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dining | Weekend Pass
Hopping on the Trend Sports teams, bands and eateries strike up clever collaborations with eager breweries
sary of Alice Waters’ famed Chez Panisse Cafe in Berkeley. “It’s like, all right, now you have wine people drinking beer, beer people drinking wine,” notes Sebastian Zutant, a partner and sommelier at The Red Hen in Bloomingdale, which collaborated with DC Brau on a Belgian-inspired saison matured in a wine barrel with sauvignon blanc lees. (A follow-up effort, a version of DC Brau’s Penn Quarter Porter aged on red wine lees, is slated for a fall debut.) “It’s a unique way for friends to not only
Beer
“You used to see a lot of just breweryand-brewery collaborations, and now it’s branching out.” — TIM PRENDERGA ST, A CICERONE AT COLUMBIA HEIGHTS’ MERIDIAN PINT WHO HELPS OVERSEE THE BEER PROGRAM
ELIZABETH REYES
The beer, Andrew Minucci says, began with a T-shirt: a DC Brau T-shirt, sold in March, that riffed on the D.C. United soccer team’s star-and-eagle coat of arms. “We saw them do that, and I called them up,” says Minucci, D.C. United’s marketing manager. “They thought I was calling to, you know, cease and desist them.” Minucci, however, had collaboration in mind. The result was a golden ale, brewed in honor of the team and named The Tradition, which the brewery introduced in June, recently rereleased and might package in cans next year. “I think it speaks to the moment we’re at with craft beer,” Minucci says. That is, everybody wants in on the action. This year DC Brau has collaborated on beers with local ska band The Pietasters, the restaurateurs behind the Red Hen and DGS Delicatessen, and the staff of the Heurich House Museum. (The latest of those efforts, an homage to the pre-Prohibition lagers of Christian Heurich Brewing, will debut during the fifth annual DC Beer Week Aug. 11-18.) Meanwhile, similar joint projects have been springing up at breweries nationwide. Fueled by the desire to build community and by, at least sometimes, savvy marketers, these beers suggest how the craft phenomenon has touched society at large. To be sure, “collaboration beers” have been coursing through taps for a long time: The term typically has referred to what emerges when employees from multiple breweries gather to brew, swap tricks of
Above: Phil Leinhart of Brewery Ommegang enjoys a “Game of Thrones”-themed beer. Below: A Golden Calf, a custom beer made for DGS Delicatessen by DC Brau.
the trade and maybe blast some heavy metal. But a broader meaning is taking hold. “You used to see a lot of just brewery-and-brewery collaborations, and now it’s branching out,” says Tim Prendergast, who helps oversee the beer program at the Columbia Heights beer bar Meridian Pint and who estimates that since 2011, staffers there have brewed 18 collaborations alongside local brewers. Particularly notable have been the creations that demonstrate craft beer’s move into the fine-dining world, typically the province of oenophiles. This past spring, for example, Bay Area upstart Calicraft Brewing bottled Chez Panisse Farmhouse Ale, a limited-edition beer honoring the 33rd anniver-
Winter Is Brewing It doesn’t take a sensitive nose to detect a whiff of marketing in some brewery collaborations. Take, for example, the soughtafter new series of beers inspired by the HBO fantasy drama “Game of Thrones,” from upstate New York’s Brewery Ommegang. The first beer, a blond ale named Iron Throne, is billed on Ommegang’s website as “the result of a creative collaboration between Brewmaster Phil Leinhart and HBO.” Leinhart, above, points out that the branding has brought his product to an entirely new consumer base, one that might not normally buy craft beer — a noble outcome indeed. D.F.
work with each other but also promote each other — and make each other money,” he says. That development has a downside, too: As more brewers partner with people whose hearts lie further and further from the world of beer, the results can seem less like true creative efforts and more like mere cross-promotion. Just look at Mmmhops, a pale ale brewed for the Hanson brothers, of “MMMBop” fame. Still, almost any collaboration can be a good one, a view held by DC Brau’s president and head brewer, Jeff Hancock. “We don’t ever just turn away an idea when people come to us,” he says. “What I want to convey and show people is we’re not a one-trick pony. We can do a lot of different stuff and work with a lot of different people.” “With each year, you kind of gain more converts.” DANIEL FROMSON (FOR THE WASHINGTON POST )