Other Half Brewing, Then & Now

So I got there right before this then, it was the summer of 2015 late August that I went. They released AGE and GD (@tynian16 ) that day, and I got to try a pour of Mosaic IPA I think. It was such a cool tiny tiny tap room and environment. I would love to go back and experience those exact beers again.

We got sandwiches at court street grocers?? (I think) down the street. It was a fun little trip that I remember fondly.

I wonder if they would ever go back and do a reboot of the OG recipes...

 

A reboot would be awesome. I wonder what we would think.

I wasn't one of the very first people at Other Half for sure but it was nice being in NYC right when they were getting going. I think the first can release I actually went to was AGE, Hop Showers, and Doug. This would have been in 2015 at some point.

 

Well they did Citra IPA, but citra beers are an easy sell. Maybe a week theme at some point would generate enough interest and nostalgia to justify brewing a bunch of old school single hop at least?

 

They've done a few throwbacks. Last summer there was a Green Diamonds that was not the usual full on OH-style haze, and I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be more or less the original recipe. They also did the non-DDH Double Mosaic Dream, but that's always been a fully hazy/NE style.

I would love to see the OG AGE come back though. One of the first 4-packs I ever got from them must have been one of the last non-DDH batches, and it was awesome.

 

I think I remember someone on here saying Trillium kind of showed them the way with hazies, and in turn Other Half showed Monkish the way. Kinda works like a coaching tree in football.

 

I remember Street Green being more of a dank/weedy IPA, rather than a juicy NEIPA

 

As much as people (usually rightfully) condemn collabs as just marketing ploys to double-up on hype, I do definitely think that for a newer brewery, collaborating with a more established one can definitely have meaningful results. I also feel like the standard local NEIPA made around the country mostly resembles the OH/Trillium/Monkish profile, all of whom collab with everybody and their grandma, whereas nobody really makes NEIPA with the same profile as Tree House, who never collabs.

 

We recently started getting distro of OH beers by me. I'm conflicted because it seems 80% of what they send out are Triple IPAs or IIPAs that are over 8.8%abv. I haven't had a TIPA that I liked, and try to stay under 8.5% because if just gets too sweet and overpowering.

However, the sub 8.5% beers I've found and bought have been really really good.

 

I’ve basically been around since the beginning and I’ve seen a bit of a bell curve here, at least in my shitty opinion. I definitely don’t drink as much as OH as the regulars in that thread but I’ve had enough consistently to have what I consider enough to add an informed opinion.

Saying that, I think they hit a bit of a rut when they started to expand and produce more. Now, I generally have had the beers produced in the OG the past year or two or so, but I’ve been very happy with what I’ve had in that time span. In fact, that little melon phase or whatever it was…gone. Been getting nothing but greatness on the DIPAs and the pilsner collab they did with Rothaus was amazing. One of the best I’ve ever had.

 

When were the "everything tastes like melon" and "bad galaxy" phases? They didn't overlap right?

 

In the year before covid I think was the worst? Bad galaxy carried on though til maybe 6 months ago. Maybe small overlap. I still had a DC can of this or that and got some over ripe melon in recent months but I recall nearly every beer having melon to some degree other than hop showers and space diamonds/ACE up until around covid. I was only getting any sporadically though during covid so I could be underestimating, but complaints on here have been down for some time on melon. That said I haven't had space Diamonds in over a year, which I feel like is the real test for where galaxy is at rather than it being one of multiple hops of unclear proportions. Trillium, for what it's worth, only recently did galaxy beers again, or so I heard.

Eta: Other half still hasn't done a galaxy theme week which i think says something. Given galaxy has traditionally been an ingredient in a lot of their NEIPAs, I think that inevitably makes it a bit harder to say, with at least a subset of their beers that are galaxy focused, that they're "just as good, " but that's not a brewery issue so much as a crop/supply issue then.

 

There has been some discussion about Galaxy hops in this thread.

Last year in the Homebrewing forum there was a thread: What happened to Galaxy?

https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/what-happened-to-galaxy.657996/#post-7245109

Below is an extract quoting Shaun Hill:

“At many large processors, they’re essentially blending multiple lots and just trying to get a homogenous blend, which is like what Galaxy is in Australia; BarthHaas, or Hop Products Australia, doesn’t really allow anyone to do selection, probably because they just want total control over the process because there’s a lot of very inferior hops, especially a lot of inferior Galaxy, being grown,” he said.

Maybe over the past year(s), the quality of Galaxy Hops has improved?

Cheers!

 

Agreed, whatever hype is gone from the IPAs their pilsners have come a long way. I had that collab thanks to browerji lane along with qualify and Palatine (great selection there as usual) and it held up against them. Can't say their earliest attempts at non ipas or stouts were nearly as good.

 

Definitely agree regarding the lagers. Years ago they were muddled and seemed over-hopped, but everything I've had over the last year or so has been really crisp and straightforward.

 

Maybe I should revisit OH lagers. Besides collabs with Rothaus and Schilling (which I think was brewed by Schilling itself), everything I tried was dreadful.

 

Cans said it was brewed at OH and it had a green tab so IDK where it was brewed since IG implied it was brewed at Schilling. Pivo Snaps, Run Out Groove, and Citra Snaps were all solid though. Their lagers used to be bad I agree, the collab they did with Trillium a while back tasted like a watery macro lager.

 

They won't change your life but vary from solid to quite good. Not suarez level but they don't embarrass themselves by any means and the rothaus one was on point.

 

All Snaps are AALs, right? I'm afraid to try that. Never had Run Out Groove, but Tumbleweeds, a couple of Crickets versions, Ivy City Lager, and Local Cones were pretty bad.

 

I disagree, most of what I tried was worse than most of what is available from other breweries.