Yes it can!
To celebrate this milestone, we’re putting a limited run of Scratch #500 Double Perpetual IPA in your hands. This amped-up version takes cues from Perpetual IPA, which just so happens to be the best-selling IPA in our home state of Pennsylvania. Cycling through copious amounts of Cascade, Chinook, Nugget and Citra hops, this bigger, bolder version of Perpetual boasts sticky notes of citrus fruit and pine.
But let’s travel back in time to 2007, when we launched our Scratch Series to coincide with the 10th anniversary of our brewery. The first beer in the series – a California Common – was met with lots of excitement from our fans. So, what do we do? Keep brewing Scratch beers, of course!
Over the years, our Scratch Series has served as a springboard for potential seasonal and year-round releases. Favorites like Blizzard of Hops, LolliHop, Field Study, and Nimble Giant – to name just a few – all started life as small-batch Scratch beers. But one of the first to graduate to year-round status was Perpetual IPA.
“One of the ways we share our creative process is through our Scratch Series,” says our brewmaster and co-founding brother John Trogner. “Today, it’s hard to imagine Tröegs without Perpetual, but there was a time when we didn’t brew an IPA. Then, Citra hops came along, so we said, ‘Why not?’”
After half a dozen Scratch batches, we finally landed on the recipe for Perpetual IPA that we all know and love.
The Scratch Series expanded when we moved our operations from Harrisburg to Hershey in 2011. This move coincided with the installation of our 15-barrel Scratch brewhouse, a pilot system allowing us to brew much smaller batches of beer and make them available just for our Tasting Room customers. At one point, it seemed like we were churning out Scratch beers on a weekly basis, and Thursday quickly turned into “Scratch Beer Day” at Tröegs.
In 2020, we decided to get even more granular, so we commissioned and installed our Scratch Lab, a 3-barrel nano-brewery designed by BrauKon to replicate the temperature controls, pressure, and geometry of our 100-barrel production brewhouse.
“With the Scratch Lab, we can break up 15-barrel brews into nano batches,” says our Brewing Manager Tim Mayhew. “That allows us to test things like dry-hop combinations and yeast strains side-by-side.”
So here we are. Five hundred Scratch beers later, and we can’t think of another beer we’d rather celebrate than our beloved Perpetual IPA. As they say, “To infinity…”
Scratch #500 is available on draft and in limited 16-oz. cans exclusively at our brewery. Come get your share! Limit two 4-packs per customer, please.
