Brewing great beer is a demanding series of very specific and precise steps. Some brewers spend years tweaking and refining to forge those brews that they’re truly happy with. Getting to that level can require years of tiny adjustments to the same motions, on the same equipment, in a familiar setting. But what happens if you’ve got the recipes, the desire, and the drive, but not the home to call your own?
For Brent Banks and Ryan Jacobs, the pair of wandering brewers behind Saint Errant Brewing, it’s creating an identity forged by challenge and in constant search of a new creation. They took their name from an old term for an itinerant missionary saint, pursuing a spiritual quest through unrelenting will.
Banks and Jacobs started as local homebrew enthusiasts and fell hard for the brewing life. Their beers, brewed 30 barrels at a time at Chicago’s Begyle Brewing, showcase bright, floral, fruity hops and silken malt-forward bodies. The confidence on display is impressive for any brewery, much less one moving from one home to another and constantly adapting on the fly. The difficult niche they’ve been able to carve out for themselves made them a natural partner for our next collaboration project. And we knew from the start what we’d have to name the beer – Reverrant.
Saint errant [a term of antiquity for a missionary saint] describes a wanderer with no home – that’s kind of how we brewed. We’d brew at my place. We brewed at Ryan’s Place. Sometimes if we were brewing big batches we’d be at [Chicago Homebrew Collective] chaos,” banks said. “we were out at Mikerphone for a while, but spending a lot of time commuting [to suburb Elk Grove] and were eventually able to double our capacity by moving into an arrangement back in the city. Obviously we’d like to have the kind of success that finds us a permanent home, but I don’t think we’d ever change that name. It kind of defines us.”
Building the Reverrant
We’re calling Reverrant a Double Dry-Hopped Down Under Hazy, and there’s a spectacular array of New World hops – the unmistakable fruit-forward hop strains from Oceania that have no true analogue in either Noble or American hops. While some strains are practically household names (like Galaxy), new and fascinating ones are slowly making their way into American brewhouses. And that’s the toolbox we wanted to choose from for this project. For Saint Errant, one benefit of being the wandering brewery is that you’re free to bring the best of everywhere into your beer, and for our collaboration Banks and Jacobs wanted to hit that idea hard.
Their day brewing at Revolution resulted in the combination of those incredible Down Under hops and the soft, pillowy malt body of a late-summer cumulus cloud. A malt base fuzzy around the edges with white wheat, flaked oats, and rye joins two titanic dry-hop additions of Vic Secret, Motueka, Galaxy, and Dr. Rudi.
TheY Grow from the Plants Down Under
The hops that shine through Reverrant:
- Vic Secret: Glows with pineapple, passionfruit, and pine
- Motueka: A cross between Saaz and New Zealand hops that pops with fresh lime
- Galaxy: The tropical citrus and peachy hop that kick-started America’s love for Down Under hopsDr
- Rudi: High in alpha acids, with grassy citrus and crisp bitterness
Reverrant
DDH Down Under Hazy India Pale Ale
Our collaboration with Saint Errant is a DDH Down Under Hazy IPA. A malt base fuzzy around the edges with white wheat, flaked oats, and rye joins two titanic dry-hop additions of Vic Secret, Motueka, Galaxy, and Dr. Rudi.
Alc. by vol. – 7.5%
Bitterness - 40 IBUs