Idle Hands is experimenting with wine-beer hybrids

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Beer

“If Germany and Napa Valley had a child in love.”

Idle Hands Weinlager is a 6% alcohol by volume lager described on the brewery’s website as “if Germany and Napa Valley have a love child”.

It was a conversation last summer that got Idle Hands brewery founder Christopher Tkach to think more deeply about pairing beer and wine.

This conversation, with City Winery’s head winemaker, Richard Jacob, began when Idle Hands started supplying beer for the winery’s Greenway pop-up across from South Station.

“We wanted to do something more with them, and it just seemed logical to try pairing beer with wine,” says Tkach.

Creating beer-wine hybrids in the craft beer space isn’t completely new. Another local brewery, Trillium, for example, has launched Dialed In series beers that include Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Gris and Riesling grape juice. These beers, all IPAs, showcase the pungent, fruity notes of hops with the addition of the more concentrated citrus of grapes.

In an effort to see what Idle Hands could do with wine grapes, Tkach and his team visited City Winery last fall to taste through barrels of finished wine. But when they started tasting only the fresh juice of select Chardonnays, from Scopus Vineyards in Sonoma, “it just clicked.”

“We had a good idea of ​​what the juice would bring because it had a wonderful tropical flavor profile that we knew we could work with.” said Tkach.

But rather than go the IPA route and “kill it with hops” like so many breweries do, Tkach and his team decided to go simpler, brewing a lager to pair with California grape juice.

“We wanted to showcase that tropical fruit character in a very different way and really put that flavor front and center in the beer,” he says. “This led us to use it in a very clean lager, which would allow the tropical fruit characteristics of the grapes to shine through with minimal interference. And I must say that we succeeded. »

The finished beer, called Weinlager, is a 6% alcohol-by-volume lager described on the brewery’s website as “if Germany and Napa Valley have a love child.” I recently tasted the brew and found it crisp like a lager but also lemony and slightly tart, although much less than many sour beers. I found myself enjoying the nuance of each sip and tasting the wine and beer aspects of the drink at different times.

While it was a limited release last month, some four-packs of Weinlager’s original batch should still be on the shelves of Greater Boston beer stores. But perhaps the biggest news is that Idle Hands isn’t done experimenting with beer-wine hybrids. They plan to brew more batches of Weinlager throughout 2022, as well as working with a well-known but unnamed Massachusetts winery on an additional release.

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