By: Blake Maitz
First-Year Brewmaster Student
Gone are the days of walking into your local liquor store and having the painstaking decision of choosing between the delicious, but not so creative offerings, of mega beer suppliers such as Budweiser, Bud Light, Kokanee and Coors Light. Yes, it is, at its core, the kind of beer that most people think of when you mention the name of the worlds favourite drink to them. But times are changing. And now, when you say the magical word 'beer' to even a passer-by, they should beam with sheer excitement!
From merely thinking of all the weird and beautiful ways creativity in beer has exploded in the last decade, it's enough to make one positively giddy. Indeed, we are in the golden era of innovation in the brewing world. Crafting the kinds of beers that would be unrecognizable to most, say twenty-five years ago, has become the norm and just another week for some breweries. The skills and knowledge master brewers have these days, allows them to be as creative as they can when coming up with recipes and additions for the delicious beers they concoct.
New Level Brewing, one of these breweries on the leading edge when it comes to pushing boundaries for recipe development, has become a new favourite of many beer aficionado’s. With beers such as strawberry milkshake and pina colada milkshake IPA's as some of their flagship beers, it is quite evident they are carrying the torch for adjunct-driven breweries. Their cask program is practically a mad scientist's lab, where peaches, cherries, coconuts, plums, pineapples, and mangoes are thrown into different casks. After ageing for various lengths of time, the results are fantastic. New Level has even recently teamed up with a local Calgary company, Happy Belly Kombucha, to do a collaboration brew that resulted in a peach beerbucha...healthy and delicious!
It is these kinds of companies that aren’t afraid to try something new and push the boundaries of what is acceptable in the beer world that is genuinely taking craft beer to a "New Level." Breaking away from old norms is now the mindset of the modern-day brewer. And thus, the expressiveness and artistry in craft brewing are on a trajectory that is surely limitless and will be for decades to come. As Ronald Reagan once said, “There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder."
Blake Maitz is a first-year brewmaster student in the 6th cohort.