Gezellig Brewing Co. ‘taylors’ beer series to suit one of America’s biggest pop stars

So long as Taylor Swift continues to write hit songs, Gezellig Brewing Co. can create a seemingly endless supply of its pop star-inspired craft beers.

Gezellig’s beer gurus have appropriately — and affectionately — named these new brews “Swizzles” (a reference to Swift’s “T-Swizzle” nickname popularized from a parody duet with T-Pain at the CMT Music Awards in the late-2000s). The series launched in June to celebrate the brewery’s one-year anniversary.

Since then, head brewer Grant Heuer and assistant brewer Lucas Greta have regularly released new, limited-time Swizzles. About a dozen or so have been made so far. Of course, all of them are named after Taylor Swift songs, which tend to tie in with the flavors or theme of their respective suds.

Shake It Off incorporated raspberries and what Gezellig brewers call “Jolly Rancher blue raspberry drank” to form a puckery, punchy brew. Our Song strives for more bright and refreshing flavors with its combination of strawberries, white grape juice and strawberry lemonade.

You Need To Calm Down invited drinkers with its soft notes of blueberry, plum and vanilla bean. Even the unreleased Taylor Swift song, “Sunshine,” got some recognition when brewers combined apricot, tangerine, SunnyD and Tang for an over fruited sour whose citrusy flavors were perfect for the summer heat.

Then there are some of the more experimental Swizzles like Look What You Made Me Do, a fruited sour with strawberry, peanut butter and Sharkleberry Finn Kool-Aid. It’s one of Heuer’s favorites and was advertised to taste exactly like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

“We were both pretty upset with how good it turned out,” Greta said with a laugh. “We kind of threw it together thinking this was going to be very silly. We had no idea how it would turn out. We didn’t even know the dosage ratio to put stuff in. It was very haphazard.”

Adding dehydrated peanut butter to a sour beer base seemed crazy, but it worked out. The success of the beer has enticed the brewers to keep trying new things. To Greta, it seemed like every other brewery that approached this same kind of project with fruited sours was mostly sticking to fruit purees.

“We figured we really wanted to corner the market on the weird, fun side of things,” Greta said. “We really figured, well, let’s fortify our positions here. Let’s really embrace the weird and just make that our thing.”

Greta’s favorite Swizzle is one he actually spearheaded: Illicit Affair, a margarita-inspired brew with key lime, jalapeño and Jimmy Buffet’s own Margaritaville brand mixer. It was that type of willingness and freedom to experiment that led to more recipes with Kool-Aids, sodas and other flavors.

If anything, the Swizzle series allows Gezellig’s brewers to get creatively crazy with their concoctions. Heck, if other Midwestern breweries like Lua Brewing and 450 North Brewing Company can have fun with their Pushpops and Slushy series, why can’t Gezellig experiment with strong flavors, too?

“For me, it’s a fun outlet,” Heuer said. “I like to tell people a lot of times we take our beer seriously but we don’t take ourselves very seriously, so I think it has been a fun opportunity to not take a beer very seriously. I mean, every one of them is a Taylor Swift song name.”

But why Taylor Swift? Originally, Heuer the series was going to be called Look What You Made Me Do. Keeping to the Swift theme — and knowing some staff are fans of the singer’s music (seriously, Heuer and Greta have matching crop tops to prove it) — Gezellig settled, instead, on Swizzle.

Plus, it’s only fitting that Gezellig — which is owned by two women, Betsy Duffy and Mindi Vanden Bosch — launch a series named after another successful businesswoman. Swizzles have definitely piqued the interests of customers who want to try these full-of-flavor suds.

Especially since they’re in such short supply. If the Swizzles were allowed to ferment over a long period of time, those front-loaded fruity flavors don’t come out as strongly, Greta said. The series also lets Heuer play around with tricky fruits like peach and strawberry and plum.

Although most Swizzles are made with a kettle sour base, Heuer said it’s not entirely accurate to even call them sours at all. If anything, he thinks of Swizzles as a “candy beer,” which means it’s perfectly acceptable for them to be very sweet and very thick, compared to what is traditionally served.

It’s a style neither brewer can really put a finger on.

“When you’re playing with anything from margaritas to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches — and that’s all, technically, the same beer series — what you’re calling a style is going to be drastically different,” Greta said.

Heuer asked, “Is train wreck a style?”

Well, as Swift put it: “Call it what you want, yeah, call it what you want to.”

Newton News did not receive a comment from Swift’s publicist by press time.

Contact Christopher Braunschweig at 641-792-3121 ext. 6560 or cbraunschweig@newtondailynews.com