For the flavor profile, the crew turned to Victory’s beverage director at the time, Paul Calvert, one of Atlanta’s most celebrated drink makers. Wild Heaven’s Eric Johnson, like most people who enjoy drinking in Atlanta, is a big fan of Calvert’s work. Before Johnson was Wild Heaven’s brewmaster, he founded one of Georgia’s best beer bars, Trappeze Pub in Athens. He’s a longtime homebrewer and horticulturist, and has hosted the PBS show, GardenSMART for 12 years. While he understood Victory was trying to make a “yellow beer” that allowed them to pare down their macro options, he says he didn’t want to dumb down his product.

“We thought, what can we do for the craft crowd where they won’t think we just made a douche-y pilsner?” Johnson says. “Paul’s a great mixologist, and we started talking about what flavors we could inject in a subtle way that would make the beer interesting, crisp, and refreshing, but also very much a craft beer. We actively test-batched it for over half a year. I would brew a batch, Paul would come in and taste it.”

Calvert’s modest about his role.

“I was there, and I’m really proud to say I was a part of it, but it’s very much a Wild Heaven beer with an Alvin Diec design for the can,” he says. “Do you know what a dramaturge is? It’s like, if you decide you wanna direct Hamlet and you’re a really great director and you’ve got really great actors and lighting people and makeup people and everything, but you wanna make sure you’re really understanding the text? You call a dramaturge. And usually that’s someone who works at a university and teaches Hamlet. So he or she hangs out and just kinda answers questions about the stuff along the edges. I feel like I hung out and just said, ‘Well, this is how I think grapefruit and sea salt go together,’ and, ‘No, I wouldn’t put any orange in, because orange is a pretty flabby acid.’ I just hung out and told Eric things he probably already knew.”

For the packaging, Jones turned to Alvin Diec of Brothers, the design office responsible for, among other things, more than 400 Atlanta-area menus. Diec and Victory have worked together since the latter opened its first location in 2011. Diec also designed Athens brewery Creature Comforts’ logo. This is his only other beer work.

“I was just excited Ian was willing to do something that looked really ugly,” Diec tells me when I ask him about the design. “That’s one of our specialties—making bad things. Because we don’t know how to make good things. So every time someone asks us to make bad things, it ends up working out really well.”