Our choice of ingredients goes hand-in-hand with our brewing philosophy, which we like to call "Beer Minimalism." As beer minimalists, we try to make very well defined styles and constantly practice the art of brewing them. Brewer Mark Thompson explains, "The way I see it, I would rather have four A+ beers, than 8 B-/C+ beers."

Mark employs the "3-2-1" style of beer making, which often resonates with other craft brewers and home brewers. Any recipe Starr Hill makes typically has three malts, two hops and one yeast.

For example, our Dark Starr Stout has a large amount of roasted barley that is the hallmark ingredient of this beer that lends the coffee and unsweetened chocolate flavors. With Northern Lights, it's the hops. We use two hops -- it's the Cascade hops that gives it that citrus-y grapefruit flavor. The Love: it's all about the yeast -- we use a special yeast strain from Germany that no one else has. Our Oktoberfest, Festie, has a specific malt called Munich malt that produces a very dry, almost bready flavor, so we use 100% Munich malt in that beer because it is the predominate flavor we want to put forth. Amber is the caramel malt, which has a lot of sweetness to it. The caramel malt produces a 3 carbon sugar the yeast cannot ferment, so since the yeast can't eat those sugars, they are left over imparting a sweet flavor. The Gift has a higher alcohol content, so you get a bit of alcohol warming with the high malt content -- but it all comes back to the "3-2-1."

We keep the beer simple and pronounce a flavor or a set of flavors, making sure not to muddle the beers with too many ingredients because after all, beer is a very simple beverage with four ingredients: water, malt, hops and yeast.