Brewing a Parody
We’ve always appreciated Three Floyds. In fact, I’m pretty sure my partner, John, financed at least a small piece of equipment for them with how much Alpha King he drank in his twenties. Three Floyds also helped us out when when we were building the brewery. Nick Floyd invited us down to Munster to brew a collaboration for our “Mischief” pop-up taproom in March 2013. Nick wanted to name it Thundersnow, but Flossmoor Station Brewing Company was serving a beer called Thundersnow so we respected their brand and pivoted to Tonnerre Neige. The beer was a 8.5% Belgian Strong Golden/Super Saison — echoing the constant bickering between Belgium’s French and Flemish speaking regions, we brewed a beer halfway between a Belgian Strong Golden and a Super Saison then pitched both a Belgian ale strain and French Saison yeast to let them fight it out. Hopped and dry hopped with Super Alpha hops.
As we grew our business, we continued to collaborate with our friends. Davin Bartosch, of Wiseacre Brewing Company, came back to town in 2016. Like mischievous little pixies, Davin and John had been scheming a beer named Alfalfa King, a pale ale brewed with alfalfa honey and hopbacked (or haybacked?) through a bed of alfalfa hay. The beer was brewed in mid-February 2016, but beforehand John and Davin drove out to some farm somewhere and came back with a bale of hay. They crammed it into a huge pot and ran the wort through it on a 20 barrel batch of beer. Surprising, it worked pretty well.
Meanwhile, the Wiseacre and Off Color art teams collaborated on the label design. The resemblance of the first draft to the source material was…uncanny.
When the label design was finished, we paused before ordering:
“Did you show Nick yet?”
“No, we should probably do that.”
So out of common courtesy, John forwarded the image to Nick Floyd. We got a response pretty quickly.
“What did he say?”
“He was, like, haha you got me.”
Then he thought about it. Or checked with his lawyers. Thinking about it now, I bet he checked with his lawyers. Nick came back with some edits. Alfalfa King was too close to Alpha King, that much was obvious. So we changed the name to Alfalfa Kang, which was wacky in its own right. Since 3F collaborated on the name, they were now begrudgingly part of the collaboration too! (’Twas also Nick’s idea).
The label came back amazing and by some magically twist of fate, the redesigned label was in hand and on bottles for release on April 1st. We were excited to release our new pale ale for the spring! But not everyone was excited. A lot of people were confused. One customer walked into our bottle shop and claimed, “I came here to buy something I wasn’t even sure was real.” He bought two bottles and literally everyone was happy.
