Like many craft breweries a decade ago, Virginia’s Benchtop made its name on IPAs, sour beers, and stouts. Lagers weren’t at the top of owner Eric Tennant’s mind.
“I had the assumption that most lagers were going to be like macro lager,” he says. But a trip to the Great American Beer Festival in 2018 led him to try Bierstadt’s Slow Pour Pils, and his previous thoughts flipped. “I was like, ‘This is actually a lot more flavorful. I need to figure out how to do something like this.’”
Tennant says he’s always leaned toward drier, more bitter beers, so the quest was as much about personal preference as it was about responding to the local market. Crispy Whip, served from a Lukr faucet into half-liter mugs, quickly became the brewery’s best-selling beer.
“Suddenly, people were hanging out and drinking three beers instead of one,” Tennant says.
Initially, Benchtop wasn’t making enough of the lager to keep a yeast on hand. Tennant bought dry pitches of Fermentis SafLager W-34/70, or he borrowed yeast from neighboring breweries.
“That doesn’t always turn out the way you want to,” he says. Eventually, he acquired enough tanks to make a double turn of lager, and he dedicated a seven- and 15-barrel tank solely to those beers. “At that point, I knew that I could really decide on a strain that I wanted,” he says.
The search began.