Innovation in beer has been accelerating for the previous decade as breweries—excited by new types and methods, and feeding a tradition of newness incentivized by social apps—churn out a relentless amount of recent beers in new codecs with new labels. Nonetheless, to listen to Invoice Cherry inform it, the alternatives he’s made at Switchback over the previous 20 years have been pushed extra by slowness than velocity.
Packaging in 22-ounce bombers so they might dial in packaging earlier than transferring to extra standard codecs, or pursuing innovation in smoked beer as a result of demand (and competitors) in that area of interest are small, have afforded the brewery time and house to determine it out and construct demand organically, all the time focusing first on the beer and its high quality.
The outcomes have paid off over current years, with 2022 gold and 2023 bronze medals on the World Beer Cup for Katie’s Love Poem, their grodziskie. However that’s simply the kindling, as their broader Flynn on Hearth sequence has seen them deal with and be taught from an unlimited array of various smoked beers. Cherry loves smoked beer as a result of they’re tougher to promote to shoppers—there isn’t a built-in marketplace for them, so that they need to create one, and he loves that problem in addition to the runway for lower-stakes experimentation.
On this episode, he talks by means of that counterintuitive technique and the way it pertains to their strategy to innovation, together with:
- designing Switchback Ale based mostly on items of different inspirational beers
- rising slowly to ensure beer high quality is all the time high precedence
- packaging draft just for the primary 10 years of the brewery till they might afford a top quality bottling line
- homing in on smoked as a result of as a result of “no person likes smoked beers, however they need to”
- creating the smoke-o-meter scale for conveying smokiness to shoppers
- step-mashing for taste, not simply attenuation
- sustaining a dwelling yeast pitch that’s happening 2,000-plus generations
- balancing hop taste and smoke aroma in smoked IPA
And extra.
“if you may get folks to drink one thing that they don’t know they need, that’s true craft,” says Cherry.
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