While we were filming our first episode with Crux Fermentation Project in beautiful Bend, Oregon, we had the distinct pleasure of crushing a few amazing brews with owner Larry Sidor and his Sales Manager Jason Randles. The knowledge these two have for craft beer is uncanny! We learned so much about their thought process and routines for creating so many out of the box brews. They are very unconventional when it comes to selecting and executing beverages. It’s not often that you visit a place and EVERY beer they offer is crazy good but Crux has that to add into their impressive repertoire!

It’s here! Our first episode from the new mini-series “What’s Brewing” where we meet up with our friends at Expedition Overland but first we hang with Bunkhouse Brewing. This quaint little brewery is tucked into the pine trees next to Montana State University in the heart of Bozeman, Montana and if you blink, you’d miss it and also miss out on some pretty incredible brews. I was invited by fellow beer enthusiast and co-founder of Fermentana; Jesse Bussard who is the sales and marketing manager for Bunkhouse, to come and try out a few brews and hook us up with some for our trip with Clay Croft of Expedition Overland. After hanging for the afternoon and meeting Nick Velasquez, the head brewer, he invited us to come back after our trip to sit down and give us a tour through his brews currently on tap.

We’ve all seen fads come and go in the beer world throughout the last century and by “we” I mean us as culture. I obviously wasn’t chugging beers with Winston Churchill in the 40’s, however I’d welcome the opportunity and have my pinky out like the gentleman I am! A fad that has absolutely exploded in the last 8 years or so has been the ever so popular IPA (India Pale Ale). With an enormous variety of flavors and ways to brew, it has become the eight hundred pound gorilla of the industry. As a true rebel to fads and whimsical trends, I once fought the urge of becoming what I thought to be a Hipster of beer fashion paired with douchebaggery on the highest order but I too succumbed to the deliciousness that is a solid IPA. My first intro to something pale was in my early twenties as most were. The occasional mingling with a Rolling Rock or Heineken was about all we had to choose in small town America. A light pale lager with bitterness that differed from our norm of general clear beer like Bud, MGD and Coors. Darks and ambers ruled the roost at this time if you wanted something different and to be frank, it was a solid way to go! I have always gravitated to a nice dark, silky porter or stout with hints of chocolate and spice that taste so nice. But what is a lad to do when it’s 90 degrees out and that thick ale is too much to bear and all you want is a nice refreshing, crisp ale without it tasting like some watered down Moose piss? What I’m getting at in a really long way is our choices were limited.

Fast forward over a decade. You are now walking into the same store you’ve purchased your frosty brew from since 2003 but instead of it being an isle full of lagers and malt liquors with a small section devoted to our European cousins, its almost all craft IPA’s and seasonals. Now this is not a bad thing but it’s like picking out socks in Target or throwing darts at balloons in the local State Fair, too many to choose. So where do you start? How do you pick the right one to not ruin your new found obsession in teaching your tastebuds to love a solid pale ale? For us, it was years of trial and error. Because IPA’s are so popular and in abundance, you almost have to just dive in. Before, there wasn’t many blogs or websites devoted to helping you choose, it was word of mouth, what was available at the Friday night party or what you could afford in hopes it tasted decent. A lot of hits but more misses it seamed but now there was hope. Breweries were taking this trend very seriously but the flip side to this was that darker beers were not as popular and getting harder to find. Now don’t get me wrong, they were out there but you had to really search for the good ones. From 2011 to May of 2014 I was stuck in good old Durham, North Carolina. Not exactly know for their beer and more for their barbecue (which you’d think the two would be more predominate), my options were limited. There was only one real player in the ale sector there in town and on Sunday, I couldn’t purchase an alcoholic beverage until noon which made matters worse!

Between sips of Yuengling lagers and ambers, I found myself yearning for an aged barrel brew, chocolate porter, oatmeal stout, anything that wasn’t pale or watered down. I felt trapped and in a state of bad nightmares with hundreds of less than mediocre IPA’s and chain restaurants serving bottom dwelling swill. There had to be a way out of this living hell I was in known as IPA Mania! That was until I visited my local beer stop who had answered my prayers. Magically, a wave of dark beer started pouring in with new styles of aging in various liquor barrels and collaborations between breweries and food joints, oh, it was a symphony! To my delight, I now had the proper beer to pair with my robust love of southern BBQ and cold Carolina afternoons of watching football, my life was complete. Now at this point, it didn’t take much to impress me. My pallet was still young and desperate, searching for the brew that would sweep me off my feet. This also made me start thinking more about spreading my wings and trying other types of ales in case I ever ran into that famine of the Devil’s Syrup again. While living on the East Coast, I had grown very fond of Yuengling. There was something about the simplicity of it, ease to purchase and it had a well rounded taste. If you aren’t familiar with this brand, it’s actually the oldest brewing company in the United States. It was founded in 1829 in Pennsylvania and they currently brew almost three million barrels a year but they keep that shit east of the Mississippi which is a god damn travesty. You’d think the oldest beer company in the nation would have found a way to get it out here to California by now but nope!

By now it’s 2014 and I’m ready to go home to the West Coast and as far as beer goes {and it’s debatable}, the Best Coast. Alas, the land of plenty, public lands and a shit ton of solid breweries who care about the darkness in liquid form. However, I found myself in a bit of a pickle. I absolutely love my dark beer but I’ve always had a tough time really smashing them in hot weather. Now I know not everybody has this issue but psychologically I have struggled to sit by a pool with a glass of bourbon aged stout and not feel extremely thirsty for something lighter. So now I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place with the weather and my insatiable lust for something NOT an IPA. So what did I do? Hoarded aged bottles of dark beer while I dove face first into IPA’s because yes, I guess I’m that guy. Tucking my tail between my legs and abandoning all that I though was sacred to pursue that is hoppy-ness. Now the caveat is that it’s years later and the West Coast has perfected the IPA by now which meant I still had a lot to choose from but the choices went from a bunch of mainstream slop to prodigious citrusy goodness. Filling my arms like a kid on a shopping spree in FAO Schwartz, I’d run through my local Total Wines collecting anything that sounded good. New England (Hazy) ales were just starting to grab hold along with more Goldens and Kolsch brews. FINALLY, people were getting it and stores were actually filling shelves with good beer. No more having to make my own with the time I unfortunately no longer had or scratching and clawing my way through what seemed like endless dead ends of a tasteless one way streets of bad beer. Needless to say, I was enjoying it!

Fast forward to late 2017. I’ve always had a special spot for wine. I’ve always collected and stored wine here at the house and we drink it regularly. Now the reason I say that is because while I went through the drought of darks and being forced to enjoy the lighter brews, I found myself drinking more wine than before to make up for not having that craving or want for a dark beer. Plus I am now living in California, the mecca of wine and it’s not hard to find a really good bottle of red. I noticed my wine collection had been quite large but now being in the Bay Area, I have less people coming over to enjoy a glass of wine and a much better selection of beer. There’s a brewery popping up on every major street and they are almost all good. I am now seeing more amazing dark beers than ever before. IPA’s are probably bigger than they’ve ever been and I smash a can almost every day BUT….if I keep adding more bottles of aged dark beer to my garage, my wife is going to call the show “Hoarders” on me. I have been in awe for the last year at what breweries have been creating. Of course there are still older vintages from breweries like Deschutes or Fremont and Firestone-Walker that have been crushing the aged barrel game for the past decade or better but others are getting on board and throwing their cards in the game and it couldn’t be a better time to be a dark beer connoisseur. In fact, I can’t keep up anymore. Every time I think I have seen it all, I see a post on Instagram or a buddy sends me a text of the latest and greatest and it starts the obsession all over again. It’s a good thing I’m not an alcoholic because it certainly wouldn’t be hard to become one with the amount of unbelievable brews on the market.

My current favorite from 2017 was the Crux Fermentation Project’s Banish Series called Freakcake. A distinguished Oud Bruin with roasted Belgium aromatic malts. Think of it as a fruit cake you ACTUALLY want to eat (really, who eats a fruit cake and actually likes it?). You can taste almost everything in it; currants, figs, orange zest, cranberries, dates and tart cherries and that sweet bite at the end from it aging in Maker’s Mark whiskey barrels. It’s not your normal aged brew but it’s surprisingly amazing. Larry smashed it out of the park with this one. Lately I’ve been on a kick of odd brews in the dark sector. I also love the Deschutes Brewery’s 2015 Rum Wowzenbock…Google that shit! It’s amazing and something completely different. If you can find it, get it and thank me later. So in closing, all I can say is we truly are in the greatest if times to be a beer consumer. There has never been such a selection of amazing (and terrible) beers at your disposal. Whether it’s dark or light, enjoy it, share it with a friend and tell us about it!

Cheers!