Ithaca Beer Company enters state

A new line of craft beer has arrived in the state. Ithaca Beer Company began selling in West Virginia this week. Chad Gourley, vice president of sales for the brewery, promoted the new line yesterday at a tap takeover at Sam’s Uptown Cafe in Charleston.

Gourley, who has been with Ithaca for three and a half years, works out of Pittsburgh, for the Ithaca, New York-based brewery. Being in Pittsburgh, only a hop, skip, and a jump from West Virginia, Gourley thought it was natural that Ithaca beer should be marketed here too. So, about two years ago the brewery began the process to get licensed in West Virginia. Now, they have opened the market with six brands.

What they’re selling in WV

Ithaca Beer Co. is known primarily for their traditional American-style beers. Four of the six beers introduced to WV would fall into this category. “These beers have stood the test of time,” Gourley said.

The most popular of these, by far, is their Flower Power IPA (7.2% ABV).

“Flower Power is our flagship,” Gourley says. “It does about 70 percent of our volume. We just celebrated our 20 anniversary as a brewery last year, and Flower Power has been brewed for about 14 of those years. We were the first East Coast brewery to bring the West Coast-style IPA to the East Coast.”

The beer has been a solid performer for Ithaca in all its markets. Flower Power is a clear, true-to-style West Coast IPA with great overall balance. It competes well in the category and demonstrates that with its strong track record of sales. (Untappd: 3.8 score on 122,000+ ratings)

Charleston craft beer fan David Mincer, who grew up in Upstate New York, called it one of his favorite standard IPAs. “Hops, malt—great balance,” he noted.

The next three Ithaca traditional-style brews are beers that well-made and have a following, but more represent styles that have fallen out of favor through the years.

Their Nut Brown Ale (5.6% ABV) was once voted as one of the top 8 brown ales of all time. The beer gives off coffee and chocolate aromas and drinks with a pretty light body. (Untappd: 3.6 score on 5,700+ ratings)

Apricot Wheat is the brewery’s oldest brand, having been brewed from day one. It is a classic, easy-drinking American wheat ale with all natural apricot fruit. (Untappd: 3.5 score on 34,000+ ratings)

CascaZilla Red Ale (7% ABV) is hoppy, IPA-style beer with loads of Cascade hop and plenty of caramel malt backbone. (Untappd: 2.9 score on 20,000+ ratings)

Newer styles hit the market too

Ithaca also brought two of its newer craft style beers to West Virginia.

Their New England IPA entry here is a series of beer called Pulp Addiction. They began brewing it last year. “It’s a rotating series, the first one we came up with was called More Citra He Said,” Gourley explained. The current beer in this series is the one we have in WV. It is called Lotus Be, Lotus Be (Untappd: 3.94 score on 71 ratings). Last month, this beer took the silver medal for its style at the TAP New York beer and food festival.

Lotus Be, Lotus Be takes its name from the new Lotus hop variety, which comes from Hopsteiner. Lotus is one of the more promising new hop varieties for obtaining aromas of orange, vanilla, berry, and tropical fruits. (Formerly known as Hopsteiner Experimental #06297)

Tasting this beer at the launch event at Sam’s Uptown Cafe in Charleston, it showed huge fruitiness with almost no resinous or piney hop aromas or flavors. Ithaca brewed the beer with low bitterness, but with just enough to balance the fruit. It should appeal to anyone who is into the smooth, juicy-fruity style of New England IPAs.

Ithaca first brewed a Berliner Weisse style beer about seven years ago, but it was probably a bit too early in the market to catch on. Gourley says people in the Northeast had not experienced sour beers back then and the market needed time to develop a taste for the style. A few years later, Ithaca reintroduced its current Berliner Weisse product and it has done well.

For WV, Ithaca’s fruited Berliner Weisse offering is Blueberry Soiree (4.2% ABV). The beer is only very lightly tart, a good bit less so compared to many other Berliners we have seen in the market. The blueberry flavor is fresh-tasting and not overly sweet. (Untappd: 3.33 score on 1,500+ ratings)

Gourley also said that the brewery registered a label for what they call a Box of Sours. It includes four beers: Cuyga Cruiser Berliner Weisse, Raspberry Soiree raspberry Berliner, The Passionate One passion fruit Berliner, and Früt cranberry-grape Berliner. No release date for WV has yet been set for this, but it could be here sometime this summer.

Ithaca: a brewery looking to grow

Since its start-up, the brewery has been solely owned by Dan Mitchell, who grew up and went to school in Ithaca. Gourley says the brewery has a very cool brewpub in Ithaca that was named one of the top 5 brewpubs in the country a while back by USA Today.

With its current annual production at 24,000 barrels, Ithaca Beer Co. is among the smaller out-of-state craft breweries to enter the West Virginia market. After a major expansion in 2016, Gourley says the brewery now has the capacity to brew 50,000 barrels a year.

“There’s not a lot of breweries our size.” Gourley says. “They’re either a lot smaller than us or a lot bigger than us.” He says the brewery has been expanding its distribution footprint southward, and now sells as far south as North Carolina.

Gourley says the brewery hopes to find a niche in West Virginia by staying focused on a manageable group of brands and keeping them fresh. “My goal is to stay relevant.”

I think we can expect to see Gourley promoting his beers pretty regularly in Morgantown and other parts of northern WV. If that happens, the line could develop a nice following in the on-premise trade, and then that could extend to package store sales.

Mountain State Beverage distributing Ithaca

Before starting work for Ithaca Beer Company, Gourley worked for a beer wholesaler for 15 years. During that time he got to know WV beer distributor Scott Parkes quite well. Parkes is now one of the principals of Mountain State Beverage. When Ithaca decided to add WV to its footprint, Gourley says it made sense to build on the relationship with Parkes and offer the line to Mountain State Beverage.

Mountain State Beverage sales representative Dakota Farmer says he thinks it is always nice to be able to add additional craft beers to the ever-changing landscape. “I think Ithaca fills some holes for us in varieties of beer we offer. These guys have been around for a long time. I think they bring some experience and clout with their name.” He expects the line to be strong especially in the northern part of the state and in tourist areas such as Fayetteville and Snowshoe.

Availability

Mountain State Beverage announced the following availabilities for Ithaca beers.

• Flower Power IPA and Apricot Wheat Ale are available in 12 oz. cans, 12 oz. bottles, 1/6th barrel kegs, and ½ barrel kegs.
• CascaZilla, Nut Brown, and Blueberry Soiree are available in 12 oz. bottles and 1/6th barrel kegs. Pulp Series
• Lotus Be NEIPA is available in 16 oz. cans and 1/6th barrel kegs.

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