There’s nothing revolutionary about Daisy Cutter pale ale anymore.
But 10 years ago, it was a game changer.
Half Acre Beer Co. introduced Daisy Cutter in 2009, as just the second beer made at its original brewery on Lincoln Avenue. Daisy Cutter was intended to be one of several beers core to Half Acre’s identity, at a time Chicago had just a handful of breweries and was still learning to value fresh and locally made beer.
Instead, Daisy Cutter went on to not only become Half Acre’s dominant flagship — it helped lead the charge for all of craft beer in Chicago.
For that reason, it landed in fourth place on my list of the 15 most important craft beers in modern Chicago history — and the top beer from a brewery not named Goose Island or Three Floyds. As I wrote in 2017: “As much as any one beer, Daisy Cutter proved that things were changing in Chicago and that a new beer culture was taking root. … (It) wasn’t a cult beer, but that was the point. For exploratory beer drinkers, it became a new go-to.”
Ten years on, and as Chicago has grown from a dozen or so breweries to more than any other city in the nation, Daisy Cutter has receded a bit in the local consciousness. Rather than being seen as a game changer, it’s mostly known for consistency and dependability. (I drank one on draft this week, and yup — still tasty.)
Yet, its 10th birthday and fundamental place in the constellation of Chicago beer are still worth marking. And Half Acre is doing just that this weekend.
Friday, Half Acre will sell limited-edition mixed Daisy Cutter four-packs ($17.99) at its Lincoln and Balmoral avenue breweries: Daisy Cutter, Double Daisy Cutter, Fully Saturated Galactic Double Daisy Cutter and Quad Cutter Imperial Daisy Cutter. Those beers will also be on tap at both breweries, along with Smoking Daisy, a draft-only hybrid version of Daisy Cutter and a new, more contemporary take on pale ale, Smoking Gull.
Saturday, more than 30 bars in Chicago and beyond will have some or all of those same beers on tap with limited availability (except, of course, Daisy Cutter).
In honor of the occasion, we assembled an oral history of the beer that helped change Chicago, with three of Half Acre’s owners, Gabriel Magliaro, Matt Gallagher and Maurizio Fiori; Tommy Nicely, who wrote the original Daisy Cutter recipe as Half Acre’s first head brewer after stints at Goose Island in Chicago and Lagunitas Brewing in Petaluma, Calif. (who went on to work at Perrin and All Rise breweries); and Phil Kuhl, an early advocate of Daisy Cutter as former beer director at Sheffield’s Beer & Wine Garden (who now works in beer distribution in Wisconsin).
Interviews were edited for space and clarity.
The backstory
Gabriel Magliaro (Half Acre co-founder): We started up wanting to be a strong local brewery making cool beer that the community responded to. We wanted to inject a lot of what we experienced ourselves when living in Colorado — a grassroots thing, and the idea you could make beer for a living with your buddies and have fun doing it. Daisy Cutter became symbolic of the brewery we wanted to be: super fun and highly accessible.
Tommy Nicely (Half Acre’s original head brewer): Before we ever brewed our first beer, I spent a day walking into every bar I could think of to check out the beers they had on tap. There was really no pale ale out there other than (Three Floyds’) Alpha King, and that was a darker pale ale, with a lot more malt character. There was no West Coast-style pale ale made in Chicago — a juicy, dry pale ale that was a good expression of hops. So I made it. And it tasted like sunshine.
Magliaro: Tommy deserves the lion’s share of the credit. It was his recipe. He’s a great brewer — he has a great gut response to beer. Daisy Cutter lived in all our minds before it was ever brewed. If you can put your finger on one thing that made Daisy unique for the time, it was that it was hoppy but also dry.
Nicely: I was pretty confident in what I was doing. I’d made that kind of beer before. At Lagunitas, most of what we made were these really awesome pale ales and IPAs. I thought that kind of beer was going to be a winner in Chicago.
Maurizio Fiori (Half Acre co-founder): No one was really making that kind of beer here with that intensity. We had plenty of choice from elsewhere, but not in Chicago.
Nicely: I remember formulating the recipe while staying at my brother’s house, sitting in a chair with a calculator. It was summer, and he and some friends wanted to hang out. But I was doing this recipe, and they were laughing at me.
Matt Gallagher (Half Acre co-owner and current head brewer): Gabriel had the name before we ever made the beer. It was going to be Daisy Cutter pale ale from the start. It’s weird how single-minded we were. The path was very clear for what we wanted to do.
Magliaro: I don’t think there were any other names in the running for that beer, or if there were, I don’t remember what they were. I worked with Sasha Barr, the design director for Sub Pop Records in Seattle, for the label. He was doing a bunch of gig posters I liked, and I tracked him down. We’ve been more loyal to that imagery than anything we’ve ever made. It hasn’t felt right messing with it.
Fiori: Daisy Cutter came out just 10 years ago, but it’s a million years ago in beer business terms. We were so passionate, but ignorant in the right ways.
Magliaro: We knew a hoppy beer was going to be a pillar of our existence. It wasn’t like Daisy Cutter would be the one no matter what, but drinking it, it was like, “Yeah — this beer is the one.”
The beer
Nicely: The first beer we ever brewed at the Lincoln Avenue brewery was an extra pale ale, just trying to figure out what we were doing. The second was Daisy Cutter.
Gallagher: It was so focused on big late-addition hops, which now is a no-brainer. But at the time, hoppy beers were for the most part known for bitterness, not aroma. The idea was to tip the scales toward hop flavor and aroma — big pine and big orange flavors — while making it very easy to drink.
Nicely: It’s a hop-forward beer that still relies on that little bit of sweetness to balance the bitterness — a bitter-sweet relationship. I had to come up with a hop bill that would make a unique pale ale, but without making it weird.
Gallagher: There are a few specialty malts in there to give it a bit of a cereal or grainy tone. There’s a hint of roasted malt to give it even a touch of roastiness you don’t always pick up on, but which lends to the grainy taste. It was a hoppy beer, but always meant to be balanced.
Nicely: There was pressure to make sure everything was on point, or else it was all for nothing. We were on a wicked budget, and we were working super hard — I swear, they were 100-hour weeks. But we got Daisy Cutter right the first time — one and done. I got lucky. I never homebrewed it. We were pretty confident people would like it.
Fiori: It drank super dank, with nice bready malty backbone that carried the hops through. To me, it hit all the notes of what craft beer was about 10 years ago. It was like, Holy crap, we’re doing this in Chicago.
Gallagher: We were filling growlers for ourselves right out of the tank to take home before we ever released it. We were so excited to drink it.
Nicely: We hand-bottled it at first into 22-ounce bombers, one bottle at a time. It was so labor intensive. A lot of hard work went into that first batch. We were freezing our hands off because of the CO2 gas we used to purge oxygen from the bottles. Many painful bottling days in the early days.
Fiori: I was going back and forth to Italy at the time then and remember coming back and seeing Daisy Cutter bombers for the first time. I loved everything about the visual component. It was a very clean look when a lot of beer labels were ominous: creatures and killing, that kind of thing. Daisy Cutter had daisies in it. It was against the grain. The aroma was incredible. It was so intense for the time.
Magliaro: We were all really pumped to be drinking that beer and to be sharing it with people. The response was positive immediately.
The response
Magliaro: The three beers we were making consistently early on were Daisy Cutter, Gossamer golden ale and Over Ale. Plus, we were doing special releases, which by today’s standards, doesn’t even come close to what’s happening in the industry. But at the time it felt like we were taking a very boutique approach. That all changed rapidly.
Gallagher: The mindset was to keep making Half Acre lager and Over Ale, which we had been making as contract beers in Wisconsin before starting the brewery on Lincoln Avenue. We had about 15 draft accounts at the time, and they were pretty intimate relationships. It was clear — they said, “We want to pour Daisy Cutter.” Feedback was very quick.
Nicely: They were thinking Over Ale would be the flagship since it was already in the market. But Daisy Cutter took over right off the bat.
Fiori: I don’t recall trying to make Daisy Cutter the flagship. It was just, “Let’s make a badass beer that we want to drink all the time.” And then it took off. I would meet people and say that we had a brewery called Half Acre. They’d say they never heard of it. But when I mentioned Daisy Cutter, they’d know it. People knew the beer before they knew the company.
Phil Kuhl (former beer director at Sheffield’s): Daisy Cutter was absolutely a hit at Sheffield’s. It was a very easy beer to talk about with customers and to be excited about because we didn’t really have anything like it. At that time, everything on draft was from a well-established brewery — Anchor, Sierra Nevada, Unibroue, Belgian imports and stuff like that. Being able to root for the home team was exciting. There was this instant feeling that it was the new hoppy beer for Chicago.
Magliaro: Daisy Cutter gave people who lived near the brewery direct connection to fresh hoppy beer. That was unique then, to be able to walk out your door and just a block or two to get fresh, hoppy beer that was packaged two days earlier. It’s common now, but was just a different level of experience then.
Gallagher: I still remember my mom saying, “Why are you making this? Who is going to want to drink this?” I was like, “Actually, it’s pretty popular, mom.” Now she likes Daisy Cutter.
Nicely: The demand for Daisy Cutter was wicked. People were selling it on eBay. They were Twittering how many bottles were left. The customers were advertising the beer for us. Social media was new, and that had a lot to do with the excitement.
Gallagher: Daisy Cutter made its name as an insiders’ Chicago beer. If you were reading Beer Advocate at the time, the word was you had to get Daisy Cutter if you went to Chicago. But it grew past that, to become more broadly known to people in Chicago and beyond.
Kuhl: Daisy Cutter is that rare pale ale that drinks like an IPA. It smells and tastes like an IPA, but drinks so well because it’s actually a pale ale. When I started at Sheffield’s, I wasn’t a fan of hoppy beer. Daisy Cutter was one of the beers that changed that for me, and plenty of other people would say the same.
Gallagher: In 2010, we started putting Daisy Cutter in 16-ounce cans, which at the time not a lot of craft beer was. It was clear when you saw it: This is something different from what you’re used to. A key part of its success was it was different, but still accessible.
Nicely: I had no idea it would explode, that people would ask me to sign their beer. That did happen once. I was up on the North Side sitting in a car, waiting for a friend to come out of his apartment. Someone walked out of a store with some Daisy Cutter, and my friend pointed at me and said, “This is the guy who made that beer!” The person was like, “Whoa, will you sign my beer?” I did.
Magliaro: Daisy Cutter definitely began to control us. When you set up draft relationships — and that was the key to having a foundation as a brewery — you did not go out of stock on beer. Today it is common for breweries to be rotating beers on and off tap, but then, it wasn’t like that. If we ran out of beer, it was a big disappointment. It was a positive, but a controlling cycle: long days, long weeks and a bit frantic trying not to run out beer. Daisy Cutter turned into this monster we were fortunate to have, but everyone was scared of it at the same time.
Gallagher: The main reason we built our second brewery, on Balmoral Avenue was because Daisy Cutter was up to 80 percent of our production. We literally couldn’t brew much else. We certainly couldn’t make less Daisy Cutter. At Balmoral, we could make more Daisy, but we could also make more of the other beers we wanted to make.
Magliaro: We didn’t want Daisy to be the tail that wagged the dog. We wanted to do more things and not to have all our eggs in one basket. It helped guide us into feeling OK about making more beer, and that building a second brewery was a good thing for us.
The future
Magliaro: Daisy Cutter was the right beer at the right time. It was what people were looking for. It wasn’t the first hoppy pale ale to come out of Chicago, but it sliced into something unique.
Kuhl: The newness of Daisy Cutter, the hometown darling aspect of it — I don’t know if you’ll ever have that again. It doesn’t matter what new brewery opens now because there’s always going to be a new one opening next week. But that was an important time for new beer in Chicago because there was finally something other than Goose Island. You can’t go back and remember what it tasted like to have your first sip of Daisy Cutter, but having this new beer from a new brewery was a big deal.
Gallagher: As craft beer and its flavors and intensity have ratcheted up, Daisy Cutter has stayed very approachable. We let the market tell us what our flagship is. Daisy Cutter is that for us and probably always will be. We see no reason to change that.
Fiori: It’s still the flagship, and I love that’s the case. It’s still the beer that satisfies me when I come home from traveling and I want to get some of our beers in my system. Still. Even now. It’s the beer I keep in my fridge all the time.
Kuhl: Daisy Cutter is a beer I think of like Sierra Nevada Pale Ale or Spotted Cow — it’s as relevant now as when it came out. It’s timeless. I don’t know that Daisy Cutter will ever go out of style.
Nicely: I left Half Acre in 2010, but I still like Daisy Cutter a lot. I’m proud of it. It’s toned down a little bit, but tastes great. Can you imagine if I got 5 cents per Daisy Cutter? I’d be a millionaire. But brewing doesn’t work that way. It’s not like a rock ‘n’ roll song.
Magliaro: I feel more dedicated to Daisy Cutter today than I ever have because of what’s going on in beer today, stylistically and conceptually. Flagships almost don’t exist anymore. We feel it’s really important to hold on to this identity and not just barrel toward whatever is next. Everyone should be exploratory and adventurous, but not at the expense of wiping away your past sensory experiences. We want to keep Daisy Cutter as Daisy Cutter as it can possibly be. There’s nothing about that beer that’s on the cusp anymore — but that’s what I like about it.
Twitter @hopnotes
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