We talk about Ocelot not repeating beers, but it’s our dirty little secret. “We’re on our third batch of it in seven months. “We have a pilsner about to come out again called Sunnyside Dweller,” McCarthy told me that evening. This beer hadn’t attained that status on July 12, 2016, but it was well on its way. A beer that would eventually become the closest thing Ocelot has to a core offering. There’s an exception to this rule, though – a beer that Widman has never tired of drinking. If I’m tired of a beer after a month, I don’t want to see it year round.” “We make a batch, and by the time it’s gone, we’re onto the next one.
“I get tired of my own beer, too,” Widman has admitted. “If you get it twice a year, you’ll drink the shit out of it.”īut like almost everything within Ocelot, this model was also a reflection of its founder’s personal preferences.
SUNNYSIDE CALIFORNIA BREWERIES FULL
“If we had Home full time, you’d get tired of it … you’d drink it less and less,” he had told The Washington Post a few months earlier. Widman understood that consumers’ interests were fleeting, and familiarity bred… well, not contempt, but perhaps disinterest. The Dulles brewery’s eschewal of flagships was partly attributable to business savvy. (As its original website declared: “We like big beers and we cannot lie!”) Opened in spring 2015 by IT-consultant-turned-homebrewer Adrien Widman, Ocelot made its name with a parade of one-and-done San Diego-esque IPAs – focused “on hops, not balance” – along with thick, high-gravity imperial stouts, Scotch ales, and barleywines. At the time, he was Ocelot’s head brewer, and, at the time, everything he was saying rang true. Three years and 11 months ago, Mike McCarthy sat in a dim corner of Alexandria’s Rustico and explained these things to me. And, as with other Ocelot beers, their recipes are not to be rebrewed with any regularity – if more than once at all.
Ocelot Brewing’s IPAs invariably appear straw pale yellow. Today, our beer is Ocelot Brewing’s Sunnyside Dweller, a 5.1% dry-hopped pilsner. The Brews of Summer is a series spotlighting the area’s best summer beers.
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