The beer biz never sleeps at American Craft Beer. And here’s more of what’s been happening in the beer world, while you were drinking your way through a long holiday weekend.
Bale Breaker Gets An Even Hoppier Look (Yakima, WA) – Bale Breaker Brewing is a family-owned brewery that has grown a considerable reputation for their fresh-off-the-farm brews and the brewery’s hop field location in the heart of one of the world’s most renowned hop-growing regions, Yakima Valley.
Backed by four generations of hop farming experience, Bale Breaker Brewing, which began in 2013, is now the fifth largest independent craft brewery in Washington. And they are taking their hop-growing roots seriously and introducing new brewery imaging.
Understanding that a brewery’s branding is increasingly important in today’s crowded marketplace and that label art and imaging now matter more than ever, Bale Breaker worked with the progressive graphic designers at Blindtiger Design, to adopt a fresh new look complete with vintage-looking graphics of everything from farm equipment to the hop field where the brewery is located.
It’s hardly surprising that hops take center stage in Bale Breaker’s new rebrand. The brewery is located in America’s premier hop growing region and surrounded by the hop farms, and sits on the corner of one of their family’s hop fields–Field 41. The great-grandparents of the brewery’s sibling-owners Meghann Quinn, Kevin Smith, and Patrick Smith first planted hops in the Yakima Valley in 1932.
Words To Drink By (Yakima, WA) – “Hop farming is in our family’s DNA, dating back to the year before prohibition ended.” Bale Breaker owners Meghann Quinn, Kevin Smith, and Patrick Smith
Are Hemp Beers The Future? (USA) – While calling hemp beer (beers brewed with the non-psychoactive part of the cannabis plant) the future might be a stretch…They certainly are an indicator of a growing direction that craft brewers increasingly interested in…if only to cash in on the growing interest in the possibilities of legal recreational pot.
New Belgium’s The Hemperor is the most widely distributed hemp beer in the nation. Released in April of 2018, The Hemperor HPA is brewed with hemp hearts (the meat of the seed, minus the shell) and dry-hopped with Simcoe and experimental HBC 522 hops to create a dank, pungent hop aroma balanced by a sweet, mildly bitter finish.
SweetWater 420 Strain G13 IPA is another hemp beer that’s generated some buzz (not that kinda buzz…but you know what we mean). The brewery’s newest year-round, Sweetwater’s hemp beer uses botanically-sourced, strain specific terpenes to duplicate the aromatics of the legendary G13 cannabis strain.