Michigantuan

Origin Story

Luke Whitley: Michigantuan was born out of my love for our first pub batch of "Squishy" cider. The Balaton and Montmorency cherries were such a great combo together in the cider. I thought an intensely hopped IPA would be great with these two types of cherries. The cherry concentrate we used in Squishy was from King Orchards...and I definitely wanted to use the same concentrate as was in Squishy. My next thought was to make this cherry IIPA with Michigan malt and hops as well. I pitched the idea to Tony and Ryan, and they liked it, but we had to wait a while to make it, because Pilot Malt House was in the process of moving into a new building, and vastly upgrading their system, and process. They are now up and running, and we received the malt to make Michigantuan. The malt bill is fairly simple..Mostly 2-row with a small amount of Munich malt, and Wheat. This was also a perfect timing because of the fact that all the Michigan hop farms were harvesting. The Michigan hops featured in this beer are Chinook (Old Mission Peninsula), Summit (Michigan Hop Alliance), and Cascade (Michigan Hop Alliance). Tony and I had equal parts in naming this beer. The name originally was going to be "Michigantic", but I think Tony misheard me, and said "Michigantuan", and I thought, That's even better. Once you see the label, you'll see how it fits well. So my original idea was to make this a "Large" IPA, but with the addition of the Cherry Concentrate there was no way to not call this a Double IPA. The original gravity was 18.3 degrees plato, which is pretty high. The beer ended up being around 8.9% ABV...So please enjoy responsibly, and pack a lunch.