WHO IS MR. KRUNKLES?
For nine years, we’ve been tracking the story of Krunkles, the greatest IPA brewer that has ever lived. It all began in 2010, when Spike found a bottle washed up on a beach in the Caribbean.
Inside the bottle, there was a recipe for a black IPA signed…Captain Krunkles. Spike and the Terrapin crew were intrigued.
Who was he? What was his life’s mission? Where was he from? Why did he send the bottle? But most importantly, was there more beer recipes?
After initially brewing Captain Krunkles as a Side Project in 2010, the brewers knew they needed to find out more about this mysterious brewer. Soon after, a scout was sent out to comb high and low for clues to where Krunkles could be, and find out more about the man.
It was almost a year before they found another recipe. This one, in a cuckoo clock in the Black Forest signed Indiana Krunkles. The beer – a combination of an IPA and a German Hefeweizen, was brewed at Terrapin as Side Project 15 in 2011. But there had to be more! So the search party continued on, looking through records of brewing history, sampling IPAs around the globe, and collecting what could be sightings of the elusive brewer.
How Krunkles traveled from Germany to the islands of Japan in 2012, we may never know. But through one of the reported sightings, a Terrapin scout was able to obtain a recipe tucked inside a Samurai sword case for an IPA that contained Ginger and Green Tea, signed by Samurai Krunkles.
Another year of searching continued, as Spike and various scouts chased the legend of Krunkles across the globe. They searched high and low, received reported sightings from Brazil to Russia, (which turned out to be dead ends) and traveled around the world with no real leads. But then, in the spring of 2013, they happened upon a farmer in Belgium who told the tale of a mustached brewer who taught him how to brew a White Farmhouse IPA. This beer was similar to a Witbier, but had more hop bitterness and a huge hop aroma. This mysterious mustached man, had to be Krunkles!
From there, the trail seemed to go cold. In hopes that Krunkles would come to Terrapin, the brewery rereleased the original recipe for Captain Krunkles and added it to the first variety kit. And then, they waited.
It wasn’t until 2015 that another clue emerged. The letter K, marked on a stone wall, was in a room that contained a scroll with an IPA recipe brewed with hops grown only in Australia. Krunkles Down Under was found! The trail was hot again. The Terrapin team collected accounts of the illustrious brewer, and followed the clues to his next stop: Hawaii. While there, the scouts found another IPA recipe! This one had been formulated using a traditional juice blend from the Hawaiian Islands called POG (Passionfruit, Orange and Guava) Signed once again by Krunkles.
Luau Krunkles quickly became a Terrapin favorite in the IPA Survival Kit, and as an ode to the brewer who’d created so many delicious beers, the beer became part of the Year Round line-up for the brewery. But where had Krunkles gone?
Turns out, while collaborating in South America in 2017, Spike heard rumors of a mustached man to the north, near the Panama Canal, who was spreading the love of hoppy beer through brewing. And so Terrapin sent another scout, this time, to discover that they’d only missed Krunkles by a few weeks! Krunkles had left behind a recipe for an IPA with pineapple and papaya that Terrapin dubbed “Panama Krunkles”, which is available now in our IPA Survival kit!
Through all this research, Terrapin has learned a lot about Krunkles’ brewing techniques and recipes, but little information can be found about the man. What do we know? Not much about Mr. Krunkles.
Who in the world is he?
