Trivia alert! Michael Mallozzi, one of guys opening the new Borderlands Brewing Company downtown, also happens to be one of the nation’s leading experts on anthrax. Seriously. The medical student opening the brewery with him told me so.
“Mike also knows everything about yeast. ... And yeast is critical to brewing beer,” said Myles Stone, a UA medical student who is opening the brewery with Mike Mallozzi, who does research on bacteria at the UA.
Stone says he and Mallozzi are not brewing experts (although Mallozzi did put himself through college working for Anheuser-Busch), but they’re working on that. They’ve been brewing 10 gallons of beer a weekend for the past couple of years to develop their recipes, which has made them quite popular with their, ahem, research crew.
“It’s amazing how many friends come out of the woodwork when you brew 10 gallons of beer a week,” said Stone.
As for the beer: The everyday drinking beer will be a lager. Stone says that’s the kind of beer the Germans brought to Mexico centuries ago, and that it held up over the years because its especially tasty in hot climates.
Come prickly-pear season around November, they’ll make a prickly-pear wheat bear. A vanilla porter made from vanilla imported from Sonora, an amber and a traditional stout are also on deck.
Stone expects the brewery to open in June or July.
