When Bobby Kros and Scott Strain opened Kros Strain in 2017, their goal was to bring a different kind of beer to the Omaha market.
“Hazy IPA wasn’t a thing around here,” Kros says. “We knew it would come around sooner or later.”
The two met while working together at Nebraska Brewing and decided to join forces to start their own brewery. Tasting what was available in the market led them to beers such as Three Floyds Zombie Dust and Surly Axe Man, and the influence of these more bitter, malty beers was apparent in early iterations of Fairy Nectar.
Yet the duo was determined to arrive at a different destination.
The Nectar’s Evolution
“It was a lot of brewing,” Kros says—including about 60 batches on his homebrew system—but the goal was perfection.
Early trials included pale ale malt and crystal 60°L, neither of which is in the beer now. They’d sit down with friends and family members and taste each version of the beer, asking people what they liked and didn’t like. They eventually decided the crystal malt was muddling the hop flavor, and they later switched to a base of two-row.
Turbinado sugar also used to be in the beer. “We felt like when we drank [certain IPAs], there was some type of raw sugar flavor,” Kros says. That sugar’s flavor also tends to play well with Mosaic hops, he says. After two years, however, he decided the turbinado probably wasn’t worth the extra cost. “We were throwing all this money into the beer, and customers probably can’t taste it with all the hops.” He took it out one day and never looked back. “Nobody noticed.”
One of their overarching goals for the beer was for it to be soft and fluffy and not very bitter. In the brewery’s early days, that meant removing a bittering charge that was once as high as 20 IBUs. What’s left today are heaps of hops at flameout and in the dry hop.
Kros says he loves the current state of the beer. The primary charge at flameout is Citra Cryo—it was previously Citra and Mosaic T-90s—then there’s a 75:25 split between Mosaic T-90s and Citra Cryo in the dry hop. “It’s just a little more bitter with Cryo,” Kros says. He also likes the better efficiency he gets from Cryo pellets.
They typically dry hop after one week, once the beer has finished fermentation and passed VDK. They first lower the temperature to 58°F (14°C). “We drop out the yeast, then dry hop it,” Kros says. They rouse the hops with CO2 twice over the next two days, then—assuming they like how it tastes—crash to 32°F (0°C). They drop the hop cone and give it another week to let more of the trub drop out. In total, it takes about three weeks to produce Fairy Nectar, from brew day to packaging.
Adjusting the Hops and Fermentation Profile
Two years ago, Kros Strain began participating in hop selection in Yakima, Washington. For Mosaic, Kros says he looks for certain grapefruit and mango notes.
“Mosaic is a little tough,” he says, “because you get stuck with a lot of dankness—people here just don’t want that in a hazy.” Instead, he focuses on hop lots that have fruitier aspects, including berry-like flavors.
This year, he says, the Mosaic they selected didn’t meet their expectations once it was pelletized. “It didn’t have some of the oil values that we wanted.” So, Yakima Chief sent them eight new lots, and he dry hopped Fairy Nectar separately with each lot. “We landed on a couple” that work well, he says.
Kros says that they learned from that experience and that he plans to focus more on oil levels up front in the future, so that every lot put in front of him will meet a certain spec. From there, he says, he can search for the usual sensory traits that he wants.
Yeast is another component of Fairy Nectar that’s changed over the years. Kros says he found that White Labs WLP002 English Ale didn’t attenuate as much as he liked, while WLP007 Crisp English Ale left the beer too dry. He continued to experiment with different strains, bringing in small five-barrel fermentors specifically to split batches and trial different yeasts.
“We ended up sticking with London III,” he says. “It added a creaminess that worked well with the whirlpool hops, bringing out a nice mango-grapefruit-like citrus character.” It also mellowed the beer out. “And the attenuation was right in the sweet spot.”
Fairy Nectar water profile includes a 3:1 chloride-to-sulfate ratio—roughly 120–130 ppm chloride to 40 ppm sulfate. “We don’t use city water,” Kros says. “Everything is strictly RO here—no blending.” They also add a small amount of sodium chloride, which Kros says helps punch up the body.
Haze for Huskers
Kros says the locals had to get used to the beer’s haziness. The brewery used to add Biofine to clear it up a bit; Kros says he liked the reduced turbidity, but it also reduced the hop presence to a degree. He eventually tried a few batches without Biofine, and people seemed to like it just as well, so they now leave it out.
Even today, there are some local accounts that are shocked by the beer’s haze. “It’s usually hole-in-the-wall-type places, where everybody’s asking for [Fairy Nectar],” he says. “And they get it that one time, and they’re like, ‘Shit, what’s this? What is wrong with this?’”
For the most part, however, it’s a beer that a wide variety of drinkers can appreciate. “Fairy Nectar is more of a beer for everybody,” Kros says. He often meets people who say they never thought they could enjoy IPA until they tried Fairy Nectar. “It’s kind of all-encompassing,” he says.
The double-dry-hopped version—which our editors named one of their Best 20 Beers in 2023—is a different recipe, Kros says, and it’s one built for a different type of drinker. “We have beers like DDH for the beer nerds,” Kros says. “They’re too hop-heavy for general drinkers.”
With that higher hop load in the DDH version—including more bitterness from the additional Cryo—Kros says he feels the need to amplify the beer’s body and sweetness. He adds Carapils at about 7 percent of the grist and increases the wheat percentage. He also mashes higher, at 156°F (69°C). The DDH beer finishes closer to 1.020–1.022 (5–5.5°P).
Kros and Strain intended Fairy Nectar to be their flagship, and they accomplished that mission—it accounts for about 60 percent of the brewery’s sales. And while Kros says he doesn’t plan to make any more changes to the beer, there are all these new hop products coming out … so, he might just do some more tinkering down the line.
