POCATELLO — For the second year in a row, Jim Dandy Brewing has struck gold, achieving a first-place finish at the U.S. Open Beer Championship with its Tango Yankee cream ale.
The local brewery recently held its six-year anniversary party and has become an area staple known for their quality ales, IPA’s, lagers, sours and countless other brewhouse inventions.
Its location at 305 E. Lander St. is filled with the locomotive trappings of a bygone area, the restored vestiges of old train signs, rustic barrels, and repurposed industrial decor from the ruinated buildings of Idaho’s historic past.
Davis Gove, who owns and operates Jim Dandy Brewing alongside his wife Hailee, has continually honed his brewing skills over the years and his success is reflected not only in the business' popularity with local residents but also through the many awards they have achieved through competitions.
“We usually (submit) two or three beers into the U.S. Beer Open among the other national and international beer competitions like the North American Beer Awards and the Best of Craft Beer Awards,” Gove said. “This year, we put in two or three and we got a gold medal for the Tango Yankee.”
Created in the cream ale style and submitted to that category, the drink was originally brewed for a veterans group that Jim Dandy was trying to raise money for and the group requested a lighter, more drinkable beer. Dandy didn’t have many light beers at the time and so a traditional cream ale called the Tango Yankee was invented.
“A cream ale is similar to a U.S. domestic lager in that it's brewed with a portion of corn,” Gove said. “It's basically one of the first original styles of beer that was that was made specifically in the United States. There was a large wave of lager breweries in the 1800’s that started to gain in popularity and the ale breweries were looking for a way to shore up some of that market because they brewed with a slightly different style of beer. They created the cream ale, which was trying to be a light lager but brewed with ale yeast and an adjunct, such as corn. It’s similar to what you think of as a banquet beer.”
Gove attributes some of the success of the Tango Yankee to their meticulous attention to detail with Dandy’s fermentation profiles.
“When we ferment it, everything's super clean, we pay a crazy amount of detail to what temperature we want the beer to be at each specific stage of the fermentation process,” Gove said. “We also use some very choice ingredients we've fine-tuned throughout all the different batches of it that we've done. It's really just trying to find the cleanest fermenting ingredients that you can find that impart just the tiniest little bit of character to the beer, but don't clash at all.”
For the U.S. Beer Open Competition, held annually in Oxford, Ohio, 20 trained judges are presented with pours of beer that they evaluate based on adherence to the various compositions of each of the styles. The categories stretch from ales, IPAs, lagers, and hefeweizens to porters, pilsners, bocks and beyond.
“We definitely have success in the competition realm because we’re able to brew a beer that's very specific, we have a lot of intention when we brew that beer and it comes out how we want it to,” Gove said. “We're able to fine tune a beer exactly to how we think it will do in a competition, but we more so brew most of our beers to what our customers' palate are and that doesn't always line up with exactly what a beer judge wants. I think that the thing that's really given us the greatest success isn't necessarily the competitions, but just knowing your customer base really well and knowing what kind of beer they would really enjoy, and sometimes that's beer that they don't even know about yet.”
Jim Dandy’s certainly doesn’t shirk away from inventive beers — parts of the brewery include all the recurring, seasonal, specialty and limited-time beverages from its six years in the business.
With a high attention to detail and a focus on cleanliness and quality ingredients, it comes as no surprise that Jim Dandy and its team have already won multiple awards from the competitive circuit.
“We spend a lot of money on getting great barley, getting great yeast and getting great hops,” Gove said. “We live right here in Idaho, where the majority of barley is actually grown and malted. Sometimes we'll have to source stuff from Germany or source stuff from New Zealand. Some of our hops come from overseas, but the majority of our hops actually come right here in Idaho, because we're actually the second biggest hop producing state in the U.S. as well. We definitely don't skimp on ingredients.”
Gove continued, "Making great beer isn't doing one thing 100 percent better. It's doing 100 things 1 percent better if you really want to see the overall beer just come out to perfection. That's what I think we're always striving for, trying to get every single tiny process as perfect as we possibly can.”
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