Several days before shipping beers to Juicy Brews, slated for February 2020 in Pittsburgh, the couple were dissatisfied with the banana taste. We were like, ‘What can we do to get more banana flavor?’” Josh recalls.

Bulk aseptic banana purée couldn’t be shipped in time, so the couple blended store-bought bananas. The oxidation lent an unappetizing brown tint. Dried banana chips also flopped. Then a discovery: Their favored purée was basically just Gerber banana baby food. The couple hit every grocery store in Newark, about 40 miles east of Columbus, to buy banana baby food for a “scooping party,” Lange says, to amplify the beer’s banana flavor. At the festival, DankHouse served beer a few booths from The Alchemist. “They’re pouring Heady Topper, and we’re laughing at ourselves with banana baby food IPA,” Lange says.

Bananas are interlinked with beer, from the yeast-supplied scent of German hefeweizens to purée-packed pastry stouts evoking a banana-split sundae. Achieving an intense banana aroma isn’t always easy, requiring brewers to stress out yeast strains, seek out dried bananas from Southeast Asia, and receive special federal approval. Until late last year, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) required breweries to submit formula exemptions to brew with bananas because they were not considered a traditional brewing ingredient like malts or hops.

Why are brewers so, well, bananas over the fruit? Let’s unpeel the appeal.

Eau de Bananas

A century ago, Americans ate a different banana. The thick-peeled, densely bunched cultivar Gros Michel, or Big Mike, once dominated the market. It contained high levels of isoamyl acetate, a fruity ester that provides bananas with their signature flavor. By the 1950s, a fungal outbreak decimated Gros Michel, which gave way to Cavendish bananas sold far and wide. The Cavendish variety contains lower levels of isoamyl acetate, creating a disconnect for fans of candies such as Runts or Laffy Taffy; they’re flavored with artificial banana flavorings heavy on isoamyl acetate.

All beers contain isoamyl acetate—Coors Banquet, in particular, has a noticeable banana element that develops during its cold fermentation—and too much is deemed an off flavor. “Banana in your beer sometimes means that you’ve screwed something up,” Lange says. Yet banana is a German hefeweizen’s signature scent that straddles a fragrant line between real and fake. “If you opened up a banana, it wouldn’t smell like hefeweizen,” says Derek Goodman, head brewer at Westbound & Down Brewing, which operates four Colorado locations. “If you crunch up banana Runts, that’s what a hefeweizen smells like.”

Goodman’s favorite, and most challenging, beer to make is the hefeweizen Don’t Hassle the Hef, which earned a silver medal at 2024’s Great American Beer Festival. To coax out big aromas of bananas and oranges, Goodman pitches one-third the recommended amount of yeast and minimizes available oxygen. “There’s too much wort for the yeast, but it gets greedy and tries to rapidly reproduce to catch up and make up for its lack of oxygen,” Goodman says. “That’s what produces these fruity esters.”

At Wallenpaupack Brewing in Hawley, Pa., flagship Hawley Hefeweizen is sometimes ordered according to its signature flavor. “People ask for the banana beer, or they tell us that they can really taste the bananas in it,” says Logan Ackerley, head brewer.

Maybe we’re entering a banana moment? Over the last few years, Jeff Mello, founder of Nashville yeast suppliers Bootleg Biology and Spot Yeast, has seen increasing interest in hefeweizen yeast. It’s now the second best-selling strain for Spot Yeast, trailing only the hazy IPA yeast. “I can’t keep it in stock,” says Mello, who points me to the late-August Banana Brunch at Nashville’s Fait La Force Brewing. The stars: ice cream and hefeweizen.

Stouts Go Wild Over Dried Thai Bananas

Today’s beer customers seek dynamic flavors. Even super-stressed hefeweizen yeast can only supply so much isoamyl acetate. Seeking intense banana experiences, breweries are buying bulk puréed bananas to channel desserts.

WeldWerks Brewing in Greeley, Colo., makes beers such as Chocolate Banana Pudding Stout, while Crooked Hammock Brewery of Lewes, Del., plays on chocolate-dipped bananas in the cheekily named Banana Hammock, a Belgian-style quadrupel with cocoa nibs and bananas. “It’s a no-brainer combination,” Crooked Hammock director of brewing operations Larry Horwitz says. “The fruit’s aromas accentuate the sweetness and fullness of the beer.” To make the 15% ABV wintertime warmer, Horwitz feeds the beer sugary banana pureé once primary fermentation has finished to prevent the yeast’s “Cheetos dilemma” of favoring junk food over healthy food. Imagine reclining on a couch, bagged crunchy snacks on your stomach, salad in the kitchen. “Do you really want to get up and walk in the kitchen?” Horwitz says, laughing. “Yeast shut down when they get tons of simple sugar.”

Adding bananas during fermentation can produce excess sulfur and off flavors, says Nick Panchamé, president of HOMES Brewery in Ann Arbor, Mich. He adds banana purée post-fermentation to beers and Smooj hard smoothies to add residual sweetness and boost body. The thicker texture of banana-infused anything can be divisive. “There’s a subset of people who really do hate it,” Panchamé says. The runaround is a not-so-secret ingredient: dried wild Thai banana.

Around 12 years ago, Rare Tea Cellar CEO and president Rodrick Markus began importing the “Grand Cru of bananas,” as he calls it. As with every ingredient, he doused the fructose-rich dried banana with hot water to assess its usefulness in syrups, spirits, and beer. “It’s this perfect way of infusing banana flavor,” says Markus, who is based in Chicago. Around 99 percent of his Thai bananas go into granola. But in 2019, as pastry stouts gained traction, craft breweries such as Other Half and Evil Twin championed infusing imperial stouts with wild Thai bananas. It imparted concentrated banana flavor without altering the body or creating fermentation flaws. “We call it the ingredient that kept us alive during Covid,” says Markus, who typically has a deep roster of restaurant clients. “When we went down to one wholesale order in Chicago, we were still selling about 1,000 pounds of the banana weekly.”

Matt Tarpey buys wild Thai bananas in bulk for the imperial stouts and barleywines at The Veil Brewing in Richmond, Va. “If you really want that crazy banana character, you need more than 10 pounds per barrel,” says Tarpey, head brewer and cofounder. At the current price of $50 per pound—and likely higher, given the current 35% tariffs on Thailand—“it gets really expensive really quick.” Profit margins are skinny on extravagant barrel-aged imperial stouts such as Sky Summoner, which is conditioned on vanilla beans, toasted coconut, and Thai banana. “We’re not losing money on them, but they’re not a huge moneymaker for us,” Tarpey says. “It’s a labor of love.”

At Crooked Hammock, Horwitz and the brewing team used to hand peel, macerate, and then blend bananas to make Banana Hammock. Now the brewery sources bulk banana purée and juice, but Horwitz can’t resist adding a few whole bananas to the brew kettle. Says Horwitz, “It just feels right to peel a banana and throw it in there.”

One thing is certain: There sure are a bunch of different ways to bring bananas into beer.

The post Unpeeling Banana’s Appeal in Beer appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

“That land still has taxes paid on it, so it’s like, what can we do to make this dirt more valuable?” says Roberts, who opened R&R in 2018.

In fall 2020, Roberts answered a call from Harvest Hosts, a membership program that lets people park, for no extra fee, self-contained RVs on private properties such as farms, golf courses, and breweries. The pitch: He’d provide flat ground, and campers were encouraged to spend money at host businesses.

Roberts signed up, spent $60 on a few signs, and welcomed his first R&R camper that December. A positive review led to more bookings, as campers were “so happy they weren’t in a Walmart parking lot,” Roberts says. “They would come in and spend like $80.”

A decade ago, encouraging people to patronize breweries was simple: brew beer and they’d come. But local beer is no longer a novel lure. To attract customers and make use of underutilized land, some breweries are opening campgrounds that entice travelers to stay and grab dinner and drinks.

“We have a captive audience,” Roberts says. “As far as return on investment, this is one of the best things we’ve ever done.”

Embracing the Outdoors

A camping boom began in the pandemic as people sought fresh air and fewer folks, leading them to national parks and campgrounds where cracking beers is commonplace. According to surveys from the Dyrt, a camping platform, 45 percent of its campers bring beer while camping, and 37 percent of beer-drinking campers favor craft beer.

Nowadays, securing reservations at national parks is becoming increasingly difficult. Seeking accommodations, campers are turning to platforms such as Harvest Hosts, Hipcamp, and the Dyrt that are partnering with private landowners to offer camping.

“Businesses are realizing that they have an untapped resource sitting here,” says Kevin Long, CEO of the Dyrt, adding that breweries are a big draw. Campers can drink a few beers and “don’t even have to drive home,” he says.

Proximity to IPAs is part of the appeal. Melvin Brewing is in Alpine, Wyo., on the shores of the Palisades Reservoir and adjoining Bureau of Land Management property. People are free to pitch tents and park RVs on no-frills, first-come, first-served dispersed campsites right by the brewery.

“It’s Wyoming, it’s wild, it’s out of bounds, it’s free,” says Molly Reilly, vice president of marketing for the brewery’s parent company Pure Madness Group. Campers can crush a few Melvin IPAs, then stroll back to bed nearby “beneath total dark skies,” Reilly says.

Golden Grove Farm & Brew opened in 2017 Piedmont, S.C., just off heavily trafficked Interstate 85 where “50,000 people pass the brewery per day,” says Andrew Brown, co-founder. The brewery sits on 100 acres with an 18-hole disc golf course and space aplenty for camping. Golden Grove, which has three spots equipped with power, will soon add enough power for 20 additional campers and plans to majorly expand its campground in the future.

“Folks that stay with us spend money with us,” Brown says. “Even if they don’t drink, they’ll buy merch.”

Instead of bringing a campground to a brewery, Doug Olsen added a brewery to an existing campground. In 2023, he bought Indian Lake Adventures campground in Huntsville, Ohio, adding Camp Brewing in an existing building the following year. “When you open a brewery at a campground, the campground stays full,” Olsen says. “Campers like hanging out and drinking beer.”

Adding beer isn’t without challenges. A campground and a brewery, including a taproom, are different businesses that require different staff and licensing. Campers are allowed to bring beer to Indian Lake, but they can’t bring outside beverages to Camp’s taproom. If customers want, they can buy to-go growlers or cups of Pitch a Tent Pilsner, Into the Woods Wheat, and Roughin’ It Red Ale that can be consumed on the grounds or at the campsites.

This fall, Olsen plans to expand the camping-and-beer concept at Adventure Trails, another campground that he purchased in Bellefontaine, Ohio. Camp is contract-brewing beer to meet production demands for both campers and locals looking for cold beers.

“We need to play catch up,” Olsen says.

Hops and Parking Lots

Part of camping’s charm is exploring an unexpected location. This spring, Billy Goat Hop Farm in Montrose, Colo., opened the Down at the Hopyard campground that welcomes campers beside hop bines climbing skyward on trellises.

A visit doubles as an educational experience. “We talk to people in the morning and everybody is always like, ‘Wow, this is so cool,’” says Audrey Gehlhausen, the farm’s president, adding that guests can also try beers made with the farm’s hops. “It’s important to know where your hops come from,” Gehlhausen says.

Urban breweries are also hosting campers. Mash Mechanix Brewing sits in Colorado Springs, Colo., “right in the center of the tourist attractions,” says Leif Anderson, head brewer and co-owner. He’s a regular camper, and after using Harvest Hosts during trips Anderson turned the brewery’s paved parking lot into a campground.

He reserves two parking spaces for Sprinter vans and truck-bed campers—no trailers or rigs larger than 25 feet—to park for free overnight and partake in views of Pikes Peak while sipping offerings such as Hill Climb Hero lager and Trailer Queen hard seltzer.

Camping broadens the brewery’s customer base. “People vacation in Colorado Springs and stop in because somebody else in their family stayed here,” Anderson says.

Festival Rides and Camper Vans

Many beer festivals are in rural locations not well served by mass transportation or rideshare. As a solution, festivals offer camping that creates immersive experiences on a brewery’s property.

“Our most important marketing effort is to show off our brewery,” says Jordan Egbert, brand manager for Brewery Ommegang.

The bucolic brewery is on a former hop farm in Cooperstown, N.Y., and hosts the annual Belgium Comes to Cooperstown festival.* Campers can either stay for one or two nights, enjoying hot breakfast, bands, bathrooms, and camaraderie. Camping is where “bottle shares happen, and new friends are found,” Egbert says.

Camping is also a more affordable and abundant option than hotels. Burning Foot Beer Festival (also August 23) takes place in Muskegon, Mich., on the sandy shores of Lake Michigan where attendees pay $70 for one of 300 beachfront campsites that can sleep four people.

“With a smaller town and limited hotel space, camping gives our patrons space to spend the night after hanging out at a beer festival,” says Jimmy Hegedus, beverage director.

Not every camper wants a rustic site. Hospitality is essential for breweries, be it in the taproom or campground. Over two decades, Win and Lori Mitchell, the owners of Boothbay Craft Brewery in Boothbay, Maine, have steadily transformed their 10-acre campground and brewery into a “boutique RV park,” Win says.

The couple, who are avid RV travelers, tore down most of the property’s old cabins and added RV hook-up sites (there are around 24). They take pride in their tavern’s kitchen that serves smoked brisket, local oysters, and a lobster-packed pretzel bun that excels with Lobsterbake Lager. Everyone leaves Boothbay full, content, and well rested.

“Campers who come here tell other campers, and that is our best compliment and best advertisement,” Lori says.

*Note: After publishing this piece, we learned that Brewery Ommegang has cancelled their festival this year. From the brewery: “Brewery Ommegang has always strived to provide great shows and experiences, and we hold ourselves and our vendors to the highest standards. Cancelling BCTC was a difficult and disappointing decision for us to make. Unfortunately, due to lower than projected ticket sales, it became impossible to deliver the high-quality event and experience that our guests expect and deserve. We know those who purchased tickets are as passionate about Belgian beer as we are, but ultimately, overall ticket sales for the event fell short.”

The post Camping Out Is in at Breweries appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

No new American breweries had opened since Prohibition, and the 1970s brought closures and light lagers. McAuliffe saw not insurmountable hurdles but rather an opportunity to brew against the grain. In 1976, he partnered with Jane Zimmerman and Suzy Stern, pooled together a few thousand bucks, rented a shabby Sonoma, Calif., warehouse, and transformed former dairy equipment and 55-gallon Coca-Cola syrup drums into New Albion Brewing Company.

It became proof that a pint-size brewery—and outsize idea—could chart a flavorful new course for American beer. New Albion only produced its porter, stout, and pale ale for a half decade, closing in 1982, but the brewery’s resourcefulness, rule-breaking verve, and impactful ingredient choices remain bedrock principles of modern craft brewing.

“Jack was truly an American original,” says Jim Koch, founder and chief executive officer of Boston Beer Company, which began producing Samuel Adams Boston Lager in 1984. “Before him, starting a brewery from scratch was thought impossible. After him, 10,000 people have done it.”

McAuliffe, who died in July at age 80, created a lasting road map to opening a craft brewery, proving that a basement passion could become a viable profession. “He showed a path from homebrewing to commercial brewing,” says Ken Grossman, who toured New Albion in the late 1970s prior to opening Sierra Nevada Brewing in Chico, Calif., in 1980. 

New Albion’s embrace of floral, piney, and grapefruit-like Cascade hops, a novel American cultivar disregarded by industrial lager brewers, helped “open the floodgates of hoppy, aromatic, bitter, but also very flavorful styles of beer,” Grossman says. Cascade hops took a starring role in Sierra Nevada’s landmark Pale Ale, first brewed in 1980 and still a standard-bearer today. 

New Albion’s past created a precedent for the present. The brewery repurposed a former agricultural warehouse on Sonoma’s outskirts, and adaptive reuse of former factories, churches, banks, schools, and more remains at craft brewing’s brick-and-mortar core. After New Albion shut down, the founders of Hopland Brewery (later Mendocino Brewing Company) purchased the equipment to create California’s first brewpub. So began a long lineage of craft breweries buying old tanks and brew kettles to ferment fresh new recipes, showing no creative end to what’s feasible with malt, hops, yeast, and a desire to upend matters of taste. 

There’s one last lesson to learn from McAuliffe. Craft brewing’s founders’ circle includes no lack of iconoclasts, self-promoters, fermentation savants, and contrarians. McAuliffe set a status quo-smashing standard. Maureen Ogle, historian and author of Ambitious Brew, has fond memories of sharing cold beers and warm conversations with McAuliffe.

“I roared with laughter at Jack’s razor-sharp takedown of this, that, and the other thing,” Ogle says. “He did not suffer fools gladly, if at all. And to the end, Jack was Jack: intelligent, a wicked ability to build anything, socially awkward, mostly bored by people, oozing sarcasm. Hilarious. And according to him, everything was a Communist plot. He was a joy to know.”

To celebrate the life and legacy of McAuliffe and New Albion, we have a simple suggestion: Grab some friends and go tip back pints at a local craft brewery. Hold tight what you hold dear.

The post Celebrating the Life of Jack McAuliffe appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

(Ed. note: Our house style uses “draught” instead of “draft.” The two terms have the same definition and pronunciation. We like to keep it olde school.)

During calls to restaurants, bars, and taprooms, he’s found evidence of rats chomping through insulation to build nests or gnawing tap lines to lap up sugary beer. Some customers filled cooling systems with cheaper, toxic car antifreeze instead of food-grade propylene glycol. And during one gnarly job, he discovered a draught beer tower’s years-long leak, leading to thick layers of slime and grime and a lively insect infestation.

“I saw probably 300 cockroaches,” says Downey, an Advanced Cicerone who opened Draft Punk in 2019. These behind-the-bar jobs have led Downey to adjust where he eats and drinks. “When I go out now, I only go out to my accounts that care about quality beer.”

A brewery can write an airtight recipe, source top-shelf raw materials, and brew a flawless beer, but all those efforts are for naught if a draught system is dirty. A beer might taste metallic, or bacterial contaminations can add notes of vinegar, butterscotch, or butter.

“We’ve all gone into a bar and thrown down $10 for a pint of beer that you’ve wanted to try, and it tastes like movie theater popcorn,” says Nicholas Martel, a wholesale draft technician for Bissell Brothers in Portland, Maine. He prevents the disappointment of drinking subpar The Substance, the brewery’s flagship IPA, by cleaning customers’ draught lines. “It’s the last step of quality assurance in our product,” he says.

After a keg of beer leaves a brewery, the final lines of defense between delicious pints and drain pours are draught technicians. They service draft equipment by recirculating cleaning solutions through draught lines and disassembling and sanitizing faucets, ensuring squeaky-clean beers are served at ideal temperatures with ample fizz, not a drop wasted. A great-tasting draught beer can lead customers to order a second pint, or perhaps a third, adding dollars to a business’s bottom line.

“I’m selling a service that every bar and restaurant needs,” says Downey, who counts Stoup Brewing and Ridgewood Bottle & Tap as clients.

It’s a Dirty Job, but Some People Love Doing It

The world is messy. Mopping, wiping, polishing, and scrubbing might temporarily restore cleanliness, but smudges, footprints, and spills will inevitably sully surfaces; that’s when bacteria and fungi set up camp. From hoses to faucets, draft systems must be regularly cleaned with sanitizing chemicals, ideally every two weeks, according to standards recommended by the Brewers Association’s Draught Beer Quality Manual.

“I’ve been working in draught beer for about 25 years, and it’s always been one of the top priorities, if not the top priority, in draught beer quality,” says Neil Witte, founder and owner of Craft Quality Solutions, a Kansas City, Mo., consulting firm focused on beer service. (He’s also co-author of the Draught Beer Quality Manual.) “We need retailers to start focusing on quality.”

In more than two-thirds of the states, Witte says, distributors are responsible for cleaning draught lines; it’s up to retailers in the remaining states, a job that’s often farmed out to third-party companies.

Brooklyn’s Sean Lynch saw firsthand the need for clean draught lines while working in sales for a beer distributor and then a brewery. “More than 90 percent of the bars weren’t cleaning their lines,” Lynch says, too often impacting taste. “I saw an opportunity.”

In 2014, Lynch founded Draught Mechanics, in time building draft systems for Finback Brewery and Threes Brewing and cleaning lines for New York City’s growing ranks of breweries, including Strong Rope, Evil Twin, and Kings County Brewers Collective.

“I’ve been in a lot of basements in this city, that’s for sure,” Lynch says.

The coolers where kegs are stored can be hotbeds of mold colonies. “Every time you tap and untap the keg, there’s a chance something will splash out,” Lynch says. If the beer isn’t wiped off a surface, mold will grow. “No one cleans their coolers. The coolers are shockingly disgusting in some of the most high-end restaurants of this city.”

Beer isn’t the only liquid dispensed on tap, and draught-line technicians are finding opportunities beyond IPA. Carly Maughan, who founded Coastal Clear Taps in St. Petersburg, Fla., in 2023, also cleans lines that serve cocktails and coffee, plus drinks containing kava and kratom.

“They’re very big down here,” says Maughan, who first became interested in cleaning draught lines while bartending at LIC Beer Project, a since-shuttered New York City brewery. She enrolled in a three-day training course (“I was the only female,” she says), before eventually landing a job with Draft Choice, a line-cleaning company in NYC.

“I fell in love with it,” says Maughan, who views dirty tap lines as a disservice to brewers’ hard work. “That’s where I come in, and that’s what made me feel like this work is incredibly important.”

If You Want Clean Lines, Do It Yourself

Draught beer has yet to fully recover from the pandemic lows of closed bars and restaurants. An estimated 7 to 13 percent of America’s installed draught lines are not pouring beer, according to Draftline Technologies, which monitors more than 1 million draught lines.

Fewer kegs sold means less money for distributors, and as a result, “line-cleaning teams are stretched thin,” Witte says. “I’m seeing more accounts that are on a three- or four-week cleaning cycle.”

Instead, some beer-focused bars are taking cleaning into their own hands. “We don’t let anyone else touch our draught lines,” says Drew Watson, co-founder of Hops & Pie in Denver. The beer-focused pizzeria has 30 lines of always fresh, always excellent craft beer from breweries including Russian River, Allagash, and Westbound & Down. Hops & Pie cleans each line after changing kegs and thoroughly sanitizes its entire system every three weeks.

“Our regimen is nonstop,” Watson says.

Most beer lines use clear vinyl tubing, and the relatively porous material and susceptibility to flavor and bacterial contamination means that the tubes should be replaced every year or two, according to the Draught Beer Quality Manual.

At the Courtyard Brewery in New Orleans, which only sells draught beer and crowlers, owner Scott Wood regularly performs a visual inspection of the lines, marking ages in a calendar. “We replace hoses every month to two months,” Wood says. “For the cost of less than half a pint, we make sure that we have clean lines at all times.”

Even with a fastidious cleaning protocol, bacteria and biofilm can still find an overlooked crevice. For a while, a funky glassware smell flummoxed the Courtyard crew before it discovered that the glass rinser sprayer had a biofilm buildup. Now the brewery breaks down the glass spritzer nightly.

“That’s part of our draught system,” Wood says. “There are so many small parts where things can go wrong.”

Craft breweries that self-distribute beer, such as Bissell Brothers, also take extra steps to ensure beers taste great. Martel spends five days a week on the road visiting accounts across Maine, cleaning taps at anywhere from eight to 15 places daily.

“It’s a last step of quality assurance in our product,” Martel says. “It’s the reassurance that our product is being presented the best way it possibly can.”

Line cleaners are essential safeguards ensuring customers receive tasty pints. They often work when bars, restaurants, and taprooms are closed, scouring dark and damp nooks and crannies, toiling in anonymity, serving as foes to microbes and friends to great beer. “Most people don’t even realize that my job exists,” says Draught Mechanics’ Lynch, who has kept many clients for the last decade.

“It’s not a matter of doing the right thing,” he says. “It’s a matter of being able to sell beer that tastes good.”

The post Drafting a Solution: Inside the Dirty World of Cleaning Tap Lines appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

As I stand inside the ranch’s cramped kitchen, where owner John Segal Jr. is stirring refried beans on the stove, office manager Delia Ramos extends a bowl of the crimson condiment. Segal and I scoop some up with tortilla chips. The salsa is warm with a low-simmering heat. I go back for a second chip. “It’s good for gringos,” Ramos says, smiling. The salsa is just one component to Segal Ranch’s annual harvest tradition, a taco party.

There’s an old saying in winemaking that it takes a lot of great beer to make great wine. But in the brewing industry, it takes plenty of great tacos to make great beer. During harvest, Yakima Valley hop farms invite brewers to their ranches to hand-select hop varieties, treating them to tacos and tamales every bit as memorable as just-picked Citra hops.

[Related on CraftBeer.com: Taco Tuesday!]

Segal Ranch started its taco party tradition in 2010 to help sell the story, and hop quality, of the family-run farm. Segal invited former Lagunitas Brewing owner Tony Magee and Jeremy Marshall, the brewmaster, to tour the farm, select hops, eat Mexican food, and listen to a mariachi band. Seeing the farm up close, tacos in hand, turned a transaction into a lasting relationship.

News spread, and soon Russian River, Allagash, Bell’s, and other breweries were heading to Segal Ranch to mix business with salsa made from peppers grown on the farm by manager Martin Ramos, who also grows and breeds Segal’s hops. (He’s Delia’s brother.) Today is the first of the season’s 11 taco parties, including visits from Tree House, Great Lakes, and Firestone Walker, all of which buy hops from Segal. An Odell Brewing contingent will arrive soon, the tacos helping Segal create a lasting bond wrapped in Delia’s handmade tortillas.

“I tell brewers that it’s like going to a farmers’ market in August and everyone has good tomatoes,” Segal says. “But then you get to know one family that grows very good tomatoes and you want to do business with them.”

The Rise of Yakima Hops

I arrive hungry and curious in the Yakima Valley, struck by the landscape’s arid expanses punctuated by lush hop fields. After grabbing a quartet of tasty tacos, including birria and al pastor, at Javi’s Chicken and Churros in Sunnyside, I dig into history. The Yakima Valley was once a sagebrush-covered desert landscape with around 300 days of sunshine and minimal rainfall. The first irrigation ditch arrived in 1864, and settlers transformed the region into an agricultural powerhouse producing apples, grapes, pears, cherries, and hops. The foundational beer ingredient took root in the early 1870s, and today the Yakima Valley accounts for some 75 percent of America’s hop production.

Harvest typically begins in late August, kicking off an around-the-clock rush that lasts about a month. Historically, hop farms relied on a largely Mexican migrant workforce that followed the harvests, typically winding a route from Texas to California and Washington to pick produce along with plentiful Pacific Northwest hops. (Tightening border restrictions, aging laborers, and competing job opportunities have led to labor shortages. To shore up the ranks, hop farms hire seasonal workers, many from Mexico, who travel to America on temporary H-2A visas and return after the harvest.)

Today, Yakima County’s population is more than 50 percent Hispanic. With all of these migrants came really great Mexican food, and Yakima Valley now features best-in-class taco trucks and restaurants. Los Hernández Tamales, in Union Gap, Washington, won a James Beard Award for its tamales made with cactus and locally grown asparagus.

Los Panchos, a tiny shack tucked off the main drag in Toppenish, is a favorite of Alexandra Nowell, a cofounder and brewer at the forthcoming Mellotone Beer Project in Cincinnati. “The tacos were some of the best I’ve had in my countless trips to Yakima,” she says. “Pollo is their specialty, and they’re grilling it over wood outside.”

I spot the sidewalk fire when I visit, and the chicken tacos are as advertised. A crunchy, textural mix of fire-charred chicken is set on supple handmade tortillas no bigger than my palm. I could devour them daily and never tire of those tacos.

Beans, Meat & Beers

For both brewers and drinkers, tacos serve as much-needed sustenance. After downing stellar afternoon double IPAs at Varietal Beer, an IPA specialist in Sunnyside, I need more tacos to balance things out. Co-owner and head brewer Chris Baum steers me to Tacos El Pellon II, a truck located in a nearby O’Reilly Auto Parts parking lot. “That’s where I usually take everybody,” he says. “The trifecta is cabeza, carnitas, and chicharrón.” I follow orders. The tacos are topped with pinto beans and crunchy slivers of iceberg lettuce, a warm-cool contrast to the crispy meat. The tacos are also served with a plank of cotija cheese that I nibble on as I head about 30 miles northwest to Loza Farms in Wapato, Washington.

“The Mexican food in Yakima is, bar none, some of the best Mexican food you will ever have,” says farm manager Leon “Junior” Loza. Junior’s father first came to the Yakima Valley from Mexico in 1976, eventually purchasing a 56-acre hop farm in 2006. Loza Farms now encompasses 360 acres, where America’s only Hispanic-owned hop farm produces Comet and Citra hops used by breweries across the U.S., including Cellarmaker and Other Half.

Junior is one of four siblings to work the farm, and today he’s flitting between Spanish and English on his walkie-talkie, tackling harvest hiccups while showing me the grounds. “Right now we’re in Amarillos,” he says, pointing to the hanging bines heading to the picking machine that will separate cones from leaves and other vegetal matter. The machinery is a mechanical ballet, full of whirring belts and conveyors delivering the plump cones to kilns to dry.

Loza’s multi-million-dollar picking machine is a pricey, persnickety employee. Motors malfunction. Shafts break. The farm fabricates replacement parts to minimize costs and downtime. “We’re 30 minutes from any place that sells parts,” says Junior, who has worked every harvest since he was 13. (He’s now 42.) “Any way you can bring down costs, it’s a dollar more to spend somewhere else.” That could mean paying workers overtime, which farms are trying to minimize, or supplying housing for workers.

The farm’s Mexican heritage draws from Mexican craft breweries such as Cerveza Minerva and Morenos during harvest. “Seeing them here at our farm is super exciting for us, especially since my parents were born in Mexico,” Junior says. “It’s cool to see a product that they came to Mexico to grow, return back to Mexico in beer.”

To celebrate, Loza Farm hosts a party for Mexican breweries in town for hop selection, and breweries from as far afield as Italy and New Zealand attend, too. Tacos are served, as well as surprises like a trained opera singer-turned-brewer belting tunes. “It becomes a potluck of beers with food,” he says.

Drinking on the Job Site

Drinking beer at a hop farm is not common. Hop farms are, first and foremost, agricultural operations. But wineries are located in vineyards. Why are breweries not headquartered at hop farms? One exception is Bale Breaker Brewing, located about 20 miles northeast of Loza in Yakima, where I head next for, yes, more tacos and IPAs.

Bale Breaker’s brewery and taproom is carved from a hop field at Loftus Ranches, which dates to 1932. Siblings and Loftus scions Kevin Smith and Meghann Quinn, along with Meghann’s husband, Kevin Quinn, run the brewery where their homegrown hops are celebrated in the IPAs Bottomcutter and Topcutter. They’re named after the machines that cut hop bines from the plant’s base and the top that’s attached to a trellis.

“Sometimes when we open our windows in the morning, you can tell when [we’re picking different] hop varieties,” Meghann says of the harvest.

Bale Breaker is in the middle of a hectic stretch of brewing fresh-hop beers, at least a dozen, collaborations included, that will drop throughout September and October. None are ready yet, but I do try an IPA brewed with zesty, tropical Krush hops, one of the newest hop varieties.

The IPA is a great companion to my crispy quesabirria tacos, a mix of tender stewed beef and mild melted cheese, from the That Guy That Cooks food truck stationed outside. Those might be my ninth or eighth tacos today. At this point, keeping count is futile.

Clients Love Tacos

Around the Yakima Valley, tacos are not just ballast for drinking your body weight in IPAs. One morning, when I arrive at Morrier Ranch, a 500-acre Yakima farm that has grown hops since 1904, Liz Morrier McGree has a plate of tacos ready for me at 10:45 a.m. They’re from a taco truck that arrives daily for the ranch workers’ lunch break.

At nearby CLS Farms, which oversees 2,400 acres and 27 hop varieties, including proprietary El Dorado and the world’s largest Centennial crop, the lunch whistle sounds around 10 a.m. during harvest. A taco truck awaits.

CLS has reduced acreage over the last several years and expanded into growing fruits such as apples, pears, plums, and peaches. Growing fruit keeps valuable employees gainfully employed as CLS rides the hop industry’s boom-bust roller coaster. Business soared when breweries needed hops, and lots of them, to create triple dry-hopped double IPAs. Excess is out of style, and hop acreage nationwide shrunk from a high of around 61,000 acres in 2021 to 44,000 acres this year, a rightsizing of production for a brewing industry decoding post-pandemic drinking behavior.

In a difficult brewing environment, inviting brewers to hop farms for tacos, beer, and business can foster a deeper tie, turning a necessary purchase into a memorable experience that drives repeat business each year. “This need for connection and understanding has been most meaningful to our family and farm,” said Shelley Desmarais, who co-owns CLS with her husband, Eric. CLS runs an annual harvest party at night, when the clinks, clanks, and hums of hops traveling through machinery contrast the quiet of starry darkness. “At night there’s less everything, and it’s a special time for people to come to the farm,” Desmarais said.

Back at Segal Ranch, farm manager Martin Ramos is tending the grill, searing sausages, chicken, short ribs, marinated pork riblets, and carne asada. “We do five different proteins, which I think is too much, but we’re locked into the tradition,” John Segal says.

The BBQ is a big production, but the payoff in growing a loyal clientele, one taco at a time, can be counted in acreage. When Segal started the tradition in 2010, the family farm only cultivated 83 acres and was in danger of closing; this year, it’s cultivating more than 400 acres of in-demand Cascade and Centennial hops, plus the burgeoning varieties Zumo, Anchovy, and Tangier. “The farm wouldn’t be where it is today without the barbecues,” Segal says. “Our farm-to-brewery approach has built some really good loyalty and relationships.” As has Mexican food.

A long table is soon topped with a DIY taco spread, including those beans, grilled meats, steaming handmade tortillas, and a ghost pepper salsa that singes my tongue. A cooler contains Russian River’s Pliny the Elder and Stone Brewing’s Zumology IPA that stars the lime-like Zumo hop, a recent addition at Segal. Containers of Centennial hops sit in Segal’s office, ready to be rubbed, sniffed, and selected for Odell’s flagship IPA. Business can wait. There’s plenty to talk about in the hops business, but the tacos come first.

The post Tacos & Beer: Fueling the Yakima Valley’s Hop Harvest appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

“Any available spot was a stool,” Cheyne says of the array of butt-numbing, backless metal seats.

“I’d rather stand than sit in one for an extended period of time,” Erika says.

When the previous taproom tenant asked to sell the stools, “we were like, ‘Abso-[bleep-ing]-lutely. Sell them and get them out of here,’” Erika says. She instead bought faux-rattan arm chairs, her attempt to break the “strange chokehold” that the metal chairs and stools hold on the industry.

If you’ve visited a bar, restaurant, or taproom in the 21st century, there’s a near-certainty that you’ve sat in some version of The Chair. The metal industrial seating comes in a rainbow of colors, with holes in the seat and cross beams to awkwardly rest feet. The back, if there is one, barely bests a bed of nails for comfort.

“They’re too tiny for regular human heinies and aggressively uncomfortable, as if they’re daring you to actually sit on them,” says Niko Tonks, head brewer of Little Thistle Brewing in Rochester, Minnesota.

The Chair has become the shaker pint of taproom furniture: ubiquitous, affordable, stackable, easy to clean, and largely unloved. No one is excited to sit in The Chair. But there is rarely an option, like a taproom with all IPAs on tap. The Chair keeps proliferating, too. In an average year, restaurant supply company WebstaurantStore.com will sell around 10,000 versions of The Chair from Lancaster Table & Seating. How did such polarizing seating rear up at taprooms?

Nearly Century-Old European Lineage

Every object has an origin. In 1927, designer Xavier Pauchard founded the French manufacturing company Tolix, using galvanized steel—it’s dipped in molten zinc to thwart corrosion and rust—to create outdoor furniture. The company designed the first version of the Chaise A in 1934, and in time it became staple seating at French cafés and bistros, the chair’s seat holes permitting easy drainage on rainy days. (In 1956, the company released a more stackable version that endures today.)

Today, a single Tolix Chaise A costs more than $500. Knockoff stools and chairs might cost around $30 to $35 each or cheaper when bought in bulk. For cash-strapped breweries and beverage companies getting off the ground, the price is right to outfit a spacious taproom.

Mark Oberle, owner and mead maker at Meadiocrity Mead in San Marcos, California, outfitted his taproom with upward of 60 chairs. Low cost trumped lumbar support. “I’d love to have more custom comfortable chairs, but when you’re buying that many items, the price adds up,” he says.

As Jeff Smith worked to open LUKI Brewery in Arvada, Colorado, costs for brewing infrastructure, draught system, and taproom buildout kept increasing, decreasing the available cash for tables and seating. After the construction dust cleared, “we just wanted to get open and start serving beer—for as cheap as possible,” Smith says. “We jumped on WebstaurantStore.com, searched ‘stools,’ and our eyes went to the cheapest one, which is our friend the metal stool.”

Brewing and drinking beer can be messy business, and taproom floors are sticky expanses of spilled beer. The ability to stack and move the lightweight seating is another compelling sales pitch as “you’re going to be mopping the floors,” says Kyle Kensrue, account executive, brewery solutions, for Next Glass and former director of operations at Randolph Beer in New York City.

Like kegs, the seating “just kind of gets thrown around. They’re just going to get trashed over time because hopefully your taproom is busy enough.”

Industrial Look. Taproom Design

Drinking fresh IPAs served in an industrial-park taproom can still feel like the pinnacle of beer consumption. The sleek and stark Tolix-style seating harkens back to the mid-20th century and looks terrific in taprooms set-dressed in brick walls, Edison light bulbs, and exposed piping.

“I like vintage-looking things, and to me the stool looks like it could have been in my great-grandfather’s workshop,” says Dan Endicott, owner of Forest & Main Brewing in Ambler, Pennsylvania.

Forest & Main has two locations in Ambler, both with different seating requirements. The British-inspired Pub is a cozy room to drink cask ale while sitting in mismatched chairs bought from thrift and antique shops, or gifted from customers. “They’re awesome, but they also break all the time and have to be glued back quite often,” Endicott says. “And we’re always worried about someone hurting themselves.”

The fear is well-founded. One of the brewery’s wooden stools broke, and the brewery was nearly taken to court over the incident. Forest & Main’s sleeker Ambler taproom, which opened in late 2022, features Tolix-style stools in an eye-catching green that echoes a saison bottle. “They’re the best-looking stools that you can find online that are structurally sound and not completely hideous,” Endicott says.

A taproom’s purpose is to sell as many beverages as possible, and more accommodating seating might boost sales. The core craft beer demographic is aging, “and people want to be comfortable in a nice environment,” says Andrew Said Thomas, founder of Halftone Spirits, a Brooklyn distillery that shares a taproom with Finback Brewery. The main space is outfitted with a variety of backed chairs from minimalist furniture company Article. “You want butts in seats for as long as possible.”

While working at a beer bar in Portland, Oregon, Richard LaRue regularly fielded complaints about The Chair. “People were like, ‘How am I supposed to have more than two beers and sit in this chair?’” says LaRue, now the general manager at Recluse Brew Works in Washougal, Washington. The brewery opened in December with cushioned chairs and stools that encourage lingering while playing games and sipping pints of German-style Pilsners. “Being comfortable is an important part of that,” LaRue says.

Taproom seating can also deliver whimsy and delight, such as the swivel stools used at New Realm Brewing’s Auburn, Alabama, location. “I can’t believe how often people comment on how nice it is to spin on our stools,” says Drew Kostic, head brewer and general manager. Taproom guests are often reminded of old-school McDonald’s stools. “There is an innate level of childhood comfort that comes with being able to spin on a stool.”

The Chair isn’t going anywhere. The maligned furniture is, for better or worse, permanently entrenched in America’s taproom firmament, destined to be passed down to successive generations of breweries. The married duo of brewer Whitney Burnside and chef Doug Adams opened Grand Fir Brewing in the former West Coast Grocery space in Portland, Oregon, inheriting plenty of the notorious chairs and stools.

“We didn’t have the money to buy new chairs, so that’s what we’re stuck with,” Adams says.

The Chair might break your back, but seating alone won’t break a brewery’s business.

The post Buns of Steel: Why Every Brewery Taproom Has *That* Chair appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

Born into Orthodox Judaism in Brooklyn and now living in New York State’s Rockland County, Pressburger follows dietary guidelines that forbid mixing meat and dairy and mandate how foods are processed, produced, and prepared.

Oyster stouts were off the table. What about double IPAs? Or strawberry sour ales? Details on certified beers were scarce, so he crowd-sourced information from BeerAdvocate’s message boards and Facebook groups, eventually creating the website and Instagram account Kosher Craft Beer.

“It’s been a journey,” says Pressburger, who posts pictures of kosher-certified beers such as Deschutes Black Butte Porter and strong Belgian ale La Chouffe. In the absence of certification, he contacts breweries for additional information. “There are just too many ingredients,” he says.

Modern craft beer broke free from orthodoxy by resuscitating historical styles, embracing excess, and tinkering with culinary ingredients. The anything-goes approach garnered attention and sales, but experimentalism left many kosher-adherent customers behind.

“When there’s stuff added beyond the four basic ingredients”—water, yeast, grains, hops—”it raises kosher questions,” says Rabbi Zvi Holland, director of special projects for Star-K, a kosher certification agency in Baltimore, Maryland. (It’s one of five agencies that certify most of America’s kosher food.) “We’ve had [brewers] use Greek yogurt to make a sour ale, which creates a kosher issue.”

To reach the broadest possible demographic, breweries are embracing kosher certification. Boston Beer’s Truly hard seltzer and Twisted Tea are totally kosher, and breweries both regional (Boulevard Brewing, F.X. Matt) and local such as Leikam Brewing in Portland, Oregon, sell kosher beer. Breweries and companies are also turning to kosher beer to celebrate Hanukkah, while New York City rabbinical student Jesse Epstein is reviving the Jewish-themed Shmaltz Brewing brand.

Kosher Certification:  Another “Traceability Exercise”

Go to any grocery store and grab non-refrigerated items such as bread or ketchup, and the label will likely contain a hechsher, a symbol or stamp signifying a kosher product.

More than 40 percent of America’s packaged foods are kosher, an outsize stat when you consider that around 2 percent of the country’s population is Jewish. “It makes companies money,” Rabbi Holland says.

Historically, German beer followed another purity law, the Reinheitsgebot, which limited beer to water, hops, and barley. European Jews who immigrated to America in the 19th and 20th centuries would’ve been accustomed to unadorned lagers. “There’s a history of drinking beer without a kosher certification because it wasn’t something that concerned them,” Holland says.

As the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, America was no longer one nation under lager. Breweries began producing assorted beer styles, and “the [kosher] community started to get nervous,” Holland says.

Coors Brewing became the first major brewery to receive its kosher certification, in 1990, followed by Miller Brewing in 1999. (The breweries are now part of Molson Coors Beverage Company.)

For more than a decade, Spoetzl Brewery has brewed kosher-certified Shiner Bock and more at its Shiner, Texas, facility. The brewery requests kosher certifications from suppliers, and a rabbi visits annually to examine paperwork. “It’s always a joyful event,” says director of brewery and distillery operations Tom Fiorenzi.

Fiorenzi has learned to navigate specific kosher guidelines such as avoiding aging a beer in a wine barrel unless the wine is kosher. And the brewery isolated its on-site restaurant, K. Spoetzl BBQ Co., from brewery operations.

“It’s a big traceability exercise,” says Fiorenzi. “I’m concerned every single day about what’s going into the beer. It’s what we practice and preach.”

Securing approvals can feel punitive for breweries. You didn’t fill out this form. Try again.

“Kosher is collaborative,” says Dan Voce, vice president of operations for F.X. Matt in Utica, New York, which has produced certified kosher beer for more than 10 years. A rabbi visits once or twice a month for a facility walkthrough including looking over raw materials and monitoring ingredient staging and production.

F.X. Matt makes its Saranac beers and contract brews for multiple companies, including Brooklyn Brewery. Kosher certification is a selling point for contract production, especially as companies seek competitive advantages and placements in chains such asWhole Foods.

Food-safety certifications such as kosher “used to be nice to have, but I would say now they’re necessary,” says Voce.

A Conduit to the Jewish Community

Attaining kosher certification won’t immediately draw sales from untapped demographics. Preconceived notions must be rewired, one pint at a time. “Culturally, Jews tend to not be into beer as much as they are into wine and spirits,” says Rabbi Drew Kaplan, founder and publisher of Jewish Drinking.

That’s partly due to beer’s perceived cultural status. People willing to spend big on Scotch or wine for an event might also opt for Heineken or Corona, Pressburger says. Lack of access exacerbates the issue. Specialty beer stores are absent from Orthodox neighborhoods. “Generally speaking, there’s a strong lack of education when it comes to beer in the Orthodox community.”

Solving shortcomings requires creating new beer-drinking occasions. In advance of next year’s relaunch of Shmaltz, which closed in 2021, Epstein conducted an event on a synagogue’s rooftop, invited congregants to homebrew, and threw a Purim party that included a drag performance. “I love going to synagogue, but I recognize not every Jew does,” Epstein says. Shmaltz can reach beyond pews to “build our communities through beer.”

In 2015, Sonia Marie Leikam and her husband opened kosher-certified Leikam Brewing with a desire to be an inclusive, community-driven space. “We’re also vegan and gluten-reduced, but the market differentiator that folks grabbed onto was that we were kosher,” says Leikam, who is Jewish. (Her husband, Theo, is not.)

The brewery focuses on classic styles such as porters and red ales, which are served during events like drag trivia, comedy nights, and live music. This December, Leikam turned its taproom into a pop-up Hanukkah-themed bar called L’chaim featuring Hanukkah-themed bingo, Manischewitz Jell-O shots, and the Maccabeer IPA made for the holiday.

“For folks who are more culturally Jewish, Hanukkah is a moment where they find pride,” Leikam says.

City Brew Tours includes Leikam beer in its Hoppy Hanukkah gift box, and founder and CEO Chad Brodsky hosts a nightly Hanukkah livestream with food pairings and Jewish guests. “The livestream gets to the connecting points of Judaism and beer,” says Brodsky, who typically sells around 1,000 boxes annually.

Not every Hoppy Hanukkah beer is kosher, so Brodsky selects Reinheitsgebot-compliant beers that avoid adjuncts like lactose. Star-K used to keep a list of non-certified beers, but it’s since stopped keeping track; the torrent of releases never stops. “We need to significantly expand the amount of certified beer on shelves,” Rabbi Holland says.

One sticking point is that kosher certification is a monetary investment (it’s typically measured in the thousands of dollars, says Rabbi Holland), and craft breweries need to prioritize any expense. “We’ve chosen where to put our financial resources,” says Leikam, adding that the brewery doesn’t spend money submitting beers to competitions.

There’s never been a better or more confusing time to be a beer drinker. Selecting a six-pack can be overwhelming—doubly so for drinkers keeping kosher. Why limit the audience? “When you create something for a Jewish audience, there’s this idea that you’re limiting your product,” Epstein says. “I believe there’s potential to take something that’s Jewish and give it to everyone.”

The post Keeping Kosher in Craft Beer appeared first on CraftBeer.com.