The production staff already has a 12-month lineup of future full-strength beers planned out, from a simple ~5-percent Dortmunder, to dark Czech-style lagers. 23, during Notch’s second annual Oktoberfest party with Karl’s Sausage Kitchen, and it should stick around for a week, Lohring estimates. The Voll Projekt debut, Festbier, gets tapped this Sunday, Sept. We’ve done all this work to make our session beers the best they can be, and I think we can take that to different strength levels and have that be successful.” “When you brew outside of what your range is, you’ll learn. “But they make good full-strength beers, too,” Lohring says.Īnd he’s hopeful the departure from session beers will, in turn, make Notch standards even better across the board.
He’s quick to add that he loves a well-made New England IPA, and points out that Notch already produces those hoppy styles with Dog & Pony Show pale ale, and Raw Power session IPA.īut with Voll Projekt, Lohring gets to take full advantage of the brewhouse, which was designed to triple-decoct, open-ferment, and naturally carbonate lagers-Czech-style processes meant to produce full-flavored session beers. “We’re not doing this so we can jump on the bandwagon,” Lohring says. The Voll Projekt brand is about maintaining that sense of responsibility more than it is about market repositioning, Lohring adds-so don’t hold your breath for boozy, dank, and hazy New England-style IPAs just yet. If we start putting out beers above 4.5 percent under the Notch brand, we’re breaking a promise.” “If people go out and drink Notch right now, they know they won’t get in trouble as quick. “But I was uncomfortable putting those out under the Notch name,” Lohring says. Loggerhead, a 7.5-percent German bock, was a well-received taproom exclusive this past spring. Last year, as he and brewer Brienne Allan got more familiar with Notch’s custom-built brewhouse in Salem, they started experimenting with full-strength beer, or vollbier as the Germans call it. Those are the styles we haven’t done,” Lohring explains. “You look at the way the Germans, and even the Czechs categorize their beer, and it’s typically ‘lower ,’ ‘full,’ and ‘strong.’ In the U.S., for some reason, it’s either ‘weak’ or ‘strong.’ But there’s this whole category in the range of 5-6 percent alcohol, which is most of the beer consumed in the world.