
Fancy Pants Sunday: Crooked Stave Funk It Up
Welcome, thirsty pilgrims, to another edition of Peaks & Pints Fancy Pants Sunday, our weekly velvet-roped detour into the rarified realm of beers that demand your full attention, your cleanest tulip glass, and maybe—just maybe—a whisper of Gregorian chant in the background, for ambiance. This is not your tailgate lager, not your post-mow pounder. This is high-minded, high-priced liquid art—complex, decadent, sometimes baffling, always worth it. And this Sunday, we’re breaking out something wild, reverent, and unrepentant: Crooked Stave’s Funk It Up, a spontaneous, oak-aged lambic-style love letter to the sacred magic of wild fermentation. Because when it comes to your Sunday sanctity, only the funk will do.
Let us now sing the praises of those who dare to worship at the altar of wild yeast. Back in the hop-saturated year of 2010, while most brewers were still locked in a bitter arms race and dry-hopping like caffeinated lumberjacks, one Chad Yakobson was quietly decoding the genetic poetry of Brettanomyces, that mystic scribe of wild fermentation. Not just using it, mind you, but actually writing his master’s thesis on it, as if wild fermentation were some sacred dialect forgotten by modern brewing orthodoxy. This thesis—The Brettanomyces Project—wasn’t just an academic exercise; it was a manifesto. A fermented call to arms. A funky, oak-laced prayer that became Crooked Stave Artisan Beer Project.
Founded in Denver, Crooked Stave didn’t so much open with a bang as it fermented slowly into one of America’s most revered temples of intentional funk. No gleaming stainless temples or one-trick hazies here. Instead: foeders, coolships, and floor-malted Colorado barley. Barrels stacked like ancient scrolls. Whole fruit macerated with the reverence of a winemaker. And always, always, the funk—drifting through the brewhouse like incense, unpredictable and wild, like a jazz solo you don’t fully understand until days later. Crooked Stave is not a brewery for the impatient. It is a cathedral for the patient alchemist, the spontaneous fermentor, the true believer in beer as living, breathing, evolving art.
Ah, the Funk series. Not so much a flight of beers as a philosophical proposition in bottle form. Crooked Stave’s Funk series is what happens when you stop asking if beer can be weird and start asking if it can levitate. These are beers born not of haste or hype but of time, oak, ambient air, and microbial jazz. Each one is a meditation on Brettanomyces, barrel-aging, and the kind of fruity, acidic funk that makes your tongue dance and your third eye twitch open. You do not “drink” these beers. You commune with them. You let them argue with your palate and rewrite your assumptions about what beer even is.
And then there’s Funk It Up, this week’s Fancy Pants Sunday crown jewel—a traditional lambic-style ale brewed with spontaneous fermentation and aged in oak barrels, all with a grinning, unrepentant swagger. It pours like a sunbeam filtered through barnwood and echoed in stone fruit. Aromas of underripe peach, lemon zest, hayloft must, and some elusive thing that might be memory itself. Tartness swirls with farmhouse grit, a firm oak spine keeps the madness in check, and Brett takes center stage—wild, winking, and just restrained enough not to burn the house down. It’s as if Crooked Stave bottled a raucous Parisian jazz bistro at 2 a.m., complete with clinking glasses and a soft sense of disorder. Funk It Up is not here to comfort you. It’s here to wake you up.
You fancy, Crooked Stave Funk It Up.
LINK: Peaks & Pints beer and cider cooler inventory