Savannah Music Festival Unveils Signature Beer for 2018

By Lee Heidel February 17, 2018

The Savannah Music Festival is a week-long event consisting of 100-pluss concerts, and each year it shakes the Spanish moss out of the trees of the sleepy coastal Georgia town. Savannah is one of the few places in the U.S. you can legally stroll the streets with an open container of beer, and festival-goers will have something new for their plastic go-cups this year: the 2018 signature festival beer.

southbound brewing co — Southbound Brewing Co./Facebook

Southbound Brewing Co./Facebook

The Savannah Music Festival has once again teamed up with local brewers Southbound Brewing Co. to craft a flagship beer. Meet Rollin’ & Tumblin’ Vol. 2., an update to the two brands’ previous collaboration by the same name (which also spawned the higher ABV spin-off dubbed Rollin’ & Stumblin’ Double IPA).

Vol. 2 takes the same malt base from the original beer but adds a fresh hop lineup of Motueka, Rakau, Wakatu, and Amarillo. The result is a beer that’s an easy-drinking 6 percent ABV with the complexities of stone fruit, citrus and tropical fruits.

“Easy but complex” might be a good way to describe the music offerings at the festival too. Stereophile has described the Savannah Music Festival as “an extremely well-curated mix of jazz, classical, rock and traditional American musical forms.” Entering its eleventh year, the fest looks to impress music fans again March 29 through April 14 with acts that range from the banjo virtuoso couple Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn to Americana songwriter John Moreland to the soul stylings of Lee Fields & The Expressions. New for this year is an all-day fest within a fest headlined by Tedeschi Trucks Band with Jason Isbell and Gillian Welch.

The 2018 signature festival beer will be officially introduced on Saturday, February 17 with a concert by Chapel Hill-based Americana quartet Mipso at the Southbound brewery and tap room. Rollin’ & Tumblin’ Vol. 2 will be served at all of the concerts during the Savannah Music Festival. A limited amount of the beer will also be shipped via local distribution in canned six-packs.

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Lee Heidel is the managing editor of Brew/Drink/Run, a website and podcast that promotes brewing your own beer, consuming the…

Food & Drink

What is a gruit, and where can you find one?

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Beer snifter chalice glass

Most beers you know and love today have four primary ingredients: water, barley, hops, and yeast. That’s largely due to the centuries-old German beer purity law, or reinheitsgebot, which demanded that beer be made exclusively using these ingredients and set the standard for today’s brews.
But beer is an ancient beverage — historians believe its story stretches back to 5th millennium BC in Iran and went on to be enjoyed by the likes of Egyptian pharaohs and the Greek philosophers. However, if Socrates or Tutankhamun ever enjoyed a pint in their days, the beer was likely missing one of those four critical ingredients: the hop.
In today’s hop-hungry climate of India pale ales (and hazy IPAs, New England IPAs, as well as milkshake IPAs, and others), it seems impossible that beer could exist without hops. The fact is that many other natural ingredients can serve as substitutes for the bittering, aromatic, and flavoring characteristics of hops. Today, if a beer relies on other herbs to fill the "hops" role, the beverage is classified as a gruit.

Gruit is the German word for herb. Instead of depending on hops, these brews use exotic additives like bog myrtle, horehound, elderflowers, and yarrow to offset the sweetness of the malts and create a more complex beverage.
Thanks to the creativity of modern breweries, you don’t have to travel back to the Middle Ages to find a gruit (though if you can, please let us in on your time travel technology). You can try them right now, but you will have to do some detective work.
“Authentic” gruits can be tough to find in the mainstream marketplace. That’s because some laws require hops to be present for a product to be sold as beer. Not having the “beer” title would limit distribution and sales channels for some breweries. To illustrate how rare gruits are in the current marketplace, there are currently 32,576 American IPAs listed on the Beer Advocate database and only 380 gruits.
But don’t despair — this list will help you get started on the path toward discovering modern versions of the ancient ale. Start your gruit journey here:

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Food & Drink

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