Skydance Brewing's Remarkable IPAs

I am always a sucker for a pilsner, especially on days when it’s hot and sticky enough to get you sweating on a two-block jaunt from the neighboring brewery. But it seemed especially apt standing in a native-owned brewery in Oklahoma and seeing the pilsner’s name: Rez Dog. I thought it was a not-so-subtle reference to the incredible Hulu show Reservation Dogs, both set and filmed in Oklahoma, though in fact, the name predates the show. Franz and I had managed to beat owner Jake Keyes by a few minutes, so I didn’t wait for his recommendation: A Rez Dog for me.

It was a good pilsner, conditioned eight weeks and inspired by Czech versions, and Jake is keen to make it a feature of his regular line-up. The menu also showcased some sours and other assorted one-offs, and I have no reason to think they weren’t fine beers, too. But when Skydance gets more national attention, as I believe it soon will, everybody’s going to be looking at Jake’s hoppy ales. They’re the star of the show and the kinds of beers he loves to brew—and they’re some of the best I’ve tasted recently.

Halfway Between East and West

We started by discussing Jake’s somewhat unusual background while I sipped my pilsner. His father Ritchie was a homebrewer who invited him to help on a brew day when Jake was just twelve. They shared a love of beer and even discussed opening a brewery together. Sadly, his father died an untimely death about a decade ago and they didn’t get to work on this project together. “He was an old hippie,” Jake said affectionately. At one point, Ritchie packed up the family and moved to Montana, where they lived off the grid. Making beer was just one of the many crafty activities Ritchie enjoyed, but it was the one that stuck with his son. Finding his way back to Oklahoma, Jake took a detour before getting to that brewery they dreamed of—managing casinos and working his way into leadership of the Iowa Tribe.

A portrait of Ritchie Keyes, Jake’s father.

After I learned that IPAs were Jake’s passion, we tucked into glasses of Fancy Dance, Skydance’s flagship IPA. He calls it a hazy, but here we get into a feature of Jake’s brewing. The IPAs fall less on either side of the hazy/West Coast line than most beers, and as I think back to how it tasted, it’s hard for me to distinguish it from other double, triple, and West Coast IPAs we tried.

Jake uses four hops in Fancy Dance, Citra, Mosaic, and Simcoe, along with a recent new addition, HBC 586. (A hop that seems destined for naming based on how many breweries have mentioned using it.) He also does versions of the beer with dry-hop additions of other hops, and one of those is usually on tap. Fancy Dance is characteristic of the qualities that make Skydance’s IPAs so good. It is deeply tropical, and the flavors and aromas have a bell-like quality to their intensity. They’re not muddy or over-packed, and there’s absolutely none of the off-flavors intense IPAs can have—no hop burn, no vegetal, chlorophyll chalkiness. They’re exactly what people want when they order a modern IPA—tons of flavor and aroma, that deeply juicy quality, but a very approachable, delicious beer that doesn’t go to 11.

The Iowa Tribe is also known as Ioway or, in the language of the people, Baxoje (Bah Kho-je). The Iowa peoople are the namesake of the Hawkeye State and come from there originally, though they moved around the Midwest and plains over the centuries. European settlers took their lands and relocated them in two locations--one group in Kansas and Nebraska, the other in Oklahoma. In 2022, Jake Keyes was elected the Tribal Chairman of the Iowa of Oklahoma.

To borrow a writing term, his IPAs had a strong sense of “voice.” In them I could taste Jake’s approach, and it lingers in my memory far more than the ostensible style each one fell into. They tend to sit in the middle of the hazy spectrum, whether called hazy or not, both in appearance and flavors. Jake likes bright tropicality in his beers, and accents them with a very smooth, silky texture. Unlike the thick, sweet hazies that started the revolution in New England, Skydance’s IPAs (Plains IPA?) are supple and drinkable, with an off-dry finish that encourages repeat sips. He likes boozy double and triple IPAs, and these especially benefit from this approach.

He doesn’t do anything tricky in the brewhouse. He starts with a base of about 15 IBUs of kettle bitterness, adds on average a pound per barrel of hops in the whirlpool and 4-5 pounds in a single dry-hop addition (beers with double doses are labeled). His orientation seems to focus more on hop varieties than technique. He was excited by the newly released New Zealand hop Superdelic and had an especially sticky tropical beer of the same name also made with Nectaron. But he’s also watching the performance of regular hops. For example the Simcoe he uses in Fancy Dance has gotten a bit sharp and dank, and he may look for a replacement.

In short, Skydance’s IPAs are just flat-out accomplished. I sampled four of the six he had on tap, and none of them had that half-baked, experimental quality breweries have trained us to tolerate. He started making beer at an incubator in Oklahoma City in 2018, and didn’t open his current brewery and taproom until 2021, so this level of focus is impressive.

In a post-visit exchange, Franz, who’s checking my work, said, “In my opinion, all discussion of IPA in Oklahoma begins with Roughtail (along with COOP).” That decade-old OKC brewery was the first to develop modern IPAs, he told me. I take him at his word—in my brief time in Oklahoma, he steered me to an impressive group of breweries. However, with all due respect to Roughtail, I suspect that going forward, Skydance is going to set the pace for hoppy ales. It’s a great brewery and I can’t wait to see how Jake’s IPAs evolve.