Triple Crossing
Richmond, Virginia’s Triple Crossing Brewing Company has made a name for themselves with progressively hoppy and hazy beers, but for these central Virginia stalwarts, it’s less about fitting into a “scene” and more about finding an honest yeast expression that speaks to their point of view.
“LIKE A LOT OF guys in the industry right now, I was a longtime homebrewer who probably got told incorrectly that his beers were so good he should sell them to people. It was a terrible way to go about opening a brewery without having any commercial experience before,” says Triple Cossing’s Cofounder and Head Brewer Jeremy Wirtes. His path to professional brewer aside, Wirtes is a humble yet ambitious brewer who, alongside partners Adam Wooster and Scott Jones, launched the small but potent brewery back in 2014.
It was the advent of Virginia bill SB604 that paved the way for them, allowing them to operate a taproom without operating a food-service business as well. For Wirtes, the opportunity was “now or never.”
“It seemed if we were going to do something, that would be an incubator way to start doing it,” he says.
Wirtes and his partners saw a unique opportunity in the Richmond market to focus on hops-forward beers that were not necessarily in vogue with the city’s drinkers at the time.
“The brewers in town at the time weren’t focusing on hoppy beer—the scene as it is now was in its infancy at the time—and I thought that was something we could do on a small scale, do it right, and not package beer to start with because that was something that really made me nervous and still does to this day,” says Wirtes.
Figuring It Out
While they started with a very conventional beer plan, “an overall yeast change to our entire profile happened early on,” says Wirtes. “We’d started making hoppy beers, and some of the earlier iterations of Union Jack from Firestone Walker were a big influence on our IPA side. A lot of New England IPA, despite the clarity issue—english ale strain, tail-end dry hopping, you name it—that beer’s almost an archetype for how a lot of those newer beers are made today.”
Their attempts at a new-school British-inspired IPA were hampered by fermentation issues as a result of their Fullers-type yeast strain. Instead of tweak- ing, they tried wholesale change, switching things up to California ale yeast. But Wirtes still wasn’t happy.
“They just weren’t what I wanted. I thought we had gotten something from the ester profile of the British strains, so I went back to the drawing board and trialed them out.”
This was late 2014, however, and “hazy” was still a new and unproven concept.
“The beers were turning out hazy, and while I wasn’t necessarily all that freaked out about it, we were biofining early, but it seemed as if we were deadening them in some way. It just didn’t have that same raw ripping character as when they’re fresh and young.”
Ultimately, they ended up with the same solution that inspired New England brewers such as Trillium and Tree House—a hazy yeast strain that left the beer cloudy, but intensely flavorful.
Doing More with Less
Relative to other hops-forward brewers, however, Triple Crossing didn’t have the luxury of riding on the backs of the hops alone.
“We had to make hoppy beers with the hops we could get. Citra and Mosaic didn’t come along for us until about a year or so in.”
Necessity being the mother of invention, Wirtes took stock of where they were in hops contracts and their ability to procure new varietals. Rather than going all-in on a strategy of new and hot, he instead refocused on some lesser-known varietals that would let them stake a claim on taste and nuance. The bold strategy worked, and
“The beers were turning out hazy, and while I wasn’t necessarily all that freaked out about it, we were biofining early, but it seemed as if we were deadening them in some way. It just didn’t have that same raw ripping character as when they’re fresh and young.”