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Two collaborations between Denver’s Cerebral Brewing and Austin Street Brewery, and a tribute to Vacationland Distributers from Belleflower. Photo by Ben Lisle It’s been a decade since Austin Street Brewery opened its doors at Industrial Way – an anniversary celebrated earlier this month at its tasting room on Fox Street. On the same afternoon, Vacationland Distributors was also toasting 10 years in business, just up the interstate at Mast Landing’s Freeport location.

It was a good day for beer drinkers, marked by the release of one-off collaborations to honor these milestones. As I sipped on a limey Mexican lager, a strawberry cream ale, an Italian pils and a couple of drippy IPAs on Mast Landing’s patio, I thought about Yann Bandaña. A collaboration between Austin Street and Hoof Hearted Brewing (out of Marengo, Ohio), this hazy IPA would pop up now and again from 2016 to 2020.



Those were the days when idiots like me stood in line for can releases, and I would breathlessly wait for the next new and mysterious NEIPA to drop. Yann has gone the way of the Dodo, it seems, but he remains lodged in my memory as a symbol of a particular time in craft beer history when the New England IPA emerged on the scene, playing a central role in the transformation of the beer landscape. On either side of the famed One Industrial Way warehouse, Austin Street and Bissell Brothers were developing hazy standards like Substance, Patina Pale Ale and Florens IPA.

Increasingly hooked on .

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