As you may know, Massachusetts beer week is coming up soon (March 6th-13th) and we wanted to take a moment to tell you how we plan on celebrating over at OPBC. If we didn’t know before COVID, we certainly know now that the beer community is stronger when we work together with a common goal in mind. And it’s with that spirit in mind that we are happy to announce two great collaboration projects that we’ve started with some of our local brewery friends.

Over the course of March we will be releasing two amazing and ongoing collaborations with our friends at Wandering Soul and Channel Marker Brewing Co. We are very proud of these beers and can’t wait to share them with you soon. See below for more details:

Sons of Beverly/Rantoul Originals: Episode One

For a while now, we’ve had ongoing discussions with the crew over at Channel Marker Brewing about doing a collaboration at some point. Once the pandemic hit it made things difficult to align schedules, but we finally got it done. In the end, we decided to create an ongoing collaboration where we trade off brewing at both locations with the goal of creating various beer styles and the flexibility to experiment along the way. 

For our first “episode” we chose to brew a West Coast IPA as an ode to a style that greatly contributed the craft beer movement over the past decade. We modeled this beer after some of our favorite West Coast IPAs that we’ve had the pleasure of enjoying over the years. This particular brew will be clocking in at 8% abv and is dry hopped with CTZ, Centennial, and Simcoe hops. So you can expect to enjoy all the amazing qualities that come with a great West Coast IPA including: amazing hop aromas, notes of pine/citrus, and a clean bitter finish. Stay tuned for an exact release date!

Old Soul (Version 2.0)

Our next collaboration project this month is Old Soul version 2.0. A couple months back we collaborated with our friend Matt Smith from Wandering Soul Beer and created a New England IPA dry hopped exclusively with Nectaron hops from New Zealand. We loved the results so much that we decided to make this a continuous collaboration where we spotlight one hop variety for each batch. 

For version two, we chose to focus on Strata hops. Originally known as X-331, this was the first hop released from The Oregon State Aroma Hop Breeding Program. This variety has dank flavor and aromas with undertones of Strawberry, Passionfruit, and citrus. We are very excited to share this with you in the month of March as a part of Mass beer week. Stay tuned for our exact release date!