The History of Liliko’i Kepolo
The long journey from a Tap Room anomaly to nationwide distribution.
by Andy Parker, Avery’s Chief Barrel Herder
Today is the day to shine the spotlight on the Avery staff’s favorite morning beer, the awkwardly named Liliko’i Kepolo (lil-uh-koi kuh-poe-low). Join me as we relive its ten-year history, share why it took so long to put it into cans, and discuss how it’s changed over the years.
While Avery Brewing Company started in 1993, we didn’t get a tasting room until much later. From 2000 to 2003, we had a kegerator with four taps in the brewhouse, and if you happened to stop by and a brewer happened to have the time, they might pour you a beer while they worked. Somewhere around 2003 we turned one of our three offices into a slightly more official operation. A couple of evenings each week, you could walk in and try some four-ounce samples of free beer. We loved the idea of giving out free beer, but we also had a lot of local fans asking us if they could buy a pint and sit down with their friends. We kept expanding and a few years later (in 2007 or so) we opened an actual Avery Tap Room with ten taps and a handful of tables. Soon that expanded to twenty taps and enough seating for around 75 people.
Sure, it was entertaining to have a busy bar hidden in the back of an industrial complex and only a tiny sign out front. More importantly for the experimental-minded brewers at Avery, it meant opportunities to fill those taps with new projects and pilot batches. For years that tap room was the only place to try dry hopped versions of our IPAs, random one-offs, and the small projects coming our nascent barrel-aging program. And for around five years it was the only place to taste Liliko’i Kepolo.
The origin story of Liliko’i Kepolo begins even further back in time. Back in good ol’ 2000, a young Andy Parker (that’s me!) was lucky enough to get an offer for his first job in the beer industry. He was one of three full time employees at the tiny Kona Brewing Company on the Big Island of Hawaii. At the time he was a young beer snob who thought he knew everything. Stouts and barleywines were badass. Pilsners and fruity beers were for rookies. But in his first week at work, one of the other employees recommended a pau hana (done with work) beer called Liliko’i Wheat. It was an American wheat beer with liliko’i, which is Hawaiian for passion fruit and a common ingredient in tropical regions. Our young Andy Parker was skeptical, thinking that it would be a sweetened fruit beer, only to find that passion fruit is slightly acidic and adds a tinge of tartness to the beer. It smelled delicious, it tasted delicious, and soon he was putting passion fruit on everything he could.
While brainstorming new beers to make for the Avery Tap Room ten years later, I thought back to that memorable experience on a Hawaiian patio and figured we should try to make a wheat beer with passion fruit just like that. But instead of using an essentially neutral base beer, I thought we should try something more flavorful. I decided to use White Rascal, our rapidly growing Belgian White Ale.
Then the challenge was finding a source of passion fruit in the middle of the country. Whole fruit is not a great option because liliko’i is mostly seeds and almost no pulp. When you pick one off a vine in Hawaii you frequently cut through the rind and extract a small amount of juice, then discard the rest. So, I searched for months to find a passion fruit concentrate or juice that matched my memories of the fresh fruit of Hawaii. When I found a consistent supplier, I started ordering small canisters and adding that concentrate directly to individual kegs, usually two at a time. Finally, in early 2010 Avery put the first kegs of Liliko’i on tap in the back of the alley and it immediately became one of the top three sellers. Beer fans were driving half an hour from Denver just to try it. Soon enough we started requesting that fruit in custom five-gallon buckets and we began making small tanks (equivalent to 40 kegs at a time) of Liliko’i Kepolo, the passion fruit devil. A massively fruit forward tart beer with some clove and banana aromas from the base beer.
People were requesting to take Liliko’i Kepolo home every day, so why weren’t we bottling or canning it? For the simple reason that we couldn’t guarantee the quality of that beer in a take home package. White Rascal has a small amount of live yeast in every bottle and keg. It’s a crucial aspect of a traditional Belgian White Ale. Then for Liliko’i Kepolo we added fruit directly to the beer, and that means potentially fermentable sugars. If you combine live yeast with sugar you are likely to end up with fermentation, which could have meant bottles and cans exploding in the market. And while a beer shower sounds alright at first, the shards of glass are slightly less cool. There are ways around this, such as filtering out all of the yeast, waiting longer for a secondary fruit fermentation, and pasteurizing the beer, but we were not equipped for any of these things and we wanted to keep that huge fruit flavor. So, we decided to just make the beer in kegs and keep them in-house where we could keep an eye on them. The one exception was when we made a handful of cases in order to enter it into the Great American Beer Festival, where it won a bronze.
Five years later we were moving out of our alley location and into a brand-new brewery on the north side of Boulder. We spent years planning that brewery out, and there were two big questions we needed to answer. First, how could we get Liliko’i Kepolo into a package and keep that fruit flavor? And second, how could we guarantee that our barrel-aged beers would be as delicious in stores as they were in our brewery? Our barrel-aging program was expanding rapidly, but a few years back we had to recall a barrel-aged beer that picked up some unwanted yeast and bacteria from the barrels. The answer to both was a tool that had been kind of a dirty word in the craft beer world. Pasteurization.
Over the last ten years the practice of aging beer in oak barrels had gone through a massive resurgence, but every time you age a beer in an oak barrel, you’re embracing chaos. You can’t sanitize those barrels fully, and many small brewers accidentally released infected beer. We’d already been through one small recall of bottles, and soon some of the larger barrel aging facilities faced recalls of their own. Several of them started researching pasteurization techniques. As we experimented, we found that pasteurization only changed the flavor of certain types of beer, and in blind taste tests our highly trained panelists could not distinguish between pasteurized and non-pasteurized versions of barrel-aged beers or Liliko’i Kepolo. And since those were the only beers we wanted to pasteurize, that new tool would allow us to get our passion fruit devil out into the market.
This meant we also had to start sourcing larger amounts of passion fruit concentrate, and after months of searching for an authentic source, it began arriving in 50-gallon drums. Considering how little juice is in a single liliko’i, it was a little mind-boggling. But there were still some issues. Fruit was sedimenting out in kegs of this unfiltered monster. We’re always trying to improve all of our established beers, as we don’t feel like the perfect beer truly exists, only the pursuit of it. And one thing we realized about a year ago is that while we’re proud of this beer and we love it, there are very few people on the Avery team who would ever drink more than one in a sitting. The massive amount of fruit concentrate resulted in a rich mouthfeel that made us all want something less fatiguing for our second pint. We also found that despite our vetting processes there was some fluctuation in the flavor of our passion fruit concentrate. Sometimes it would taste more like peach or apricot than that vibrant pineapple and lemon mix.
We went back into research mode, and after six months of experimentation we made a recipe change. We recently replaced that concentrate with a passion fruit juice. This seemingly small alteration has meant a much more vibrant passion fruit aroma that reminds me of picking fresh fruit off the vines in Hawaii. And since there’s less actual fruit pulp in the beer it’s absurdly drinkable. Now many of us are taking six packs of it home instead of just having the occasional pint. The improved version is out in many stores now, so go grab a sixer with the knowledge that you might put it down in one sitting. That would mean going back out for more.
Better grab two sixers just to be safe.
