Besties & Beers: Celebrate National Best Friends Day the Autumn Arch Way

Cheers to National Best Friends Day taking place on, Tuesday, June 8! If you haven’t found the perfect place for you and your posse to enjoy the festivities, consider observing the ‘holiday’ and joining us at  Autumn Arch.  We have you covered with where to celebrate (with us, of course) and (most importantly) what to drink, based on the brews that were seemingly made for you. 

There are few things that top a night spent sipping on Local - Authentic - Funky, house-brewed pints & flights with friends, so kick back and enjoy a beer (or two) with us and see how our curated suggestions measured up. Check out the line-up below! 

The Reliable, “Always Got Your Back”  Best Friend 

We all have that faithful ride-or-die friend who is sure to show up no matter the situation. They’re the type to have your back, so we’ve selected a brew for them that always hits the sweet spot: our 4.5% American Blonde. This light lager is refreshing with hints of sweetness from honey,  and pours with a light copper color and a solid head. 

The Wildcard Best Friend 

Ah, the wildcard friend. The firecracker in everyone’s social circle who colors outside the lines and is always down for an adventure. In fact, this person usually leads said adventure.  While the wildcard may be a little crazy, we always look up to their authenticity and boisterous chutzpah, which is why we’re pairing this pal with our Inspiring People 9.5% Double IPA. The brew features notes of resinous tree sap, pine needles and grapefruit, which may seem like an unorthodox combination, but has proven to be a brewery favorite. 

The Workaholic Best Friend 

The Workaholic Best Friend has a special place in our hearts because, let’s be honest, we (the brewers) very much fall into this category. While juggling careers as engineers and brew-focused entrepreneurs, we are sick of Zoom, rarely off email, and have to schedule time WAY in advance to hit our favorite local hiking trails, attend picnics, or begin never-ending house projects. Despite all the controlled chaos in our lives, we’re somehow able to remain reliable friends, mainly thanks to the perfect ratio of coffee and beer -and our Silent Space Black Lager fits that mold exactly. Made with dark roasted malts, this lager is deliciously light with nuanced layers of fresh baked bread and coffee. This lager is the perfect drink for that friend that seems to be constantly going. 

What we’re trying to say is that Autumn Arch has a brew for every bestie. We also happen to have a fun tap room with awesome employees and regulars, making us the perfect hosts for your next friendly catch-up or group gathering. Come grab a flight on National Best Friends Day, and tag us @autumnarchbeer on Instagram in your celebratory pictures and posts to let us know which beer suits your bestie the most!

SUMMER IS ON THE WAY, LIVE MUSIC IS ALREADY HERE

With the summer sun creeping in and the excitement of warmer weather (finally) on the door step, we can’t help but picture the perfect summer evening with live music and a craft beer in hand.

For the Autumn Arch crew, close friends, cool drinks, stellar food, and superb music are what can make up some of the best summer memories. With COVID-19 impacting the world in so many ways, we unfortunately had to pause to our live music last year.  We were really bummed about this.

But we are excited to announce the resounding relaunch of Live Music Fridays at Autumn Arch!  Check out the schedule here (and note that we have both indoor and outdoor seating!). Beer and music lovers alike are encouraged to sip and savor these live music moments and enjoy food from our awesome food truck partners

Live Music

This Friday (May 7th), we will be hosting Eric Paul Levy from 6:30 - 8:30 p.m with Molto Bene Italian food truck on premises all evening.

Throughout the month of May, additional live music performers including Scott Testerman, Red Smith will stop by Autumn Arch to set the scene for chill Friday night vibes. To keep up-to-date with each weeks’ live music performers, food trucks and events, follow us Instagram and Facebook or sign up for our newsletter.

Beers Perfect for Summer

We have a few warm weather beers on tap to accompany our carefree summer setting - Law of the Few is a 7.4% orange grapefruit West Coast IPA with the classic combination of Cascade and Centennial hops.  This bone dry and bitingly bitter drink is pleasantly ripe with citrus sweetness.

Our vividly purple-hued Choose to Challenge Hazy IPA is another fitting beer for the early summer, as it’s conditioning on passionfruit and butterfly pea powder gives it a super smooth taste.

New beers land on the tap list weekly at Autumn Arch, so stop by for the music and see what we have to offer.

NEXT BEER CRAZE?

Newark, DE. The latest nascent craft beer trend seems intriguing - “performance beers” are light beers with added electrolytes, kind of like adult Gatorades. But there’s no way they can be nearly as effective in hydrating the body because the presence of alcohol (hello! It’s beer!) will always be a dehydrating factor.

Will these performance beers really take off and be the next hard seltzer? Not sure, but I suspect not. Although, feel free to call me out if we put Arctic Blitz Belgian Wit on tap this summer.

Over the last 20 years, I would argue that the lead beer in the craft beer charge has passed the baton per the following (approximate) schedule:

late 90s - Pale Ale and dry-hopped IPA
early 2000s - West Coast IPA
mid 2000s - New England / Hazy IPA
early 2010s - Barrel Aged Sours
mid 2010s - Dessert Stouts
mid 2010s - Fruit Smoothie Beers
2019 - Fruited Hard Seltzer
2021 - Performance Beers?

It’s easy to see that the 1990s Sierra Nevada Pale Ale craze was going to inevitably turn into hazy New England IPAs, even if a bunch of traditional breweries didn’t want to admit it. It’s a logical chain of evolution.

As the craft beer market grew and pulled in different and varied tastes, mainstream barrel-aged sours and dessert stouts were able to take hold and generate excitement. I think the craft beer market had really matured at this point, with 5000+ breweries in the U.S., it was common-place to find a few craft brews in the typical American’s picnic cooler. In fact, your peers may have been disappointed had you NOT included those craft brews.

Not everything lived up to the hype, and thankfully, a few strange beer inventions died a quick death (i.e. Brut IPAs). This is part of craft experimentation…some things just don’t work.

This all leads to my main point. At some point, you have to throw it against the wall to see if it’s going to stick. It’s fun and usually interesting.

What is Autumn Arch going to throw against the wall? We have a couple things in the works, but I’m not disclosing anything until after I finish this performance beer.

NEW YEAR, NEW THINGS

What’s up 2021?! It’s good to be here.

Last year was a quite an interesting journey for the entire craft beer industry, and unfortunately, Delaware lost at least one brewery (3rd Wave in Delmar, DE). But ever the optimistic state, DE gained a fancy new brewery in Middletown - First State Brewing - and Burley Oak opened up a spin-off “Loakal Branch’. So that’s a net gain of one, which isn’t too bad considering the ramifications of a world altering pandemic.

Coming out of the the unexpected craziness that was spring 2020, the Autumn Arch team sat down and made some decisions around ‘who we were going to be’ moving forward (and how to do that in the middle of a pandemic). What became abundantly clear during that work is that we were going to double-down on our mission to create and release complex and unique beers.

What does this mean in reality? It means delivering beers that make you say ‘whoa’ with just the aroma. It means crafting beers so delicious that you save the bottle and place it in location of high regard (as I do). It means trying some edgy and experimental things with adjuncts/barrels/ingredients that may or may not work. It means sending more cans and bottles out into the world. It means bringing in a full-time brewer (which we did) who shares the vision and has the tools and experience to execute.

Therefore, in addition to our can releases, you’ll see two new bottle series from us in the coming month - Cellar Series and Abstract Methods .

One half of the Valentine’s Double Sour Release

The Cellar Series is exclusively focused on our nascent sour program. After nearly two years of brewing and barrel-aging, the program is yielding some very interesting and unique flavor profiles, which hopefully you’ve experienced at one of our Sour Wednesday events. We have several fun sours and sour-hybrids currently bottle conditioning, as well as a few more in the works for a 2021 release. We are very excited about what’s in the pipeline, and in fact, the first two beers in the Cellar Series releases on Feb 6! More details on that little gem soon…

Abstract Methods is a series more focused on the ‘complex’ side of ales and lagers. No sours here. These will generally be high ABV (10%+), high character/interestingness, occasionally barrel aged, and rarer styles. In other words, not your typical Monday night after-work beer. Justin and Dan are actively working to release the first one of these in late February/early March.

Does this mean we are eliminating all the light/golden beers on the tasting room menu?!

Heck no.

The tasting room will continue to serve a broad range of ‘whatever suits our fancy’ which includes a nice selection of golden/dark ales and lagers. But you’ll start seeing the occasional Cellar Series and Abstract Methods beers sprinkled in, which is a good thing for 2021.

P.s. I made a resolution to post more than once per quarter on this blog, so hold me to it.

DATA ON THE TRIPEL

Like all other huge events requiring the social gathering of thousands of people, the Kennett Beer Festival was canceled this year.  Instead, the festival organizers put together a novel concept of selling “backyard mixed cases” consisting of 48 different beers from 48 different breweries. 

Note that I didn’t state that there would be 48 different styles of beers, and this was something that Autumn Arch strongly considered when selecting a beer to send to this year’s brewfest.  I suspected there would only be a few styles but tons of variants of those.

I strongly feel the typical American craft beer enthusiast focuses heavily on just a few styles. Most of which are variations of IPA.  This is an interesting phenomenon, and not unlike European countries which see broad loyalty to just a few styles like Helles, Pilsner, and Wheat.

In the interest of doing something different, yet strangely conservative, (sometimes to our regret and other times to our delight), we sent a humble Belgian Tripel up to the Kennett Backyard Brewfest.   I was fairly certain that a majority of the Brewfest cases would be IPAs and a majority of those would be the New England style, which is the most popular style among a broad spectrum of craft beer drinkers (I don’t know any breweries that would dispute this). 

So we hung our hats on a Tripel - fruity, certainly not bitter, incredibly sexy, and possessing great ester and phenol aroma. The classic Belgian Tripel is quite the badass beer.  In fact, I’m required to disclose that Belgian Tripel is a hard beer for hard men. #fact

What’s not to like?  (assuming it lacks defects or other atypical offensive characteristics)

While it was a calculated decision to stand a bit out from the IPA crowd, I knew Autumn Arch risked the ire of the hype beer enthusiast.  And thanks to the internet, there is a way to quantify the magnitude of this ire! 

Enter Untappd (a fun app for craft beer fans to rate their favorite and least favorite beers).

Here is my summary of observations on Don’t Ride Triples data collected from the release date through October 2020:

1. This piece of the chart is from the first few days after release in our tasting room.  Don’t Ride Triples was on tap (just a single keg) and available in 4-packs to go.  Folks who go out for beer releases typically have at least a slight affinity for the brewery, and because they already have a favorable impression of the beer, it tends to get a slightly higher rating (seriously, would you go out to a Budweiser release?  Even if they made a NEIPA?  Nope, you wouldn’t.). Mean is 4.07 stars (represented by the black line).

2. October 3 and 4 - This was the weekend of the Kennett Brewfest case pick-up.  A lot of folks had backyard gatherings and consumed copious amounts of amazing beer.  There were no inhibitions and Untappd scores were brutally honest.  I think said copious quantities of beer also contributed to a high level of variability. A true statistician may be tempted to omit some of the low outliers, but since this was a beer festival (and we all know what happens at those), I thought it was prudent to keep all the ratings in the chart. Mean is 3.48 stars.

3. The steady state.  This represents about 3 weeks of check-ins after Kennett Brewfest and is comprised almost entirely of the slower brewfesters and folks checking in from the Autumn Arch tasting room. I’d say this section of the graph represents the average Untappd user experience (if there is such a thing as an average Untappd user). The data levels out between the two previous means at around 3.65 stars.

So the question is - knowing what we know now, do we stand by the decision to send a humble Tripel to the Kennett Brewfest instead of a style more closely associated with “hype” beer?

Yes, we definitely do.  Purely on the basis of doing something different, this was a good decision in my mind.  However, I think a big take-away for Autumn Arch is that the craft beer market’s appetite for “unique and complex” beer is insatiable.  And we have some plans over the coming months to meet this thirst head-on.