Ripe Trait Takes 550 Pounds of Peaches and Six Hours by Hand

The peaches for Ripe Trait arrive by car. Bella Bolettino Farms has grown them in Palisade since 2020, and the family drives the load down to Denver themselves every year. This season's delivery was 550 pounds of Cresthavens.

What happens next is not mechanized. Cerebral Brewing says its team spends roughly six hours halving, pitting and squishing the entire lot by hand before any of it reaches the beer. The brewery adds that everyone is covered in peach juice by the end of the shift.

The variety does the crew a favor. Cresthaven is a late-season freestone, so the pit lifts away cleanly instead of clinging to the flesh, which is the difference between a long shift and an impossible one at that volume. It also ripens late enough on Colorado's Western Slope to put a peach beer on tap at the end of August.

Ripe Trait is built on Rare Trait, the house IPA Cerebral has been running variations through for years. This is the fourth release of the peach version. The brewery's own listing for it gives 6.4 percent ABV and names Citra, El Dorado and Mosaic in the hop bill.

The claim worth pausing on is what all that fruit reportedly does not do. Cerebral describes a surprisingly subtle peach character despite the quantity, and calls the beer a nuanced take on Rare Trait that drinks like a true product of the season. That is less of a contradiction than it sounds. Whole fruit added to beer tends to give up more sugar than aroma, since the sugars ferment out and much of the volatile character leaves with the carbon dioxide. Getting a restrained peach note out of a quarter-ton of peaches is roughly how the arithmetic works.

Ripe Trait returns Friday, August 28. It pours on draft only, and only in Cerebral's own rooms: Aurora Arts, Congress Park and West Highland.