Photo provided The label for ZwanzigZ’s Fulcrum Imperial Stout, a gold medal winner at this year’s Brewers Association World Beer Cup.
Taking on stout competition against nearly 100 craft brewers from around the world, Columbus’ ZwanzigZ Brewing achieved a gold medal victory Thursday in the prestigious Brewers Association World Beer Cup.
ZwanzigZ reigned supreme in the American-style imperial stout category, besting 96 challengers with its entry, Fulcrum Imperial Stout. Brewers in Taiwan and California, respectively, took silver and bronze in the category, one of 103 categories in the world’s largest international beer competition, held this year in Minneapolis.
“All I can say is, we’re just honored,” said Kurt Zwanzig, who with his wife of 27 years, Lisa, operates ZwanzigZ Pizza & Brewing, a Columbus destination eatery and brewpub at 1038 Lafayette Ave. that’s garnered some heady national and now international acclaim. “It’s a big boost for our business and our reputation.”
In the fiercely competitive world of craft brewing, word of ZwanzigZ’s international gold for a dark brew had gotten out by early Friday morning. “It’s already gotten crazy,” Zwanzig said, predicting that retail stock at area Cork Liquors stores will sell quickly — “those bottles are going to be gone.” A few kegs are stashed, so the restaurant may not get tapped out right away.
The Fulcrum brew is among the core beers ZwanzigZ serves up. The award comes at an auspicious time for the establishment whose pizzeria recently celebrated its 20th anniversary and whose brewery just turned 10.
Since the brewery’s start, Zwanzig’s roommate from their college days at Northern Illinois University, Mike Rybinski, has been the brewmaster. Zwanzig said when he and Lisa were exploring the possibility of adding a brewpub to the original pizza restaurant, he turned to his college roomie for advice on the best setup from a business standpoint and from a brewer’s standpoint.
Before long, Rybinski had moved his considerable brewing credentials from Chicagoland — where he had won an unprecedented three consecutive World Beer Cup gold medals — to Columbus.
“The drought is over!” Rybinski joked Friday from Louisville and his annual pilgrimage to the Kentucky Derby.
“The stout has been on tap since day one” at ZwanzigZ, he said. Earlier this year, though, he took a few suggestions from fellow brewers he knows from his days in Chicago, and he made a couple of recipe tweaks. He and his assistant brewed a new batch and liked what they tasted. So about six weeks ago, they sent off a 12-pack to another Louisville — this one in Colorado — for entry into the Boulder, Colorado-based Brewers Association’s biennial international competition.
“You just hope for the best and kind of forget about it,” Rybinski said, noting ZwanzigZ entered only two beers in competition this year. When he and his assistant tasted the entries again this week, he said, they were pleased with the results.
“So were the judges,” he said.
The 2022 World Beer Cup competition was the first since the pandemic, and it also was the largest ever, organizers said. On tap were 10,542 entries from 2,493 breweries representing 57 countries.
According to the Beer Judge Certification Program, an imperial stout’s overall characteristics are “an intensely-flavored, big, dark ale with a wide range of flavor balances and regional interpretations. Roasty-burnt malt with deep dark or dried fruit flavors, and a warming, bittersweet finish. Despite the intense flavors, the components need to meld together to create a complex, harmonious beer, not a hot mess.”
The Brewers Association describes the ideal American-style imperial stout as follows: “Extremely rich malty aroma is typical. Extremely rich malty flavor with full sweet malt character is typical. Roasted malt astringency and bitterness can be moderate but should not dominate the overall character.”
Rybinski noted the stout that won global gold also is the base brew for ZwanzigZ’s Ghost Pepper Imperial Stout, which previously won a gold medal in competition in the Brewers Association’s Great American Beer Festival in Denver. He said brewing is alchemy that melds art and science, noting a current experiment at ZwanzigZ involves a brew infused with multiple variations of the space-age orange drink Tang.
For Zwanzig, the continued acclaim implicates decisions about expansion, and what that could mean. He said he’s had conversations with distributors, but for now, the brewery controls its own distribution. Zwanzig suggested there is also a business alchemy involved in the equations involving wider distribution, quality, and what it means, exactly, to be local.
“The pizza made everything possible. The beer has been an amazing addition,” Zwanzig said. “We’ve always been a quality establishment. … Sometimes we will work counter to business principles” to ensure quality. “We will slow things down.”
On Thursday evening, Rybinski and his crew were at the brewery, which has relocated from the restaurant to a location at 315 12th St. When it occurred to him that the winners would be announced online that evening, he set up his laptop. The brewery recently began serving customers for limited hours Thursdays through Saturdays, and customers and the brew crew gathered around to watch the results when Rybinksi announced, “here’s our category.”
When ZwanzigZ won, Rybinski said, “All of us were high-fiving, double high-fiving.”
“It’s fun making beer, and I like to make people happy,” Rybinski said. “That’s why I got into this business.”
