Rick Bayless Creating New Craft Beer With Corona UPDATE
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MyBeer Buzz
Looks like celebrity chef Rick Bayless will be adding craft beer to his cookbook as he works Corona brewers Crown Imports to create a new beer. Details from Chicago Business:
The Chicago restaurateur and PBS cooking-show star will partner with the nation’s largest beer importer to create a craft beer that will hit stores next year. The planned brew is part of a significant new deal that Mr. Bayless has struck with Crown Imports, which distributes Corona and other Mexican beer brands in the U.S…
The craft beer is in its early stages of development. It will be owned by Crown, which initially plans to distribute it regionally, although the footprint could grow. The brand is still nameless and the style has not been determined. But it seems all-but-certain that Mr. Bayless will give it a south-of-the-border feel. "We are going to use Rick and all his expertise with Latin flavors and Mexican flavors and spice. He’s very into beer," Crown Chief Marketing Officer Jim Sabia told Crain’s sister publication Advertising Age. "We will have our own brewers, but he is going to be actively involved in the recipe and style. He’s going to be our master brewer."
While this represents Mr. Bayless’s biggest foray into booze, he is not a rookie. A few years ago he collaborated with Chicago’s Goose Island Beer Co. on a beer called Marisol that is still served in his Frontera Grill restaurant in Chicago.
19 Mar 2013 Update from the Chicagoist:
Chicagoist: Word has it that you’re partnering with Crown to create a Latin beer. What are you envisioning and how would it be different from previous beers you’ve helped create?
Bayless:
We haven’t created it yet. I did a bunch with Goose Island before, and one, Marisol, we were super happy with. We created Marisol to go with traditional Mexican flavors, what I call party food. I think it was a really solid beer, with bright flavors of citrus; it was a Belgian wheat ale with green coriander. It had this bright note to it. Our original idea was to scale that up, but we couldn’t do it. It was too craft-beer like. It had too many elements to go into a bottle. Then the Crown people came to us, but their focus is to create something that we can produce as a craft beer in Chicago that we can take national. Most Mexican beers are quaffing beers, for drinking when you’re sitting on the beach. That all works really well except that now everybody, Mexico included, is interested in craft beers. So we decided to do this with an eye to the fact that it’s a beer that will go in our restaurants and see what works best. It probably won’t be ready for consumption for over a year, however.
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