Good beer is for sharing. Great beer is for enriching lives. Create artisan beer that harmonizes local ingredients with ambient microflora to impart a distinctive terroir. The unique aspects of a place influence and shape the beer made from it. Remarkable beer character is the product of natural elements and the human element. Farm to table is not dead. Seek ingredients from local, family-owned farms. And emphasize the direct relationship between farmer and brewer. Be sustainable. Strive for self-sufficiency. Believe in the zero mile beer. And embrace the natural pace of ambient fermentation. Slow beer preserves beer culture and tradition. Faster is not always better, seek the right speed. Savor the experience rather than just drink beer.

These 15 sentences embody where we began and what drives us forward. The manifesto is a daily reminder of the values we live and work toward as a homebrewery. It represents the synergy of five philosophies; ambient microflora, terroir, farm-to-table, zero-mile beer, and slow beer.

Third Leap Brewing & Blending was established in 2010 by Andrew Kazanovicz – a biomedical engineer by day and passionate homebrewer by night. His inaugural batch of homebrew was a grapefruit honey ale fermented (like most beers) with standard brewer’s yeast, Saccharomyces Cerevisiae. But forty batches later, in late 2013, Andrew fermented his first beer with domesticated wild yeast, Brettanomyces Custersianus, changing his homebrewing life forever.

Today his focus is to create artisan beer that harmonizes local ingredients with ambient microflora to impart a distinctive Mountain West terroir. He aims to create beers that are a product of the natural elements that surround us and the human element used to make them, resulting in beer that is uniquely tied to a place, people, and time.

Our beers are entirely shaped by local ingredients. Eventually, we hope to grow and process every single ingredient used in our beers but in the meantime, we strive to source all of our ingredients directly from the Mountain West.

With the exception of spontaneous ales, all of our beers are fermented with yeast and/or microflora from Bootleg Biology, the first organization to pioneer the collection and cultivation of official local yeast strains for every US postal code. Bootleg banks both our house yeast and microflora.

We exclusively use Mecca Grade Estate Malt from Central Oregon. Their eighth generation farming family grows and malts over a half dozen specialty estate-grown grains on their farm. The grain is singularly sourced within a two mile radius of the malthouse, lending to unique taste of the Central Oregon High Desert.

Our beers are brewed using North West grown hop varietals. Someday soon, we hope to once again grow our own hops here in Idaho, but in the meantime we will continue to source hops directly from local Idaho farms.

We believe mother nature knows best when it comes to water and that is why all of our beers begin with 100% untreated Boise-area water, derived mostly from untouched ancient aquifers.