Back Forty Truck Stop Honey Brown Ale — The GABF Silver Medalist That Put Alabama on the Map

The Review

In 2010, Back Forty Beer Company was still brewing their beers under contract at Lazy Magnolia in Mississippi while they built out their Gadsden facility. That year, Truck Stop Honey Brown Ale won a silver medal at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, and the distribution offers came flooding in. The rest of Alabama’s craft beer story is partly a sequel to that moment.

Truck Stop Honey pours a clear, deep amber-mahogany with a tan head and a nose of toasted grain, caramel, and a clean honey sweetness that isn’t cloying. On the palate: the honey integrates seamlessly into the malt character — you feel its sweetness without identifying it as a separate ingredient — and the finish is clean, dry, and subtly warming. It’s a brown ale that tastes like it was designed for the working person, honest and satisfying and unpretentious.

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The name is a tribute to Alabama’s truck stop culture — the roadside infrastructure that moves everything through the South — and it captures the beer’s character perfectly. This isn’t a fancy beer. It’s a very good one, made with craft and intention and Alabama honey, and it won a national medal at a time when Alabama wasn’t supposed to win national medals.

Back Forty opened their Gadsden brewery in 2012 and their Birmingham taproom at Sloss Docks in 2018. Truck Stop Honey is at both. Start there.

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