When some of the team from Wren House Brewing gathered to watch the virtual Great American Beer Festival awards ceremony last October, they weren’t on the edge of their seats for the last category—Juicy/Hazy IPA—to be announced. That was the most-entered style at the competition, with 377 beers vying for just three medals.
The Wren House team was beginning to accept that they hadn’t medaled in any category at GABF when the Brewers Association announced the final medal of the night: “The gold medal for Juicy/Hazy IPA goes to Spellbinder, from Wren House Brewing Company, Phoenix, Arizona.”
“Drew punched me, like, 10 times when it happened. Preston cried a little. We hugged,” says Luke Wortendyke, Wren House’s director of brewing operations, referring to cofounder Drew Pool and head brewer Preston Thoeny.
That coveted win cemented what Phoenix beer drinkers and fans nationwide already knew: Wren House is making some of the best hazy IPAs in the country. That’s in addition to their renowned barrel-aged stouts and barleywines, plus a diverse taproom lineup that might include, on any given day, an English pub ale, Czech-style lager, and a fruited sour.
This year, its sixth in business, Wren House will expand with a production facility in Prescott, Arizona, less than two hours’ drive north of Phoenix. That brewery will boost capacity by about 10,000 barrels, finally allowing its brewers to catch up with demand for Spellbinder—and to fine-tune the technical aspects of other styles they love.
Embracing (Not Chasing) Trends
Brewing nationally renowned hazy IPAs and barrel-aged stouts puts Wren House squarely in the cool kids’ club. But the team has been careful not to chase trendy styles just for the sake of it—they brew only what they think they can make well.
“That was maybe always the goal of Wren House, to find that medium between what people want and what we want,” Thoeny says. “Those tend to overlap because of the diversity of our team.”
He credits Wortendyke, for example, with spearheading the brewery’s hazy IPA brewing and Akil Zakariya, another Wren House brewer, with taking charge of barrel-aged and adjunct stouts.
“When a trend pops up, we don’t automatically dismiss it,” Wortendyke says. “There’s a level of open-mindedness and not trying to sway away from anything that could be a big pathway for success for us.”
But not all styles feel right for Wren House. Pool recounts a series of heavily fruited “slurry” beers the brewery began making for the taproom in 2018. Called Las Frescas, they sold “like gangbusters,” Pool says. But when the cellarman who’d pushed for that style left Wren House, the remaining team didn’t feel enthusiastic about brewing them. Because they weren’t fully attenuated, the beers didn’t feel like the highest-quality product the brewery could put out.
“We didn’t have to do it, and we didn’t have passion to do it, so we just didn’t want to do it,” Pool says.
The brewery overhauled that series, using the name Las Frescas for a new line of fully fermented, fruited sours. They’re not as popular, Pool admits, but the brewers feel like the new Las Frescas beers meet their quality standards.
Taste the Rainbow
Working on a bare-bones, two-vessel, 10-barrel brewhouse, Wren House long ago maxed out the 2,000-barrel capacity at its central Phoenix location. Because any hazy or double IPA the brewery makes will sell five times faster than its lagers, it’s been a challenge to justify brewing anything other than IPAs over the past couple of years.
However, stylistic diversity is what most excites the brewing team. Thoeny estimates that Wren House brewed about 100 different beers for the taproom in 2020. On any given week, the brewery might release a barrel-aged beer, a lager, two IPAs, and a pub ale.
“Drinkability is probably the through line,” Thoeny says. “When we opened, we brewed a stout and a porter out of the gate, and they were designed to be drinkable even in Phoenix. As we’ve expanded, we’re into 13 percent [ABV] barrel-aged stouts and stuff—so drinkability doesn’t always mean crushability.”
Drinkability for a barrel-aged stout, he says, also means packaging it in 12-ounce bottles—a more manageable quantity for one or two people, perhaps, than a 22-ounce bomber.
Until this year, Wren House’s size constrained the brewing team from diving into all the styles that their hearts may have desired. There was only so much capacity, and demand for core beers such as Spellbinder already exceeded it. But the new brewhouse in Prescott will free up the taproom to do what taprooms do best: experiment. “With Prescott coming online, brewing a German lager doesn’t mean we don’t brew two IPAs—which it did before,” Thoeny says.
Thoeny also is excited that the larger, more advanced brewhouse will allow them to upgrade core recipes for beers such Spellbinder, the Valley Beer lager—which won GABF silver in 2019—and Jomax, a coffee-and-oatmeal stout. Crucially, the new equipment will make cereal mashes and step mashing easier to do.
“It’s all about the technical side of what we can accomplish with making wort specifically,” Wortendyke says. “You’ll see a whole new wave of European and German and Czech lagers [from us] based on that brewhouse.”
Sharing the Stoke
IPAs are undeniably the best sellers from Wren House’s taproom—that hasn’t changed, even while the taproom was closed and offering only to-go sales through early 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Curiously, IPA sales give a lift to all the other styles on offer, too.
“The name we built for hoppy beers has only helped the sales of lagers,” Wortendyke says. “People pick up the six-pack of hazy double IPA and maybe a six pack of lager here, too.”
The key, the team says, is conveying their excitement about a particular beer to drinkers. When they recently brewed an English dark mild, for example, they used social media and conversations with customers to explain what makes British pub culture special and how that beer was inspired by that atmosphere.
“Customers aren’t dumb; they want to really dive into your product,” Thoeny says. “You can say, ‘We have a four-pack of lager for sale, come try it.’ Or you can say, ‘This lager is a little different from the last one, and here’s how.’ You have to treat them as the smart consumer and, often, homebrewer they are.”
That’s also applicable to IPAs: Even if Wren House is putting out a hazy IPA using the same combination of hops it used for a previous hazy IPA, there are subtle differences between beers’ grain bills or yeast profiles that keep customers interested—and willing to pick up another Nelson- and Citra-hopped iteration.
Pool was instrumental in opening those lines of communication with Phoenix beer fans and homebrewers from Day One. He answers Instagram DMs, strikes up conversations at bars, and is always patient with questions.
“I’m responsive, and I listen to people, and I explain why we do things,” Pool says. “Fans of our beer approach me constantly, call me, text me. … I’m a very open book. I want people to know we care about our beer and how we make it. It’s cliché, but I just actually care.”