LINCOLN PARK — Off Color Brewing co-founder John Laffler bolted awake early last Friday morning determined and more than a little anxious to return to his Lincoln Park taproom as soon as he could.
Laffler had spent more than 14 months entrusted with pH1, American craft brewing’s single most famed barrel. Its brewing progenitor in Colorado now speaks of it at once as an artifact worthy of the Smithsonian and a sentient being that chooses where it travels.
It’s a vessel credited with popularizing wild and sour ale in the United States and one that has since formed a bond among a half dozen breweries over nearly three decades. But the wort Laffler placed in that barrel a year ago — its wooden staves a repository of all the wild yeast strains left behind by the brewers who previously used it — was no longer there.
“I did not think I was such a high-strung person until this,” he’d later say.
A day earlier, Laffler and his team had transferred the finished product from a packaging tank into about 700 375-milliliter bottles and three small “sixtel” kegs after judging about a month ago that the beer was ready. Word had started to spread that packaging of Off Color’s pH1 beer was imminent. Laffler hoped to stage a late July release party alongside a visiting Peter Bouckaert, the brewing legend who first took the former wine barrel and used it to craft New Belgium Brewing’s “La Folie” wild ale in the early 2000s.
John Laffler, owner, leans on Off Color Brewing’s rare vaunted beer barrel at its The Moustrap taproom, 1460 N. Kingsbury St., in Goose Island on June 9, 2025. Credit: Colin Boyle/Block Club Chicago
But first Off Color’s pH1 beer had to survive the packaging process. Oxygen could harm the beer’s character and knocking around the liquid’s suspended yeast too much could also ding its overall taste and quality.
“The worst of the damage would be seen immediately or overnight,” Laffler told Block Club later that day, after opening one of the still-then-unlabeled bottles and pouring a few fingers of the beer into small plastic cups. “If it’s f—ed, we’re going to know.”
“And this is not f—ed,” Laffler declared. “I’m quite happy.”
Late Thursday afternoon, about a week after Block Club’s visit, Off Color confirmed that it’ll be throwing a party at 5 p.m. July 24 to celebrate pH1’s release. Bouckaert will indeed be there and an “extremely limited number of bottles” will go on sale in-person at the Mousetrap taproom at 1460 N. Kingsbury St.
More than a year after Cory King, the head brewer and co-founder of Side Project Brewing in St. Louis, shocked Laffler by showing up at the Mousetrap to hand over pH1, Off Color’s signature whimsical mouse is now branded on the barrel’s face alongside the California, Colorado and Missouri breweries that nurtured it before.
Inside the barrel, Off Color’s wild yeast strain — which Laffler prizes for its imparting of delicate, floral impressions — shares a home with the burlier, more acidic expressions of Side Project and California’s Russian River.
Off Color is just the sixth brewery to make a wild ale using pH1.
Laffler said the finished product is a blend of a wheat-forward wort that initially rested in the barrel and one of his brewery’s Belgian-style saisons. He said he entertained the idea of dry hopping the beer as a send-up of Off Color’s refusal to ever brew an IPA — but he deemed the thought too much of a gimmick to impose on this iconic barrel’s history.
Still, he saw to it that what emerged from this past year of tinkering and hemming and hawing was a distinctly Off Color take on a barrel that can be assertive. While tasting the beer’s progress, Laffler enjoyed trying to place the characteristics the barrel imparted to the previous brewery from which it came.
“It’s a reflection of all the other breweries that have contributed to it and used it, which is why this project was so special to us,” Laffler said. “We are part of the lineage. It’s not us making this beer. It’s us contributing to everybody else who’s making this beer. And it’s not one brewery, it’s not two breweries, it’s us as U.S. craft brewers.”
RELATED: The Barrel That Launched A Sour Beer Movement Is Now At Chicago’s Off Color Brewing
At its core pH1 naturally wants to bring out flavors more densely acidic than Laffler prefers in his own ales. He tempered that acidity by blending the wheat ale that had aged in pH1 with a saison that was among the about 40 wild ales aging in the Mousetrap’s barrel room, all while keeping pH1 “front and center.”
Off Color is releasing its “pH1” beer July 24 after aging the wild ale in the famed eponymous barrel since May 2025. Credit: Stephen Montemayor
So, what does Off Color’s own field mouse-shaped stamp on pH1 lore taste like?
As Block Club sat down with Laffler for what would be just the second time he’d sampled the freshly bottled pH1 beer, the ale poured a hazy, brilliant gold that radiates like the contents of Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase in Pulp Fiction.
Laffler describes it as moderate in alcohol strength and bitterness and lending itself to a long shelf life that’ll see its flavors evolve thanks to the living organisms inside each bottle.
A gentle crackling of carbonation offers a first impression on the palate that finds green pineapple and lime riding a bright and slightly acidic wave. But it’s a fleeting wave and, as it crests, Off Color’s signature delicate floral elements that evoke jasmine and chamomile dance along with white stone fruits.
Fourteen months of slumber inside a decades-old barrel that remains as relevant as ever has yielded a kaleidoscopic sip experience that leaves one longing for the next one.
The interest and enthusiasm surrounding pH1 and Off Color’s place in its story has been heartening for Laffler, countering the harsher narratives that sometimes surface about the state of the brewing industry. Since taking custody of pH1, Laffler said his visitors to the brewery have included out-of-towners fresh from O’Hare Airport and still toting their luggage, asking just to take a look at the barrel.
“It’s really refreshing and wonderful and flattering to see people so excited about a project and actually care about brewing as a whole,” he said.
The barrel is “by far the oldest barrel we’ve worked with,” Laffler said. Judging by its technical parameters and overall health, Laffler assessed that pH1 has plenty more stories to tell. He — or maybe it, if you ask Bouckaert — will choose the barrel’s next caretaker once the beer he brews with Bouckaert is ready to be packaged.
Laffler meanwhile said he now knows a little bit more about himself after managing the anxiety and weight of caring for and adding to pH1’s history. It’s been an exercise, he said, in “thinking about your relationship to the overall brewing community, brewing as a whole, where you are in life and your part in the world.”