Bale Breaker, Maui Brewing, and Peaks & Pints Frenz Party Friday 13th
Some beers are brewed for the tap list. Others are brewed because two breweries looked across a brewhouse table, laughed, and realized they were basically living inside the opening credits of Friends — water fountain, big smiles, The Rembrandts blasting somewhere nearby.
That spirit lives inside Bale Breaker Brewing’s Frenz Series, a long-running collaboration project born in Yakima hop country and built on one simple premise: brew beer with friends you admire. Since 2016, the Quinn family’s hop-farm brewery has invited breweries from across the craft universe to Yakima to create limited beers together — a kind of liquid handshake between brewers, hop growers, and the wandering tribe of people who orbit the craft beer world.
The result over the years has been a rotating constellation of collaborations with breweries large and small, cult favorites and industry giants, each release reflecting a slightly different conversation between brewing styles, ingredients, and personalities.
The newest entry in that series stretches that conversation across an ocean.
For the latest Frenz release, Bale Breaker teamed with Maui Brewing Company, Hawaii’s pioneering craft brewery, to create a tropical IPA that merges Yakima Valley hop intensity with island fruit swagger. Brewed with a light base of pilsner malt and flaked rice, the beer leans crisp and breezy, letting pineapple and guava step forward alongside a trio of hops — Citra, Krush, and Dolcita — that push citrus, mango, and bright tropical aromatics into the glass.
Think hop field meets fruit stand. Yakima sunshine colliding with Hawaiian trade winds.
It’s a collaboration that makes sense once you realize both breweries share a similar DNA. Bale Breaker is rooted in fourth-generation hop farming in Washington’s Yakima Valley, while Maui Brewing has built its reputation around island agriculture and tropical flavor. One brewery grows the hops; the other lives among the fruit trees. Put them together, and you get something that feels like a beach vacation that started in a hop field.
Peaks & Pints will tap the new Frenz IPA Friday, March 13, bringing the Yakima-to-Maui collaboration to Tacoma for its local debut. The celebration will pour not only the Frenz release but a lineup of other beers from both Bale Breaker and Maui Brewing, creating a mini Pacific-to-Pacific tap takeover where hop country and island brewing culture meet in the middle — right there in Tacoma’s Proctor District.
For Tacoma drinkers, it’s also a chance to experience the Frenz series the way it was intended: not just as a single beer, but as a snapshot of brewing friendships stretching across geography, climates, and time zones.
And if the spirit of the Frenz series holds true, the only real requirement is simple:
Show up, raise a glass, and drink like friends.
Bale Breaker × Maui Brewing Frenz Release Party
Friday, March 13, 5-8 p.m., no cover
Peaks & Pints, Proctor District, Tacoma
LINK: Peaks & Pints beer and cider cooler inventory
