Little Thistle Double Elbow Landrace Czech-Style Lager 4pk Can

There's a particular magic in observing how things in one place come to fit together the way they do, and there are lessons to be learned in those observations about how necessity tends to produce a kind of slow, hard-earned perfection. There are so many instances of natural adaptation, moments of recombination, persistence, and happy accidents required for something as simple as a glass of pale lager to exist.

Haná (or Hanna), the Moravian malting barley used to create the original pale lagers in Czechia, is a landrace variety, meaning that it's a genetically diverse collection of barley varietals adapted to thrive in a particular place under particular conditions. It was so good that it became the pre-eminent malting barley in the world, with bits of its genetics popping up in barley breeding programs for centuries, but the rise of single-variety breeding pushed the original landrace version's locally-adapted variation aside in favor of standardization.

This beer is brewed primarily with a modern rebirth of Haná malt, grown in NY state and malted in Massachusetts, and is hopped with an American homage to the classic German landrace hop (that just so happens to actually be an American planting of an English landrace). It's a reminder to all of us that nothing happens in a vacuum, that diverse populations tend to produce the most compelling results, and that keeping an eye on the past is necessary in order to create the future we want to live in.  3.9% ABV