We love making new friends, especially when those new friendships lead to the creation of crazy beers. We made some friends recently with just that goal in mind, crazy beers. Hop Butcher, a leading brewery coming out of the brewing mecca of the Chicagoland area, stopped up here a few weeks back. We collaborated on a few ideas and ultimately decided to make a beer that none of us had ever seen before.

Based off that notion, Previously Unknown Species, a Double Dry Hopped, Double IPA, was brewed with a whole lot of Spelt, about 60% to more accurate, (thanks, in large part, to our Mash Filter) combined with some scrumptious Oat malts. No barley. This beer has no barley. What’s so great about Spelt malts? Well, Spelt is an ancient grain that is known to possess a bunch of health benefits. For this reason, Spelt was the favorite grain of the medieval pioneers of today’s health movement and is considered highly digestible and conducive to good health. #BeerForYourHealth

There are also two things that Hop Butcher and Modist are known for, IPA’s. We knew at the end of the day that we wanted to make a killer IPA. With that in mind, Hop Butcher muled a good amount of a hop variety that we haven’t really played around with much, Vic Secret (New Zealand hop varietal), to Minnesota specifically for us to use in this beer. Oh, and we used it alright. We combined Hop Butcher’s Vic Secret with our Sabro pellets and Cryo Sabro because you can never have too much Sabro, right? In total, we added more than 7lbs of hops per barrel. To add an additional layer of complexity, we blended Vermont yeast (Conan) and London Ale 3 which added some great stone fruit characteristics to the nose. and The results of all of this experimenting come in the form of aromas of passion fruit, pineapple, coconut, tropical fruits, and a touch of apricot and peach. Many of those aromas carry through to the flavor with a nice touch of earthy pine at the end to help balance out those juicy fruit notes.

To showcase this new “species” of beer, we had to make a decision on how the overall design and look of the beer would be. When new species begin to emerge, they don’t happen overnight, they are created from small, minor changes at the molecular level, read Modified, often within the genes or DNA. With that in mind, we figured a human genome map would be the perfect representation of those minute changes.

We’re all extremely excited at how Previously Unknown Species turned out! We invite you to swing in and give a try yourself! You can find it on tap here at the brewery beginning on Saturday, May 11th. We will also have a limited number of crowlers available for you to take home.