Many Mountains, One Radler: Inside a Summer Grapefruit Beer Collab

Brewery collaborations have become a staple of craft beer, but the best ones offer more than a limited release.

They create opportunities to share ideas, test new approaches, and strengthen relationships across the industry. That's exactly what happened when Double Mountain in Hood River, Oregon and Holy Mountain Brewing Company in Seattle, Washington teamed up to brew a refreshing summer beverage. With a desire to create something neither brewery would have made on its own, the result was a crisp, refreshing grapefruit radler brewed with Oregon Fruit aseptic grapefruit puree.

Double Mountain Head Brewer Matt Coughlin and Holy Mountain Head Brewer Colin Lenfesty invited Oregon Fruit to join them on brew day and hear how the collaboration came together, why they landed on a radler, and what they learned along the way.

This was the first time the two breweries had brewed together. The two breweries had crossed paths for years through friends and the Pacific Northwest brewing community. The idea gained momentum after Double Mountain sales representative Don suggested the two teams brew together.

The beer itself took longer to decide. Early conversations bounced between a Belgian-style beer, a pale ale, and a few other possibilities before settling on a grapefruit radler.

"We both brew plenty of hoppy beers," they explained. "A radler felt like something different."

Neither brewer had made one before, and that was exactly the point.

The original concept was planned as a 20-barrel pilot, but enthusiasm quickly grew. Before long, the project expanded into a 120-barrel batch brewed at Double Mountain's Hood River brewery.

If you have ever wondered how to start a beer collab, both brewers landed on the same answer: pick the right partner first.

The best collaborations happen when both breweries genuinely respect each other's work and enjoy working together. Before getting down to work, spend the time to meet up, hang out, have a couple of beers, and make sure you are on the same wavelength. Once you are, the rest tends to come naturally. It takes a healthy mutual respect, a brewery whose beer you genuinely like, and a vibe you actually want to be around.

For Colin, that respect ran deep. He looked up to Double Mountain long before Holy Mountain was a blip on the radar. The two breweries are different sizes, and seeing the reach of a place like Double Mountain up close was its own kind of inspiration. You do not have to reinvent the wheel. You just have to be on the same page and communicate.

Timing also helped shape the recipe. A lager-based radler takes several weeks to mature, making it an ideal beer to brew in spring and release just as warm weather arrives.

It also reflects where many drinkers' preferences are heading. Lower ABV is having a real moment, especially with younger drinkers who want something refreshing they can drink more than one of. 

But this wasn’t about chasing a fad. Matt has watched enough trends come and go to be skeptical of chasing them. His take is simple. As a brewery they will adapt, sure, but mostly they make the things they want to drink. And right now, what they want to drink is a radler.

So if you are asking yourself what to brew this summer, here is one answer from two people who have seen tastes shift for decades: something light, low in alcohol, and built for a hot afternoon. 

Here is the technical distinction that most drinkers miss. A shandy is a traditionally a finished British lager with lemon added after the fact, as juice, soda, or carbonated lemonade. A radler is a German invention that allows for other fruits like orange and lime.

This collab radler is a coferment. The grapefruit goes in during primary fermentation, working alongside the lager strain and the base beer.

The goal, as the brewers described it, is a bright grapefruit aroma sitting over a background of baked bread and biscuit. Best of both worlds. Germans are famous for splashing fruit juice or soda into beer. This is the more deliberate version of that idea. 

They weighed other citrus before committing. Grapefruit won on depth. It carries further than lemon or lime, and its aroma behaves a little like a hop, which suits a beer that is deliberately light on actual hops. Holy Mountain had also used Oregon Fruit grapefruit puree in a hefeweizen years ago, so it was not a total unknown.

This is where the fruit decision got interesting. The brewers chose aseptic puree over fresh fruit, juice, zest, or concentrate, and the reasoning is worth hearing if you are thinking about brewing with fruit yourself.

The big one: aseptic puree means no worrying about further fermentation after packaging. For this beer, they did not want any more fermentables and no surprises in the keg. With limited experience fermenting grapefruit specifically, a consistent puree also gave them a much clearer picture of where the finished beer would land.

In bench trials, they tasted through samples Oregon Fruit’s Fermentation team sent over. Concentrate read a little artificial. The coferment with real puree read more natural and full spectrum, the kind of layered flavor they were after. None of the trials were outright failures. One came in too heavy, one too light, and from there it was a matter of dialing it in. Chris at Oregon Fruit traded recommendations with them along the way, until it was right. That collaborative process gave both teams confidence before production even began. 

Brewing with fruit means accounting for the brix the fruit brings. Early planning covered the usual worries, browning and temperature among them, and the crew worked in shifts to get it done. Three turns, two eight-hour shifts, with Matt leaning on brewer's intuition and training and leaving notes for the next shift to time things out.

They also had a head start. Double Mountain had previously cofermented a cider with blackberry puree, which taught them how that kind of ferment behaves and helped with the math. Compare that to barrel-aged whole fruit, where the wild yeast on the skins runs the show.

"We've sent plenty of beer down the drain that didn't turn out right," Colin said. "Stuff that blew up because we didn't do the math. Or beer that turned out good, just at nine percent instead of five. With aseptic puree you know exactly what you're going to get, the brix going in."

Matt put it plainly. "It's nice to do the math, have the numbers, and know what to expect. With this product we'll know right away if it's good, because with puree there's no skin." 

Matt spent years behind the bar, and he has a standard response for fruit-beer skeptics. "When someone says they don't like IPAs because they're too hoppy, I want to know what that means to them," he said. "Fruit is the same. Fruited sours, fruited IPAs, shandies, radlers, fruited stouts. There's a whole gamut. You're going to like something."

The brewers were also clear about what this beer is not. They keep to a short list of ingredients and tend to steer away from sweeter beers, and a lot of fruit beers get pegged as sweet. This one is the opposite. Tart, crushable, dry. Not, as they put it, a jolly rancher beer. 

Ask whether the place ends up in the beer and the answer is yes, completely. Double Mountain mostly does not treat its water. The Hood River supply carries nice mountain minerals, not too hard and not too soft, the kind of water you would otherwise pay to recreate.

The rest of the beer is just as local. Malt from the Northwest and Montana. Yeast from Portland. Hops within 100 miles, including Brewers Gold out of Yakima. It’s a value that carries through to everything they do. Double Mountain's owner runs an apple orchard that supplies the cidery, and the refrigerated warehouse has a patch of garden out back that grows the tomatoes for their summer pizza.

Colin sees the whole region the same way. "We're lucky to be a brewery in the Pacific Northwest," he said. "Hops, fruit, malt, water, the farms. We have everything we need right here to make world class beer." 

The radler is brewed and timed to be released for the summer. We asked both brewers to picture the moment they made this beer for.

Matt went local. "At the Hood River taproom, garage door open, sitting on the rail, crushing one. Or at home on the porch with a couple of buddies. Or outside seeing some music. A post-hike or post-bike beer."

Colin went north to his home base in Seattle. "Middle of July, Puget Sound, salmon fishing. It's hot out and you can't crush eight percent IPAs all day, especially as the captain."

Both brewers said something similar about working with Oregon Fruit, and it had nothing to do with a price sheet. It felt local. The communication was easy. Real people to talk to about dosing rates, brix specs, and what might actually work in the beer. Holy Mountain has used Oregon Fruit for eleven years, since its very first barrels of cherry and raspberry puree.

That is the part we care about most. Not moving a pallet of puree. Our goal is always the same, helping great breweries make something they are proud to pour.