There’s Beer In The Jar: 8 Boundary-Pushing Brewer-Musician Collaborations
If you’ve spent any time watching television in the last several years, you’ve probably had the dubious pleasure of watching Pitbull try to sell you Bud Light. These ads tend to feature the hip hop star in a white suit and dark shades, holding a condensation-dripping bottle of Anheuser-Busch’s biggest seller, surrounded by women wearing so little that you wonder if their party invitations listed the same dress code as Mr. Bull’s. Sometimes he’s rapping, but usually he’s just having a good time, the very essence of his existence thus successfully equated with the fun (and proximity to anonymous underdressed women) that Bud Light will grant you.
The role of pop culture icon as product pitchman is nothing new, of course, but artist-brewer alliances have become increasingly weaponized in the escalating culture war between corporate and craft beer. Pitbull is an unpretentious, mainstream-approved rapper, associated more with his ability to soundtrack a good party than with any distinctive musical aesthetic. His sound is the product of rigorous market testing, and his success is owed mostly to the fact that he and his management understand what a certain type of party-bro wants to hear when they want to get fucked up. He is not, in other words, the kind of guy you listen to while you sniff your beer.
A growing number of brewers are looking to form alliances with musicians who do sniff their beer, though, and it’s impressive how often they’re finding them. While it’s difficult to imagine Pitbull conducting a quality test at an InBev facility or Aloe Blacc and Capital Cities suggesting tweaks to the malt bill of Beck’s flagship lager, craft brewers are now frequently asking musicians to come on board not just as brand partners, but as full-blown collaborators. The result has been a crop of fascinating, often delicious beers, imprinted with the idiosyncrasies of dozens of great bands.
Stillwater Artisanal Ales has been a major player in the movement to unite craft brewers and musicians for the greater good, with collaborations with Lower Dens, Small Black, and Tennis already under their belt as a part of their Sensory Series. On April 25, the gypsy operation will launch The Devil Is People, a sour smoked wheat ale brewed in collaboration with Bonnie “Prince” Billy and the atmospheric Grails/Slint affiliates, Watter. In an unusual twist, there’s also a 12-inch single associated with the project, credited to Bonnie Stillwatter and due out April 14 on Brooklyn label Temporary Residence Ltd. Between the beer and the record, The Devil Is People project might be the most fully synthesized marriage of brewing and musical creation ever.
Brian Strumke, the founder and brewmaster of Stillwater Artisanal, has been the driving force behind the company’s collaborations. As an electronic musician and visual artist himself, Strumke has always tried to use his beers to stir up a reaction in you that goes beyond just the flavor of what’s in your glass. Take the gorgeous, distinctive Stillwater label art, done by tattoo artist Lee Verzosa. Every brewery worth its salt has an aesthetic, but Stillwater’s is remarkably consistent dating to their very early days, and that’s a testament to Strumke’s commitment to beer as art. His choices of musical collaborators are an extension of that level of care.
“As with any type of creative collaboration, I seek to work with others that share a common vision and interests,” Strumke told me in an email interview. “Coming from a music and art background, I find that most of my interests in those worlds usually coincide with what I am trying to do with Stillwater and the relationships usually unfold naturally. And while similar collaborative projects like this are based on marketing or endorsement, ours have all been based on mutual admiration for one another’s work.”
That mutual admiration simply has to be in place for a musician-brewer collaboration to work. Music nerds and beer geeks are both adept at sniffing out phoniness. When a beer exists primarily as a piece of merch for the band “collaborator,” it’s obvious, and those beers rarely have much impact beyond completist superfan collectors. The beers that succeed do so because they work on two levels — as a great beverage, and as a worthy, aesthetically resonant part of a band’s output.
We culled a few of the most interesting examples in the gallery above. Cheers!
Stillwater/Bonnie "Prince" Billy & Watter - The Devil Is People (Wheat Ale)
Watter keyboardist Tyler Trotter is also the owner of three craft beer establishments in Louisville: Holy Grale, Gralehaus, and Beer Store. He and Zak Riles, also of Watter, met Stillwater brewer Brian Strumke at a brunch at Holy Grale about a year ago, and the rest was history. "From that point on it was really just a matter of managing to find some time within everyone's busy schedules to make it happen," Trotter said. "We wrote and recorded the song over a couple days in late September and everything else just sort of fell into place." In this case, "everything else" also meant getting Will Oldham onboard, and the resulting track is like the most spaced out Bonnie "Prince" Billy song ever. The sour smoked wheat ale associated with the project will launch on April 25, and given Stillwater's track record as an artist collaborator, it feels safe to assume it will be great.
Robinsons/Iron Maiden - Trooper (English Ale)
This one walks the line between artistic expression and shameless merchandising, but given the rest of vocalist Bruce Dickinson's resume -- pilot, fencer, author -- you want to give them the benefit of the doubt. Trooper has been billed as "Created by Iron Maiden, Brewed by Robinsons," and Dickinson was apparently responsible for the recipe. ""I'm a lifelong fan of traditional English ale," he said in the press release. "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when we were asked to create our own beer." And you know what? It's pretty good. Trooper is a quintessential British "real ale," mildly bitter and complex, and great when served on cask. Saint Vitus Bar here in New York carries it, and while it's a pricy option to keep ordering over the course a long gig, there's something pretty awesome about watching metal bands play and drinking a beer made by one of the genre's godfathers. Up the Irons.
Dogfish Head/Guided By Voices - Beer Thousand (Light Lager)
Dogfish Head brewmaster Sam Calagione is notorious in beer circles for his try-anything-once recklessness, and he's extended his brewing insanity to a handful of great music-themed brews. His Miles Davis-inspired Bitches Brew is as good an American imperial stout as you'll find, and his eclectic taste means there have also been beers made in honor of Robert Johnson, Pearl Jam, and the Grateful Dead, among others. Beer Thousand, brewed for the 20th anniversary of Guided By Voices' Bee Thousand, is one of his most radical acts yet. While it's unclear how much input Robert Pollard had on the beer's creation, the beer feels thoroughly GBV, in that it's a light lager that drinks like a whiskey. Dogfish Head used 10 malts, 10 hops, and cranked the ABV all the way up to 10%. (10x10x10=1000. Good one, guys.) I first drank one in Dayton -- my, and GBV's, hometown -- and I wanted to crank "Gold Star for Robot Boy" to 10 and drink 1000 more.
3 Floyds/Municipal Waste - Toxic Revolution (Imperial Stout)
3 Floyds Brewing in Munster, Ind., is generally considered one of the best breweries in the world. It also happens to be run by metalheads. As you can imagine, that's led to some awesome abuses of power. The brewery's annual Dark Lord Day (the only day all year you can buy their coveted Dark Lord imperial stout) is a de facto metal festival that always has a stacked bill. They've also collaborated with tons of metal bands, and the results have been consistently excellent. My favorite is Toxic Revolution, a monster imperial stout so hoppy it could pass for a black IPA. Municipal Waste is the collaborating band, so one can assume a lot of the credit goes to their beer geek drummer, Dave Witte. A 3 Floyds/Municipal Waste beer wouldn't feel genuine if it wasn't an extreme kick in the taste buds, and Toxic Revolution is definitely that. (Note: This beer hasn't been in production in a couple years, so any bottle you manage to track down today will likely be cellar-aged.)
New Belgium/Clutch - Lips Of Faith: Clutch (Stout-Sour Ale Blend)
This one hasn't been brewed in a few years either, but it marked the first time I realized how fully a band and a brewery could collaborate, and it seemed to help set off the current boom of collab beers. When I interviewed Clutch vocalist Neil Fallon in 2011, he explained the brewing process: "When we say the band did it, the band was at the brewery. We put the malts and the barley in the mill, and [added] the hops and the sugar and the whole thing. In some ways, I'm more nervous about this beer than I was the last record. Beer geeks are much more merciless than metal purists." He needn't have worried; New Belgium can sometimes seem to be coasting on their mediocre flagship beers like Fat Tire and Ranger IPA, but their Lips Of Faith series almost always yields tremendous results. The Clutch beer was an 80/20 stout-sour ale blend, and it remains one of the high points of the series. This is another case where the band's well-documented love of beer -- guitarist Tim Sult is known for including a six-pack of local beer on the Clutch tour rider in every city -- clearly rubbed off on the end product.
Elysian/Sub Pop Records - Loser (American Pale Ale)
Elysian Brewing's Loser is a fine American pale ale, not unlike much of Sub Pop's fine American music. That's not why it's interesting, though. In January, the Seattle-based Elysian was acquired by AB InBev, Budweiser's parent company. That inevitably made Loser's tagline of "Corporate Beer Still Sucks" a little awkward. Now, granted: The Beer Internet is as prone to teapot tempests as any online subculture, but it feels fair to say Loser catalyzed a moment that had a lot of people considering the meaning of venerable independent beer and music brands becoming more corporatized. Elysian started in 1996, and a lot of breweries from that generation have started to weigh the value of their coolness and perceived authenticity against the comfortable retirement that would come from "selling out." We haven't really seen an acquisitions boom in music yet, probably because record labels are a bad investment in 2015. But music buyers are often concerned with the same major-indie split that beer drinkers fret about, and affiliations with one or the other go a long way in informing people's perception of a band (or brand). No word on whether InBev will keep Loser in its portfolio in the long run, but it's bound to raise hackles until they admit that they don't really think corporate beer still sucks.
Stone/Kyle Hollingsworth & Keri Kelli - Collective Distortion IPA (Double IPA)
Sometimes, breweries collaborate with critically acclaimed artists who are well-respected in the music community, and other times, they collaborate with a guy from the String Cheese Incident and some dude who played guitar for Alice Cooper. Luckily, Kyle Hollingsworth and Keri Kelli's brewing prowess outweighs their reputations among highbrow music fans. Collective Distortion is a double IPA brewed with elderberries and coriander, and it's not nearly as aggressively bitter as Stone's more archetypal West Coast hop bombs. I'm not really qualified to say if it tastes like Hollingsworth and Kelli's music sounds, but it does suggest that beer geeks are democratic. Collective Distortion is a very good beer, and the relative anonymity of its musical collaborators doesn't change that. Now I'm going to go listen to a String Cheese Incident song. Oh, no. Never mind.
Goose Island/Run The Jewels - Run The Jewels (Belgian Wheat Ale)
(I won't get into the corporate ownership of Goose Island too much here, but they're owned by AB InBev, same as Elysian. I didn't give Elysian a pass so I won't give Goose Island a pass, either. Moving on...)
The origin story of the Run The Jewels beer alone justifies its existence. Apparently, through "a series of conference calls and emails," Killer Mike and El-P talked the guys at Goose Island into making a dry-hopped Belgian wheat with the purpose of making it smell like weed, and to help "alleviate cotton-mouth." The rappers came to the Chicago brewery and helped make the beer in advance of the 2013 Pitchfork Music Festival, where it was exclusively available. I didn't make it to Pitchfork Fest that year, so I haven't had the beer, but good on Run The Jewels and Goose Island for having some fun with the whole brewer-musician collaboration thing. It's also just really fun to imagine Killer Mike and El-P sniffing hops and high-fiving over how much they smell like weed. It's worth remembering that at the end of the day, beer has to be fun.
