Alpha King-winning brewer Phil Pesheck joins Vice Beer in Vancouver

Vice Beer added a proven hop specialist to its east Vancouver operation, bringing Phil Pesheck back to the Pacific Northwest brewery scene just as the market keeps rewarding sharp, balanced IPA work over brute-force bitterness. Pesheck, who helped Burke-Gilman Brewing win the Alpha King Challenge in 2020, joined Vice Beer at 705 SE Park Crest Ave., giving the young Vancouver brewery a brewer with competition credentials and a history of building beers that stand out in a crowded hop landscape.

That pedigree still carries weight. The Alpha King Challenge dates to 1998, when hop industry veterans Ralph Olson and Bill Owens set out to find the most balanced, drinkable hop-forward beer in America, not simply the highest-IBU puncher. Pesheck’s winning beer at Burke-Gilman, Fresh Hopotheosis, was a juicy fresh hop DIPA, and Burke-Gilman also took home a Great American Beer Festival gold medal in 2020 for its juicy, hazy IPA. In other words, Vice Beer did not just hire another brewer. It hired someone who has already delivered when the judges, and the hop crowd, were paying attention.

Vice Beer opened in east Vancouver on Aug. 12, 2022, and has built its identity around experimental small-batch beers, collaborations and a goal of tapping something new each week. The brewery, which operates both the main taproom on SE Park Crest Avenue and Little Vice on Main Street, has also leaned into an 80s-and-90s pop-culture aesthetic. Adding Pesheck gives Michael Perozzo’s operation a more established production voice as it tries to keep that playful brand from drifting into gimmick territory.

Pesheck arrived after several years in Hawaii, where he helped launch Howzit Brewing in Honolulu’s Kaka‘ako neighborhood in late 2023. Before that, he brewed at Mac and Jack’s, Georgetown Brewing and Burke-Gilman Brewing. His return to Washington matters because it reconnects one of the region’s more competition-tested hop brewers with a market that has only gotten more demanding since the Alpha King era.

For Vancouver drinkers, the move is more than a personnel note. Vice Beer was registered in Washington in March 2022 and opened as a relatively small, focused brewery in a city that has kept growing its craft beer base. Pesheck said he was excited to work with Vice, get back into competition brewing and explore a barrel-aged program, a sign that the hire could stretch the brewery beyond its current small-batch lane. In a hop-saturated region, that kind of experience can shape a brewery’s next chapter fast.