But there’s often another, more personal component to their efforts to protect rivers, streams and lakes: Beer brewers and drinkers enjoy spending time on the water when they’re off the clock. Whether rafting, water skiing, tubing or fishing, clean water and a healthy ecosystem are critical to those recreational opportunities. And when it comes to recreation, few activities trump trout fishing among brewers’ favorite pastimes.

That’s why so many craft breweries have used beer as a vehicle both to educate the public about trout conservation and raise money for organizations that protect trout habitat. From coast to coast, small and independent breweries have found creative, substantial programs to bring the worlds of trout conservation and beer together for the betterment of local waterways. Here are a few ways small and independent breweries are protecting water and even raising trout near their own taprooms.

Upslope’s 1% For Rivers

“I was an avid fly fisherman in another life; now I’m too busy,” says Henry Wood, director of sales and marketing for Boulder, Colorado-based Upslope Brewing Company. That love of fishing cold rivers throughout the West, though, continues to be at the heart of Upslope’s partnership with freshwater conservation non-profit Trout Unlimited (TU).

Through its 1% For Rivers program, Upslope donates one percent of topline sales from its Craft Lager to the Trout Unlimited chapter in states where the beer is sold, allowing the money to flow to local conservation projects. The program is now in its tenth year, and Wood says it generated roughly $25,000 for TU in 2018.

“Protecting cold water fisheries protects water for us, for people, for beer, for wildlife. We can’t survive without clean water,” Wood says. “I believe that TU has a bigger mission than just fish.”

As for why Upslope chose Craft Lager as its designated TU beer, Wood says that’s simple: It’s the beer you want to drink when you’re fishing.

“It’s what you want in the drift boat all day. It’s so sessionable. We have had some younger members of TU who are like ‘What about a pale ale? What about an IPA?’ But I can’t crush five IPAs and still steer the boat.”

Heirloom Rustic Ales’ Trout In The Taproom

Not many brewery taprooms have fish tanks, and still fewer have a 55-gallon tank full of 100 fledgling rainbow trout. Naturally, that tank is a conversation starter for visitors to Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Heirloom Rustic Ales, where head brewer and cofounder Jake Miller is more than happy to wax poetic about his hopes and dreams for the small fish living inside. Once they’re roughly a year old, Heirloom plans to hand them over to its local Trout Unlimited chapter for release into the nearby Lower Illinois River. All that is contingent, though, on Miller keeping the trout alive.

“I studied fish in college, so I went in super confident, like ‘We’re gonna have this tank and it’s gonna be badass,’” Miller says. “And then, oh my god, I went on a business trip for two days and I came back and probably a third of my fish were dead.”

Ammonia levels in the tank had spiked dramatically while Miller was gone, a not-uncommon and perplexing issue among people raising aquarium trout. Through hours of daily work and monitoring, Miller was able to correct the water chemistry and stabilize the tank, though he still frets over the trout as though they were puppies.

To educate the public about what the aquarium represents, Heirloom has incorporated the Trout In The Taproom program, a spinoff of TU’s Trout In The Classroom program, into brewery tours. Each tour wraps up in the taproom with a 10-minute discussion of the tank, focusing on how regulatory changes in Oklahoma—like controversial EPA permitting loopholes and agricultural waste from new chicken-processing plants—can damage local waterways.

“It’s trying to get people who would otherwise never hear about these issues at least get some sort of conversation started,” Miller says. “They’re here for a beer, but I’ve luckily been able to talk about these things. People have no idea we even have trout in Oklahoma. It’s been really cool to see a whole bunch of conversations in the taproom even spin off from the one that I’m having. So hopefully my fish freaking live.”

If all goes according to plan, the same small trout Heirloom’s visitors watched while sipping a saison will be swimming through the Lower Illinois later this year.

Five & 20’s TimberFish Partnership

Craft breweries are often more than just breweries; they’re community gathering spaces, music venues, and if Westfield, New York-based Five & 20 Spirits and Brewing has anything to say about it, maybe commercial fish farms.

The family-owned brewery, distillery and winery has partnered with a local agricultural technology company, TimberFish, to install a first-of-its-kind aquatic farm on the brewery’s property. TimberFish’s technology essentially uses waste from the distilling and brewing operations combined with wood chips from felled trees to grow a sustainable biomass that feeds trout, catfish, yellow perch, freshwater prawns and other types of fish. Eventually, the hope is to scale the program in such a way that the nutritionally beneficial, sustainably raised fish could be sold to grocery stores or restaurants, sequestering carbon and making use of manufacturing waste in the process.

“Six, seven or eight years ago, I never expected [to see] myself talking about recirculating aquaculture. We’re located on a farm, so we don’t have municipal wastewater. Our options [for our waste] are either land application at certain times of the year, or having it hauled away—both of those have cost. Here, you’re creating a value added product out of it,” says Mario Mazza, general manager and vice president of Five & 20. “You can actually generate a revenue stream with this rather than incurring a cost.”

TimberFish founder Dr. Jere Northrop says increased attention to climate change, sustainable seafood and local agriculture has generated interest in this technology, which he hopes will be implemented on a global scale. A renovation and expansion to fully enclose the hoop house and 8-foot-deep concrete tanks at the TimberFish facility at Five & 20 is set for this summer, and would make the facility capable of producing a million and a half pounds of fish each year.

“In the summer when we have pint nights or events, we do tours of the system. I think people expect a few buckets and 55-gallon drum out back,” Mazza says. “It’s wonderful to try to get people to do things that are good for the environment, but if you make it an economic driver, you hopefully get widespread adoption.”

SweetWater’s Stack A Fish, Stock A Stream

If stocking streams with healthy trout could be as easy as drinking beer, wouldn’t that be a beautiful world? For Atlanta-based SweetWater Brewing Company, it is almost that simple. The brewery launched its Stack A Fish, Stock A Stream initiative three years ago as a visual way to connect SweetWater drinkers with fish conservation.

The premise is easy: Stack three specially designed SweetWater cans so they form a fish, snap a picture and post it to social media with the tag #fishforafish, and SweetWater works with local TU chapters to repatriate trout to their natural habitats. Initially, that program partnered with Trout Unlimited, but has grown to also include tagging tarpon with Bonefish and Tarpon Trust. All part of their annual Save Our Water campaign, SweetWater has donated over $1 million to partner organizations TU, Bonefish and Tarpon Trust, Coastal Conservation Alliance and Waterkeeper Alliance.

“Last year we turned our seasonal can, Mosaic IPA, into the brook trout stackable can. We, specifically with those cans, helped Trout Unlimited repatriate some native brook trout in streams,” says Jake Pickett, SweetWater’s partnership marketing manager. “So instead of dumping stock hatchery fish into the river, they take native trout from other parts of the river into parts of the river that might need some native fish. That’s so they can impact the river in a more sustainable way.”

A search for the hashtag #FishForAFish shows beer lovers have responded to the program in a big way, snapping photos of their stacked cans in rivers, on boats, and alongside actual live fish they’ve caught—and released.

These varied brewery trout programs all have something in common: They illustrate breweries’ creativity when it comes to community involvement. While trout themselves may seem like a very specific cause, these breweries’ efforts also touch on sustainable food systems, clean and safe wildlife habitats, outdoor recreational opportunities, and more. Best of all, beer lovers can support those important causes just by raising a glass.

The post Hooking Up: Craft Brewers Combine Passions for Trout Conservation and Beer appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

Craft-brewed Italian pilsners in America can trace their family tree back to a single beer: Birrifico Italiano’s Tipopils. Brewed in Limido Comasco, a small Italian town southwest of Lake Como, Tipopils may be the most influential beer Americans have never heard of.

It was the inspiration for Firestone Walker‘s revered Pivo Pils which debuted in 2012, and since then it’s remained something of a well-kept secret among brewers. (At this past year’s Firestone Walker Invitational Beer Fest, numerous brewers told me Tipopils was the beer they were most looking forward to tasting, as Birrifico Italiano attends the festival every year.) After tasting Pivo and Tipopils at festivals like the Invitational and Birrificio Italiano’s Pils & Love, American brewers couldn’t wait to return stateside and brew their own versions.

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Characteristics of Italian-style Pilsners

So, what makes an Italian pilsner an Italian pilsner if it’s brewed in America?

The simple answer is that Italian pilsners are German-style pilsners that have been dry-hopped with European hops for maximum aroma. (Dry hopping is the process of adding hops to beer to maximize aroma without imparting bitterness.) Italian pilsners are dry, squeaky clean, and as Kevin Davey, brewmaster at Portland, Oregon’s Wayfinder Beer puts it, should “punch you in the face with Noble hops.”

Unlike some other lager styles, Italian-style pilsners are less about malt and all about the hops. Using German-grown Noble hops like Tettnanger, Spalt, Hallertau Mittelfruh, other German varieties like Polaris and sometimes Saaz hops from the Czech Republic, American brewers recreate a German-style pilsner–but with amplified, American levels of hop aroma.

“American brewers were really struck by the Italian pilsners because we all make a lot of pilsner, but theirs are so floral and interesting and use different hops than are normal for us,” Davey says.

Italian pilsners made such an impression on him and his fellow American brewers from Modern Times and Heater Allen who attended Pils & Love that the three breweries vowed then and there to brew one together. Last fall, they teamed up to make a version called Terrifica. It’s since become popular enough to warrant status as a rotating release from Wayfinder. (“I’d like it to be a regular release,” Davey admits.)

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Hop Choice is Crucial for Brewing Italian-style Pilsners

What’s the secret to its appeal? Davey says the hop choice is crucial. Brewing a pilsner with citrusy hops like Mandarina Bavaria or fruity American hops like Citra won’t recreate the slightly spicy, minty, verdant hop nose so crucial to Italian pilsners. And it’s that super-charged, dry-hopped aroma that defines the style and made Tipopils such a revolutionary beer.

“Amazingly, dry hopping was not Reinheitsgebot-compliant,” says Tim Adams, owner of Portland, Maine’s Oxbow Brewing, which was the first to label its beer, called Lupulo, an Italian-style pilsner. “But here [Birrifico Italiano brewer] Agustino Arioli is in Northern Italy, close to Germany, so he learned very much the German way of brewing pils, but made it his own. It’s a wonderful beer. The Italian brewers coming up after him were drinking Tipopils and loved it and were like ‘Okay, this is what pils should be.’ So it became the norm in Italy to dry hop their pils.”

Given American drinkers’ obsession with hop aroma, a hopped-up pilsner hasn’t been a hard sell. Adams says sales of Lupulo have “taken off,” especially after Oxbow began packaging it in cans. Lori Beck, co-owner of the venerated craft beer bar Holy Grale in Louisville, Kentucky, has high praise for Oxbow’s version: “Oxbow is one brewery that I can say is incredibly passionate about Tipopils, and their beer pays real homage to it. They’re not just jumping on the bandwagon and making a style that’s hyped-up right now.”

(LEARN: 75+ Beer Styles Made Simple)

Brewers are Smitten with Hoppy Italian-style Pilsners

Maybe Italian pilsners haven’t become regular on draft lists yet, but drinkers are certainly ready for them. A recent batch of a collaboration Italian pilsner from Waunakee, Wisconsin-based Untitled Art Brewing and Minneapolis’ Fair State Brewing Cooperative, sold out almost as quickly as it hit shelves.

“It’s a good gateway beer because IPA is king right now, and craft lager is still steadily growing. It’s a good in-between to bring IPA drinkers to the table. It’s bitter; it’s got a kick; it’s got lots of aroma,” says Untitled Art‘s head brewer Ben Knutson. “Even for the lager drinker, to get them into a more hoppy beer, it’s the same thing. I think it’s a cool bridge beer for people who prefer different styles.”

“I think it’s a cool bridge beer for people who prefer different styles.” Ben Knutson, Untitled Art

Plus, Knutson adds, the fact that so many brewers are smitten with the style should tip drinkers off to how good it is.

“Italian-style pils is a challenge to brew and great to drink. The brewer has it in their face all day, so if they want to drink it then it’s probably worth checking out.”

Beck says Holy Grale will order “as much as it can” of unpasteurized, unfiltered kegs of Tipopils when it’s available, trusting her enthusiastic staff will guide drinkers who are new to the style toward it.

“When we have beers that our staff gets behind because they love it, it’s gone immediately,” she says. “Tipopils reminds me of the Italian cooking philosophy: Less is more; pay respect to the ingredients.”

(READ: These are the Experimental Hops Brewers are Testing Right Now)

While Tipopils can be elusive in the States, plenty of American breweries are trying their hand at the style. Besides versions from Wayfinder/Heater Allen/Modern Times, Oxbow, and Fair State/Untitled Art, other American-born Italian-style pilsners have come from Orange County, California-based Green Cheek; Madison, Wisconsin’s Working Draft Beer Company; and a Brooklyn-born collaboration between Threes Brewing and Kings County Brewers Collective.

“I hope that if people are starting to get excited about Italian-style pils, they’ll also explore some of the other Italian beers out there,” Oxbow’s Adams says. “Italy has made such a unique contribution to the beers of the world but I feel like it’s not that well-known here in the States.”

Looks like the secret’s finally out.

The post How One Beer Birthed an American Crop of Italian-style Pilsners appeared first on CraftBeer.com.

Almost as soon as a technique, ingredient, or process hits brewers’ tool kits, they can’t wait to see how far it can stretch. The latest example of stylistic exchange: brut lagers.

Birth of the Brut IPA

Brut lagers wouldn’t be possible without their parent style, brut IPAs. And brut IPAs wouldn’t have been possible without an enzyme called amyloglucosidase or amylase. Thankfully, you don’t need to know how to spell it or even pronounce it to understand its effects on beer.

This enzyme piqued brewers’ interest at the tail end of 2017, when Kim Sturdavant of San Francisco’s Social Kitchen and Brewery used the ingredient, which craft brewers typically reserved for big beefy stouts, to brew an IPA.

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Amyloglucosidase breaks down malts’ sugars into smaller bites, making them easier for yeast to eat. That changes the character of the beer by drying it out, decreasing its perceived weight on the palate, and making it highly effervescent like the brut champagne that brut IPAs are named for.

The style spread, and now you might find brut IPAs in six-packs on grocery store shelves. But it got a couple craft breweries wondering: What if they applied the enzyme to lagers?

Brut Lagers Filling a Void?

While no one had used the term “brut lager” until 2019, brewing lagers with this type of enzyme goes back to the 1960s. It was a key component of some large breweries’ light beers, as it helped remove the malt sugars that would add a fullness to beers, and it made the final beers lower in calories.

So when Dave Berg, brewmaster at August Schell Brewing Co. in New Ulm, Minnesota, heard about its use in brut IPAs, he thought it was a natural fit for the lagers his brewery is known for. His goal in brewing August Schell’s Brut Lager was to replicate what drinkers liked in brut IPAs—aromatic hops, a light body—and translate it to a lager.

“We used a lot of late-addition hops trying to imitate the brut IPA style, and we used some newer hop varieties,” Berg says. “I think people are apparently more calorie conscious but they still want flavor, and so it seems like that’s a pretty large untapped area right now.”

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Drinkers seeking lots of hop character but in an easier-drinking package than an 8% IPA could find their answer in the Brut Lager, which was part of the brewery’s summer variety pack that debuted in June. The word brut, so associated with IPAs in the beer world, helped convey effervescence and aromatic hops.

“I think it was something different to try. Brut had become a name that people actually recognize in beer,” Berg says.

While he’s not sure the word brut will still grace beer cans five years from now, Berg thinks the refreshing, flavorful components of a brut lager have staying power.

“Everybody’s been doing the big imperial stouts and really boozy beers for a long time and they’re great, but especially as you get older, you can’t drink that much. I think there’s probably a market for reduced carb beers that have more flavor,” he says.

It’s Not Wine, It’s Brut Lager

But the lower-malt aspect of brut lagers wasn’t initially what drew Kinslahger Brewing Company to the emerging style. For co-owner Keith Huizinga, it was all about its proximity to wine.

The brewery in Oak Park, Illinois, has brewed primarily lagers for just over three years, and its brewer Steve Loranz is constantly on the search to expand drinkers’ perceptions of what the category can be. When people hear lager, Huizinga says, they think of a certain flavor. But lager is just a type of fermentation, a part of a beer’s overall design that doesn’t pigeonhole it any more than the word “ale” would.

“We wanted to create a different type of experience, something almost like a sparkling wine, but 100 percent beer,” says Huizinga. “The idea was combining the dry brut techniques with a hop selection that would emphasize that almost grapelike character.”

Their hop choice was a blend of Nelson Sauvin and Hallertau Blanc hops which teamed up to give the lager, named Sauvin Blanc, its vinous aroma and flavor. That the beer’s name sounds like the wine varietal sauvignon blanc only helped get Kinslahger’s point across.

“Originally we released it as a taproom-only beer back in March. We loved it; the customers loved it, so we turned around and got an extra batch in the tanks,” Huizinga says. “The initial feedback was strong, once we can get over people thinking it’s wine.”

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Brewers Experiment

Kinslahger adds the crucial amylase enzyme to the brewing process at the end of fermentation to break down those long-chain sugars. But August Schell’s brewers actually add the enzyme in the mash phase. Brewers seem split on the question of when to add the enzyme in the brewing process; both August Schell and Kinslahger say their methods achieved their end goals for the beer.

Because brut lagers are an even newer spinoff of the relatively new brut IPA style, there’s much for craft brewers to still explore when it comes to processes and ingredients. But its defining characteristics—a barely-there malt bill and aromatic, usually wine-reminiscent hops—seem firmly established. As with any new beer style, though, where it goes next is anyone’s guess.

The post Brut Lagers?! Brut Lagers! appeared first on CraftBeer.com.