Run the Jewels Stay Gold IPA
Photo by Jim Vorel
Promotional beers, like promotional tie-in videogames, are quite often the sort of thing you’d be better off avoiding. It’s only natural to be a bit wary, when a band or movie decides to shack up with a craft brewery to produce a beer. But when those bands choose good breweries, that’s when things get interesting.
It would seem that Killer Mike and El-P of hip-hop duo Run the Jewels apparently have some good taste in beer, because they chose Brooklyn’s Interboro Spirits & Ales, along with Asheville, NC’s Burial Beer Co., to produce their new Stay Gold IPA. Named for the track off RTJ 3 (read our 9.3 review here), Stay Gold is an IPA that plays to the strengths of both Interboro and Burial as two of the East coast’s best brewers of hop-forward beers. It’s not entirely clear to me if Burial has been involved with the project since it was first announced, or if they were brought in later, but either way our can says that it was produced in Asheville by Burial, a brewery we’ve written about pretty extensively.
Stay Gold seems structured as a fairly straightforward, approachable, no-nonsense take on IPA that is informed by modern IPA brewing trends but doesn’t slavishly commit to them. This is not the hazy New England-style IPA, either in appearance or flavor profile, but it does have elements that have come into the vogue in current IPA brewing.