I spent the other morning down at Darkness, hanging out, drinking beer, talking beer, and just generally having a really great day with Andy Reynolds from Alexandria and Eric Bosler and Ron Sanders from Darkness Brewing.  I had been hearing a couple of rumors that the two breweries might be getting together to put something together, so when I found out that they were all in the same building I knew I had to get my little gnome butt down there.

It’s a good thing that I did – this sounds like its gonna be a fun one, and if we’re going to talk about this collaboration, we should start by discussing why they’re doing it.

Why Collaborate?

Well… on the simple side of things, The guys are all friends.  It really is that simple to explain collaborations like this.  Alexandria Brewing Company isn’t up and running quite yet, where Darkness brewing is finally catching their stride and settling in to their home in Bellevue.

When both Alexandria and Darkness received word about an upcoming ‘High Gravity Beer Fest’ being held down in Lexington in February, the gears started turning.  One of the things you’ll hear people talk about as one of the best things about the craft beer community is the desire of breweries to help each other – you know… rising tides lift all ships and whatnot.  That’s the root of all of this.  These are two breweries that are going to be serving the community of Northern Kentucky together, why wouldn’t they help each other?

Darkness knew that they had a chance to help out Alexandria in getting their name out there, and to give people a chance to try something that is representative of what they’re going to be doing, sort of.

About The Beer

This recipe starts off as a base of what will become Alexandria Brewing Company’s White IPA.  The beer comes in at around 6.2% ABV, and is a pretty “traditional” white IPA (If there is such a thing, yet).  But because this is a collaboration the beer takes on a different life.  First it needs to meet the requirements of the festival, which means getting a boost in abv to somewhere in the 9% range.

How do you also bring in the soul of Bellevue, Kentucky’s Darkness Brewing to the whole process?  It’s pretty simple really, just make a Black and White IPA.

You’ve had Black IPAs, right?  And you’ve had some White IPAs too then, yes?  This beer takes those two styles and smashes them together face first into a style that I’m fairly certain that I’ve never tried before.

Haus of Schwartz & Wit is going to be something unique that captures a piece of both of the breweries involved, something that is really hard to accomplish for a lot of collaboration brews.

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