I can build expansive fantasy worlds out of thin air. I can roll up a D&D character, look at a map of a forgotten kingdom, and name high-level NPCs on the fly just by letting syllables tumble out of my mouth. But for some reason, the second I have to name a batch of my own beer? Total mental paralysis. My brain freezes up, screams in frustration, and promptly goes back to bed.
Naming beer is hard. And if I'm being completely honest, my track record isn’t doing me any favors.
Take my legendary "Chicken Dinner Pale Ale." I had just won a major brewing competition for the second consecutive time. I felt like an absolute genius. I named the beer as a literal, celebratory winner, winner, chicken dinner joke. I even did the mandatory finger guns when I pitched it.
Nobody got it. Not a single soul.
Then there was "The Bearded Weirdo," a highly semi-autobiographical session IPA. I went all out and slapped a literal drawing of my own face right on the tap handle. Another inside joke that crashed and burned hard into a sea of blank stares.
By the time I brought a beer to a festival themed after The Big Lebowski, I panicked and named it "The Viggely Penis" for... reasons. Look, it made sense in my head at the time. But after years of executing jokes that missed the mark, I’ve admitted defeat. I’m officially gun-shy.
So when it came time to brew a refreshing, hot-weather crusher for this year’s Beerstock 5060 hosted by Washington State Homebrewers Collective's summer homebrew club roundup, I absolutely refused to play into the theme. The theme was Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (a theme I actually came up with, ironically). Did I name it Attack of the Cones? Obi-Wan Ken-Oatmeal Stout? Nope. My brain went on strike.
Instead, I looked at the blistering summer heat and kept it purely literal: the Lemondrop Shandy.
Original? Not even a little bit. DELICIOUS? Absolutely.
The backbone of this recipe is the original Lemondrop Wheat, a proud staple of our ongoing Summer Brewing Series. It's clean, crisp, and beautifully bright. To transform it into the ultimate antidote for this humidity, we blended it into a traditional, refreshing shandy. It’s exactly the kind of sweet, tart, lower-ABV patio pour you need when the sun is melting the asphalt.
For the uninitiated, Beerstock isn't just a standard excuse to day-drink in a field. It is a literal celebration of freedom. The "5060" stands for Washington Senate Bill 5060, the monumental piece of legislation that finally legalized the transport of homebrew. Before that law changed, you were technically a bootlegging criminal if you filled up a growler of your own homebrew and drove it down the street to a friend's backyard BBQ.
The Washington State Homebrewers Collective fights the good fight to keep our community vibrant, legal, and well-fed with incredible beer. Events like Beerstock remind us exactly how far our local hobby has come.
Speaking of keeping the hobby alive, our ongoing homebrew competition is still heating up. If you've been working on a summer clone recipe or a secret masterpiece of your own, now is the time to dial in your fermentation. Bring your bottles by the shop, get your entries locked in, and let's see what the Northwest is cooking up this season.
Just do me a favor: spend a little extra time thinking about your submission's name. Don't end up like me, holding finger guns next to a tap list, explaining a joke to an empty room.
But hey, if your brain completely freezes up on the title as mine did, just focus on making what’s inside the glass taste incredible. You can always take the coward's way out and name it exactly what it is.
If you want to recreate the absolute crusher we poured at Beerstock, the backbone of that batch is our Lemondrop Wheat Kit, a proud staple of our ongoing Summer Brewing Series. It is a pale, clean, crisp American wheat beer designed specifically to be bright, refreshing, and lemon-forward—not a banana-and-clove heavy German Hefeweizen.
To turn it into the shandy we served, I simply kegged 4.5 gallons of the finished beer and kicked it up with a half-gallon of sweet lemonade right in the keg. (Though if you're doing the math, I started with 5 gallons of beer and still haven't figured out where that lost half-gallon went before packaging. Let's just say it was consumed "for science" and move on.)
Whether you want to drink it straight or blend your own patio-session shandy, we have the kits fully stocked at the shop right now. Fire up your kettle and brew yourself some liquid air conditioning:
The Vital Stats
- OG: 1.048
- FG: 1.011
- ABV: 4.6%
- IBU: 21
Kit Inventory
- Grain Bill: 4.5 lb. Pilsner Malt, 4.5 lb. White Wheat Malt, 0.5 lb. Rice Hulls
- Hops: 1 oz. Mt. Hood (60 min), 1 oz. Lemondrop (10 min)
- Recommended Yeasts: Wyeast 1010 American Wheat, SafAle US-05, or Wyeast 1056
- Bottling Primer: 5 oz. dextrose (Corn Sugar)
Brew Day
- Mash: 151°F (66°C) for 60 minutes.
- Sparge: Aim for a 6.5-gallon pre-boil volume.
- Boil: 1 hour (ending with a 5.5-gallon kettle volume).
- Fermentation: Keep it clean and cool between 65–72°F (18–22°C).
Pro-Tips from the Shop
- Bag Your Hops: We highly recommend boiling your hops in a muslin sock or straining them out entirely before you hit the primary fermenter to keep things crisp.
Grab a kit, dial in your fermentation, and let's see what you've got for the ongoing competition. Just keep a close eye on your volumes so you don't end up with a missing half-gallon of your own!