In a sleepy beach town less than twenty miles from downtown Los Angeles, a five-year-old craft brewery is on a mission to change how people see—and taste—hoppy beer. El Segundo Brewing Company has quickly evolved from a favorite of local beer geeks to a destination in L.A.’s thriving South Bay craft-beer scene. And now, the hops-obsessed brewery is gaining national attention for a unique collaboration with an iconoclastic entertainer. At the end of 2015, El Segundo Brewing (ESBC) partnered with “Stone Cold” Steve Austin—legendary professional wrestler turned reality TV star and podcaster—to craft Austin’s ideal IPA. The result was Broken Skull IPA, and it’s more than just an off-the-shelf IPA adorned with a celebrity name. The beer, which ESBC Founder and Brewmaster Rob Croxall calls a “hybrid of old-school and new-school IPAs,” was designed from the ground up to appeal to Austin’s tastes, and it has become a massive crossover hit with a whole new demographic.
“He’s got a pretty good palate,” Croxall says. “He knows what he likes, and he’ll tell you if he doesn’t like something.” The ESBC team got to know Austin’s preferences, which tend toward the classic California craft flavors of C-hops, and Croxall wrote a recipe that combined the iconic character of Cascade and Chinook hops in the kettle with a Citra-heavy dry hop. Showcasing a bold mid-palate hops flavor and more subdued bitterness and aromatics than the typical ESBC IPA, Broken Skull strikes the balance of quaffable and striking that Austin was looking for. “I may be biased,” Austin told the assembled throng of wrestling fans (who greatly outnumbered craft-beer fans) during the Broken Skull release party at the brewery, “but it’s a damn good beer!”
Broken Skull, with its emphasis on hops flavor over aromatics, is a departure for ESBC, even among the brewery’s more than two dozen other IPAs. When the brewery launched in 2011, they brewed a flagship IPA that showcased Simcoe hops and a wheat-heavy and Nelson Sauvin-hopped IPA called White Dog. They soon added a double IPA to the mix, and as Croxall got more comfortable in the production brewhouse, more new IPA recipes found their way onto the brewing schedule.