Ocelot Brewing & Superchunk Collaborate On Superczech

From Ocelot:

On Wednesday, December 13, Ocelot Brewing will release Superczech, a 4.6% Czech-style premium pale lager made in collaboration with indie rock icons Superchunk. Elegant and eminently crushable, this Bohemian brew bookends the release of Misfits & Mistakes: Singles, B-sides & Strays 2007–2023, the punk band’s fourth compilation for longtime home Merge Records.

Misfits & Mistakes is a formidable tome. Across four slabs of vinyl, the box set collects 50 classically Superchunk earworms from 31 physical and digital releases. Superczech, by contrast, is an exercise in restraint. The faintly golden lager is constructed almost entirely with one grain: Weyermann Bohemian Pilsner Malt. Floor malted in Czechia using Bohemian-grown heirloom barleys, this rustic malt is world renowned for round, earthy flavor and aromas of biscuit and honey. On Superczech’s brew day, we sought to coax further depth from its grist with our version of a decoction. The result is simple yet beguilingly complex – a knot you can’t untie, to paraphrase singer-guitarist Mac McCaughan on compilation ripper “Good Morning.”

Saaz hops assertively animate the beer, but with a light touch of American irreverence, we opted to use the Michigan-grown version of the varietal. Like its traditional European counterpart, this cultivar is floral and spicy, just… more so. Amplified, one might even say. Fittingly, Superczech’s label features “Tube Guy,” an anthropomorphized amp tube drawn decades ago by McCaughan. Over the years, Superchunk album art has taken Tube Guy to a North Carolina beach and within view of Giza’s Great Pyramid. Now, he travels to the Czech countryside – the kind of bucolic Bohemian setting described by McCaughan on a 1994 Portastatic track called, naturally, “Naked Pilseners.”

Need we discuss the collaboration’s name? We jokingly referred to it as Superczech for months, and while more “serious” options were subsequently entertained, sometimes a silly idea sticks and you end up with a naturally carbonated pale lager called Superczech. It’s sort of like how sometimes you name a college band after a phone book typo and that group is still going strong more than three decades later. And listening to Misfits & Mistakes, Superchunk indeed sounds as vital today as it did when the inaugural Chunk 7-inch surfaced in the fall of 1989. The North Carolinians simply never mail it in, regardless of whether a song is a lead single, included on a charity comp, or pressed to flexi disc. We’ll raise a Superczech to that.

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Misfits & Mistakes: Singles, B-sides & Strays 2007–2023 is available now via Merge, Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, and pretty much everywhere else.

Superczech follows Ocelot collaborations with The Clientele, Protomartyr, Palehound, and Fucked Up over the course of 2023. The brewery is located in Dulles, Virginia.