Three Floyds has grown markedly during the last 10 years
Ten years ago, Three Floyds beer rarely reached store shelves.
With each weekly shipment, retailers stashed the beer in back, waiting for people to ask for it. Three Floyds beer reliably sold out, often in less than a day. Legend has it the most obsessed fans followed distribution trucks around town, waiting for the beer to be unloaded. People craved it, both for the extreme, inventive flavors and the heavy-metal-meets-dystopian-comic-book ethos.
As one beer seller said at the time, “I’ve got 2,000 fresh beers on the shelves, and if someone can’t get Gumballhead, they’ll walk out without buying anything else.”
We chronicled the phenomenon in April 2012, when the brewery, housed in an unassuming Munster, Indiana, office park 30 miles south of downtown Chicago, seemed at the peak of its ascendance. Seventeen of its beers had garnered perfect scores on the RateBeer website, which led to Three Floyds being named the world’s best brewery five of the previous seven years.
Such praise was just a precursor, though, for what would become Three Floyds’ defining moment: Zombie Dust.
The pale ale, bottled for the first time in early 2012, ushered in a new era of consumer tastes by highlighting the bright fruitiness of the Citra hop, which played an outsize role in transforming pale ales and India pale ales from largely bitter and piney to more boldly fruity. It’s a trend that only continued, and Zombie Dust was as elemental to the transformation as any American beer.
When Zombie Dust was released that January, Three Floyds sold close to 1,000 cases in a day — that’s 24,000 bottles — as people screeched to a stop in the brewery parking lot and literally ran inside to buy the beer. Three Floyds owner Nick Floyd compared the frenzy to watching a cartoon: As Three Floyds filled cases of Zombie Dust, people carried them away.
The demand for Three Floyds’ growth was obvious, and grow Three Floyds did. Though an ambitious plan to expand the brewery into a sprawling campus has tapped the brakes, Three Floyds has still grown significantly, including launching a new brewery in 2019 for its canned beers. Production has nearly quadrupled in the last decade, from 27,600 barrels of production in 2012 to 106,638 barrels in 2021, according to figures provided by the brewery.
Three Floyds has quietly transformed from scrappy underdog to joining Goose Island and Lagunitas as the largest breweries in the Chicago area. It’s the
nation’s 24th-largest craft brewery, according to the Brewers Association, up from 45th in 2018.
But 10 years later, after all that growth, the question is this: How’s the beer? Is Three Floyds still the same Three Floyds, even as its beer has migrated from lurking in the storeroom to tall stacks at liquor stores and the aisles of Costco?
I tasted everything I could find on shelves in recent weeks for an answer. In the current sea of beer — the nation is closing in on 10,000 breweries and the Chicago area is home to about 250 — I was curious to know whether Three Floyds could still be called a world-class brewery, or whether time has made it settle into the crowd.
Year-round beers
Three Floyds makes eight year-round beers, and six of them are pale ales or India pale ales — beers that showcase hops, those wonderful little plants that can inject fruitiness, bitterness and piney character into beer. As it has always been, Three Floyds is an unmistakably hop-driven brewery. It’s what made it a sensation in the first place.
There was only one place to begin the exploration: Zombie Dust (pale ale, 6.5% alcohol). It has, not surprisingly, become Floyds’ biggest-selling beer, and 10 years on, I half-expected it to have outlasted what once made it great. While I’m fairly sure it’s not quite the same beer, and that the recipe has been tweaked as it has been scaled up, it’s still an ace example of a balanced, modern pale ale, boasting fruity orange-grapefruit notes upon light resin overtones, backed by a bitter, piney snap before drying out in the finish.
Zombie Dust isn’t the showstopper it was 10 years ago; today it is a definition of dependability. Few people might run across a parking lot to load up on it in 2022, but it remains a local touchstone — and it’s still one of my favorite Three Floyds beers. A crucial aspect: I bought a six-pack at my local beer store that had been packaged less than a month earlier. That’s
impressively fresh beer.
Next up was another Three Floyds classic, Gumballhead (pale ale, 5.6%), which predated Zombie Dust in the lineup by about 10 years. It was a counterintuitive sensation in its earliest days, an intensely hoppy wheat beer with a memorable label: a scowling, cigarette-smoking cat who has inspired countless tattoos across the Chicago area.
These days it amounts to a lighter version of a pale ale, mildly fruity and easy-drinking with an earthy, grassy touch. Though ahead of its time, I wouldn’t consider Gumballhead so memorable these days. It’s simply a well-built pale ale that blends nicely into the landscape, one you’re glad to see on tap at Wrigley Field — which, yes, is a thing thanks to Three Floyds’ growth.
Another beer ahead of its time, and which is undeniably showing its age, is Alpha King (pale ale, 6.66%). It’s one of Three Floyds’ oldest beers, dating to its opening in 1996, and tastes like it. Bitterness! Malt character! Lots of malt character! This beer is a dinosaur.
But dinosaurs are cool! And in the beer world, doing things differently from everyone else should be applauded. Alpha King’s malt character does as much lifting as the hops, which makes for a surprisingly balanced beer these days: crisp bitterness mingling with malty sweetness. While I might not regularly stock it in my fridge, I’m glad Alpha King still exists, and I’ll order one every time I walk into Bucktown’s legendary Map Room, where it is treated with the proper reverence of a permanent draft handle.
A more modern cousin to Alpha King is Space Station Middle Finger (pale ale, 6.5%), also fairly malt-oriented by current standards. The fruitiness, however, grows stronger and more interesting as the beer warms, veering into unlikely apricot character. The pine, bitterness and malt converge with that fruity note to create a harmonious balance and a unique beer — a modern spin on an old-school pale
ale — that few other breweries are likely to attempt.
There are pitfalls to growth, and that’s best expressed by my experience with LazerSnake (IPA, 7%). More beer in the market can easily mean more old beer in the market. On one shopping trip, the only LazerSnake on shelves was more than four months old. I never would have bought it if not writing this article; hop character is almost certain to drop out in an IPA sitting that long on an ambient shelf. I tried it. I wasn’t impressed.
But a week later, at the same store, I found LazerSnake canned three weeks earlier. I drank the older LazerSnake alongside the newer one and the difference was striking. The older one was mostly bitter and the fruity character fell off a cliff after each sip. The fresher one was brighter and more expressive, with notes of apricot and grapefruit laced through the notes of pine and resin. If you find LazerSnake fresh, I recommend it.
The beer I was most curious about was Three Floyds’ attempt at modernity: the hazy IPA.
No brewery can stay relevant by remaining entirely in the past, so Three Floyds introduced Barbarian Haze IPA (IPA, 6.5%) in 2020. The style — intensely fruity, easy drinking, often so sweet it slides out of balance — is antithetical to the brashness on which Floyds had built its identity. But fascinatingly, Floyds’ approach works to the advantage of Barbarian Haze, at least to my taste buds.
Barbarian Haze suggests it’s not like most hazy IPAs as soon as it lands in a glass. While many are downright turbid, Barbarian Haze is attractively hazy, like a golden cloud. The aroma is the predictable fruit stand — melon, grapefruit and plenty of pineapple notes — but unlike many hazy IPAs, it’s discernibly dry and lands with clear bitterness in this finish, just enough to balance the fruitiness. For someone who doesn’t care for the single-note sweet sludge of many hazy IPAs (such as me), Barbarian Haze is an impressive case of the old dog mastering new tricks.
The old dog also embraces old tricks, introducing Speed Castle (Pilsner, 5.6%) this spring as its newest year-round offering. You might assume, as I did, Three Floyds would roll out a sharp-elbowed, intensely hoppy pilsner. But this one is soft and sweet, underpinned with toasty malt character. It’s a tasty beer that sits nicely alongside a wide array of dishes. I ordered it on draft alongside a brisket sandwich and had no regrets. Speed Castle could use a touch more crispness and bitterness to play off the malt character, but it’s a beer I’d order again and is a welcome counterpoint to the rest of the Floyds lineup.
The biggest surprise for someone who hasn’t paid attention to the Three Floyds portfolio in recent years? It still makes Robert the Bruce (Scottish-style ale, 7.5%). And all year long! Probably fewer than 25 make a year-round, Scottish-style ale. Kudos to Three Floyds for being its stubborn self.
As for the beer: Robert the Bruce is a fine representation of the malty, lightly sweet style, though I’d like a bit more round caramel character. While I might not stock it in my fridge, I’ll gladly drink it.
Seasonal beers
Three Floyds keeps a steady stream of new and limited beers in the market — crucial in today’s competitive craft beer landscape. Some are familiar to longtime Floyds watchers and some less so.
On the less-so front, I came across a beer I’d never heard of, Rites of Ramm (IPA, 5%), introduced this year and available only in April and May. Yes, it’s yet another hoppy Three Floyds beer. But it’s a very good one, and one of my favorites on this list: crisp, bitter, lean, with lush fruitiness — notes of grapefruit pith meets mango and apricot — before drying out in the finish. As a lighter, hoppy beer, I prefer it to Gumballhead. It’s more interesting, with more nuanced hop character. Too bad it’s only around for two months.
Another hoppy beer available this spring will be familiar to longtime Three Floyds fans: Dreadnaught IPA (imperial IPA, 9.4%), which is yet another throwback: a boozy, bruising, bitter and malt-forward hop bomb. Like many Three Floyds beers, the hop character is hardly single note or uninteresting; in this case there’s melonlike underpinning. This sort of beer, like Alpha King, isn’t easy to find anymore. But it scratches an itch, and I’d gladly buy a fresh four-pack when released every spring.
Three Floyds makes a lot of hoppy beer, but a corner of the portfolio veers in an admirable range of directions. Pear Bear (wild ale, 8%) is a spot-on wild ale made with, you guessed it, pear. It’s aged 11 months in wine and bourbon barrels, deeply funky from the presence of Brettanomyces yeast and souring lactobacillus bacteria, and given an extra lightly fruity wrinkle from the pear. Like most wild ales, it’s an arcane beer lovers’ beer: elegant, challenging and fascinating layers of aromas and flavors.
Another lengthy project, though far less arcane, is Pillar of Beasts (barley wine, 13.7%), brewed with salted caramel, vanilla beans and cocoa nibs, then aged 12 months in bourbon barrels. The cacao and caramel do the heavy lifting, and meld nicely with the vanilla for a wave of bold, boozy sweetness in the middle of the sip. But to the beer’s credit — and this is a recurring theme with Floyds
— it dries out nicely, never losing sight of the need for balance. The beer doesn’t do much for me, but it is well-constructed.
Finally, there is WarPigs — Three Floyds’ other beer brand. Most WarPigs beer is made under contract at Summit Brewing in St. Paul, Minnesota, but the limited releases come from the Munster brewery. The limited release at the time of this writing is Aquanauticon (sour ale, 5.5%), made with pineapple and mango. It’s an ace summer sipper: bright, tart, rife with citrus notes with grassy undertones. It’s archly sour, but not overly so, which keeps it refreshing. It’s an impressive left-field beer from a brewery as hop-driven as Floyds.
Takeaway
Three Floyds was an essential brewery in 2012. I wouldn’t call it that in 2022. But that’s a function of the landscape around it. Amid so much competition, it’s difficult for any brewery to come across as essential these days.
Yet Three Floyds is still what it was 10 years ago — and that’s a good thing. Plenty of breweries endlessly pivot toward contemporary tastes, even when contemporary tastes veer in boring or gimmicky directions. Three Floyds has remained true to itself, and done so with intention: Zombie Dust, Gumballhead, Alpha King and Space Station Middle Finger are all pale ales, but they’re all very different pale ales with different merits. All are worth drinking.
Despite losing some of its sizzle in a growing beer landscape, Three Floyds has settled in as an admirable craft beer elder statesman. It remains a very good brewery, and often an excellent brewery. Its beer may be far more accessible than 10 years ago, but not having to know to ask for the Zombie Dust hiding in back is a welcome development.