Yesterday, Alan Sprints of Hair of the Dog (HotD) passed away aged 66. He had announced his illness publicly earlier this year.
I never met Alan and I never went to any of the HotD locations – he and I were Facebook friends for a number of years FWIW. If I’m honest, I didn’t much care for the beers that Alan made, but that’s at least part of the reason that I wanted to write this tiny note.
From everything that I have read, and all of the beer people that I have spoken over the years, it became apparent that Alan did things pretty much exclusively on his own terms. In a interview with Jeff Alworth he once described himself as a contrarian. As such, I felt a mild kinship with him.
For me, Alan’s beer was difficult, a bit of an effort, and that’s not something that I ever wanted in most of my beer consumption. Of course my preferences – in fact nobody’s preferences – were any concern of his, he simply brewed the beer that he wanted to brew. I came to admire that in him (and by extension his beer) immensely, especially as brewers of late have continually bent to the latest trends in manners that I suspect they know is compromising their standards and their principles. Alan didn’t ever do that as far as I could tell. Alan will be greatly missed.
On more than one occasion I said to people that if I owned a brewery it would be most like Hair of the Dog, not because I wanted to brew like Alan. but rather because I would bloody well do what I chose and screw the rest. I have no idea if that’s what Alan was really like, but that’s the impression I got from afar, and I was delighted by it. For those reasons, and the fact that he was one of the OGs, I will always think of him and HotD kindly.
One final note. In 2022 I wrote that when HotD and Stone almost simultaneously “finished” in their own respective ways it was really hard not to draw a comparison between the two endings. As I said at the time these were definitely not apples-to-apples comparisons, but juxtapositioned they offered a stark and interesting contrast to the way two West Coast legends disappeared over the horizon. Godspeed.
There will be a ton of tributes out there, this one by is Ezra Johnson-Greenough is rather nice and ends with a great quote from Alan.
