New beer collaboration has real appeal

We're excited to bring Fightin' Hokies Orange Wheat beer to Hokie Nation. It takes a beer that's a very traditional over 500-years-old style beer from Germany, and we've kind of tried to put a modern twist on it. We went with a wheat beer, kind of true to German style, using German malts, German hops, but also in this one, add a little twist to us, add some orange peels, sweet orange peel. We give it a nice effervescent, citrus finish and start there, but not overpowering. We've had about 100 barrels we're caning up today. So somewhere around 700 cases. We'll see in the market very very soon and on draft in Blacksburg and elsewhere. We started our collaboration with Hardywood Craft Brewery around 2019, 2020, that's been going on for over four years now. And the impetus for starting that was we wanted to have something to share with the Hokie Nation about what we're doing here at the university. We were interested in having a partner whose vision of quality and excellent beer was the same as ours. The back and forth, you know, the faculty at Food Science Department comes up with a recipe concept. They bring it to us, we'll pilot it and see how it goes and then bring it up to production scale. It's always been a true collaboration back and forth between Brian Wiersama and his team to us to come up with the perfect beer. The Fighting Hokie Branded Beer benefits Virginia Tech in a lot of ways, not only through general scholarship funds to the university, but also specific funding and assistance to our students in our fermentation option in the Food Science Department. Some of the monies directly from our department go to assist them in traveling abroad, first study a broad programs, and others go to programs to help them be a little bit more engaged in active learning here while they're in classes. Any opportunity that we have to work with companies gives the students an actual vision of what the potential could be for them in the future as they go out and work in the food industry.