MINNEAPOLIS — We hope you enjoyed the 17 hours of spring we got this year in the Upper Midwest. It was a wild ride and will be fondly remembered by us all. We’ve heard some places get a few months of mild weather between howling blizzards and stifling humidity, but that sounds real unlikely.
With summer apparently here for the, er, summer, it’s fortunate that our second BC Small Batch beer fits the season like a tasteful leopard-print Speedo or fireworks from a Wisconsin pole barn.
Zest Crazed is the kind of beer your parents warned you about. Wild-eyed, lurid tales of hop aromatics and citrus flavor follow this American pale ale around. What if you become Zest Crazed too?
Your parents, God love ’em, need to settle down. (Also, have you seen the nonsense they’re putting on Facebook?) That said, this beer very well may inspire the kind of antic devotion you exhibited the last time you lived at home, to things like snap bracelets, JNCOs, or let’s say Night Ranger.
“This beer arose from a relatively straightforward idea,” said Ben Smith, head brewer, Surly Brewing Co. “We’d done a few different infusions with fruit, peel, and zest, and we really wanted to have an easy drinking, zest-forward pale ale as we transitioned into summer. We trialed a few different fruits before settling on lemon and grapefruit.”
Zest Crazed succeeds Inside the Upside Down in the new series of limited-edition beers we’re making at our original Brooklyn Center facility.
“The beer fits the BC Small Batch series as a one-off, experimental brew utilizing fresh zest sourced locally, which would be hard to do on a larger scale” says Smith. “I think it follows Inside the Upside Down very well – a totally different beer but extremely refreshing, just in time for patio season.”
The stats:
- 5.5% ABV
- Moderate bitterness
- Citra hops
- Pours golden
As noted previously, the footprint on our BC Small Batch series is limited. Look for Zest Crazed in Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and the Chicago area beginning the week of June 4.
About Surly Brewing Co.
You do enough settling. That’s part of life. You owe it to yourself to drink a beer that doesn’t settle. Not settling drives Surly. It’s what drove us to convert a Brooklyn Center abrasives factory to a brewery in 2004. It’s what drove Surly’s owner, Omar Ansari, to go bar to bar, asking them to carry our beer. It’s what drove us to earn medals from the Great American Beer Festival and Best Brewery in America honors. It’s what drove us to change a Minnesota law that had been on the books since Prohibition. It’s what drove us to build a state-of-the-art destination brewery in the heart of the Twin Cities in 2014 featuring a massive beer hall, outdoor beer garden, Surly Pizza Upstairs and event center. And it’s what drives us today. Surly’s not for everyone. It’s for you. Don’t settle. Get Surly.