(Press Release)
DENVER, Colo.—Our Mutual Friend Brewing Company, who assisted in coordinating and hosting the Denver Beers Made By Walking festival in 2015, will be releasing a Beers Made By Walking cross-country collaboration beer for Collaboration Fest in conjunction with Fullsteam Brewery (Durham, NC), Scratch Brewing Company (Ava, IL) and Hopworks Urban Brewery (Portland, OR). Beers Made By Walking invites brewers to create place-based beers inspired by native plants identified on trails and all four breweries involved in this project have taken part in its programming and creative process. These four breweries are some of the most innovative and place-based epicenters of local culture in the brewing scene across the entire country.
This particular beer, named Golden Fang, is a barrel-fermented sour golden ale with persimmons, bittering roots, rose hips and all Colorado base ingredients. The inspiration for this beer came from the idea to connect all four continental US time zones into a single undertaking. The persimmons are from North Carolina (Fullsteam), the Rose Hips from Oregon (Hopworks) and the bittering roots from Illinois (Scratch). The interplay of these ingredients and the sour yeast provides a stone fruit forward flavor and tart finish, balanced by the tannic acidity of the bittering roots and tea-like bitterness from the rose hips.
Fullsteam Brewery has developed a community foraging program in Durham, offering market price for persimmons to patrons of the brewery. The end product has resulted in a foraging community and the beer First Frost, a persimmon winter ale, among various other beers with foraged ingredients. Scratch Brewing Company has been featured in national magazines in regards to its expansive foraging program, as the brewery is located on a farm that yields a plethora of wonderful ingredients to use in beers. Notably, this brewery brought five different “single tree” beers to Great American Beer Festival in 2015, crafting different beers based on ingredients from different types of arboreal products. Hopworks Urban Brewery recently became the first B Corporation brewery in the Pacific Northwest as well as the first Salmon-Safe Certified brewing site in the world. It also happens to be the largest contributor to BMBW in the PNW. Our Mutual Friend recently garnered national attention by earning a silver medal in the wood and barrel aged sour beer category at GABF in 2015 and has striven to cultivate local practices by brewing all Colorado ingredient beers as well as other innovative offerings.
Golden Fang will be released at Collaboration Fest on March 19th at Sports Authority Field at Mile High along with more than 85 other collaborative projects and will subsequently be available on tap at Our Mutual Friend’s Tap Room starting Thursday, March 24th.