Holiday Experiments

Experimenting is definitely one of the more fun practices in brewing beer. Flavors, colors, names all that stuff. Around the holidays brewers get especially adventurous with spices and higher gravity beers. We are happy to fall in suit because it’s just a good time.

Ross and I have been brewing holiday beers together for a few years now. Some of you may have had the pleasure of tasting our Dead Santa from last year, mildly spiced brow ale. This year our beer is going to be called Hammered Holiday because, all the spices that went into it had been smashed with a hammer. No kidding.

We also had a batch of stout finish a few days ago so we thought we should do something special and age some on something…. A quick trip down to Wholefoods produced a lot of somethings….

Cherries, cranberries, blackberries, cinnamon, dates, figs, black strap molasses, agave, ginger... the list goes on। Diving right in we started chopping things up pouring stout on them and tasting. A little of this a splash of that and presto, we had some pretty nice flavors. We settled on two combinations.

1) Cherries, blackberries and cranberries
2) Figs and dates

Awesome!

Come to our holiday party and we will be tapping both of these beers and the hammered holiday of course! It will be on 12/18/2010.