Tyson Arp, the head brewer at Nebraska Brewery, swears that the first beers he drank were Bass Ale and Fat Tire and that even when he was a young drinker, macro-brewed lagers never passed his lips. He started drinking beer in 1996 and got into homebrewing in 2002. It was at that point that he started buying beers that he could re-create at home. Nebraska wasn’t known for a lot of beer diversity in those days, so he and his wife would travel out of state and pick up bottles to bring home and even used to a few mail-order beer services to further branch out. “I’m a beer opportunist. I like the one that’s in front of me,” he says, noting that despite having access to his own beer, he still walks the aisle of the store on weekends looking for new beers to try.
Ska Brewing Modus Hoperandi IPA
(Durango, Colorado)
“I don’t have a first memory of my first IPA, and Ska’s Modus Hoperandi certainly wasn’t the first one I had, but it is the first that grabbed my attention and kept me coming back for more. I remember back in the early 2000s, and here in Omaha our marketplace was starting to blossom. Until that point, we had the big San Diego, West Coast IPAs and then the maltier English-style IPA from the East Coast. I really liked that Ska was doing something that represented the middle of the country, the Rocky Mountains. Modus Hoperandi wasn’t too bitter; it wasn’t too malty; it just had great hops flavor on that citrusy side. When I was tasked with re-inventing our IPA at Nebraska Brewing Co., Modus Hoperandi is the beer that I kept in the back of my mind for inspiration. I like the piney forwardness and the balance and have sought to do that with our IPA. It’s diverged a bit over the years, and I brought it into a different direction, stripped it down to the hops honed with a good bit of malt, and getting those two flavors to work together was thanks to Ska and the beer they make.”
North Coast Old Rasputin
(Fort Bragg, California)
“Old Rasputin was an easy beer to pick out. It’s one of my all-time favorites. In my early days of craft-beer drinking, there wasn’t a lot on offer in Nebraska, so in addition to going to far-flung locations and bringing beer home, we started mail ordering beer. Old Rasputin was in one of our shipments, and I was just blown away the first time I had it. If not the first, it is one of the first imperial stouts I’ve ever had, and the hops forwardness of the beer is what makes it stand out among the others. And because I loved that beer but couldn’t buy it in my own market, it’s one of the first I ever cloned as a homebrewer. I love that recipe, and it still kind of exists in Black Betty, our imperial stout.