20+ Collaboration Fest Beers Brewed With Craft Malt in 2018

Named America's most creative beer festival by Food & Wine, Collaboration Fest delivered in its fifth year with more beers brewed with craft malt than ever before— more than 20 of them. 

Root Shoot Malting Company’s Loveland-grown and malted barley for much of the beer at this year’s Collaboration Fest. These beers include Ursula Brewery's and Westbound & Down Brewing Company's Farmhouse IPA  that was brewed using 100 percent Root Shoot malts and Citra, Moutere, and Loral Cryo hops; and two hazy IPAs by Lost Highway Brewing Company, with Berthoud Brewing and Peacemaker Brewing, respectively.

"Having the opportunity to shape the consumer's drinking experience by providing the highest quality ingredients straight from the farm is powerful," explains Root Shoot Malting's Mike Myers. "Despite being in a competitive industry, we as craft maltsters and brewers, are all trying to make the best product together. We are taking freshness to a whole new level by providing a once inaccessible avenue that leads directly to the supply chain."

Fort Collins' Trubador Malting also saw features in more than 10 collaboration beers, including The People's Beer—a saison with rye, cirtra hops, and tangerine zest—the result in a series of public online voting.

"It's super cool to have our malts in what was billed as the largest ever collaboration brew - The People's Beer, with Little Machine, Two Parts, and the Colorado Brewers Guild," describes Christopher Schooley, Founder and Maltster of Trubador Malting. "We also got to work closely with New Belgium and Blackberry Farms on their Biere de Mai collab and the Cellar West /Alesong  collab—Song of the West Super Saison which was also a collab between Oregon's Mecca Grade Estate Malt and us, featuring Mecca's rye and our wheat."

Craft malters' contribution to beer spans further than the ingredients themselves. They foster an industry of exploration and cohesion with fellow crafters and this year's Collaboration Fest was a prime example of that spirit.

Welcome to the World's First Crowd-Sourced Beer Blog

Photo by Emily Sierra Photography

You made it. Welcome to ground zero of the World's First Crowd Sourced Beer Blog. 

In November 2017, we partnered up with Ray Goodrich at Foothills Brewing in Winston-Salem to present a seminar about brewery blogging at the North Carolina Craft Brewers Conference. The point: blogging is a simple tool that can help you make storytelling an integral and lucrative part of your craft brewery marketing strategy. 

Blogging is also an easy tool, and you don't have to be a writer or a poet to execute an interesting, informative craft brewery blog— you just have to be yourself... though we discovered that there were some writers and poets in the house that day. 

We challenged the NCCBC participants to help us write the first edition of this collaboration beer blog. We asked them to weigh in on the idea of "coopetition" in the craft beer business, and we compiled their thoughts in this first-ever crowd sourced beer blog that we hope will be the first of many to come.

If you'd like to share your thoughts on coopetition, email us at coopetitonbeerblog@gmail.com. 

Include your name, brewery name, and job title, please.