Pete Jones, a beer historian with the Lost Lagers consultancy, wasn’t on the lookout for a beer to recreate when he stumbled across the lab report that would become Washington, D.C.–based Right Proper Brewing Company’s Senate Beer. The discovery was especially exciting to Kim Bender, executive director at the Heurich House Museum, as much of the archival information about Heurich Brewing was destroyed in a fire.
The report sparked an idea in Bender, who later reached out to Tom Shellhammer, a professor of brewing science at Oregon State University (OSU), to see if they could recreate the Senate Beer.