbert, Arizona) and Creature Comforts Brewing out of, coincidentally, another Athens,this time Georgia’s.
The Boulevard/Arizona Wilderness/Creature Comforts Oak-Aged Lager, seventh in its numbered Collaboration series, also features lemon zest, peaches and Riesling grape juice. The brewers all like each other, and the Collaboration series is all about celebrating technical strengths and mutual respect.
While the weather stupidly clings to its late summer swelter, this subtly fruity recipe represents a good way to quench your thirst, but with enough woody bite to feel appropriate for early autumn. Whenever that gets here.
Evil Twin’s stout made with a brewer from Jackie O’s, on the other hand, sounds summery enough but is better suited for the cool weather yet to come. You’re in the Jungle Baby! (yes, exclamation point included) is an imperial stout based on a dessert the brewers had at Danish restaurant Noma’s Tulum, Mexico, pop-up.
If this sounds incredibly pretentious, it kind of is. The pop-up’s tasting menu rang up at $600 per person and ran for six weeks in the middle of the Yucatan jungle. The only connection to Jackie O’s is that Brad Clark of Jackie O’s and Evil Twin’s Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø dined at Noma Mexico together. Both brewers are good with thick adjunct stouts, but the pasilla chile/tangerine peel/honey/cocoa nib beer is too smoky and bitter when it should by all indications be more zippy and sweet.
Regardless, as with Fieldwork, Creature Comforts and Arizona Wilderness, it’s fun to see that cursive Jackie O’s logo anywhere on Madison shelves. We can’t expect to get every beer all the time, but a brief introduction is pretty great.
