Montauk Brewing Company (MBC) is among the over 1,000 breweries that have joined Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, a Chico, California-based brewery, in brewing Resilience Butte County Proud IPA, a collaborative project that benefits the Sierra Nevada Camp Fire Relief Fund.
100 percent of the Resilience IPA sales will go towards the Fund, which Sierra Nevada, who actually had to temporarily shutdown for a short period of time because of the wildfire, will donate to partner organizations committed to rebuilding and backing the communities that have been impacted by California’s deadliest wildfire.
MBC’s iteration will be exclusively available at the Montauk Brewing Company Brew Barn. The Resilience IPA (6.8% ABV) features centennial and cascade hop varieties.
“Sierra Nevada had been planning on doing it for a little while and was going to do it themselves and then realized there’s 7,000 plus breweries in the U.S. that could really band together. So they reached out to everybody,” Vaughan Cutillo, Montauk Brewing Company, Inc. Co-Founder, told us. “Everybody’s been through – whether it’s out here with the hurricanes or people going through issues, you can always use some help from others. We just thought that the nice thing about the beer industry is it’s very collaborative and supportive so it was a no-brainer. They’re a West Coast brewery and we’re almost as far away as you can get and the few kegs that we’re going to brew can make an impact for them.”
The breweries weren’t the only ones to pitch in. “It was great that some of the grain, malt, and hop companies for the raw materials, they are actually footing a lot of the bill,” Cutillo noted. “We were able to get really good raw materials but cut some of the costs. So we’ll sell all the beer, the beer will be exclusive to the Taproom in Montauk with growlers and pints and then 100 percent of the proceeds will go directly to the Camp Fire Fund.”
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MBC’s iteration will be exclusively available at the Montauk Brewing Company Brew Barn. (Courtesy Photo) |
The collaborative brewing effort quickly caught on with the tight-knit beer industry. “It was kind of cool, actually. They reached out to all the breweries and got a list of everybody – I think it ended up being 1,200 to 1,500 signed on across the country,” Cutillo said. “Sierra Nevada’s huge, they’re brewing like 2,400 barrels of it to start. We’re going to do a small, limited – we wanted to make it a special limited release beer, so it’s 7 barrels. It’s about 14 or 15 kegs worth.”
To brew the Resilience IPA, Montauk Brewing Company is actually using Sierra Nevada’s Resilience Butte County Proud IPA recipe. “Once they got the go ahead that we were interested they sent out a really cool recipe that Eric Moss, my business partner, our brewmaster, used. They actually sent out their own formula where we type in the size volume output that we’re going to have and then it populates how many pounds of grain and what types of grain and what type of hops and the hop process that goes into it,” Cutillo explained. “It wasn’t exactly turnkey, but it was as close as you could come because Eric obviously knows our system and Montauk better than anyone so he took that recipe and tweaked a little bit based on our equipment and we brewed it last week.”
Cutillo doesn’t expect the limited edition brew to be at the Taproom long. “Especially with the holidays and people in town I’m sure the beer will go pretty quick,” he relayed.
In addition to the Resilience IPA, MBC is releasing another exciting beer soon. “We just finished brewing, it’ll be on tap in about a week, we do a seasonal batch of our Montauk Bay Scallop Stout. We do one batch, about seven barrels, every year and Riley Sullivan, our brewer, goes and harvests about ten pounds of bay scallops right when the season opens,” Cutillo shared. “We add that to one of the phases of brewing. It gives a really nice kind of salty, briney finish – not a seafood characteristic – to our stout, which is a nice dark, chocolatey, coffee beer. People are always excited for that one.”
Montauk Brewing Company’s Resilience IPA will be on tap exclusively at the Montauk Brewing Company Brew Barn starting at 12 p.m. on Friday, December 21.
The Montauk Brewing Company Brew Barn is located at 62 South Erie Avenue in Montauk. For more information about the Resilience IPA or Montauk Brewing Company, call 631-668-8471 or visit montaukbrewingco.com. For more information about the Sierra Nevada Camp Fire Relief Fund, visit sierranevada.com.
