Tuesday, April 28, 2020

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Sun King’s Keller Haze IPA in growlers, available at Pints&union as of Thursday, April 30.


As a preface to what follows, something more important:

A reminder about Pints&union and the Restaurant Workers Relief Program.

The past six weeks have been surreal, to say the least, and the very last thing any of us saw happening in 2020 was creating a workers relief grocery store on the fly, running it out one door as we maintained the curbside food and drink carryout trade out the other, and having two completely separate operations -- one non-profit, one (barely) for profit -- in a building so damn small.

And now, beer. I've made similar comments at the Pints&union website, but because the inception of the beer blog there coincided with pandemic disruptions (read: no one knows about it yet), they bear repeating here.

On March 25, just after Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb eased restrictions on carry-out alcoholic beverage sales at establishments just like Pints&union, we were ready to pour growlers for one reason only, and that’s because Sun King Brewing Company made cases of their growlers available at cost, and the brewery’s Southern Indiana regional sales representative Chris Cox was willing to schlep a load from Indianapolis to the area.

My friend Kelly Conn, who with his wife Teri owns Pearl Street Taphouse in Jeffersonville, providentially clued me into Chris's offer to truck growlers from Indy to Southern Indiana. I'm grateful to them both for the hookup.

Chris has made several trips since, and as of last weekend I’d personally filled roughly 170 varied growlers for sale to our customers. A tad embarrassingly, in our particular case we didn’t even have any Sun King beers on tap and hadn't for a while, but this didn’t matter to them.

Well, it matters to me, and beer karma is real. This week, having finally cleared some tap space and established a working routine, it’s a good time to doff my chapeau to Sun King and fill some growlers with their newest year-round ale, Keller Haze IPA (as the name implies, a hazy IPA at 6.3% abv).

Sun King's anticipated Keller Haze roll-out last month unfortunately coincided with the coronavirus quarantines; it’s a few weeks later now, but the beer’s still plenty fresh. It's also fun to freshen up the presentation, and pour something that everyone can have a chance to buy (as opposed to the subscription-only Schlenkerla Fastenbier).

There’ll be further information about pricing and such on Thursday at Facebook. Thanks again to the folks at Sun King Brewing Company for their help.

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