Foothills & Wicked Weed Collaborate on New Brew Named “Batch 69” Coming 5/31

(Asheville, NC) – “Maybe they’ll think we’re cool enough to do something with.”

That’s how Wicked Weed Brewing’s Walt Dickinson describes his initial thoughts on approaching Winston-Salem’s award-winning brewery, Foothills  Brewing, about collaborating on a project for Asheville Beer Week 2013.

The result of that project is Batch 69, a beer that will release at 7pm on Friday, May 31st, at Wicked Weed’s Biltmore Avenue brewpub in Asheville.

It all began when Dickinson, head of brewing operations at Wicked Weed, and his brother Luke, were deciding what to brew for Asheville Beer Week 2013 (May 25th-June 1st).

“Foothills is a brewery we’ve always looked up to,” says Dickinson. “It’s my favorite brewery in the state of North Carolina. Their beers are really well-executed, and I think a lot of their commitment to quality.”

So he approached T.L. Adkisson, head brewer at Foothills, who had only recently tried Wicked Weed’s offerings at an event in Charlotte. “We’d been hearing a lot of good things about them,” says Adkisson. “Their double IPA is my kind of beer – super floral, super dry. When you drink a beer like that you can tell your brewing philosophies match.”

Thus, a collaboration was born. 

That same double IPA, called Freak, is one half of the recipe backbone for Batch 69. The other half is Foothill’s iconic Sexual Chocolate Imperial Stout. The result is a beer with bright, citrusy notes, balanced by an earthy chocolate presence.

As Dickinson puts it, “It’s ideally going to be a drier beer, but with a lot of chocolate complexity, with a nice, bright, citrus finish on it.” Adds Adkisson, “the beer’s designed to have a chocolate profile, but tilt heavily toward an orange, almost tangerine flavor.”

Batch 69 uses five malts from North America, Great Britain and Germany. The hop profile supplied by Foothills contains Amarillo, Simcoe and Citra hops. As for the chocolate, Guatemalan organic cacao nibs were hand-roasted by French Broad Chocolate in Asheville especially for this beer.

And the name? It’s simply a reference to this being the 69th batch of beer brewed at Wicked Weed since they opened in December 2012. “With beer names like Sexual Chocolate and Freak, obviously we could have gotten very risqué with the name,” admits Dickinson. “It just happened to be batch number 69 for us, so that’s what we called it.”

If the beer is any indication of the collaborative nature that resulted from the project, then it will be a hit. “Working with them was a lot of fun,” says Adkisson of the Wicked Weed brew crew. “Their enthusiasm is refreshing. To see guys throwing all their effort and passion into something is rejuvenating. It reminds you why you do this.”