My wife and I were recently invited to brew a beer with a local brewery.

For nearly three years, we've been blogging our way through the Minnesota and Midwest craft beer scenes under the pseudonym Ale Adventures. We've had our fair share of incredible opportunities over that time -- from attending beer releases and craft beer festivals to writing for local and national publications to traveling out-of-state to explore and report on craft beer scenes elsewhere. For all of our knowledge and passion, however, one thing we'd never done was actually brew a beer ourselves...up until recently.

Earlier this year, our friends at The Nordic Brewing Co. in Monticello reached out to us, inviting us to collaborate on a beer with them. "Um, we'd love that!" we told them.

The first step was sitting down with owner Zach Barthel and head brewer Matt Belz to brainstorm ideas for a beer. At the time, we were heading into summer and wanted to do something summer-y and unique that we'd not seen before in the Minnesota market. My wife and I had previously had a Pink Lemonade IPA from Untitled Art Brewing out of Madison, WI that we loved; what if we tried to make our own version of that? Matt and Zach were game and set about working on a recipe. About that time, COVID-19 hit, putting our plans for a big beer release on hold. A couple months ago, Matt followed up to say he had a recipe he was excited about; we set a brew date and a beer release date.

On a Wednesday night, my wife and I joined Zach, head brewer Matt and his assistant brewer Matt at Nordic Brewing. While the Matts undertook most of the grueling work, Katie and I helped add some key ingredients like organic lemon zest for an authentic lemon taste. We had a blast!

We gave the beer a month to ferment, finally culminating with its release this past Saturday. We made an event on Facebook, arranged some live music and a food truck and promoted it all on social media. The day of, we had a great turnout of people for the release of our beer! We chose to name it Ale Adventure Time Pink Lemonade IPA -- a play on words between our own beer blog name Ale Adventures and the Cartoon Network animated series Adventure Time.

We were super pleased with how the beer turned out! The lemon zest and raspberry puree (for the pink color) were both definitely present, with just the right amount of mouth pucker you'd expect from any pink lemonade. From the feedback we received, everybody who tried it really enjoyed it, too, including some who said they don't typically like IPA's or beer!

Our beer will continue to be on tap at Nordic Brewing Co. in Monticello until it runs out if you'd like to try it for yourself. If you do happen to, let me know what you think! Shoot me an email at Adam@Mix949.com or Adam@River967.com!

Disclosure: My wife and I did receive some free crowlers of beer for ourselves and to give away as we see fit  following the beer's release. This post does not affect or influence any product we may have received or opportunities that are presented to us in the future.