Classic Colorado summer scent inspired Broken Plow’s chili wheat beer

By Steve Graham

Before opening Broken Plow Brewery, Randy Waddle spent 25 years selling his homegrown organic produce at the venerable Boulder Farmers Market. So it’s not really surprising that the signature Colorado market smell of roasting chiles inspired one of Broken Plow’s flagship beers.

“When chili season would come around, I would think, ‘I need to make a chili beer,’” Waddle said.

He had been home brewing a chili wheat beer, and perfected the recipe long before opening Broken Plow.

“My wife used to make a lot of Mexican food at home, and I just wanted a beer that wasn’t over-the-top hot, something that you could enjoy two or three pints of, and an enjoyable beer that would complement the spice of the Mexican food,” Waddle said.

Every fall, he buys a year’s worth of fire-roasted Anaheim chiles. He freezes them, then thaws individual batches, which he peels and mixes into the brew during fermentation.

Like all Broken Plow beers, the Signature Chili Wheat is nearly gluten-free. Waddle adds an enzyme during fermentation that breaks down the naturally occurring gluten proteins in the wheat, barley and rye in his beer.

Waddle said his family doctor, who has celiac disease, asked him for a gluten-reduced beer, so Waddle experimented with the enzyme. The good doctor was pleased with the result.

“He used to be able to drink a taster glass or two,” Waddle said. “Now he’ll have two or three of my (20-ounce) pours.”

The beer essentially has no gluten, but he can’t label it gluten-free.

“Everything we have had tested comes in below 10 parts per million, and the FDA says anything 20 parts per million or less is gluten-free,” Waddle said. “But the TTB, that regulates alcohol, says that if you make it with a product that contains gluten, you can call it gluten-reduced but you can’t call it gluten-free.”

The flavor is not reduced, however. In fact, Waddle believes it’s an improvement.

“It’s made my beer brighter and crisper,” he said.

Nor has the gluten reduction diminished the popularity of the Signature Chili Wheat, one of the brewery’s best sellers.

“We’ve got one lady, we call her Chili Kim, she comes in and fills one or two growlers a week,” Waddle said.

Broken Plow opened in 2014. Waddle’s parents own the commercial strip off Business Route 34 in west Greeley, so he got a good deal on rent, and recently expanded the space to include a kitchen that serves up pizza, sandwiches and chicken tenders.

He also got a good deal on beer ingredients when he first opened, relying on some homegrown hops and home-propagated yeast from his fellow home brewers.

While farming south of Greeley, Waddle was also home brewing alongside friends in a Greeley home-brewing club. He watched many of his friends move on to jobs at Weldwerks, Boulder Beer and other major regional breweries, then decided to hang up the hoes.

“I actually had a lot more experience than any of them,” Waddle said. “It’s been a passion of mine and something that I wanted to do. We were kind of fed up with what we were doing.”

The agriculturally inspired brewery name comes from a song overheard while homebrewing in his barn.

“I was over tapping a beer and I turned the radio up, and Bob Dylan’s song called ‘Everything is Broken’ came on. One of the lyrics in that song is ‘broken hands on broken plows,’ and I said ‘that’s it, Broken Plow,’” Waddle said. “We named the brewery long before we had the place.”

Steve Graham is a freelance writer and former newspaper editor who likes taking his two young boys biking, hiking and brewery-hopping in northern Colorado.