There are a growing number of myths accumulating about the personas and legends in and around Core Brewing and Distilling, of Springdale, Arkansas. No doubt, the falsities will be debunked in their own good time, but meanwhile, I felt the need to begin laying down with certainty such claims and lore as can be substantiated.

First, let me tell you about my friend Derek.

The Salmon from which Derek's grandsires claim their paternal lineage was a wild north Atlantic prehistoric ichthys that drove forever further into the headwaters of a Scandinavian fjord, and eventually, in drier seasons, became trapped in a slowly evaporating pool. Sensing his mortal Time approaching he waited for a hungry she-otter to make a pass at him, fin-slapped her across the face and copulated with her. The resultant hairy amphibian moved directly up the evolutionary ladder and took a human wife, breeding generation by generation the more Norse god-like specimens that would have the courage to brave a north-Atlantic crossing, see the Native Americans and Canadian First Nation peoples, not as a culture to fear, but to embrace as the Salmonson clan sought ever to develop a super race. Their expansion and lust led them eventually to the bison-lands of modern-day North Dakota, where the newly-bearded native cross-breeds finally found meat that left them full and unhungry. Here they settled, finally at peace with their surroundings-- a habitat made mostly of sky and fresh air. But even Heaven grows weary-- after too few generations, a new scion was reared from the Salmonson fold: Derek, called Thor, who found that his impeccable constitution was unaffected by human dosages of alcohol. Heartbroken at his own betterness, he left his beloved Badlands in search of a mythical land of verdant hills and rippling streams, where alone grew trees of such a wood that a bow made from it could fire an arrow that would fell a bison at two miles, an orca-- underwater-- at forty feet, where monastic dachsunds had developed an inconceivably brilliant method for brewing the most superior beers on earth. Trials beset him: the Platte River was at flood stage and Young Thor had to fashion a rope of prairie grass and lasso the beltloop of the great ethereal hunter to trapeze his way across; nearing the Missouri/Oklahoma border, he was swept up by a tornado. Never blanching, he merely stuck out his jaw in defiance of the wind, which cowed and sought shelter from his ire in the waves of his beard. He kept the swirling prairie wind there, and when he finally found the monastery he sought, stored the wind in a fourth, here-to-fore unused tank in the Lowhounds' brewing system, thereby giving them the first whirlpool tank in the glorious state we all know as Arkansas, perched atop those emerald Ozark hills. Here, Derek found his home, sired his own brood of immortals-to-be, and with his own two calloused hands, set about building the wherewithal for that elusive brew that had been the core of all his desires for so long, to be readily available to all who felt that self-same torrential pull that originally led one saltwater giant inland, and a bearded plainsman overland. This, dear friends, could be no ordinary brew. Take Pride!