Music For Your Mouth
When you begin to think about it, music and beer have a ton more in common than just being a great pair at festivals and parties. It takes a tremendous amount of talent—more than I have—to create either. With equal helpings of passion and creativity, along with enough chutzpa to believe you can make something so good and/or new that others need to experience it, brewers and musicians take materials readily available to everyone and create pure magic. Perhaps it will inspire someone countries away, generations from now. Hopefully it will resonate with some part of someone’s soul. It can create emotion so positive or negative that it makes you want to blog about it to the wide void of the internet. But most of all it comes from the brewer’s/musician’s desire to create something tangible from something within their hearts.
Now enter Kyle Hollingsworth. Formerly of The String Cheese Incident and (obviously) leader of The Kyle Hollingsworth Band, the guy knows his way around a keyboard enough to have a cult-like following in Colorado and abroad since the early 1990’s. He’s also apparently pretty good at brewing beer, and has already released his second commercial beer via Boulder Beer Co. called Hoopla Pale Ale:
“I wanted to make a beer for a hot summer day that was still a quality pale ale, but wasn’t super overwhelming like you’re drinking a loaf of bread. When you’re sitting in the hot sun watching Cheese, Phish, or Widespread you want something that is a little lighter and goes down easy. Boulder Beer and I got together and put all of our thoughts in one pot to come up with Hoopla.” – Kyle Hollingsworth
And the best way to see Hoopla and Kyle Hollingsworth rock it out together is next weekend at Kyle’s Brewfest at Boulder Beer Company (that’s right; when you’re cool enough you can get a beer fest named after you). After selling-out 2010’s inaugural fest, Kyle will host his second annual charity beer festival and concert on Saturday, July 23, benefiting Conscious Alliance, a non-profit group aimed at eliminating hunger, particularly among economically isolated Native American reservations. And $25 isn’t bad knowing you’re helping fight hunger while sampling 50 different beers from 25 different brewers (including Hoopla, duh).
Where else are you going to see someone play a rocking set of live music right after brewing a beer on the same stage? Or for that matter, when was the last time you even heard of a musician brew a beer themselves for national distribution? You don’t see Bono crafting an amber ale for charity. What Kyle has done is taken two separate passions and melded them together for the best possible pairing: music and beer on a Colorado summer for charitable causes.