Great minds collaborate – maybe jam, too

Do a Web search on brewing collaborations and you'll find plenty of brewers and breweries that have put their collective minds and talents together to produce imaginative beers.

Oregon beer-makers Deschutes Brewery and Hair of the Dog Brewing have a collaboration brew due out in 2011. And here in New Jersey, Flying Fish's Exit 6 Wallonian Rye is the effort of the Cherry Hill brewery working with Nodding Head (Philadelphia) and Stewart's (Bear, Delaware) brewpubs earlier this year.

We're thinking of another collaboration that COULD (all caps because it hasn't even been brought up) produce a great beer and a musical tie-in to boot: River Horse in Lambertville and High Point in Butler, two breweries whose mash tuns are manned by quite capable guitar players.

First of all, neither brewery has been approached with an idea to collaborate (that we know of), so let's make that clear. We're not reporting something, we're suggesting something.

The collaboration would work this way: Pick a beer style (a weizenbock or a dunkel of some sort), refine the idea, brew it. Chris Rakow, guitarist-brewer at RH, and Bryan Baxter, guitarist-brewer at High Point, take things a step further and put their musical minds and fretboard chops together on a tune, too.

Easier said than done of course. But imagine the rocking release party for the beer.