Behind Grand Canyon Brewing’s daring decision to brew an IPA with everyone’s favorite Arizona cactus fruit.
Let it never be said Grand Canyon Brewing + Distillery lacks devotion to the prickly pear. The Williams-based beverage company has been infusing adult liquids with the ubiquitous cactus fruit almost since its founding, releasing Prickly Pear Vodka and Prickly Pear Wheat Ale to great acclaim. “It’s extremely iconic to Arizona,” sales director Alexander Phillips says of the plant. “And it has a tart, refreshing quality we like.” According to Phillips, it was owner John Peasley who pushed hard for the brewery’s most recent addition to the line, Prickly Pear IPA – a bold concept that required GCB brewers to don their puzzle-solving hats. We’ll take “Tricky Beers” for $200, Alex.
The challenge: For many years, IPAs typically leaned toward “big citric and stone fruit profiles, and prickly pear is neither,” Phillips says. “It’s generally more melon-y or bubblegummy.”
Ultimately, the flavor-clash problem was reconciled by the rise of the New England IPA, with its tropical hops and richer mouthfeel. “The juicy revolution helped us get our heads around [a prickly pear IPA],” Phillips says.
Borrowing a page from the juicy playbook, GCB brewers “added hops later to the boil” to limit bitterness and leaned into tropical Amarillo hops to match the prickly pear. Voila! A crisp, delicious, fruited IPA. Not hazy, Philips cautions, “just tropical-forward.”
All that was left was the can art. Phillips was so smitten with brand manager Kevin Callaway’s nopales-as-hops design, he got it tattooed on his arm. “I always told everyone I was going to get a GCB tattoo someday, and this was it!”
$12/4-pack
Grand Canyon Brewing + Distillery Prickly Pear IPA
Available in beer stores Valleywide, or visit one of GCB’s four high-country locations.
grandcanyonbrewery.com
Beer of the Month
Tombstone Brewing Co. Mango Berliner
Sour Fruited Ale/5% ABV
Loudly and repeatedly hailed for its creatively hopped IPAs, Tombstone has also proven pretty handy with sours, illustrated in its delightful series of Berliner Weisse beers. Lightly wheated and faintly sweet, the style is much more reminiscent of Prairie Artisan Ale’s highly crushable, hugely popular fruit beers than the Bragg-apple-cider-vinegar-like sours that brewers favored 20 years ago. Tombstone’s Raspberry Berliner is the flagship of the bunch, but there’s also Prickly Pear, Apricot and this tropical temptress. Let the crushing commence. Find it at Arcadia Premium and other fine Valley beer shops. tombstone.beer
