This week we welcome back our old friend, Through the Glass, for the second time on the new brewery. We initially took our time to release this beer knowing full well that the “dialing in” period was going to take some time. By our ninth brew day in the new brewery we were feeling like maybe we had a handle on this whole brewing thing again and so we decided to finally get over ourselves and just friggin 'make it. This turned out to be the best, but also most frustrating decision we’ve made since moving beer production entirely to the new brewery. 

Through the Glass is a beer we know better than any other. We’ve made it more times than any other recipe we have in our arsenal and the flavor profile is something we can easily picture in our flavor memory when we close our eyes. It’s a beer we reach for often and it’s not only one we always want to get right, but perfect... if such a thing is even attainable. 

Upon drinking our first release of Through the Glass on the new brewery, I was, to put it mildly, pissed. It was a good beer, sure, but Through the Glass it most certainly was not. For the next several weeks I descended into an exercise some may call madness, but we’ll call it “research” instead. I pulled the recipe apart and rebuilt it dozens of times over, had it and several other of our beers lab analyzed for chemistry and composition in areas we think are vital to our flavor profile simply trying to figure out exactly why we weren’t hitting what we were looking for. Eventually the answer revealed itself as the one in front of us the whole time: recipes do not scale linearly, or even necessarily well for that matter. 

What worked before, on the old brewhouse, would not work here. There would be no jamming of square pegs into round holes no matter how hard we tried to make them fit. We needed to change the beer and our processes to keep it the same. We needed to rebuild it if we ever wanted to move it forward. And rebuild it we did. Unshackled by the realization I was basically trying to carbon copy my own recipes, armed with everything we had learned from the madness “research” stuff, and the now thirty or so turns on the brew house, we rebuilt the beer from the ground up.  

Ultimately we landed in the same place in certain areas (like hop bill, for example) and totally new places in others, and the beer is infinitely better as a result. It is, at its core, very much still Through the Glass, perhaps now more than it ever has been. We are, as always, still committed to continually improving our beer every time we brew, but we’re excited to re-introduce you to our baby. It’s drinking big and aromatic, with a firm clean bitterness and our signature soft, fluffy mouthfeel that we’ve been chasing like some mythical dragon we were starting to doubt ever existed. 

In fact, we think the original tasting notes are more accurate than ever, so we’ll let us circa 2017 do the rest of the talking:

Bursting with aromatic American hop varietals, Through the Glass is a heavily dry hopped IPA that is bright, juicy and highly aromatic. It’s loaded with aromas of mango, peach and candied citrus that are delivered on a soft, fluffy malt canvas. A delicate mouth feel and gentle, but present, bitterness ensures that this beer never tires the palate.