Fruit

From pandan to seaweed, there are certain flavors catching on with consumers. For breweries willing to experiment, it might be possible to capture some of that buzz.

In South Florida, former science teacher John Hoolihan is scaling up his pursuit of flavor, fueled by demand for sparkling meads and informed by a feedback loop where customers have a real say.

When done thoughtfully, fruited sours, spiked sodas, and even hard seltzers can address many of the same drinker demands as RTD cocktails.

Whether using whole fruit or purees, breweries benefit by estimating their needs in advance.

Kettle acidification has become an important technique in the craft brewer’s bag of tricks. Here’s some advice from a few of the best in the business on how to get greater consistency and depth of flavor when deploying lactic acid–producing bacteria.

Quick acidification has become an important tool in the flavor kit of craft breweries worldwide. Brewers have honed their methods while labs have added plenty of new options. So, how well do you know your microbes?

Fruit beers with straightforward flavors and familiar inspirations may be all that breweries need to keep up with ready-to-drink canned cocktails. (The little umbrellas are optional.)

From a 19th-century former church in Cincinnati, Urban Artifact is building a national reputation driven by heavily fruited, tart (and shelf-stable) beers and direct-to-consumer sales.

Brewers have become adept at squeezing more fruit flavors out of their hops as well as producing lush fruit beers that evoke tropical cocktails. However, there is another way to amplify those crowd-pleasing flavors in your beers.

Money doesn’t grow on trees, but fruit does—and yet, it can be a finite resource. For all the talk of how climate could affect malt and hops, fruit is another raw material of modern beer that’s vulnerable to weather, as well as to supply-chain issues.

Two Roads cofounder and brewmaster Phil Markowski has embraced hard seltzer as a beverage that has its time and place. Here, he discusses the development of their groundbreaking H2Roads hard seltzer.

Our latest in a series on small breweries going beyond beer: From a young brewery built to anticipate the latest trends, the Lulz brand of seltzers finds success by embracing big flavor while shedding all beery pretensions.