Craft brewers joined together to create a commemorative beer for the 2014 Craft Brewers Conference (CBC), taking place April 8-11 in Denver. The official 2014 CBC beer is called Centennial Pale Ale in connection with Colorado being known as the centennial state. It is completely made from local Colorado ingredients, such as Centennial hops.
In particular, the beer sourced malt from Colorado Malting Co.; hops from Colorado Hop Yard, Rising Sun Hop Farms, High Wire Hops, Todd Hopps, Oskar Blues Hops and Heifers Farm, and New Belgium Brewing; and yeast from The Brewing Science Institute.
Centennial Pale Ale is the first American craft beer to use Broomfield, Colo.-based Ball Corp.’s new Dynamark Variable Printing Technology, it says. The variable print technology will create a collection of cans that will spell “CBC Colorado 2014” when aligned with the full collection of cans available to CBC attendees. In addition, the Centennial Pale Ale demonstrates the innovative nature of Colorado’s craft beer culture by being the first-ever CBC collaboration beer to be packaged in a can, it adds. The beer is packaged in 19.2-ounce single-serve cans, which Ball introduced to the U.S. market in 2013.
The collaborative beer project involved 145 Colorado Brewers Guild member brewers, who were all invited to attend the brewing and canning of Centennial Pale Ale at Oskar Blues Brewery in Longmont, Colo., on Feb. 24. Test batches of the beer were brewed prior at Strange Brewing Co.’s pilot plant in Denver.