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Maximum Hops Yield Maximum Results: Making Beer With Sunn O)))

Scott Walker and Sunn O)))'s collaborative record Soused, a dark and wild leap into the metallic abyss, has inspired a collaborative beer by the same name. What does that beer taste like?
Sunn O)))'s Greg Anderson (center) mugs with brewers from Right Proper, Stone and Pen Druid to make "Soused," a beer inspired by the drone-metal band's collaboration with Scott Walker.

The D.C. brewery Right Proper was like a cultural mullet during a recent visit: a posh baby shower in the front (complete with chocolate petit fours), a bunch of metal heads making beer in the back. Right Proper's head brewer, Nathan Zeender, was dumping a heaping spoonful of hop extract into a tank.

"It's the most bitter, intense stuff you'll ever try in your life," he told me. "It'll blow your mind. You won't have any taste buds left." It was thick and waxy, like pomade, colored a dirt-pollen yellow and smelling like a barrel of fermented oranges packed into a tin can. Zeender assured me that it's good for a "clean bitterness."

Zeender was stirring this viscous goo into aand a friendship, separate from that album, struck up many years ago.

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