Hana Select Lager at Bierstadt Lagerhaus

A Collaboration Worth Keeping Simple: Haná Select Lager at Bierstadt Lagerhaus

How a heritage grain, a 1932 brewhouse, and a shared philosophy made something worth waiting for.

There is a school of thought in brewing that says simplicity is the ultimate test. Strip away the complexity, the adjuncts, the layered additions, and what you’re left with is an honest question: can the ingredients stand on their own? When Bierstadt Lagerhaus lead brewer Ashleigh Carter agreed to collaborate with Crisp Malt on a single-malt, single-hop pale lager built around Haná Malt, that was exactly the question she was setting out to answer. The result is Haná Select Lager, a 4.3% ABV beer that, by design, lets the grain do the talking.

A Brewhouse That Likes to Do Work

Bierstadt Lagerhaus doesn’t do things the easy way, and that’s by design. The Denver brewery’s kit dates to 1932, and every beer that runs through it undergoes a full decoction mash. Not occasionally. Every time.

“As soon as the decoction starts boiling, the aroma changes entirely,” says Carter. “And I think that carries over into the malt.” For her, decoction isn’t a point of pride so much as a default: a deliberate choice to let the brewhouse do what it was built to do, rather than outsourcing character to the malthouse.

It’s a philosophy that extends to ingredient selection. Bierstadt was among the first breweries in the United States to brew with Weyermann Barke pilsner malt, adopting it before the brewery even opened its doors in 2015. When Carter agreed to feature Crisp’s Haná Malt in this collaboration, she approached it the same way she approaches any new ingredient: without compromise.

“Every time I use a new malt, I try to use it in a 100% capacity,” she explains. “You’re not going to really know anything about it until you do all of it.”

The Grain

Haná is a heritage floor-malted barley originally grown in the 19th-century Haná Valley of Czech Moravia, a variety that Carter describes as nodding back to the Czech approach she clearly admires. Crisp malts it in the UK, and it’s not produced in large volumes. That scarcity is part of what makes it meaningful.

“I didn’t realize how artisanal this particular malt was,” says LaTreace Harris, a beer educator and certified Cicerone also known as “The Beery Godmother” on social media, and the creative force behind the Kaleidoscope collaboration series, which includes Haná Select Lager. “Only certain brewers are getting a chance to get their hands on this. That makes it even more special.”
For Carter, the grain behaved exactly as she hoped: clean, consistent, and a touch more generous on extract than anticipated. “Numbers were really good the whole time,” she says. “I kind of treated it exactly like I treat all our other malt.” High praise, delivered in the most Bierstadt way possible.

She paired it with Czech Saaz hops, classic, complementary, and intentionally restrained. “I kind of like the nod back to the Moravian, Czech idea,” she says. “I had some really nice Saaz, and I thought it would be really cool to just use them and keep it simple.”

Her reasoning is worth sitting with: “Like an Italian chef, take a nice tomato and just don’t screw with it too much.”

Brewers First

The collaboration didn’t happen in isolation. It sits within Kaleidoscope, a series of eight collaboration brews organized by LaTreace Harris for International Women’s Month, each made with a female or non-binary brewer Harris knows and admires. The concept for the series grew out of a casual conversation with a cheesemonger at Atlanta’s Brickstore Pub, and crystallized around a frustration Harris had been carrying for a while.

“Nobody really says that a man is a male brewer,” she says plainly. “That just doesn’t happen.” The qualifier—female brewer, black woman in beer—was something she and the brewers she reached out to all recognized immediately. “When I wake up every day, I’m not saying I’m a female brewer. I’m saying I’m a brewer who’s a woman.”

Kaleidoscope, then, is not a celebration of women making beer. It’s a celebration of brewers—who happen to be women—making excellent, diverse, unexpected beer. Carter was the first to respond when Harris sent out her invitation.

“I’ve been wanting to do something like this,” Carter told her. “I just couldn’t articulate it.”
The name says it all. “Depending on how you look through a kaleidoscope, how the light hits it, you’re going to see different elements and different pieces of the story,” says Harris. “It’s a collection of all these different brewers coming together.”

The Beer

Before the beer was finished, Carter was measured in her ambitions for it, as any good lager brewer should be. “With a low alcohol beer, I think getting that body is really important,” she said. “I personally like my low alcohol beers to taste light, but not thin.” The goal wasn’t complexity. It was clarity.

Haná Select Lager delivers exactly that. At 4.3% ABV, the beer is pale, crisp, and dry, with a lovely malt character that Carter describes as having “bready undertones and enough body to support the hops.” Compared to Bierstadt’s house malt, the Haná reads as almost nutty, a subtle distinction that speaks to just how expressive a single malt can be when given the room to perform. The color is beautiful. The foam, she says, is too.

Harris had predicted as much. “It drills down to a very basic level of can you brew a good beer when there’s no noise,” she says. “Simple ingredients, simple process—but if you don’t do it right, it’s going to show. There’s no way to cover it up.”

There isn’t. And it does.

Where to Find It

Haná Select Lager is available in cans and on draft across various states, timed for the Little Beer Festival on March 28 in Duluth, Georgia, a lager-focused event now in its sixth year, where several Kaleidoscope beers will be on pour. Harris is hosting a panel at Little Beer, in partnership with All About Beer, bringing together the collaboration’s brewers to discuss the project and what it means to them. The beer will also be available at Atlanta’s Brickstore Pub and at Wayfinder Beer in Portland, Oregon. Additional visibility is on the horizon at the Craft Brewers Conference in Philadelphia in late April. Back home in Denver, expect to find it on tap at Bierstadt and in cans throughout the metro area.

Crisp Malt’s Sales and Marketing Director Colin Johnston, who was present on brew day, put it simply:

“This is what being in the industry is all about, bringing people together with great ingredients to make great beers. We can’t wait for this to be on the bar at CBC. Make sure you come and try it on our stand number 1801!”