300 literal yards to my backside was the historic, and thanks to South Park, super iconic venue of Casa Bonita. Anyone who moves to Denver waits for the moment to witness the high dives and diarrhea it provides, but today, my path was focused on a slightly newer establishment on it’s way to icon status on Colfax Ave. I was visiting Westfax Brewing Company just next door. Westfax has been brewing beer on this site for some time, and all without the added diarrhea effects of Casa Bonita.

This visit in particular was to talk about their brut IPA, “Just Brut It” after I’d spent a weekend destroying my liver at a giant lake in Nebraska (that lake will go unnamed, but those who know, fucking know. You know?). I spoke with the owner Anthony about the dry joy of the brut style, hops and his amazing-jack-of-all-trades role at Westfax. We even dug into the art renaissance that is going on this this neck of Denver’s Woods, but that is a story for another time.

The real meat to this story is all the learning I pulled from our talk about this new style of IPA. Everything else is just happenstance. That said, now we’ll get into the official interview.

The following is submitted to the BnL audience as Under Oath episode 003. It has been edited for clarity, but the accompanying audio is unadulterated.

Sam: Thank you for joining us today, could you please state your name for the record?

Anthony: My name is Anthony Martuscello.

S: Thank you. And could you please state our current location?

A: We’re at WestFax Brewing Company.

S: What is your current position within the Company?

A: President, owner, founder… wearer of many hats.

S: AND A VERY NICE HAVE YOU HAVE ON TODAY, I MIGHT ADD. [laughs gregariously, yet unconfidently] SO the lawyer’s tell me WE USE the term “under oath,” we use that very loosely here, but do you pinky swear that you’ll tell something resembling a mildly truthful statement today?

A: Absolutely.

S: Alright, that’s good enough for me. You are now Under Oath on BnL, Anthony. Could you please state for the record what beer we are drinking today and briefly describe it?

A: Sure, we’re drinking our ‘Just Brut It’ IPA. A brut IPA, a newer style that has some base in California. And of came out of the San Francisco Area. It is a super light, super dry, super crisp, tropical fruits, little bit of grape and ripe apple. 7.1%, 43 IBUs, so really drinkable for being a 7% beer, and the biggest thing with this beer is we’re using an enzyme to chop out some of the those long chain sugars and allow the yeast continue to basically ferment this beer out to zero. There is no residual sugar, it’s dry. So that’s sort of where the name ‘burt’ comes from – dry brut champagne.

S: And it sounds like if you’re using an enzyme, you’re getting some brute force in there to really make that yeast get after it. Alright, you answered like four of my questions already, so good work there.

A: [chuckles politely]

S: So off the top of your head, do you know what kind of hops were used?

A: Yeah! So there was a little bit of galaxy, then primarily cashmere and pacifico. So a little bit different. The hop flavor, hop notes are going to be slightly more subtle because pacifica and cashmere can really be overpowered by those big oil hops like galaxy and city and mosaic. So we’ve toyed with them before in other beers and just gotten overpowered so we just wanted to make them really prevalent in this beer and them BE [smashes a glass on the floor for emphasis] the forefront. We went light on the galaxy on purpose to not overpower the cashmere and I think most of the flavor you get in this beer is cashmere. A little bit of pacifico – and little bit of the noble pacifico that comes out.

S: [pretending to be intelligent about hops] And I like that they’re hops you don’t really hear about that much either.