FAQ

1. What makes you so High & Mighty?

Ah . . . excellent question, grasshopper. Mostly, this whole thing is intended to be fun, and maybe even funny. It's only beer, after all.  Do we think we’re better than everybody else? Sure, sometimes. Honestly, any brewery that doesn’t believe its beer is the best thing going needs to rethink its mission. But we’re not perfect, either, and we know there are a lot of ass-kickin’, sock-rockin’ breweries out there.

Now, having said all that, we’re also trying to do things a little differently around here. In typical American fashion, we brew beers that don’t follow any strict style guidelines, but unlike many of our friends and lovers in the biz, we’re generally brewing lower alcohol beers, and we believe pretty firmly that a lot of brewers are making ‘big’ beer because it’s a hell of a lot easier to make (and sell). The problem with a lot of that beer, though, is that you lose what we especially love about beer in the first place – the pas de deux of malt and hop, and the earthy yeast flavors that most breweries work so assiduously to keep out of their beer.

2. I don't see an IPA in your list of beers, let alone a Double IPA or Imperial Stout. What's the matter with you?

Simply, we brew the beer that we want to drink, though we obviously hope you like it, too. We realize that making big, crazy-hopped beer might sell better and would get us higher scores on a few web sites, but we just didn’t see any point in making the same beers that other breweries do, and do well.

Sure, we used to like IPA quite a lot, and we still enjoy a pint now and then, but, as is the case with such things, our taste changed over time, and we found ourselves going back to classic European beers. We weren’t going to try to recreate those, either, but we like to think that our beer leans more in that direction, with a decided American accent. Like many other American brewers, we love our hops, and use lots of them, but we think it’s worth the trouble and expense to get the best ones, which have been grown in Europe for centuries.

3. Oh, that's right. I heard that you dissed American hops. Why do you hate America, commie?

We're probably more Socialist than Communist, actually, but as long as there’s enough food and beer to go around, you can have it your way. But don’t always believe what people want you to believe, homes. It’s true that we don’t love the character of most hops grown domestically, but we don’t hate them, and we certainly don’t hate them because they’re American.

We use mostly German hops grown in the Halletauer region of Bavaria, as well as our favorite hop of them all – Czech Saaz. To our taste, those hops have a more pleasing, subtler bitterness, and provide the sorts of flavors and aromas that make us giddy. You have to use a lot more of them to get the kind of bitterness that we like, but, dammit, we think you're worth it.  Having said all that, we're quite happy with the hop character we're getting from our new Xtra Pale Ale, which uses both American (Simcoe and Palisades, primarily) and English hops.

But hate? Nah, we don’t hate anything or anyone. Except maybe Dick Cheney. He’s creepy.

4. What's the deal with the white fist? Are you, like, racist, or what?

Good Lord, no. That never occurred to us when we came up with our logo. And, of course, if we really wanted to make some sort of statement like that, we’d have used a Caucasian-colored fist, rather than a totally white one, wouldn’t we? The simple truth is that white shows up better on the shelf and in the bar, which is why we originally used white tap handles . . . but our new ones are a delightful silver.  Tin man power!

You’ll notice, also, that on our newest labels we’ve changed the color of the fist to silver. And we might just go ahead and get some tap handles done in black. We’ve got no problem at all getting accused of supporting black power.

But mostly we’re just trying to sell a little beer. Buy some, won’t you?