Three Floyds has grown markedly during the last 10 years. Does it still have the magic?
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 yearround 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 wellbuilt 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.