Limited Releases

At Clown Shoes, we spend time on the fringes. You may even say we live on the fringes, in a surreal bungalow that could use a little less paint and some work, however the view is amazing. To find the flavors we’re looking for, we experiment with styles and ingredients from across the landscape of beer, reaching deliberately but with unhinged aggression and a fervent belief that our ideas are good, dammit! Every month we eventually reach a team consensus, get to work on the brew deck, and bring you our latest experiment.

The first limited release of 2019 was a prime example. The Drongo was a blend of two beers, a kettle sour and an Australian-hopped IPA. We wanted to mix the dry and tart notes of a kettle sour with an expressive hop profile. Several pilot batches later, we landed on Galaxy and Ella for the perfect hop flavor to balance a Half Sour IPA and released it for you to enjoy. Or to ridicule us for if you feel like being mean, we can take it (please ignore the sound of our uncontrollable sobbing).

In the world of beer styles, there’s no shortage of trails to explore.  We won’t make a beer just to follow a trend, but also won’t ignore the new, innovative, and unconventional. Take fruited IPAs: we successfully combined hop-forward Double IPAs with fruit purees in past releases like Pineapple Space Cake and Josh the Guava King. Successes like these only came after years of unsuccessful experiments with fruits, from homemade extracts to freeze dried additions, before landing on the fruit purees we use today. Not only did those beers accomplish the stylistic goals we set for them, they helped us chart the course in developing our series of Smoothie IPAs, Don’t Fear the Blender.