Brewers are great at brewing beer, but there’s one thing they can improve upon: using email. Look, I get it, making beer is grueling work spent raking steamy-hot grain and constantly cleaning all the things, but for some reason, email to brewers is like kryptonite.
As someone who puts on a beer festival every year, the need to send ‘gentle reminders’ from time to time is the best hope you may have for getting some work done. When seeing the name of the new collab beer that just came out from Pizza Port and Modern Times, I knew it had to be email-related.
“The first deadline with this project was the name as you have to get artwork for the can,” says Sean Farrell, director of brewing operations at Pizza Port Bressi Ranch. Turnaround on can art and label approvals these days can take around 4-6 months, and “the email thread the collab was on was called gentle reminder…like hey guys, we need a name for this, any ideas?”
Gentle Reminder IPA is centered around a hop farm in New Zealand called Freestyle Hops which grows its tropical varietals and sends them mostly to San Diego breweries. The beer features Motueka, Nelson, Crystal, Simcoe hops, “We expecting to get a really nice fruit medley and some nice tropical notes from the Nelson and Motueka, and a bit of really nice citrus from the Crystal and Simcoe hops,” says Tim Kamolz, director of brewing operations at Modern Times. The beer has a really nice soft mouthfeel with the addition of flaked oats and white wheat, and isn’t a NEIPA hazy…it’s firmly a soft west coast IPA.
The beer will be made again at Modern Times for a fall release, and that version will be a little more Nelson-forward. Pizza Port’s Gentle Reminder leans more on Motueka hops.
Gentle Reminder IPA will be available throughout all Pizza Port locations.
Greg Nagel has been writing about beer since 2011, is an avid homebrewer of wine, cider, and beer, is a certified Cicerone Beer Server, level 1 WSET in Wine, a podcaster with the Four Brewers Show, and runs a yearly beer festival called Firkfest happening on June 29th in Anaheim!