Horus Aged Ales has grown in popularity faster than maybe any other brewery in San Diego County. The first four bottle sales were over in a matter of seconds, and owner Kyle Harrop has poured his beer at some of the most exclusive beer festivals across the world; at the Mikkeller Beer Celebration in Copenhagen, he served alongside established San Diego breweries AleSmith, Bagby, Pure Project, and Modern Times.
From a social media perspective, he has more than 42,000 Instagram followers, with engagement levels similar to The Lost Abbey and Pizza Port. “I think it’s flattering on one side of the spectrum, and it’s terrifying on the other,” Harrop says.
San Diegan brewers have taken notice. “Kyle’s experimentation with different types of barrels for his mixed fermentation beers goes to places that I would never have thought of,” says Winslow Sawyer of Pure Project, whose barrel-aged sour took bronze at the Great American Beer Festival in 2016. “He creates amazingly nuanced and layered beers with great variations. Regarding his Stygian beers, I would describe them as exemplary specimens of the pastry stout style.”
According to Anthony Tallman of Burgeon Brewing, “The network of brewers and breweries that Kyle has at his disposal for tips, tricks, information, ingredient sourcing, et cetera is pretty remarkable. He’s done more collaborations than anyone or brewery I know of.”
Behind the popularity, Horus Aged Ales is a one-man show. Harrop runs it all by himself. There is no cellarman, no assistant brewer, no social media guru…when people come to claim their bottles, Harrop is the one handing them out. He responds to social media posts personally. He pours the beers at the festivals. And he does all of this while working a full-time job in aerospace, and raising his two-year-old daughter alongside his wife Laurel.
“I’m proud of the fact that this is my own, and I want to keep it that way,” says Harrop.
Harrop’s headquarters are in Oceanside, where a light industrial unit contains dozens of barrels filled with beer. What you won’t find, however, is a major brewing system or tasting room. To brew, he goes off-site, renting time on other systems around town – Burgeon and Groundswell for example. Harrop does the brewing himself, then totes it back to Oceanside where it’s conditioned and aged before bottling. “With the small amount of beer I am able to produce, I fear that I would run out of beer within a few weeks if I were to build out a tap room. Nevertheless, I do look forward to having a tap room someday.”
Collaborations
At the beginning of 2018, Harrop had yet to sell a single beer under the Horus label. He had, however, brewed 55 collaborations, and was rapidly accumulating connections and exposure. Today, he’s close to 100 collaborations in more than 20 states, and four countries. “I think learning was the number one thing I got out of it…some of the collaboration beers challenged the way I would have brewed that style in the past – stouts being one of them.”
One example is Mount Stoutmore, a four-way collaboration alongside J. Wakefield, Bottle Logic, and Angry Chair, some of the country’s most acclaimed stout producers. “Our recipes couldn’t be any more different! Like, none of them are even remotely similar in any way, down to water profile, grain choice, boil time…it was across-the-map different. I think all four of us came out of that with a different mindset, and I think all four of our beers have gotten better since that one. Mine sure have.”
Besides developing recipes, these partnerships also helped Harrop learn how to brew his beers on a commercial system. “I felt quite scared when I first got onto a big system. Brewing with Derek [Gallanosa] when he was still at Abnormal, that was my second collaboration and it was a ten barrel; it’s just a lot different than your mash tun at home. There’s a lot of money on the line, there’s a lot of ingredients, there’s just a lot of unknown.”
Wake Fest 2018
In February, when Harrop showed up to the 2018 Wake Fest Invitational (the anniversary party for J. Wakefield Brewery in Miami), he was running late. It was his first major festival pouring his own beer, and he didn’t know what to expect. “I showed up to the festival, maybe two minutes to go before VIP started. I was pouring next to Hoof Hearted, Holy Mountain, and Hudson Valley, and there was a line forming. I figured it was probably Holy Mountain…I’m a huge Holy Mountain fan and thought, that’s cool. As I got behind the booth, I slowly realized it was for my beer.” Buoyed by a local article previewing his Great Maple Imperial Stout, he blew through the keg before VIP was over.
“I expected to be the guy who had a lot of beer at the end of the day, and I ran out of both beers in the first hour and a half, of a six-hour festival. One of many lessons learned this year was to bring more beer next time.”
Three days later, Harrop’s first bottle release went on sale. Oceanside’s Eleven, a blend of 11 different strong ales aged in Pappy Van Winkle barrels, sold out in two seconds.
Goshawk’s Grasp
“I set out to do something innovative each and every time I make a beer, and that does not usually come cheap. I just don’t really sacrifice ingredients because of the cost. Some people appreciate that, others might be resistant to it.” Harrop has become known for using rare, exotic, and costly ingredients and barrels. With Goshawk’s Grasp, he used the most expensive Geisha coffee in the world. “After reading several threads and forums online about how that coffee does not belong in any beer because of how delicate and floral it is, I took that as a challenge.”
He added thousands of dollars’ worth of hazelnuts and boiled off more than half the original wort in the kettle. In the end, he had to charge a price that is comparable to a bottle of barrel-aged beer in order to not lose money. Goshawk’s Grasp went on sale in April and crashed the Brown Paper Tickets website due to the extraordinarily high volume of traffic.
The Convocation
In May, Harrop poured his beer among the best brewers in the world at the Mikkeller Beer Celebration in Copenhagen. Two days later, he caused a massive line at the Modern Times Festival of Funk by announcing pours of Goshawk’s Grasp via Instagram.
In June, Harrop launched his beer club, The Convocation, comprised of two hundred memberships. Along with first dibs on bottle releases, members receive sour ales bottled exclusively for the club, like the beer Not Yanny. “I put real mint into the beer; it is probably one of the hardest ingredients to work with. I took a single barrel of a Belgian-style sour ale that was aging the entire time in an expensive Del Maguey Mezcal barrel, named after my wife Laurel, and added lime and mint from my own backyard. I wanted to create something that would challenge somebody’s palate.”
Brewing with Passion
Despite this success, Harrop maintains his business is not lucrative – “not at all” – mainly because of the small scale. “All along, the sour stuff would barely pay the rent. The pastry stouts are basically allowing me to keep brewing the barrel aged beer. I think keeping it small in this business model is a huge factor, but I have no choice with my current lifestyle.”
More than anything, Horus Aged Ales is an intensely personal passion project.
Harrop’s father, Bob, is a falconer – hence the bird-themed names and label artwork. “I saw a lot of goshawks growing up. My dad had one I will never forget named Mocha, and I also saw them camping out at June Lake and Mammoth.” The Horus logo design was a wedding gift from his wife. The label is a falcon’s head atop his own, a re-envisioning of the Egyptian god Horus.
“My wife pushed me one thousand percent…then this health scare,” he says, pointing to a scar on his throat. Two and a half years ago, during a routine physical, his doctor ordered a CT scan. With his young daughter at home, Harrop had half a dozen lumps surgically removed from the base of his neck. The lumps turned out to be benign. “I realized life can be really short and I wanted to pursue the thing I was so passionate about: beer.”
“A lot of people put me into this hype category – and I hate hype, I don’t want that, I just want to keep making the best beer possible and let the beer speak for itself. There’s nothing cooler for me than when there’s a guy at a bar or a festival who’s never had a beer like this, and you see their reaction, and you talk about it…It’s the community that it brings, the experiences, the people you surround yourself with. Brewing beer is just something I’m incredibly passionate about. There’s so much ground that hasn’t been carved out yet.”