Ballantine IPA: Rebuilding a Legend

My latest All About Beer post went up on Friday--sorry about the delay in posting a link.  A teaser:

A couple years ago, Pabst’s master brewer, Greg Deuhs, started wondering about that beer. The brand is still owned by Pabst, but that doesn’t mean anyone knows how Ballantine IPA was made. “With all the acquisitions related to Ballantine, none of the records made it to me. All the records you’d expect just aren’t there; no one handed me a couple boxes and said, here are the recipes.” He was still intrigued by it, and researched it the best he could through the fragments of information that still exist. Eventually, he started five-gallon test batches to see how hard it would be to rebuild from memory, educated guesswork, and incomplete records. A couple of months ago, Pabst launched a new-millennium version of Ballantine IPA, and I spoke to Deuhs to find out how he’d reconstructed it.

Read the whole post here.   If you enjoy it, do all those social media-y things that help share the piece and put it in front of a larger audience.

Incidentally, All About Beer has really stepped up their online game.  Great recent posts include:

• An insider's account on judging at the GABF by John Holl.
• A bit of GABF history from Tom Acitelli: moving the fest from Boulder to Denver and the fest's evolving style categories.

Definitely put the web-only site on your radar.