Ralph Whistler

Origin Story

We had a brand new beer go on tap last night called Ralph Whistler! A continuation of our new Sour Ale endeavors, Ralph Whistler is the first beer brewed using a relatively new technique in what has become a thriving new segment in the American craft beer scene. Unlike traditional sour beers, that often require oak barrel aging for many months, where the beer interacts with bacteria strains that continue to consumer sugar, resulting in the production of lactic acid making them "sour". Ralph Whister was created in a much quicker fashion using a newer modern brewing technique called, kettle souring. Without getting too technical, we still used a popular bacteria strain, Lactobacillus Brevis, to generate the desired lactic acid qualities in this beer, but rather than getting that from wooden barrels that brewers often use as a way to cultivate these little microbes, we simply added it to the wort in the kettle pre boil and allowed it to sit for a period of time. By allowing the bacteria to interact with the wort in a sterile environment like a brew kettle, it was still able to consume sugars and produce lactic acid, but once we boiled it, the bacteria was neutralized, allowing us to transfer the beer to the fermentors without contaminating other pieces of equipment where we don't want the bacteria to be present. For all intensive purposes, we would still prefer to simply refer to this beer as an American Sour or American Wild Ale, but the brewers thought it would be cool and educational for everyone to know how we are employing different brewing practices as we continue to explore these types of beers at Short's. By keeping the overall malt bill super simple, the brewers where really able to determine the fun types of flavors that would be produced from this particular strain of "lacto". In addition to describing this beer to customers as an American Sour or Wild Ale, Ryan also mentioned that it is similar to a Berliner Weisse (think Bucktricity), due to a small amount of wheat used, but it certainly wasn't enough to really be stylized as such. Overall, this beer is another fun example of our fearless nature to create an array of flavors in our beers that will continue to excite and amaze our fans!A note about the name: continuing on with tradition, the name of this beer is just as intriguing as the method in which is was made. Becoming a company legend for creating epic beer names, often with comical stories to go with them, this latest one is another Luke Whitley original. I'm not entirely sure how Luke stumbled upon this gem while browsing around the internet, but I'm starting to think he doesn't sleep at night, with the endless amount of material he continues to find inspiration from. One viewing of this video, and you will immediately understand why this incredible Michigan man with a one-of-a-kind talent, deserved to be immortalized in another amazing Short's pub only beer. Enjoy! If you only have a limited amount of time, fast forward to 2:22, cause that's when the magic really starts to happen....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw52zfjh3E0