Yesterday, Jeff Alworth wrote, “One comment I hear a lot is that beer ‘isn’t fun’ anymore. I certainly have as much fun with beer as I used to, and indeed in these fallen times, sitting with a pint and a friend is about the funnest thing I do.”
I also had pints with a friend yesterday, but funnest thing, sort of, was the “cubes” for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival posted. Skip the rest of this paragraph and the next if you don’t care for this digression; I understand. One of the first things Daria and I did when we quit “real jobs” in 1992 was start “Music Festival News,” a guide to music festivals across the country. Eventually, we produced an annual guide they sold at Tower Records (RIP), and in the Jazz Fest bookstore (also RIP). That was a hoot.
The lineup for Jazz Fest, which we’ve been attending since 1990 (but not every year), arrives in pieces. First, the list of artists, followed by the weekend they will appear (that happened at the same time this year). Later, which days they will appear, and finally, what time they will be playing. Hence, the cubes. You know there will be painful conflicts. That you’ll have to choose between Rod Stewart, David Byrne, The Isley Brothers, Jon Batiste, Left Over Salmon (five of the nine closers April 26). But then there are the surprises. The Revivalists, Jason Isbell, Burning Speer, John Boutte, Sonny Landreth and Pine Leaf Boys are not closing, but they are all up against each other. Taking all of this into consideration and making a plan to maximize our music experience is part of the fun.
That’s the spirit with which I approach the Colorado Collaboration Fest. It’s a special event because talking to the brewers pouring their collaborations it is apparent how much fun they had making the beers. Also because there will be 130 beers none of the attendees has had before; these are one-offs. That they have not been perfected across multiple iterations adds to the appeal.
Take a little time to enjoy the list. Perhaps your eyes will pause each time you read the description of a beer in the weird category. Or you will be struck by some of the names: Naming Beers is HARD/Blending Beers is FUN, Buzzword, Liquid Thanksgiving-Get Basted, or Semicolon > Em Dash.
What also caught my attention is the presence of “Cold Pressed Hop Juice,” to be found in a New Image/Casey collab called Fresh Eyes and in American Ninja Keyboard Warrior from Milieu and Lady Justice.
This doesn’t sound like a breakfast drink, does it?
It is an offspring SubZero Hop Kief that Freestyle Hops in New Zealand introduced in 2022. “We worked with a hemp/cannabis/botanicals startup [New River Brewing in North Carolina] to develop a new (patent pending) ultra-cold mechanical separation process that is in many ways similar to high quality methods of making cannabis kief. It is a solventless process and not an oil extract,” managing director David Dunbar explained at the time.
Cold Pressed Hop Juice is the name for hop extracts made partially or fully from fresh green hops. “All of these are still in the R&D stage and only available to our ‘Freestyle Hops Research Collective’ members for trialing/feedback purposes. We plan to keep refining these with crop year 2026,” Dunbar reports now.
It wouldn’t work, obviously, to ship fresh hops to North Carolina for processing, and Freestyle has built a bigger, more efficient system on the farm.
The Cold Pressed Hop Juice in the hands of breweries in the US is a mixture of SubZero Hop Kief extracted from T90s and fresh hop extract. “The fresh hop extract on its own is very green and resinous, but has super cool elements to it. We think the blend gives an interesting, fresh twist while still having an overall nice, well-rounded character that is going to work in many beers and across different styles,” Dunbar reported via an email.
Just looked at the list. Wish there were more lagers.
Todd — Not to be a contrary host, but I think I could spend the afternoon only sampling lagers. I won’t, but what particularly pleases me is the number of lagers that are not pilsners.
I didn’t know you once had a festival guide! I have a question about the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival – I know there are some jazz and New Orleans – based acts (and maybe more this year than in recent years?), but it always seems to be much more of an “acts you hear on the radio” modern music fest. Were things different back in the 1990s?
Hey Bill — Thanks for the invitation to write more about Jazz Fest. In other words, I think I will answer this more broadly in a post. For now, perhaps going through the entire list of artists this year might prove this wrong, but it is stated every year that more than 80 percent of performers are from Louisiana. And many of the others (Big Name Acts, or as Jazz Fest protectors call them, BNAs) have a NOLA connection. More later.
Looking forward to reading it! Thanks, and best wishes!