Brewers as a group love numbers. There are hundreds of variables that brewers juggle to craft the beers that you love. Numbers move the needle on variable until it gets as close to certainty when agricultural products are involved. Our brewery team just brewed the 500th Batch of Beer since StillFire opened. Coincidentally, Batch 500 was the 10th time we brewed Dude 21 IPA in honor of Chandler Patterson. There is one beer we have brewed 50 times, and a half dozen we have brewed over 40 times each. Not bad for a team of 4 brewers with a 5th in training.

So you don’t get the impression we are simply a Fabrique de Bière (Beer Factory in French), consider we have introduced a new StillFire beer roughly every 20 days since we opened. That does sound cooler in French don’t you think? Now, back to the topic. We are brewing some old favorites and scheduled even more for release very soon. Among the short list of beers are Reality Czech, Thrill Ride, Suwanee Devil, Hugh Hefeweizen, All That Razz, and a series of new sour flavors. Expect us to mix in a few other old favorites and a couple of ones that will soon become a favorite.

While brewing a second batch of Version 4.0 of Hopnoxious DIPA, we realized we would have extra wort (fermentable sugar) in the mash tun that we could use as the base for another new beer. We were much more efficient than even we thought we would be for this Hopnoxious batch, so our nominal American Pale Ale on paper became an IPA by the time it hit the kettle. Then after checking the numbers, it was even stronger than that. We ended up with a 9% ABV Double IPA base. The plan was to feature Cashmere hops in the Pale Ale. Cashmere is a hybrid hop we haven’t used much and is for lack of better terms, a “Super Cascade” that has even brighter flavor and aroma than its ancestor. By the time our beer morphed to a double IPA, we had already started searching for the hop we were going to use for a second dry hopping. With Cashmere hops exclusively, the beer was good, but why settle for just “good”?

Having just attended the 2023 Craft Brewers Conference in Nashville the week before, I was armed with a lot of new ideas and a few interesting samples of new hop breeds. Enter my Nashville stash of HBC 586, a hop so new it still has a number and no name yet. I had tried a hop tea that simulates late hop additions at the conference. HBC 586 expresses itself as Mango, Guava and complex citrus fruit, which is exactly what our new DIPA needed. The second dry hopping made our latest creation worthy of inclusion as the second episode in our X-Series of IPAs. Since our second favorite raccoon runs around with a likable stump of a wingman, the name of our newest creation had to be Juicy Groot DIPA. It is tropical and strong yet easy to drink because we didn’t load it up with a lot of bitterness or needless sweetness. Look for our announcement in the next week.

Cheers!

Phil