Three Floyds has grown markedly during the last 10 years. Does it still have the magic?

Ten years ago, Three Floyds beer rarely reached store shelves.

With each weekly shipment, retailers stashed the beer in back, waiting for people to ask for it. Three Floyds beer reliably sold out, often in less than a day. Legend has it the most obsessed fans followed distribution trucks around town, waiting for the beer to be unloaded. People craved it, both for the extreme, inventive flavors and the heavy-metal-meets-dystopian-comic-book ethos.

As one beer seller said at the time, “I’ve got 2,000 fresh beers on the shelves, and if someone can’t get Gumballhead, they’ll walk out without buying anything else.”

We chronicled the phenomenon in April 2012, when the brewery, housed in an unassuming Munster, Indiana, office park 30 miles south of downtown Chicago, seemed at the peak of its ascendance. Seventeen of its beers had garnered perfect scores on the RateBeer website, which led to Three Floyds being named the world’s best brewery five of the previous seven years.

Such praise was just a precursor, though, for what would become Three Floyds’ defining moment: Zombie Dust.

The pale ale, bottled for the first time in early 2012, ushered in a new era of consumer tastes by highlighting the bright fruitiness of the Citra hop, which played an outsize role in transforming pale ales and India pale ales from largely bitter and piney to more boldly fruity. It’s