Beer Stories
Will Hamill is probably the most hands-on microbrewery owner out of any I’ve had the pleasure to meet. Serving as both Company President and Brewmaster, he is responsible for creating the best selling and most awarded Utah beer: Cutthroat, which consistently wins medals in beer festivals all over the world in its category.
Uinta Brewing Company Owner Will Hamill with his new “Crooked Line” of beers.
But as all things go, when a product is successful, supply must keep up with demand. And because Cutthroat, Golden Spike, Shocktop and nearly every beer Uinta makes are so good, they have grown huge—by Utah microbrew standards—which is actually very small by macro-brew standards. Uinta’s facility has a set of six 80 barrel tanks that churn out more beer than any brewery in Utah.
Hamill apparently wasn’t content with just producing huge volumes of micro-brewed beers, so he has returned to his roots of crafting small batch boutique beers.
Uinta’s latest “Crooked Line” is the result of two years of planning and development and a $1 million investment which includes an all-in-one, state-of-the-art bottling, labeling and cleaning machine bought and imported from Italy. Due to this investment producing Crooked won’t require an excessive amount of labor to produce. The choice of champagne bottles with corks and artistic labels, make Crooked appear more like a craft wine than craft beer. This is by design as Hamill explained “Crooked” are beers off the eaten path, and a departure from the main stream microbrews.
Crooked is now available in Utah liquor Stores, and Uinta is currently working on obtaining a license for a store enabling them to sell the high point beer directly to the public from their facility.
In other news Uinta just won three medals at the Australian International beer awards for Cutthroat, Anglers and Barley Wine. At the most recent Mountain Brewers Beerfest in Idaho, Uinta was awarded two medals for beers from the new Crooked line. Imperial Stout Labyrinth received a gold medal. And Cockeyed Cooper received a bronze medal. In addition, Cutthroat and Anglers were both awarded bronze medals.
