Nao Ohdera / Director of Brewing Operations, Meanwhile Brewing Co., Austin, Texas

“Good Beer in Good Company” is the slogan at Meanwhile Brewing Co., a new craft brewery in Austin, where beer is the product and community is the point. Meanwhile’s three-acre map includes an outdoor entertainment stage, a natural playground interspersed with picnic tables and hammocks, a soccer field, a bocce court and three food trucks — elements that make it uniquely suited to bringing people together during a pandemic. Besides beer, Meanwhile serves coffee, cider and house-made hard seltzer cocktails at the indoor taproom. As a respite or a gathering place, Meanwhile makes sipping a cup of coffee and working on a laptop just as comfortable as listening to live music in a throng of kids and dogs.

Director of Brewing Operations Nao Ohdera worked with The Perfect Purée at the award-winning Breakside Brewing in Portland. He started brewing at Meanwhile with The Perfect Purée Mango Puree and the result is a bright, clean, effervescent Mango Sour.

“I knew how great The Perfect Purée was from using it at my last brewery so right away I wanted to use it in one of our first beers here. The acidity of the base Berliner Weisse goes great with the sweet, tropical taste of the Mango Puree,” Nao says.

Nao has also worked with The Perfect Purée Passion Fruit Concentrate, The Perfect Purée Pink Guava Puree and The Perfect Purée Blood Orange Concentrate and is thinking about how to use The Perfect Purée Yuzu Luxe Sour blend. Tangy and refreshing fruited sours are warm weather favorites. They also satisfy brewers’ thirst for experimentation with endless flavor combinations of stone fruits, berries and tropical fruits.

“Mango Sour just goes perfectly with the heat here in Texas,” Nao says.

Nao added The Perfect Purée Mango Puree during conditioning but has used purées in fermentation and conditioning.

Meanwhile’s brewing team likes to play around with acids to make the fruit flavor pop (think citric, malic or tartaric or a blend of them all). “Some fruits may already seem pretty acidic, but adding some of these acids can enhance the fruit character even more. You really get the most out of the fruit in my opinion,” Nao says.

Meanwhile is a three-vessel, 15bbl brewery producing 50 beers a year with a focus on quality, creativity and variety. Simply put, they want to make the best beer possible and have fun doing it. “The Perfect Purée’s products are great for us because the quality is definitely there and the wide array of flavors allows us to be even more creative,” Nao says. “Having such good purées gives us another element to use in our beer recipe formulation and really can diversify the beers we make.”