A Hard Row to Hoe (and its partner Out on the Ocean) are two beers made in collaboration with Poor Toms Distillery, an experimentation with our beer and the botanicals and roots utilised in spirits. They are also our first collaboration beers to exclusively be released to the Collective.

A Hard Row to Hoe is a barrel aged Golden Australian Wild Ale macerated and steeped with the exact spices, fruits and roots used to flavour Poor Tom's Imbroglio Amaro. Holy shit I love the bitterness of a negroni... that lasting earthy punish on your senses that draws any sweetness from your palate so intensely that you are bound to jump back into the drink and have another taste just to figure out what happened. This beer bears flavour from 13 herbs, fruits and spices, chief among them are the bittering agents which we love. After the maceration with barrel aged beer, A Hard Row to Hoe had an intense red colour which has somewhat sadly faded during refermentation in bottle, but the flavours are intact. Big nose of gentian, orange citrus and strawberry gum. Intense orange citrus palate, noticeably bitter. The gentian and wormwood mix perfectly with the gold citrus and orange to create a delicious back palate. Dry and wonderfully bitter in a negroni sense....

The name for the beer bears not only a resemblance to the name of the Poor Tom's amaro [Imbroglio is an unwanted, difficult, and confusing situation, full of trouble and problems... a clusterfuck if you will] but also the 1980 John Lennon song 'Beautiful Boy', the same source as the name for the gin inspired beer 'Out on the Ocean' based on Poor Tom's Imbroglio. The lyrics of the song are always top of mind in the Boehm household as they are rehearsed almost nightly during the bedtime routine.