Brewvine: Fall Favorites at Dead Bear Brewing Company

As we slowly transition into fall, it’s not just the weather and the leaves that are changing.

For this week’s Brewvine, Whitney Amann and chief photojournalist Jeremy Erickson take us to Dead Bear Brewing Company in Grayling, where the beer is starting to see a seasonal change too.

“This is really the first year that we that we tried a lot of fruit beers like we did in the summer, but it worked. People really, really enjoyed them. So we’re going to continue doing stuff like that.”

Shandy, Pale Ales and IPAs infused with watermelon, strawberry and blood orange were all the rage at Dead Bear Brewing Company this summer. That trend got brewer and owner, Travis Krebs, drafting and crafting some new fall recipes.

“Because we’ve had so many people enjoying our fruit beers here, I’m going to do a series of saisons for the fall and I’m going to do some different fruit additives with those,” said Krebs. “So I’m going to do probably some apple, maybe a little bit of cherry and some cinnamon, and then I’ll see what our fruit supplier has, and I might play around a little bit with that too. So we’ve got some fun, some fun stuff coming up this fall.”

While they’re siphoning off the summer suds, they’ll also be accelerating the release of their autumn ales, like their popular Maple Bacon Porter, “Sugga Bear,” and Oatmeal Chocolate Stout.

“While it’s still September, they can still get a couple of those shandys, they can still get our regular staple Escanaba River, Amber Ale, our Hefeweizen, our River Gremlin IPA,” said Krebs. “And then over the next month, September, going into October, we should have more and more of those stouts and more and more of those saisons and things like that going on. We’ll also probably be doing a couple of porters. I always like to do porters, maybe play with some peanut butter and things like that.”

The end of the busy summer season gives the staff at Dead Bear a chance to regroup and recharge their creative batteries.

“In the summer we’re so go, go, go, go, go,” explained Krebs. “The fall slow down. I can really play around and take a little bit of a breather, you know, get back to square one./ and then we move into like the fall color season and hunting season and stuff and we’ll get those customers. So it’s it’s a nice, subtle, slow down.”