From left, New Belgium Brewing's Matt Gilliland, Peter Bouckaert, Penelope Gilliland and Jason Tomsic fill the PH1 barrel for the first time in 1999 at the Fort Collins, Colorado, brewery.
John Laffler holds his breath, lowers an electric branding iron, and sears a perfectly legible grain mouse logo into an upright barrel. He only gets one shot at this. While the Lincoln Park brewer is practicing on a dummy cask, the real target rests nearby: a heavily scarred, 60-gallon French oak drum scrawled with the name “PH1.”
This isn't just wood and iron; it is a legendary living relic of American brewing history, an original 1990s New Belgium Brewing cask that helped launch the nation’s sour beer revolution and has spent the last thirty years passing from brewery to brewery as a symbol of craft beer's collaborative soul.
That the drum has a name is some indication of its significance. PH1 is an original barrel from New Belgium Brewing’s sour-beer program, one of the first of its kind in the United States. In the late 1990s, the cask produced an early batch of that brewery’s La Folie, a groundbreaking American sour brown ale. It has since gained almost mythical status on a 30-year odyssey: sold, lost, found, gifted and passed on.
