For all its Northwestness, you can safely pour this puppy for your craft-newbie, bitter-beer-face, crap lager converts and those guests from the East and Midwest who blanch at even our tamest IPAs.
Crux Fermentation Project…I call ’em “one of America’s Best breweries” and I have seen nothing to alter that judgment a millimeter since they opened, back in the summer of 2012.
Tough Love 2020, for all my purposes, is Perfect. It leaves NOTHING to be desired. It’s malty, rich, deep, complex, chewy, BALANCED, food-friendly, complete, and immensely thoughtful; one of the brainiest jobs EVER of crafting a great beer.
Crux Fermentation Project is one of the five most significant new breweries to open in the US in the past ten years. Period.
This somewhat cloistered little city, out in the middle of the Central Oregon High Desert, is to brewing what Rome is to religion, Detroit is to cars, and Seattle is to dateless techies.
This adulation of frat-boy tastes ignores a major FACT of the Craft Beer Phenomenon: we all went All In on craft beer because we wanted flavors – and not the same three that were all BudMillerCoorsPabst had to offer.
These two ales are all the evidence that any sensible person needs to conclude that Crux Fermentation Project is well and truly into its maturity as what they gave every indication of being from their outset: one of America’s great breweries.
Here in the cradle of the world’s hops production, the use of and experimentation with hops borders on a religion. And Larry Sidor is arguably the High Priest.
