SUNSHINE BREWERY / PARASITE PRODUKTIONS
BERLIN, GERMANY
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Raised in Australia, Cristal Peck had been around beer since she was young, watching her dad homebrew. “It was ingrained in me that I would eventually try it,” she says. “My dad trained me to be a fan of beer. Having three daughters, he thought it was more parentally responsible of him to get us on beer instead of spirits.”
She trained as a microbiologist, toiling in a lab before instructing high school students about, say, the enzymatic process or long sugars breaking down. “I was basically teaching kids to brew beer without using beer as the reference,” she says.
Her brother bought her a starter kit, which proved exciting and irritating in equal parts. “I did one extract kit and straightaway lost patience,” says Peck, who sought out Grape & Grain, a great Melbourne homebrew store, and jumped into all-grain brewing.
Come weekends in the Sunshine suburb of Melbourne, Peck unwound in her garden, tending to a vegetable patch, kicking back with her dog and ducks, and making beer in a shed under the name Sunshine Brewery. She brewed on a gravity-fed system fashioned from stainless-steel kegs and fed the spent grains to her ducks. The setup was idyllic, but wanderlust beckoned. She wanted to live in Europe and settled on Berlin, shuttling her brewing system into her dad’s garage. “It was heartbreaking,” she says.
Peck resumed brewing on a more rudimentary system in Germany. “I had to use my stovetop and do smaller batches. I didn’t have a refrigerator with a thermostat. I lost total control.” She soon landed a job in a science lab, injecting DNA into fruit fly embryos, and quickly found her homebrew footing as well. Her raspberry-infused Framboise Fantastic took top honors at the 2015 Berlin Beer Week, the recipe brewed professionally and distributed citywide.
Peck began managing Bierlieb, a homebrew shop and beer store, and taught classes that blended beer and science, uniting her two passions. She created new recipes, including a stout made with vegemite, and began brewing commercially with her boyfriend, Richie Hodges, the brewmaster at Berliner Berg. When Bierlieb closed in 2017, they plotted Parasite Produktions.
Orval, Rodenbach Grand Cru, and St. Bernardus Abt 12 are fabled and flawless. Why mess with perfection? Because they can. Peck and Hodges love adulterating revered beers. They dose the rich and malty Andechs Doppelbock Dunkel with souring bacteria and age the amalgam in wood. They add wild blueberries to Rodenbach’s archetypal sour. Playful contamination distinguishes the efforts of Parasite Produktions.
“We’ve taken some of our favorite beers and meddled with them in a way that a good parasite does,” says Peck. In addition to doctoring beers, she and Hodges are thinking of creating a business that will allow them to gypsy-brew legally. “There are so many big breweries that are closing down,” she says. “There’s a culture of gypsy brewing in Germany, where breweries are encouraging people to come in. Like a good parasite, you have to exploit a situation,” Peck smiles.
BREWER SPOTLIGHT
A chance meeting at an Illinois liquor store led homebrewers Marika Josephson, Aaron Kleidon, and Ryan Tockstein to launch Scratch Brewing Company. The farmhouse brewery focuses on beers made from foraged hickory bark, dandelions, pine needles, and homegrown turmeric. Check out their Homebrewer’s Almanac to learn more about forage brewing.
