Utah Brewery Map

Monday, February 11, 2013

RedRock/New Belgium Collaborate on Lips of Faith

Last October, RedRock Brewing pulled of a big win at the Great American Beer Festival, coming away with a Gold Medal for Paardebloem, a barrel aged ale made with dandelion greens, in the Experimental Beer category. We talk about Paardebloem often around here, but it's not wildly known that our favorite local, dandelion ale is and has always been a collaborative effort between RedRock & New Belgium Brewing.

Usually Chris McCombs, the plant manager at New Belgium Brewery comes to Salt Lake to take part in the brew, this year there's been a change. Due to Paardebloem's recent high praise at The Great American Beer Festival. New Belgium has decided to brew the collaboration Dandelion ale again and make it part of their Lips of Faith series. A few years back NB released a version of this ale but it was never bottled or barrel aged. This time it's due to go "big time".

"Beer Yogi", Kevin Templin - Asst. Brewer, Chris Harlin & Brewers Liaison,  Erika Palmer are in Fort Collins, Colorado this morning assisting in the creation of approximately 23,000 Hectoliters of Dandelion Ale.  NB will be releasing their version of Paardebloem on April 1st and RedRock will release with in two weeks of that date.

RedRock will reportedly get some of New Belgium's version for sale at their restaurants & some of RR's will go to Fort Collins. This ale never disappoints, we'll keep you in the loop as the dates get closer.

This will hopefully pave the way for New Belgium to enter the Utah Market. Hey, weirder things have happened...

Cheers!


Photo courtesy: B. Doran & SLUG Magazine
Chris McCombs & Kevin Templin (left), Chris Harlin (right) 

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Nice writeup! We are excited to have my old friends at Red Rock up here to collaborate on this beer... T minus 18 hours to 1st mash-in!

A couple of clarifications- I am actually a Plant Engineer, not the Plant Manager, and we planned this collaboration as part of Lips of Faith a couple months before the medal at GABF. That was just icing on the cake! Cheers, Chris

Unknown said...

Also, we are brewing 1600 hl, not quite 23,000 hl. That's the equivalent of 1,342 barrels, 42,267gallons or 671 hogsheads

rob@microbusbrewery.org said...

This is awesome. Red Rock is one of my favorite local breweries and New Belgium is one of my favorite out-of-state breweries. I can't wait to give this one a try.

Jamie said...

Loves me some Paardebloom!!

Matt M. said...

Paardebloem is one of my favorite's, I wonder if we'll ever get it in the Liquor stores here...New Belgium, please come to Utah, pretty please.