Jude La Rose, cofounder of Chicago’s Hop Butcher for the World, has been into beer for more than two decades. The first steps on his beer journey were mostly Midwest-focused—“anything that we could get access to as beer drinkers,” he says.
But the most memorable were the ones that influenced his palate while widening his worldview.
“It’s incredible that we have access to liquids that are brewed all over the world, with their own personalities and their own stories, and that we get to experience them and share them.”
These chosen six are those that most broadened his views on what beer can be.
Firestone Walker Sucaba
(Paso Robles, California)
Up until the time I had Sucaba, I had only experienced American barleywine—and the big one that sticks out in my mind would have been Three Floyds Behemoth. What I heard in beer circles is that American barleywine is another double IPA. I hadn’t tasted or experienced what it meant to be an English-style barleywine, so I was always on the hunt for bottles. Anytime Firestone Walker would come out with their anniversary beers in Chicagoland, they would sell out in seconds. So, it was a huge get when we finally got one, and my wife and I opened it—I want to say it was Holy Saturday, the day before Easter. And my beer journey definitely begins with my wife. We went on this journey together, drinking beers together and talking about them. So, we finally had this super-high-gravity beer, and it… I never knew that beer could be so rich and velvety and decadent—all of these dark flavors: molasses, crème brûlée, caramel, toffee, chocolate. I think that was a pivotal moment in my love of barleywine.
Half Acre Vallejo IPA
(Chicago)
Half Acre is my favorite brewery in the entire world—another brewery that was hugely influential in the way that we talked about beer, thought about beer, looked at beer, and the beers that we made. First off, the Vallejo can is incredible—it’s like a painting of waves crashing against the shore, big rocks, beautiful blues. It’s got an excellent name, which in my mind calls from the West Coast and sets up what you’re going to experience. It is a Simcoe and Nelson IPA, one of the first experiences with Nelson Sauvin anywhere, first brewed in 2012.
That’s a special time in hoppy beers—it’s almost the pre-hazy hoppy beers, what hazy beers would become. The hoppy beers that were coming out at that time set the table. Simcoe and Nelson are such an incredibly modern, futuristic combo—white wine, gooseberry, orange, grapefruit—incredibly modern at the time. And still to this day, when you taste Vallejo, it feels young and fresh. And they still make it, and it’s incredible. It’s a West Coast IPA, and it’s just got this signature Half Acre malt character—it’s got just enough malt sweetness, but the flavor is just saturated, and the aroma is booming. I thought it was the first of its kind.
Three Floyds Arctic Panzer Wolf Imperial IPA
(Munster, Indiana)
I think a lot of people talk badly about the “IBU wars,” and I just love it, and I don’t feel the same way. I feel the opposite. Arctic Panzer Wolf was the most bitter beer I had ever had at that time. This is a time where everyone was exploring, and nothing was off the table, and it set up what we were allowed to do for the next decade.
But the bitterness—I wasn’t sure if I liked the bitterness. I just didn’t know. It was big. There’s something, when you’re going on a beer journey, that you’re unsure if you like the flavors and aromas being presented to you, but you know that it’s popular and it’s making other people happy. So, you know something is there; you just don’t know what it is. So that keeps you going, and you start to acclimate. And I think that’s important: No one teaches you how to develop a palate. You just have to expose yourself to lots of things. Arctic Panzer Wolf was incredibly bitter. It had the classic grapefruit, pine, and new citrus elements. I’d never smelled hop aroma [that] beautifully orange. And just a total ripper, an enamel remover.
Bell’s Hopslam Ale
(Comstock, Michigan)
It’s a rite of passage: Chicago winters, it’s the new year, it’s January, everyone always looked forward to the release of Hopslam. I was a very young beer drinker, didn’t know a lot. I heard a lot of people talking about Hopslam—“If you like this, wait till you try this”—and then I finally got my hands on a six-pack of bottles. We were living around the corner from Wrigley Field, and I remember popping off the top of two bottles and smelling the aroma—just the whiff out of the bottleneck—and then pouring it. It was the most potent, tropical, lots of Simcoe, marmalade, pine, catty expression—slightly honeyed, so much booze, so rich, so satisfying. We’d try to drink six of them in a night if we could, it was so good.
That was the pinnacle of beer. The best part of it is they used to put it in these tiny kegs that you could serve at home. So, when they would release it, every Super Bowl we’d buy one, and my dad would come over for the Super Bowl—me, my dad, and my wife with work the next day. The first year we finished the whole keg, and then we made it a point every year to do the same or else we weren’t doing our jobs.
Hopslam showed me what hops could be. It showed me what aroma is, and layering flavor, and just bigness. It changed what I thought hoppy beer could be—something that we always strove to hit.
Is/Was Will Be
(Chicago)
I think Is/Was is one of the greatest saison breweries in the world, and Will Be is one of the greatest saisons in the world. When you first start on your beer journey, you’re thirsty to try everything. You’re hungry for knowledge, and you’re hungry to drink through all the styles. So, every style was on the board, and saison was a huge influence. I would seek out all these saisons from all these breweries, the most obscure I could find, because I just love that character. One of the first beers that Hop Butcher brewed was a Nelson Sauvin and lavender saison.
We had met Mike Schallau, the owner of Is/Was, when he was with Pipeworks. And he set off to create his own saison brewery. So, at his release at the Beer Temple, they had a party where they were going to release this first beer, which became their flagship beer. Will Be was the most effervescent, juicy, fruit-forward—pineapple, slight white pepper. There’s a little shaved rock, kind of flinty, a sprightly nose—but it was the closest example that I had experienced to my favorite saison brewery, which was Blaugies. Just big and fruity, tropical, light, so bubbly, incredibly pretty. I said it when I had it that day in August, and I still say it: I think it’s one of the best saisons in the world.
Goldfinger Original Lager
(Downers Grove, Illinois)
Hop Butcher brews lager, and it’s mostly been Italian-style pilsner and German pils, or rice lager. But we had never dipped our toes into helles. I drink a lot of lager beer, but I didn’t spend enough time pinpointing exactly what helles was. I guess there’s four or five different types of helles, and I was told that by Tom [Beckmann] when I was talking to him about creating our own. And he was like, “Well, it depends on what helles you’re going for. Are you going for this one or that one or this one?” I’m like, “Tom, I frankly don’t know any of these. I don’t know what any of these mean.”
So, I’m not sure what type of helles Original Lager is. I can ask Tom. But it showed me what the beer is and what the beer could be. It’s incredibly soft, slightly honeyed. It’s probably got a single decoction on it. But the way that they are able to coax these soft and mature and gentle flavors from their malt, it’s just so nicely placed. It’s almost like a gymnast sticking the lightest landing. I could drink buckets and buckets of it, as I do. But I know the care that Tom and Jeremy [Gouldey] put into the beers—the amount of time and patience that they have with those beers—and then when it comes out on their Lukr faucets, the attention that the people who are pouring the beer give to it. It’s just this nice, soft, floral, honeyed, incredibly pretty beer that you can drink just gulps and gulps of.
