By introducing Budweiser Discovery Reserve American Red Lager, brewmaster and former U.S. Air Force Captain Karissa Norrington is living her dream.
The newest addition to the Budweiser Reserve Collection, Discovery Reserve marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon missions with a light hoppy aroma, a toasted barley malt taste with a hint of toffee, and a sharp finish. Toasted Voyager barley malt gives the lager a reddish color reminiscent of the next frontier in space exploration—Mars.
For Karissa and her team, the challenge was to combine 21st-century craft brewing techniques with an archival recipe from around the time of the first Moon landing to create something that’s simultaneously nostalgic and totally new.
Karissa launched her career by looking at the stars, so this mission felt almost magically fateful—a delicious confluence of her life’s passions: astronomy, engineering, history, and beer. “It was a happy coincidence,” she explains. “It was an interest in astronomy that inspired me to join the Air Force in the first place.”
During her deployments, world travel allowed her to explore her passion for beer, sampling a variety of styles before she started making it. “While I was in the service, I was gifted a little home brew kit, started tinkering, and it really got out of hand. I just couldn’t get enough of learning about how to make beer. I started entering competitions, and then judging them…I just loved it.” After leaving the Air Force to settle into marriage and motherhood, Karissa’s love for brewing inspired her to pursue the two advanced degrees and specialized training she needed to make her passion her career.
Some members of Karissa’s team affectionately call her “Captain” but every member of the roughly 70-person crew—who have worked three-shifts around the clock since September 2018 to create Discovery Reserve—considers this very special brew their own. Rather than simply re-creating an older style beer, they rolled up their sleeves to truly innovate, evoking the pioneering American spirit that keeps expanding our horizons.
“In terms of space exploration, we’re moving well beyond the Moon now,” Karissa says, and it makes her smile. “Maybe we can get people on Mars? What can we do if we are there? We’re playing with that in the packaging with the Moon and Mars, showing both where we’ve been and where we’re going."
“What's giving it that red color is actually a malt called CaraRed,” Karissa explains. “It's got a great, caramelly toasted flavor. Essentially, when you're malting barley, you're drying it out and then you're sort of roasting it. As you roast it, it gets darker. When creating a beer like this, we’re using a variety of grains and barley that have been malted in different ways. We're having to physically put large sacks of grain right into a mash cooker ourselves, continually finding inventive ways to add these malts into the mash as we brew the beer. It presents some challenges, but our brewers get really excited about it.”
The process she describes is far less automated than one would imagine at a company as large as Anheuser-Busch. “It’s very hands-on, literally, and there’s a direct, physical, personal involvement in making this beer. It’s a lot of fun,” she says. “It's definitely brought us together as a team and brought out all the specialized skills of each person to make the whole thing work. It’s very special to be part of that.”
Beyond bonding with one another, her team in Cartersville, Georgia also feels connected to the company’s far-flung adventures in space. “We recently sent barley seeds to the International Space Station National Lab to see if we can actually malt it in space and to potentially learn something about making barley more resistant to extreme stress environments. That can be very helpful to our farmers back on Earth,” she explains. “I love that aspect of space travel, how we can connect it back to making all of our lives better here and now."
Budweiser Discovery Reserve not only commemorates the pioneering American spirit that brought us to the Moon, it also recognizes future frontiers and is a nod to the United States Air Force, which worked in great partnership with the space program of the 1960s. From April 1, 2019 through September 30, 2019, Budweiser will donate $1 for every case of Budweiser Discovery Reserve sold to the Folds of Honor Foundation, which provides educational sponsorships to military families.*
As a veteran, Karissa feels particularly honored to be a part of this program. “We’re a very big employer of veterans,” she explains. “It's one of the things that makes me proud to work at Anheuser-Busch, and to be able to give back as a veteran to the families of veterans in this way, through this special beer.”
*Up to $100,000
