Crank Arm Brewing and All About Beer Collab!

With NC Beer Month quickly approaching there is one event that settles perfectly right into all the festivities that happen right here in the Triangle…That is the Raleigh World Beer Fest. Now I have a nice post coming up soon about the World Beer Fest as a whole, but today I want to talk about a single beer that will be appearing at the festival this year. Recently we were invited out to Crank Arm Brewing by the wonderful folks at All About Beer Magazine (the facilitators of the WBF) and this was to get a first person account of the brewing of a WBF exclusive collaboration beer.

Here we ran into the President of All About Beer Magazine, Daniel Bradford, who took a few minutes to tell me about the beer they were brewing with Crank Arm with is simply named “Beer Fest Beer”. He described the beer along the lines of a Belgian style pale ale with roasted Pilsner and Vienna malts and very aggressive wit yeast. He didn’t stop there though. He went on to explain how this beer is brewed using Azacca hops, which Mike Morris, co-founder & Brewer at Crank Arm, called it “the last known indigenous hop in North Carolina” or “Last of the Beerhicans”. The Azzaca hop provides a very interesting variety of characteristics, ranging from fresh citrus, manga, and grapefruit, to spicy and piney flavors. Daniel noted that this beer is not going to be one-dimensional and judging from diverse amount of flavors involved, that shouldn’t be the case. This beer sounds like it caters to just about everyone and, as always, each individual is going to take something completely different from this beer.

Now credit has to be given where credit is due – Daniel made sure to note that this beer was happening all because of Shannon Legge, who is the Advertising Manager over at All About Beer. All I know is she was holding the all-important brewers paddle of creation so who was I to question this? Everyone involved seemed very excited about this beer and personally i’m as equally excited to try it.

Of course I had the pleasure of also meeting Adam Harold who is the Director of Beer Programs at All About Beer and the guy who is overseeing the lineup for the WBF. I also had the chance to meet Adam Eckhardt the other founder of Crank Arm who was eager to allow me to sample a few of the beers they had on hand. (The Motivator Russian Imperial Stout was pretty damn tasty!)

You will be able to sample the All About Beer/Crank Arm Brewing collab beer at this years Raleigh World Beer Fest being held downtown in Moores Square. tickets and other information can be found here.

You can visit Crank Arm over at 319 W. Davie St. in Raleigh and try any one of the fantastic beers they have on tap which you can see a list of over at their website http://www.crankarmbrewing.com/