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(Courtesy Molson Coors)
Corporate breweries like Molson Coors and craft breweries are more times than not positioned as rivals… Corporate organizations verses small, independent brewers.
Fair or not, that’s just the way many beer fans see it…
So a real collaboration between a Big Beer brand such as Miller High Life and an eclectic craft brewery like Philadelphia’s Evil Genius Beer Company is almost unheard of.
But that happened in October…and it feels like a long overdue truce.
Described as the “Mimosa of Beers,” a riff on the longstanding Miller High Life moniker, the “Champagne of Beers,” Miller High Life / Evil Twin Brunch So Hard is a 6.5% ABV Hazy IPA that combines the lightness and brightness of the heritage lager with a fruit-forward India Pale Ale.
For Evil Genius, a brewery known for its humorous pop culture-inspired beer names and bold IPAs, collaborating with an icon like Miller High Life “was a joy from start to finish,” Luke Bowen, who co-founded the brewery along with Trevor Hayward in 2011, told Beer & Beyond. “The beer itself – High Life is every craft brewer’s elbow beer. It’s a classic.”
And not only was the collaboration fun to pull off, it was also learning exercise for the Philadelphia craft brewery…
“It was a cool class to take from a curiosity perspective,” Bowen says. “We learned so much from (the High Life marketing team) about all the facets of the business, like marketing and distribution and how a brand goes to market. It was such a unique opportunity we wouldn’t have had any other way.”
Evil Genius brewed 8,000 cases of Brunch So Hard, all of which was sold before it was packaged. And it may still be available four-packs of 16-ounce cans in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, because these kinds of ‘craft meets corporate’ collaborations are EXTREMELY rare and the beer undoubtably interesting.
Last year Miller High Life teamed up with Terrapin Beer Co. to craft a Brut IPA (remember those?). But that was a little different since the Athens, Georgia-based brewery was purchased by MillerCoors (now Molson Coors) in 2016, so that collaboration was more of an in-house affair.
Miller High Life also partnered with a Chicago craft brewery, Off Color in 2016 to make an American Wild Ale built off the High Life grain bill.
