Hops: Centennial
ABV: 7.2%
IBU: 65
Availability: Year-round
It’s Friday, which means it’s time to dig into our lost photos archive!
On the Founders Brewing Company website, there’s a fun story about how the Centennial IPA came to be. No, it wasn’t brewed for the 100th anniversary of something cool, it was basically inspired by unrequited beer love. Around the year 2000, Founders Brewmaster Jeremy Kosmicki had a friend who was having a big party. At the time, Kosmicki was working on the bottling line, so he had access to a nice company discount. Kosmicki offered the friend a keg of Founders IPA for the bash, and the friend turned him down in favor of a full-price offering from another brewery. The crew at Founders got pissed off in a motivational kind of way, and took their recipe back to the drawing board.
Thank goodness for that friend, because the Founders folks really do a great job with the Centennial. It’s hopped exclusively with—you guessed it—Centennial hops. Like the Bell’s Two Hearted Ale we had on the Sill earlier this week, the Centennial was very good. The dry-hopping added some awesome citrus notes, but the hops and malts work very well together to make a beer worthy of any party. I think I give the edge to the Two Hearted in the Battle of the Centennials, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of.
There’s plenty more Founders beer on our Instagram, so go check it out!