Recreational Chemistry by Hop Haus Brewing.
Sara Hoechst had already been impressed with her patrons’ dedication to drinking beer at the 4-month-old Fitchburg location of Hop Haus Brewing this month.
Then, someone brought a personal propane heater to cozy up the outdoor patio.
“We’ve got a firepit out there, and most days there’s people sitting out there by the firepit having beers. They’ve been incredibly resilient,” Hoechst said. “People are just making it work. We’re really grateful for that kind of fighting spirit that people have right now.”
Hoechst and her husband, Hop Haus brewmaster Phil Hoechst, opened the Fitchburg brewery, complete with a full kitchen, 15-barrel brewhouse and canning line, on Sept. 1 as a supplement to the small Verona taproom that opened in 2015.
The heavy investment in open-air amenities — planned long before any notion of a pandemic — paid off immediately. Beers were poured for customers on the rooftop and ground level patios and expansive lawn, and the garage-style doors opened up to bring the outdoors into the indoor taproom as well.
The cold weather of December and January has deterred some of those drinkers and diners, but not as many as Hoechst expected.
“There’s a huge segment of people that are really trying to really shop local, keeping that front of mind,” she said. “To see that people are making such an effort to support where they can and when they can, it’s just so heartwarming. … You just can’t appreciate it enough.”
The packaging capabilities of the new brewery have been key, allowing Hop Haus to bring in house production of the six-packs of beers like Magic Dragon double IPA, Plaid Panther scotch ale and Sweet Sunglasses blonde ale. Such beers had been made and bottled or canned at Octopi Brewing in Waunakee since 2017.
With bigger batches at Fitchburg, the original Verona Hop Haus is now Phil Hoechst’s “Innovation Station” where one-offs and experiments take form. (Sara Hoechst is stoked about Hop Haus’ first sour, coming soon.) A one-off that’ll be graduating to the big system in Fitchburg this year is Castaway, a lager infused with lime that was such a hit on draft last summer that it’ll be canned when the weather befits a lime lager.
And Fitchburg also has brought Hop Haus’ fun Recreational Chemistry IPA series to a wider audience. Since 2018, Phil Hoechst has rotated hops on a mostly consistent juicy/hazy IPA base to showcase the wide range of flavor and aroma profiles that can be found in the many, many hop varieties available to brewers.
Recreational Chemistry had been mostly draft-only, with a small amount of large-format bottles available mainly at the brewery. With the new place, the Hoechsts moved the series to four-packs of 16-ounce cans, which has become the preferred package of the hazy IPA.
If you didn’t know this a year ago, you surely know it now. Hazy IPA options here have exploded in the past year-plus, to the point that I stare at the shelves in the cooler and really have no idea what I’m looking at. The pandemic has caused many breweries — including many hype-ey ones I wouldn’t have dreamed would ever distribute here — to redirect production from draft beer to cans for far-flung markets. These are New York’s Other Half and Barrier, Illinois’ Phase Three, Virginia’s Aslin, Minnesota’s Modist.
Many of these tallboys have sophisticated, abstract labels that, conveniently enough for Hop Haus, resemble the visual and beer palette it had already adopted for Recreational Chemistry. The market for this kind of beer has kind of developed around it.
“The whole hazy explosion that’s happened in Wisconsin, specifically in the past 18-24 months, has really worked out so well for that,” Sara Hoechst said.
While it’s hard to say Recreational Chemistry matches the output of some of the country’s best hazesmiths, it’s no slouch. Let’s dive into the most recent hoppy iteration to come out of the Haus.
Recreational Chemistry
Style: Hazy IPA
Brewed by: Hop Haus Brewing, 2975 Sub-Zero Parkway, Fitchburg; and 231 S. Main St., Verona
What it’s like: The Brewing Projekt’s usually excellent Dare Mighty Things is another rotating-hop concept in a hazy IPA, although Recreational Chemistry is beefier and a bit more restrained in its embrace of the hazy arts. DMT is lighter in color, is quite a bit hazier and has a fuller, softer mouthfeel.
Where, how much: The current Recreational Chemistry — featuring Mosaic, Amarilo and Idaho 7 hops — was canned on Dec. 8 and arrived at retail in late December, so supplies may begin running thin soon. (It’s still drinking plenty well at six weeks old; with hoppy beers, always check dates on the bottom of cans.) The colors in the label change slightly for each new version of Recreational Chemistry, and the featured hops are clearly marked on the label. Four-packs of the handsome tallboy cans are around $13 — a very competitive price in the hop-haze market.
Booze factor: While Recreational Chemistry occasionally veers into double IPA territory — the last version was 8% — this version is 7% ABV, which is still on the high side end of IPA’s range.
Up close: Recreational Chemistry pours a hazy amber, and this version’s hop cocktail delivers an intense aroma of a tropical fruit bowl — sweet mandarin orange, ripe mango, pineapple — and a hint of pine in its deepest recesses.
The flavor more or less follows that juicy blueprint, with a little snap of bitterness and a sizzle of Mosaic’s signature dank note on the finish. That mostly tidy finish and the medium body helps make this beer a pretty easy drinker despite its ABV.
Hint: Slow down and let the second half of your pour warm up in the glass and you’ll be rewarded with more hop complexity. This chemistry is recreational, after all.
Bottom line: 4 stars (out of 5)
Beer Baron’s Beers of the Year 2020: Worst Year Ever Edition
Let’s take inventory of the most unforgettable, symbolic and just downright delicious beers of 2020.
This was not the best new beer Madison’s Ale Asylum released this year, but it was unquestionably the most successful, and it’s obvious why without even cracking open the can. This beer’s label perfectly captured the zeitgeist at the time of its release in early April, and it never really stopped resonating. The pilsner was followed by a hazy pale ale version, and both were taken national by the new Wisconsin-based distributor Brew Pipeline. Locally, the brewery has offered the FVCK COVID duo and many of its other beers for $6 a six-pack for most of the year. By the way, my favorite new Ale Asylum beer also had a “ugh, 2020” theme: MRDR HRNT, the first in a new “Apocalypse Bingo” series. It’s a pale ale heavily dosed with Mosaic, Denali and Trident hops that create an intense, nearly hard seltzer-like lemongrass-lime character.
This is not one but 25 beers, a different one from each of the Wisconsin breweries that committed to this worldwide collaboration started by San Antonio’s Weathered Souls Brewing. Most of the beers were imperial stouts, but the Black Is Beautiful black IPA (remember that style?) from community-focused Delta Beer Lab might have been my favorite of those I tried. The other participating Madison-area breweries were Herbiery, Giant Jones, Parched Eagle, Rockhound, Sunshine and Young Blood. Black Is Beautiful was, of course, a response to the other story that defined 2020: our national awakening on racial justice. The 1,192 breweries that took part pledged to donate proceeds to local foundations that support police reform and legal defense for those who have been wronged by police, and also committed “to the long-term work of equality.” I am happy to drink to that.
Yes, there are plenty of beers on this list that are not a statement on times like these. And Untitled Art’s take on the legendary Chocolate Shoppe ice cream flavor was probably my favorite of them. Loaded with lactose for sweetness and creaminess, and cocoa nibs and dark malts for chocolate character, it was not just a beer that tasted like chocolate ice cream but specifically like Zanzibar. It was sweet but not overly so, and the chocolate had dark depths and the fruity complexity of its namesake.
Young Blood Beer Co. picked a heck of a year to debut. The plan was to pack the taproom on King Street and pour glass after glass of head brewer Kyle Gregorash’s IPAs, saisons, lagers and pastry stouts. The opening went ahead in May, with a quick pivot toward canning the bulk of the beer, though the sidewalk patio did brisk business, too. Young Blood’s M.O. is to crank ’em; its Untappd page records 117 different beers already. And while this is really a nod for the entire brewery over a single beer, I don’t think any Young Blood I had this year surpassed the mostly by-the-book but excellent saison Cheryl’s 2004 Cobalt. I’m looking forward to seeing more of the colorful cans in my fridge — and what they come up with next for beer names — in 2021.
The label of color fields and geometric shapes was almost as adorable as this beer’s diminutive pop culture namesake, but the beer inside was the real force. Released for Third Space Brewing’s fourth anniversary in September, this kinda-hazy session IPA packed bright citrus and stonefruit flavors and a satisfying body despite its wee 3.9% ABV. Baby Yo capped a great year of new hoppy beers, with kveik yeast stars Nordic Sunrise and Fjord Explorer strong BOTY contenders as well.
If you’re the most successful craft brewery in Wisconsin and you’re going to release only one new beer in a year, it had better be a banger. And this complex, enigmatic sipper sure was. A blend of three batches of spontaneously fermented ale from New Glarus’ “wild fruit cave,” it incorporated Geisenheim grapes after blending to put an unmistakable spin on brewmaster Dan Carey’s familiar fruit lambics. This sweet creation was aptly named, with a floral, intensely fruity profile of apricot, white grape and honey that really did evoke a butterfly’s sip.
Oktoberfests get all the love every year, but a great Vienna lager can scratch that toasty-malty itch year-round. For that reason, I didn’t love that this beer from Lakefront Brewery’s My Turn series came out in fall when shelves were already loaded with beers with a similar profile. But it was still a standout: bready and flavorful but clean and balanced. Wisconsin brewers, let’s be like Lakefront warehouse employee Johnny Hopgood (his real name, a true aptonym) and make some more Vienna lagers, please!
Yes, the bow on top of my 2020 Beers of the Year is a 117-year-old American light lager that you can find literally everywhere. I wrote a column in May revealing the Champagne of Beers as my “comfort beer,” a rock of palate certainty to balance the uncertainty in the world. But as the year marched on, I realized there was another factor bringing me back to High Life. On Feb. 26, a Molson Coors electrician killed five co-workers and himself at the Miller Valley brewery in Milwaukee. I feel a kinship with this beer for many reasons but the one I thought about often while buying yet another 12-pack this year was a solemn solidarity with the survivors of that day and the loved ones of the fallen: Dale Hudson, Gennady "Gene" Levshetz, Jesus “Jesse” Valle Jr., Dana Walk and Trevor Wetselaar.
Got a beer you’d like the Beer Baron to pop the cap on? Contact Chris Drosner at chrisdrosner@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @WIbeerbaron.
January 23, 2021 at 10:00PM
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Beer Baron: Hop Haus gets in on the hazy IPA hype - Madison.com
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