First off, I hope everyone had a great and beer-filled holiday season. Well, I guess we can jump right into the third installment in my Q&A with Boscos and Ghost River co-owner and head brewer, Chuck Skypeck in which experimentation, collaboration, and Memphis are discussed.
Do you feel like you have become more experimental, more willing to push styles over time?
I think you have to look at that in two perspectives, and one of those is that when we opened Boscos, our four beers on tap were the Tennessee Cream Ale which still sells well whenever we brew it, the Germantown Alt— a German-style brown ale, a beer we called Bluff City Amber which kind of morphed into a pale ale over time, and a real mild winter warmer. When we first introduced an IPA in 1993 or ’94, it was only 38 or 40 IBUs which at the time was probably the hoppiest IPA east of the Mississippi. That was Bombay IPA, and that’s grown over the years to the IBUs it has now.
It’s really interesting to me when we take that beer to the [Great American Beer Festival], people will come up and taste it and say things like, “This isn’t an IPA.” It sells like crazy for us, and I’m not going to make it extremely hoppy for a couple of hop heads who tell me I should be ashamed for calling it an IPA. It used to be around 40 IBUs, and now it’s closer to 60. So in that sense yes, [we have experimented]. You see what people are buying and drinking over time. Lately, there’s been a gravitation to hoppier beers.
