King Cong has the right pandemic brew: A good, affordable IPA at the grocery store

King Cong Brewing was in trouble in mid-March. The Old North Sacramento brewery leaned heavily on draft sales at area restaurants before the coronavirus pandemic. King Cong was also an eat-in brewpub with no delivery options.

All of that went away when California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered restaurants to do takeout-only business.

Necessity being the mother of invention, owner Cong Nguyen and his team needed a new plan. Fast.

“When everything went down, it was a really scary moment,” he said. “We didn’t have anything in place for takeout. We’d just got into cans. We were so new to it, trying to ease our way into the canning system.”

The solution Nguyen and his team landed on was simple: They made an affordable, tasty IPA and started distributing four-packs of cans to grocery stores. That new brew, Essential IPA, is turning into a runaway hit.

Essential, which debuted in late March, has a solid 4.02 rating on Untappd, the website and app where beer lovers grade brews. Essential is King Cong’s highest-rated beer. The takeaways should be obvious to any Sacramento-area brewery looking for a lifeline during the pandemic.

1. The beer is good and an in-demand style. This isn’t some arcane style or a quirky pastry stout that tries to mimic the taste of a Pop-Tart. It’s an IPA, the most popular style of craft beer. There’s a nice balance between hops and malt; it’s not watery and the hops are strong on the first sip, but the hops wash out of the mouth with a slightly sweet aftertaste.

Head brewer John Anaya said he just wanted to make a classic, delicious West Coast-style IPA.

“It’s nice to see it appreciated,” Anaya said of the Untappd score. “We’re used to good, old-school delicious IPAs on the West Coast. It’s always nice to have something clean, easy to drink, flavorful, but reminds me of the past. That’s the reason I did it.”

2. It’s affordable and it’s at the grocery store. While it might not be in large chains, it’s at local spots such as East Sacramento’s Compton’s Market. While some brewers are selling 32-ounce crowlers for $13 (or more) apiece, four 16-ounce cans of Essential cost $14.99. You can pay nearly double that for a four-pack from hot breweries like Moonraker. Beer drinkers (in grocery stores) know a bargain when they see one.

“It’s been doing exceptionally well,” Nguyen said. “This is a little different from that fruit-forward IPA style people have appreciated. People are surprised. It’s nice to see people are appreciating West Coast styles more now.”

3. It spreads a positive message. An odd byproduct of the pandemic is it’s easier to get good work done. In the past, breweries could spend weeks laboring over can designs and getting approval from the federal government. The beautiful blue-and-black can features hops strewn across the country, with a hop right where Sacramento is. At the bottom are the words “Faith over fear” and “Peace over panic.” One of Cong’s friends was a graphic designer before starting Oblivion Comics and Coffee, who suddenly had little better to do than design a beer can.

“We were trying to bring the community together and create a positive message that we’re all in it together,” Nguyen said. “At the end of the day, if we can just work through it, we’ll get through to the other side.”

When the beer was being developed, it was an important message. It still resonates. While people might be itching to return to everyday life, sampling beers in taprooms likely won’t be happening for quite a while.

That’s OK. Things at King Cong are not great, but it looks like they’ll be around after the pandemic to serve beers for the Old North Sacramento neighbors that are pulling them through the pandemic. Cong had to lay off most of his part-time staff, he said, but they will likely have jobs at the brewery waiting for them. Talking to Cong, it’s easy to see where the positive message comes from on Essential IPA cans.

“I’ve got my core skeleton crew with me. They have mortgages and things like that. For me, I wanted to see if we can support our staff as much as we can by staying open,” Cong said. “I think we’re going to be able to prevail.”

This story was originally published April 24, 2020 at 12:59 PM.