Hellacious Rock

Origin Story

The creation of this beer was all about making use of this epic name. To keep it "Short's" and sweet, we basically have some farmers who come by ER to pick up our spent grain. One day, one of them was in the office chatting it up with Tony and the topic of stone masons came up. The farmer (an old white dude) began talking about a guy he knew in the mason business and described his awesome ability to lay stone as one who "throws some hellacious rock"! As you can imagine, this totally caught Tony off guard and he immediately thought that this expression definitely needed to be used for a beer name. Quickly tying a connection to another relatively new beer that was just released this past August and used the word "rock" in the title, Space Rock, Tony figured he could capitalize on the amazing popularity of that beer by brewing a double version of it and calling it, Hellacious Rock! For those of you who may have trouble recalling, Space Rock was a continuation of our Pale Ale exploration series that began last year with certain beers like Chatterbox and Yosemite Scooter, to see if we could continue to revive interest in this instrumental craft beer style by showcasing a new wide range of them. Brewed with three well known and very popular American hop varieties (Simcoe, Amarillo, and Citra), Space Rock embodied many bold attributes of a true "American" Pale Ale, coming close to pushing the limits of being an IPA, but stays just under the range of intensity to be classified as such. The inaugural batch of Space Rock was so well received by pub patrons and many Short's staff, that this beer has already made it's way into the 2015 Rotating Pale Ale line up, as the next beer to replace Bonafide Legit. Seeing as the straight up singular version of Space Rock was so well enjoyed, a double version of it is pretty much a sure thing, and besides, Tony got to use the name "Hellacious Rock", so that's all that really matters. Hellacious meaning very great, bad or overwhelming, I definitely feel that anyone who tastes this beer will quickly realize that it's anything but bad, perhaps slightly overwhelming (for those few unsuspecting hop timid souls), but really it's just very great!