Mix honey and water and cool must to pitching temperature. Pitch yeast and add pure O₂ for 30 seconds through a 0.5-micron stone (a stir whip on a drill works just as well and will keep you from over-oxygenating). Ferment at 60°F (16°C).
Add nutrients in four additions: (1) when active fermentation began, (2) at 1.100 SG (23.8°Bx), (3) at 1.086 SG (20.7°Bx), and (4) at 1.074 SG (18°Bx). The last of these is the ⅓ sugar break. You don’t need to be quite this exact, as long as you stagger the additions. However, I find making additions by gravity preferable to staggering by the clock. A sluggish start or fast fermentation could cause you to unintentionally front-load or miss the points when your yeast needs some nitrogen. That said, a lot of great meadmakers do it by time intervals, so do what works best for you.
I like to keep my nutrients in small, sealable, plastic fridge containers. Then I just add a little distilled water, shake it up, and add that to the fermenter. You can do this with a plastic zip-top bag, too. You want to know your yeast’s nitrogen requirements so you can adjust the amount of nutrient accordingly. You can usually find this information on the manufacturer’s website.
If you degas, do so twice a day for the first week—make sure to do this before adding any nutrients or you’ll have some great mead all over your floor. If you do a 1-gallon batch in a glass jug, I’ve found the yellow tops of the 1 lb. honey bears from the grocery store fit nicely on the top of the jug. Simply shake the fermenter and pop the top a few times to let out the CO₂.
Crash fermentation to 30°F (–1°C) at 1.045 (11.2°Bx). I usually have a ballpark final gravity target when I make a mead, and I start tasting when it reaches that mark. When I think it shows enough of the balance and flavor I want, I crash it. You could also dial down the original gravity to 1.066 (16.1°Bx), ferment dry, and then back-sweeten to your taste if that’s the way you want to go.
Use potassium sulfate and potassium metabisulfite to stabilize and Super-Kleer KC to clarify. Let it sit about a month at 30°F (–1°C) until you can read a sheet of text through it and then bottle. I transfer to a keg and then use a bottling gun.
I keep this one still, but I think pétillant would be very nice, too. The yeast really makes the vanilla notes pop, and it has a very soft mouthfeel that keeps the body from feeling heavy or sticky. The flavor is pleasantly balanced, with enough acid to make this very drinkable. I really dig this honey and definitely recommend checking out Yirsa Farms. This could be a good platform for a very nice metheglin as well.
Bjarke Østergaard is still, ready, his face a study in concentration, his weight shifted forward onto the balls of his feet. In his pale blue denim coat, yellow round-neck sweater, navy trousers, and white plimsoles, he has the look of an early ’70s singer-songwriter, but he’s preparing to dance, not croon.
Waiting across the floor of the Sparta Hallen in Copenhagen is Carling Talcott-Steenstra of the Royal Danish Ballet, identically dressed. It’s just after 5:30 p.m. on Friday evening, March 6, 2020, and their performance, Spontan Goes Spontan, the centerpiece of the Social Revolution By Beer festival, is about to begin.
Dancing at beer festivals is not unknown. When enough Nut Brown Ale has been drunk, it’s late, and a tribute band is hitting the right notes, Great British Beer Festival attendees will frug with abandon. Oktoberfest can be a table-stomping riot. Even craft-beer festivals sometimes play host to dancing, albeit of a more self-conscious variety.
This is not like that. As an extended introduction ends, the music, composed for Spontan Goes Spontan by Aaron Dessner of rock band The National, begins. It falls like raindrops, gentle and repetitive, insistent, sweeping one way and then the other. As it begins, Østergaard and Talcott-Steenstra race towards each other and, for the next three minutes or so, are an elegant, energetic whirl of entwined arms, focused minds, and feet in perfect union. A crowd of perhaps 250 watches in silence, and then erupts in delighted applause.
It’s a moment of wonder, not least for Lars Carlsen, the co-founder and CEO of People Like Us, the brewery running the festival. Østergaard, the in-house dancer for People Like Us, has autism and ADHD. “Wow, wow!” Carlsen says when I catch up with him the day after the performance. “I cried afterwards, I don’t know for how long. It was so emotional. I have known Bjarke for five or six years. To see the person here and compare it to the person five years ago, it was amazing.”
Not many breweries employ a dancer, but People Like Us is unique. Founded in August 2016 by Carlsen, a former teacher, and his brother Jesper, its stated aim is to change perceptions about autistic people in the world of work. Before the COVID-19 crisis began, People Like Us employed 65 people in a variety of roles, from dancers to bartenders, brewers to accountants, more than 90% of them with a diagnosis of autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, or PTSD. Most employees are not involved in the brewing process, which takes place under contract at three breweries—De Proef Brouwerij in Belgium; Flying Couch Brewing in Denmark; and To Øl’s new facility just outside Copenhagen, which produces the majority of it.
In its five-year tenure, this small Danish brewery has had an outsize impact in Europe and beyond. That’s evident from the range of breweries at its festival, from the Brussels Beer Project to Goose Island and To Øl. People Like Us has helped to usher in an era when social activism is as much a part of the craft beer discourse as hop varieties. Over the last year, though, it has faced perhaps its biggest challenge of all.
WORKING IT OUT
People Like Us was born out of frustration. By 2016 the Carlsen brothers had spent seven years running LevAs, a provider of education and training for autistic people, but were becoming disillusioned with their inability to have a long-term impact. “We had been getting more and more frustrated because when our youngsters leave [LeVas], nothing happens,” Jesper Carlsen told me in the spring of 2017. “It’s impossible for them to find a job.”
Brewing seemed to offer an opportunity to change that story. As Lars Carlsen put it at the time, given that pretty much every job in a brewery can be done by an autistic person, setting up such a business would serve as a clear case study. Right from the start, placing autistic talent in other businesses was a big part of the plan.
I had my doubts in the beginning. Was it going to be a petting zoo for autists, where everybody who worked with us would do it to get PR benefit? I was worried that people would buy our beers as a charity act. It took me two years to see that wasn’t going to happen.
— Rune Lindgreen, People Like Us
Mikkel Borg Bjergsø, founder and owner of Mikkeller, was also involved during the brewery’s early phase. Approached in the hope that he might brew a promotional beer, he convinced the Carlsen brothers to think bigger, and to launch a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for a brewery in early 2017. Although that fell significantly short of its goal ($21,965 was raised out of a target of $150,000), Bjergsø remained a key source of support and assistance, taking to the stage at the Social Revolution By Beer festival to exhort Danish companies to do more.
“There is no financial support, but People Like Us has been able to use staff at Mikkeller HQ, their network, know-how, social media, and much more,” says Lars Carlsen.
I first came across People Like Us in 2017. A year before, my son Fraser was diagnosed as autistic and, among many other revelations, I was becoming cognizant of the difficulties faced by autistic people in the workplace. People Like Us, and its clarity of vision, hit me like a hammer. In an act best filed under “enlightened self-interest,” I pitched and then wrote a story for the Guardian, published in April 2017, about People Like Us, which helped the brewery move beyond the disappointment of the crowdfunder, the founders said.
I interviewed Rune Lindgreen, the brewery’s recipe developer and brewer, for that story. Although Bjergsø designed the recipes for the brewery’s core beers, collaborations are the responsibility of Lindgreen, who has been with People Like Us since its early days. Lindgreen left his previous job at Copenhagen’s Bryggeriet Djævlebryg when he was diagnosed as autistic in his late 20s (he is now 42), and found out about People Like Us through an old brewing contact and friend, Lars Buch, at the time the company’s project manager.
“I had my doubts in the beginning,” Lindgreen says now. “Was it going to be a petting zoo for autists, where everybody who worked with us would do it to get PR benefit? I was worried that people would buy our beers as a charity act. It took me two years to see that wasn’t going to happen.”
A TASTE OF SUCCESS
His worries assuaged, Lindgreen stayed on, and says he’s flourished in the role. “I’ve always been developing recipes for People Like Us, but most have not been our main beers,” he says. “I feared that I was being used as a token, a poster child for autism. But now I’ve done 25 collabs at least, and with 20 of them I’ve made half of the recipe. I’ve gained a lot of confidence in doing that.”
Before the pandemic, Lindgreen spent much of his work time traveling to take part in brew days around Europe, a process that he believes has helped him grow as a brewer. There have been fewer opportunities in the past 12 months, but he’s still worked virtually on a number of beers. One was the recently released Brut Pilsner, made with Jens Magnus Eiken and Christian Andersen, authors of the Danish book The Naked Beer (Den nøgne øl), after they were guests on a People Like Us online tasting.
“It’s daunting getting hooked up with [breweries like] Magic Rock, or Northern Monk [both in the U.K.],” Lindgreen says. “I don’t have the same credentials. I was happy taking the underdog role—now I’m more confident, saying, ‘Let’s try this.’ In the beginning I feared that I was going to be replaced at some point, but I don’t feel that anymore.”
Lindgreen says that the financial empowerment that has come from working at the brewery, the reality of making a living from his work, has been deeply satisfying. “There’s a huge benefit from working, psychologically. It’s about having some worth, having someone care that you are there. When I walk into our bar, and I see 10 cans that I’ve been a part of, that makes me really happy. I’m proud people like the product, I’m proud I’m doing sensible things in the real world that are making money.”
Lindgreen’s role has expanded during the pandemic. He and Lars Carlsen began hosting Facebook beer tastings shortly after lockdown began. Their popularity has grown so quickly that they are now central to the brewery’s business plan. Hosting corporate tastings—a recent event was broadcast to 500 employees at a Danish company, for example—is now a significant part of Lindgreen’s job.
“One day before Easter I had five tastings, two [of them] half an hour apart,” he says. “That was a little too much, maybe. It is actually pretty hard work. The approach we take, which is why I think people like them, is we are always kind of just hitting the floor, seeing whatever happens. It’s spontaneous [but] it can be a challenge to keep it fresh.”
He clearly enjoys them, to the extent that the return of in-person tastings is not as appealing a prospect. “When you have people in the bar, it gets much more fragmented. Some people just want to drink beer and talk to their friends,” he says. “I really hope that they’re going to continue doing these online tastings. And I think we will actually, because there are many benefits.”
MILITARY SERVICE
People Like Us’ mission now also encompasses veterans, who can face difficulties upon their return to civil society. Jon Nielsen, the brewery’s logistics manager, was injured while serving with the Danish army in Afghanistan in 2009, and struggled to find his way in the job market afterwards.
He first encountered People Like Us in 2018, when it launched a project to help veterans that culminated in the beer Vet 364. Nielsen, who was looking for a way to get into volunteering, responded to an appeal for veterans to head up the campaign. “I wanted to be part of that project because I like beer and it sounded interesting,” Nielsen says. “It wasn’t really like this was a job opportunity, but more like this could be a volunteering [opportunity]. And then, when I actually heard how [People Like Us] work and their mission, it was like, ‘Okay, this is pretty cool.’”
The greatest challenge is in the workplace. You have to fit into this box. Sometimes veterans just hit the wall and then they break. They might need to say, ‘I had a bad day and I can’t come to work.’ At People Like Us, we say it’s OK. We understand that war veterans or people with PTSD can have these issues. So our response is: ‘That’s fine. Just come back whenever you’re good again.’
— Jon Nielsen, People Like Us
The name of the beer, 364, refers to September 5, a commemoration day for soldiers in Denmark, and the fact that their problems—with PTSD, in particular—are forgotten for the other 364 days of the year.
“The greatest challenge is in the workplace,” says Nielsen. “You have to fit into this box. Sometimes veterans just hit the wall and then they break. They might need to say, ‘I had a bad day and I can’t come to work.’ At People Like Us, we say it’s OK. We understand that war veterans or people with PTSD can have these issues. So our response is: ‘That’s fine. Just come back whenever you’re good again.’”
That flexibility is what Nielsen most enjoys about his role at People Like Us. “It binds us better together,” he says. “We form a stronger bond thanks to this acceptance. We can just be more the way we are instead of having to pretend to be someone else or pretend to feel okay. We don’t have to hide and feel like shit if we have a shit day.”
THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
The pandemic has tested breweries around the world. In the U.S., small and independent breweries declined in number by more than 7% in 2020, according to figures from the Brewers Association. The picture is unclear elsewhere, but unlikely to be any more positive.
For cause-based breweries, where providing work is the point, the pandemic has hit particularly hard. People Like Us was founded to get autistic adults into the workplace, to demonstrate what they can achieve and to build self-confidence and self-worth; the pandemic meant many were forced to sit at home. It also meant other businesses—who had benefited from talent nurtured by People Like Us—were less likely to be able to take on more workers, or to even begin the process.
The brewery’s problems began before its festival started last March. On the first Friday of the two-day event, the Danish government announced that gatherings of more than 1,000 people were to be banned. A week later, the country went into lockdown. The rest of Europe soon followed, some countries more belatedly than others. Denmark’s speed was rewarded when it emerged a month later, blinking into a harsher daylight.
But things got worse for People Like Us before they got better. By June, the number of people employed in full- and part-time roles at the brewery had fallen to 42. Outsourcing talent to other companies, a huge part of the brewery’s raison d’etre, was on hold. Alberte Jannicke, People Like Us’ popular, energetic head of communications, was let go as the business’s once-international focus narrowed to Denmark. A brewery that had always challenged itself, that had always sought to run rather than walk, was now facing its biggest hurdle.
“We were struggling just to have enough money to pay salaries,” says Carlsen. “From June to November, we were struggling. It was quite horrible.”
They weren’t alone. Other cause-based breweries were facing difficulties too, like Browar Spółdzielczy, in Puck, a town of around 11,000 people on Poland’s Baltic coast. Founded in 2014 by Agnieszka Dejna, chairperson of the town’s DALBA social cooperative, and occupational therapist Janusz Golisowicz, it employs around 30 adults with learning disabilities. It had been an unqualified success: By early 2020, production had expanded from 4,000 to 18,000 liters (roughly 150 barrels) a month, and three pubs had opened across Poland. Lots of jobs had been created.
I don’t know how we are going to survive. I hope that COVID-19 is going to end, but to be honest, I don’t know when—but I know that we are not going to lose the brand. I know that we are going to brew.
— Agnieszka Dejna, Browar Spółdzielczy
2020 was set to be a huge year for Browar Spółdzielczy, which was among those invited to serve beer at People Like Us’ festival, but then the pandemic arrived. Plans for a new brewery were canceled after a bank loan fell through. Even worse, the closure of Polish pubs meant the brewery lost its main route to market, leaving Dejna and her team with an unenviable choice.
“In Poland, it’s illegal to sell beer by post,” she says. “We had to decide what we were going to do, and we decided that we are going to sell [by post]. We know it’s illegal, but it was the only thing which would allow us to keep people employed. We don’t want to just give up.” So they didn’t—although monthly production has fallen to “2,000 or 3,000 liters [17-25 BBLs].”
Dejna and her team can take some comfort in the impact they’ve had. When they began, she says, people couldn’t believe that they weren’t going to hire a brewer to oversee the process. “For many people, it was really hard to understand how disabled people were going to be able to do it,” she says.
Half a decade on, attitudes have shifted—and when they haven’t, Browar Spółdzielczy has an army of supporters at its back. “In January this year, someone was abusive in the comments on a Facebook post: ‘Who is going to drink that shit? Look at them, they look horrible,’ and so on and so on,” she says.
“So I recorded a film, saying what I think, and posted it on Facebook. And people started commenting, it was amazing [the post now has 1,000 likes and over 100 comments]. In 24 hours, we sold 1,000 boxes of beer, which people ordered to show those stupid morons that they disagree. We have a lot of people who care about us.”
The future remains difficult; just 10 people are currently employed at the brewery. Uncertainty reigns. “I don’t know how we are going to survive,” she says. “I hope that COVID-19 is going to end, but to be honest, I don’t know when—but I know that we are not going to lose the brand. I know that we are going to brew.”
A similar resilience can be found at Ignition Brewery, based in Sydenham, South London, which employs seven people with learning disabilities. The pandemic meant sales dropped 20% year-on-year, but a pivot to takeaway and delivery, allied to grants and a fresh injection of cash from old investors, saw the brewery through the worst.
“We had that ability to deploy different routes. We’ve been very lucky,” founder Nick O’Shea says. “And the community has been brilliant. People helped us deliver leaflets, they’ve delivered beer for us, they’ve asked after the team the whole time. They’ve come and bought beer in the middle of a COVID testing center, which is what we are now—the taproom is a COVID testing center. We’ve realized that we are a bigger part of the community than we thought.”
Not only has Ignition survived, but it’s about to multiply. O’Shea says he’s in touch with groups in Bristol, Liverpool, and Essex who are aiming to found similar breweries. He could be forgiven for patting himself on the back, but he knows that the project’s fundamental aim—to provide jobs for those locked out of the conventional system—is not currently being fulfilled.
“The pandemic has reduced our ability to provide jobs,” O’Shea says. “Our people are not working. They’re being paid, but they’re not working. And that’s so difficult, and there’s nothing we can do about that. If we were just a standard business, we might be thinking, ‘Do we pivot? Do we do this, do that?’ There’s a lot of work in running the taproom, but actually, it’s such an important factor in how we provide work that you have to say, ‘Well, no, we’ll open the bloody taproom.’ The question for us is, how do we get back to that safely in a world where this kind of thing may not be possible?”
GREAT DANES
If the past year has seen unprecedented hardship and difficulty for these businesses, the promise of brighter days is beginning to dawn. December marked a turning point for People Like Us, courtesy of a bank loan. Since then, good news has flowed: A deal with Coop, Denmark’s biggest supermarket chain; the return of outsourcing (Voi, a manufacturer of electric scooters, recently got in touch); a bottle-shop collaboration with Mikkeller, the Social Beer Shop, in Copenhagen’s Vesterbro neighborhood; the brewery’s best-ever month in terms of sales in March. The re-opening of Danish hospitality in April and May took the number of people employed up to around 45, the vast majority of them with a diagnosis.
“This group of people … are strong as hell, and I think the reason why they are strong, it’s because they have been struggling all their lives,” says Carlsen. “So, there’s not so much new in this way of living. It’s just a new way to manage problems. We are just getting on with it.”
This expectation—that there will always be difficulties to navigate, so they must be navigated—has served People Like Us well during the pandemic. They proved far quicker to act, and more nimble in what they did, than many other Danish breweries. “Acting so quickly on the online part was a game-changer,” says Lindgreen. “I’ve watched a lot of other tastings, and I get this feeling that it’s about sales, which is obviously important, but from an entertainment perspective, a two-hour-long commercial is not what you want to pay for. I believe we have authenticity.”
They’re now building on the breakthrough that 2020’s festival provided in their domestic market. “It has been quite difficult to get the story out, to get the message out,” Carlsen told me in the summer. “People in Denmark think it is a socially progressive place but for us—it’s not. We are struggling for our lives, we are struggling to have a place in society. Danes think that [because] we have the welfare system, and we are paying our taxes—50, 60% of our income—then the government has to take care of it! But it’s starting to change. We were on national TV two times the week of the festival, and there have been [Danish] newspaper articles. That’s new.”
This year he had hoped to open a new school, Stjerneskolen, alongside Mikkel and his partner Pernille Pang. It is designed to cater to all children, in an environment free of the one-size-fits-all approach that Carlsen sees in the Danish system. (“We believe that everyone is born equal, but with different abilities and potentials, and that we can all learn from each other’s differences, challenges and ways of acting,” the school’s website puts it.) COVID-19 means the opening has been pushed back to September 2022.
The future may be uncertain, but for People Like Us it always has been. The pandemic wasn’t its first challenge, and it probably won’t be the last. But the brewery continues to look ahead. A second festival is planned for 2022, this time spread across seven or eight sites in Copenhagen because, as Carlsen puts it, “We do not trust the corona[virus].”
His belief is undimmed. “When we started, I couldn’t say out loud what I wanted to happen because people would say I was crazy,” he told me at the festival in March 2020. “But I have met a lot of people during the 20 years I was a teacher and I knew they had huge potential. I have met so many children and young people, I couldn’t understand why there was such a problem … but the only thing we are thinking [in society] is, ‘How are you doing in school, how is your maths, how is your Danish,’ and so on.
“But here they are. A lot of potential and talent is flowering.” And, even after a year like no other, it still is.
We hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving, now its time for some Releases and discounts for the busy shopping (online) weekend! Starting NOW we are offering 30% off when you spend $30 or more through our online store when ordering for pickup in the taproom, curbside or shipping (can’t ship alcohol).
Combine the water, honey, yeast nutrient, and yeast energizer in a sanitized fermenter. Optional: sanitize must (i.e. sulfite) to reduce the possibility of contamination.
Add the yeast starter to the mixture when it is 67-70° F (16-21° C). Stir vigorously to oxygenate. Ferment completely, then rack to secondary fermenter, and age until clear.
Add 1 ounce of oak chips for 4-7 days before bottling, if desired. Bottle when ready!
These are the words, images, and beers that inspired the GBH Collective this week. Drinking alone just got better, because now you’re drinking with all of us.
CLAIRE BULLEN
READ.// “It still means something to be from Marseille. There is a fierce identity and an almost vicious pride to contend with; an immediacy shared by those who live there, their identity soaked in a history of rebellion and frustration. Authority is always questioned and outsiders closely scrutinized. Marseille is nowhere to hide.” Substack food publication Vittles is vital reading every week, but last Monday’s piece—part of Vittles’ new “season four,” dedicated to hyper-regionalism—was particularly beguiling. Pulled from Ingrédient, the small Marseille community zine by Frank L’Opez, it captures the many voices and overlapping traditions found in the city’s Noailles neighborhood.
LOOK.// Lucy Dacus has dropped several new songs recently, in advance of her third album’s release on June 25, and “VBS” might be my favorite of the bunch. The song, about a summer spent at vacation bible school, is a mix of humor, coming-of-age poignancy, and a loss of innocence. It’s gorgeous, as is its dreamily animated music video.
DRINK.// Kutna Hora Gold 12 Czech Pilsner London’s first dedicated Czech beer bar, Pivo, just opened last week, and my god—what a delight. I had visited the Czech Republic some six months before the pandemic began, and this felt uncannily like being back in Central Europe. Of all the beers I tried, Kutna Hora’s Gold 12, which I’d been lucky enough to first sample at the brewery, was my favorite. So richly bready, so much like toasted brioche with a swipe of butter and drizzle of honey—and now I can get it whenever I like.
JAMAAL LEMON
READ.// “If Americans eat less meat, but better meat, we can help keep smaller, local farms in business and weed out the mega-operations that are fraught with ethical and environmental concerns.” For a few years now, my wife and I have been making conscious efforts to eat locally sourced food only. I have quite a few vegan friends who always fail at their attempts to convert me. Not just because I’m a lover of meat (and hunting), but mostly because I see the benefit in supporting local farms who practice sustainability methods that benefit the environment. This Washington Post story really spoke to that perspective.
LOOK.// This is no secret—I’m a Dave Chappelle stan. He’s one of the few people whose words I hang onto through every syllable, as I did while listening to this podcast episode. His storytelling is like none other, and I always get more octane for my perspective.
DRINK.// Hysteria Brewing Company’s Baltimore Chop Milkshake IPA I’m the first to roll my eyes when I hear folk express their love for Milkshake IPAs. But hot damnit—this beer makes me backtrack on my response to the style.
KATE BERNOT
READ.// “Cold cases invite speculation. We’re wired to seek order in the universe, to string together a series of facts into a narrative that makes sense to us.” This Outside Magazine longread—about the only Park Service ranger ever to go missing and never be found—is one of those stories that you’ll turn over and over in your head like a pebble. It’s a true mystery of the unsolved sort, the kind that reminds us that, no matter how much we want clues and tidbits to fit together, some truths will always remain beyond our power to lock together.
LOOK.// Two years ago, one of the world’s most compelling dance companies, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, commissioned Donald Byrd’s “Greenwood,” which explores the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre through dance. This year, the company is streaming “The Story of Greenwood,” which pieces together rehearsal footage, performance video, and documentary clips to present a behind-the-scenes look at how this piece of art came together. It’s a powerful testament to how the past and present are in constant dialogue, and how art can mediate that dialogue. (This video is available to watch on YouTube until Tuesday, June 8 at 7 p.m. EDT.)
DRINK.// Falling Knife Brewing Co.’s Royal Squabble Kölsch I’m grateful to the friend who saw Falling Knife’s Royal Squabble, a gin-barrel-aged Kölsch with Meyer lemon, and knew it would be up my alley. It’s soft, botanical, and elegant, but still quenching and sunny—a lovely summer beer to pore over, or just to drink in the backyard on the hottest day of the month.
The Brewers Association is leading a charge on promoting all the small breweries that bring you craft beer to your communities. Celebrate the craft by joining us throughout the weekend but especially on November 29, 2020 as we release some archives for your taste bud enjoyment.
Coffee has earned its place as one of the more widely-accepted adjuncts used in beer recipes. We’ve compiled 11 recipes that explore the ways to incorporate coffee into your next homebrew recipe.
Jael Skeffington was making chocolate truffles in her kitchen in Minneapolis over a decade ago when she had a moment of perfect clarity. By her own admission, Skeffington isn’t someone who looks at life through a spiritual lens, but it’s hard not to invoke mystical language in describing what happened to her that day, as she engaged in the meditative physical ritual of rolling truffles, passing them from hand to hand.
“I was in this zone and rhythm and I felt my hands begin to tingle. I opened my fingers and looked at them and said, ‘Chocolate is the thing that will make me happy.’”
Shortly after that realization, Skeffington and her then husband Dan Rattigan relocated to Asheville, North Carolina, and founded French Broad Chocolates, named for the river that wends its way through this city on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains. French Broad Chocolates is a bean-to-bar chocolate company making bars, bon bons, and other chocolate confections using ethically sourced cacao exclusively.
But what is bean-to-bar chocolate, what does it mean that it’s ethically sourced, and what the hell does this have to do with beer? The answer to the first two questions peels back the wrapper on the harsh realities of the industry that are often invisible to consumers, while the answer to the third pops the tab on a growing segment of the craft beer world that is just beginning to be explored.
THE REALITIES OF CACAO
Chocolate is a familiar delight in the Western world. This childhood treat morphs seamlessly into an adult indulgence full of nostalgia, sometimes transporting us back to younger, more carefree moments, sometimes comforting us after hard days and sometimes helping us celebrate great ones. It is given in apology and in appreciation, in flirtation and in friendship. As ubiquitous as chocolate is, though, most people have no idea how it’s made, what it’s made from, and how it gets from its place of origin to grocery store shelves. Those details are often nowhere near as sweet and innocent as our associations with chocolate would have us believe.
“The most important thing is understanding that chocolate comes from a tropical fruit that is the livelihood of millions of families around the world,” says Emily Stone, founder and CEO of Uncommon Cacao. She founded the company in 2010 as an intermediary between cacao farmers and the growing number of craft or bean-to-bar chocolate makers. Most of the world’s cacao at that time was being grown as a homogeneous commodity crop for a handful of multinational corporations. It wasn’t of the quality craft makers needed, and, most importantly, it was destroying the lives of a whole lot of people in the Global South.
“There’s no problem with the fact that these companies are mega-billion-dollar corporations. That’s capitalism. That’s how money works,” explains Mackenzie Rivers, a bean-to-bar chocolate maker who ran Map Chocolate for years before launching Spoon & Pod, a company supplying ethical cacao products to bakers. “The problem is they’re mega-billion-dollar corporations that are paying cacao producers pennies, and the cacao producers live in the worst forms of poverty that exist on the planet.”
Beyond poverty, the chocolate industry hides another insidious truth: Much of the world’s cacao is harvested and processed by child slaves and other exploited labor. Statistics are hard to track, but most experts estimate over 70% of the world’s cacao has labor abuses in its supply chain.
“On the one hand, there’s a philosophy of slavery where they’re just not going to pay the farmers any money,” explains Rivers. “And then there is the literal slavery. It’s well-documented by the U.S. government and other large entities. There’s been a lot of legislation that has tried to prohibit cacao being brought to the U.S. that has used child slave labor, children stolen and forced into slavery.”
There is currently a case before the U.S. Supreme Court evaluating the complicity of major chocolate corporations in child exploitation, but up until now, no measure has succeeded in shaking up the status quo. The big chocolate producers continue to promise change, and continue to extend their deadlines for accomplishing it.
THE ORIGIN OF CRAFT
The bean-to-bar movement sprang up in the early aughts to both make better chocolate—chocolate that would be crafted all the way from dried cocoa beans to finished bars and confections (hence “bean-to-bar”)—and to make it with ethical, traceable cacao. After launching in 2010, Uncommon Cacao is now the single largest broker for this cacao, working with around half of the world’s 500 or so bean-to-bar makers. Many makers also forge relationships directly with farmers and co-ops in the cacao belt (a region spanning the globe between 20 degrees north and south of the equator) to source their cacao.
Skeffington at French Broad does both for her single-origin bars (which highlight the terroir of particular growing regions) and inclusion bars (which use additional ingredients for flavor, such as fruits or spices). You can think of the difference between these categories as analogous to classic beer styles and more experimental styles like adjunct Stouts, fruited Sours, or spiced beers. And that similarity is where bean-to-bar chocolate becomes relevant to craft brewers and fans, particularly as cacao itself is being used in more and more beers.
My husband is a homebrewer, and when we first started looking at breweries at Ethereal, I was spending a lot of time in homebrewing stores. I picked up some cocoa nibs from the shelf and compared them to what I knew we were making, and I knew there was a huge difference. We started talking about how we can get these into brewers’ hands.
— Marisa Allen, Ethereal Confections
While cacao and chocolate have been used in beers as far back as the 1980s (though Mesoamerican peoples were making a form of beer from cacao thousands of years ago), the use of these ingredients has rapidly increased in recent years with the emergence of dessert or “Pastry” Stouts and related styles. While chocolate flavors play a big role in these beers, brewers still tend to think of chocolate as a single flavor concept and order the cheapest or most available cacao they can find, which often isn’t of the best quality.
Marisa Allen is the sales manager for Ethereal Confections, a bean-to-bar chocolate maker and chocolatier (a chocolate maker makes chocolate, a chocolatier makes things with chocolate) in Woodstock, Illinois, on the northwest side of Chicago. Ethereal Confections now provides cacao to over 150 craft breweries, and Allen recognized the market opportunity after seeing the poor attention being given to cacao quality in homebrewing.
“My husband is a homebrewer, and when we first started looking at breweries at Ethereal, I was spending a lot of time in homebrewing stores,” she explains. “I picked up some cocoa nibs from the shelf and compared them to what I knew we were making, and I knew there was a huge difference. We started talking about how we can get these into brewers’ hands.”
“Brewers are buying from a distributor or a brew supply house, and maybe they care about where their hops come from but not where the cacao comes from,” says Ethereal co-founder Michael Ervin. “I would say there’s a little bit of fear in working with cacao for brewers, because not everyone knows a lot about it. Part of our job is to educate people about where it comes from and what the distinctions in cacao actually mean.”
BEER AND CHOCOLATE
French Broad’s chocolate factory sits in South Slope, a region of Asheville that has blossomed with craft breweries in recent years. Beer has been Skeffington’s beverage of choice since her days drinking New Glarus in college in Wisconsin back in the mid-90s. She has built relationships with most of the breweries in Asheville, and provides cacao nibs and other chocolate ingredients for numerous brewers around Beer City USA. Her most notable ongoing creative partnership is with Burial Beer Co.
Burial seems to do just about every style of beer well, but it’s best known for its luscious Hazy IPAs and complex dessert beers. The latter have proven a fertile ground for collaboration with French Broad, and have led to close friendship between Skeffington and Burial co-founders Jess and Doug Reiser (along with third founder Tim Gormley). Their back-and-forth creative exchange finds a host of cacao products being used in Burial’s beers—well beyond the typical cacao nibs—and has even seen French Broad produce bon bon bars infused with Burial’s beer (bon bons are filled chocolates, and French Broad occasionally releases longer versions in bar form).
The most common cacao products Burial gets from its neighbors are nibs, husks (the brittle shell around a cocoa bean), and fines, a more powder-like by-product of the chocolate-making process that is a combination of husks and nibs. The type of beer and the desired chocolate character determine which product Burial uses.
“We do a lot of decadent Stouts, so we choose something like nibs or fines for those, because you’re going to get a more rich, prominent flavor,” says Alia Midoun, head brewer at Burial’s Forestry Camp location. “The husks we often use for our more nuanced beers, like sours. That would be an example where we wouldn’t want to overdo it.”
Midoun is excited about the idea of making a series of lighter beers that highlight the nuances of different cacao origins, similar to making a series of single-hop IPAs. “Fruit and chocolate always goes together, so experimenting with IPA and just brushing with that cocoa flavor would be really cool,” she says. “These days IPAs are a lot richer than [they used to be], so we’d want to tone that down a bit so you could still showcase the cacao flavors.”
Burial has even experimented with a cacao product previously assumed to be unusable in beer: cocoa butter. The pressed fat of the cocoa bean can be richly aromatic, but fats and oils are usually thought to be anathema to the brewing process because of their detrimental effects on beer foam.
“It’s pure fat, but it’s a highly aromatic fat, sort of like coconut oil, so we wanted to experiment with it,” says Doug Reiser. While some of these attempts have failed, they’ve had success with chilling the butter and cutting it into finger-sized blocks and then resting the beer on it. Reiser says this extracts the aromatic surfaces oils without the deeper fats, and allows them to replicate the flavors of white chocolate, which is made with cocoa butter rather than cocoa bean solids.
KNOWLEDGE NEEDED
Few brewers work as extensively with cacao as the Burial team does, but the increasing popularity of dessert Stouts has seen a proliferation of chocolate-flavored beers hitting the market, and a recent study funded by several large breweries projects this trend will continue for years to come. While plenty of these beers are delicious, many of the brewers behind them—and the drinkers craving them—still see chocolate as a single, abstract flavor, rather than the product of a tropical fruit grown around the world in varying microclimates, with all the diversity and nuance springing from such variety.
Chocolate is very much like coffee. We grew up with it. It surrounds us and feels accessible. But when you really sit down and think about where it comes from, it’s much more than that.
— Jess Reiser, Burial Beer Co.
“Chocolate is very much like coffee,” says Jess Reiser. “We grew up with it. It surrounds us and feels accessible. But when you really sit down and think about where it comes from, it’s much more than that.”
Stone at Uncommon Cacao agrees, but sees the bean-to-bar chocolate industry as a whole as several years behind its craft siblings in public awareness.
“The craft chocolate movement is still early. If you compare it to craft beer or third-wave coffee, we’re still pretty immature as an industry, both in consumer knowledge that we even exist, and our reach into more mainstream channels,” she explains.
The growing pains and questions facing this industry—built by scrappy, DIY makers pushing back against massive corporations—will be uncomfortably familiar to anyone aware of the evolution of craft beer since its early days. How do you define “craft”? How big is too big for a “small” maker? How do you explain your varieties of style to consumers who are used to your category being one thing? How do you celebrate quality without being a snob and turning away the curious? How do you defend significantly higher prices? How do you maintain positivity when ill-qualified makers are putting out subpar products to capitalize on the segment’s growth?
As in any small but growing industry full of proud and talented artisans, there is often more turmoil and tension beneath the Instagrammable surface than meets the eye, with adherents defending their particular positions on the above questions. Perhaps the biggest challenge facing bean-to-bar chocolate, however, is its ongoing invisibility, and the invisibility of the ethical problems that led to its genesis. And this is especially true of chocolate’s use in craft beer. It is common for beers brewed with chocolate or cacao to say only those two words on the can or bottle and nothing more. Mention is rarely made of origin, source, or format of the cacao. No nod is given to sensory diversity. “Chocolate” is accepted as a single, monolithic flavor concept.
Stone mentioned craft chocolate is well behind third-wave coffee, and cacao’s erasure within brewing is a perfect example. It would be rare at this point for a brewer not to include the name of the roaster they partnered with to source beans for a coffee beer. Coffee is no longer just coffee. It’s Ethiopia washed process, or Guatemala Huehuetenango, or China Yunnan honey process. Most of the time though, cacao is still just cacao.
That’s beginning to change however, as more craft brewers work with bean-to-bar chocolate makers like French Broad to source their cacao. Parallel to that growth is another single source of cacao that complicates this relationship of beer to origin one step further.
A LIQUID SOLUTION
Cholaca was founded in Boulder, Colorado, in 2012 by Ira Leibtag. The company’s biggest focus has been its eponymous liquid product of pure cacao emulsified in water. Leibtag initially marketed the product to coffee shops for use in mocha drinks and still finds success in that field, but the business blossomed around 2016 when brewer Tim Matthews asked to use the product in a chocolate beer at Oskar Blues Brewery. It didn’t take long for breweries to make up close to 80% of Cholaca’s business. The product makes cleaning tanks much easier than the sludge left behind by nibs.
Leibtag has established his own cacao supply chain in South America, building exclusive relationships with farms in Colombia and Ecuador. He is passionate about both paying his farmers well above the market rate for cacao and establishing regenerative agriculture guidelines for the cacao he buys (there are ecological concerns around cacao cultivation that are beyond the scope of this article). And he’s buying a lot of it.
This volume allows for blending and consistency, meaning brewers can count on Cholaca to provide a consistent flavor profile, a promise single-origin nibs can’t offer with their seasonal variances. This makes the product a desirable option for larger brewers or breweries looking to use chocolate in a core beer. It does, however, iron out some of the nuances that make single-origin cacao intriguing in the first place.
Jason Pellett of Orpheus Brewing in Atlanta uses both. For quirkier special-release beers, he uses single-origin nibs. For packaged beers that will end up in can packs, he uses Cholaca.
“We find some beers [using nibs] are hard to scale up to full production,” he says. “It ends up being a huge mess. The nibs are more nuanced, but dealing with all that sludge is a mess.”
The reduced mess, as well as consistency, have established Cholaca as the industry standard for larger brewers. “Those breweries are starting to scale their flavored beers,” explains Leibtag. “When you’re going to make thousands of barrels using nibs, they know the problem with it. They’re looking at Cholaca and seeing the benefit, from Molson to Oskar Blues to Great Divide.”
Leibtag is something of an eccentric entrepreneur-type, a mad scientist with a keen knack for business. He’s not shy in explaining why he thinks his larger-volume model is doing more to improve the ethical problems in global cacao than boutique, mom-and-pop bean-to-bar chocolate makers.
“If I’m a bean-to-bar guy who travels down to South America once a year and buys a pallet from this person and 100 lbs. from this person, yeah, that’s great, you’re creating awareness and feeding your ego, but how much difference are you actually making to those people?” he asks. “We’re going down there and saying, ‘As much as you can produce, we’ll buy it all.’”
Bean-to-bar makers see their efforts as the snowflakes that combine into an avalanche, but Skeffington acknowledges that the desire to do more good is a factor in wanting to grow as a company and an industry.
“It motivates us to grow to know that that means we can buy more cacao that is more supportive of a healthier supply chain,” says Skeffington. “If we buy one bag of cacao, we’re not making a big difference. If we buy several containers of cacao in a year, we’re making a much bigger financial impact.”
HUSKS AND FOEDERS
Cholaca’s classically chocolatey flavor is a great option for large-batch Stouts, but many brewers still opt for cacao from bean-to-bar makers for more esoteric beers. In New Belgium Brewing’s storied foeder room in Fort Collins, Colorado, Lauren Woods Limbach has brewed several high-concept wood-aged Sours with cacao, and has partnered with bean-to-bar makers to get the sourcing details right.
Limbach is known for her prowess in blending wood-aged Sour Ales, and has used Felix (New Belgium’s single-foeder Golden Sour Ale) and La Folie (its Brown Sour Ale) as the foundations for several cacao-infused beers. Supporting Midoun’s explanation at Burial, Limbach has found cacao husks to be best for these complex Sour Ales, such as the recently released Fernandito, a La Folie-based beer aged in Leopold Bros. fernet and bourbon barrels (there is a direct relationship between the flavor character of an origin’s cacao nibs and its husks, even if they aren’t identical). Limbach began working with husks several years ago at the recommendation of Toby Gadd at neighboring Nuance Chocolate, a frequent collaborator.
If you’re going to say you’re using this single origin and then put it into a sour beer, the nuances aren’t there anymore [after fermentation]. With Venezuela, I love the jasmine and lavender notes, and I could put that on the label and somebody’s going to totally say they get it, but it’s not there. It makes sense if you’re going to add something that detracts every nuance from that origin, why not just go with the most chocolatey cacao?
— Lauren Woods Limbach, New Belgium Brewing
“He kept expounding on how much husks he ends up with and how aromatic and luscious they are,” she recalls. “So I went over there and would taste different origins and try to think through what kind of beer they would work in.”
She explains the reasons for using husks in terms any brewer can appreciate: “Fat content. And price. They’re both happy accidents.”
The lack of fats in the husks in comparison to the nibs means head retention isn’t impacted, an important consideration for sour and mixed-fermentation beers in which the protein and dextrin structures that contribute to foam may already be diminished by the fermentation process.
“When I’m creating a sour beer, by the time it comes out of the foeder, the beer has nothing for the foam to stand on. The last thing I need to do is add another obstacle with the extraction of oil from the nibs,” she explains. “And because the husks are a by-product, the price immediately goes down. Husks are relatively cheap, so I tend to overdose with husks for a short period of time. You could never think about doing that with nibs. That would be extravagant and dumb. You have this wiggle room and luxury with husks to be like, ‘I’ll double that order.’”
That need for volume dovetails conveniently with Nuance’s abundance of husks from an origin known for its straight-ahead chocolatey flavor: Ghana, in West Africa. Nuance uses Ghana for most of its bon bons and other confections because it provides a recognizable, comforting chocolate backdrop for other flavors without competing for attention.
“As luck would have it, what we have the most of is what brewers want most,” says Gadd. “The smaller brewers I’m pushing more to use different origins and be more experimental. New Belgium is usually looking more for a traditional chocolate, roasted flavor. It’s a lucky coincidence.”
Limbach points out that even if she wanted to add more nuanced cacao flavors to her beer, there might not be much point to doing so in her sour, mixed-fermentation environment.
“You put a beer into a foeder, and it just rips and tears everything apart. Anything that’s flavor is food,” she explains. “If you’re going to say you’re using this single origin and then put it into a sour beer, the nuances aren’t there anymore [after fermentation]. With Venezuela, I love the jasmine and lavender notes, and I could put that on the label and somebody’s going to totally say they get it, but it’s not there. It makes sense if you’re going to add something that detracts every nuance from that origin, why not just go with the most chocolatey cacao?”
Since establishing its Asheville location in 2016, New Belgium has also partnered with Raleigh, North Carolina bean-to-bar chocolate maker Videri Chocolate Factory. In 2020, Limbach worked with Videri on Exquisite Extraction, another La Folie-based Dark Sour that also utilized coffee from Raleigh’s Black & White Coffee Roasters. For this beer, Videri co-founder Sam Ratto suggested Limbach try a blend of nibs and husks he’s been fine-tuning specifically for brewers.
“I’ve been working to create this product called Brewer’s Bullion, which is basically a tea product produced from the cacao winnowing process that is 90% powdered nibs and 10% husks,” explains Ratto. The product is very similar to the “fines” French Broad offers to Burial. “The finer the nibs, the more surface area for extraction there is. Brewer’s Nibs is 97% nibs and 3% husks, and that’s what Lauren used.”
For this beer, Ratto selected cacao from Zorzal Estate in the Dominican Republic, known for its berry-like acidity (and as an added piece of romance, it’s grown in a bird sanctuary). While acknowledging origin nuances may not always come through directly in a sour beer, Ratto believes the Zorzal cacao combined with the Black & White Roasters coffee to yield a cherry-like note to Exquisite Extraction, as well as a deep cocoa character.
“One of our main jobs is to be a chocolate lumber mill,” says Ratto. “We want to make the best lumber for somebody else to make a great dessert or beer. Lauren was able to put those puzzle pieces together and make that beer taste the way it did.”
At Orpheus in Atlanta, Pellett took a very different approach to producing a sour beer with cacao. Rather than using processed nibs or husks, he added the wet pulp and seeds of fresh cacao fruit directly to one of his Méthode Traditionelle sour beers. Artifice of Eternity is a 4.6% Lambic-inspired beer that aged on the raw fruit, and it picked up the unmistakable lychee and passionfruit flavors of cacao pulp. Pellett then dried, roasted, and winnowed the seeds, and turned half of them into chocolate bars (which bore the influence of the spontaneous fermentation), and returned the other half to Artifice of Eternity Inversion, a bourbon barrel Imperial Stout.
Exploring the flavor cycle of cacao in this way was a fascinating experiment for Pellett and a rewarding flavor exploration for invested beer and fermentation geeks, but proved difficult to explain to consumers. The release was Orpheus’ slowest-selling bottle release of 2020. When I asked him what will come next in his cacao experiments, Pellett responded wryly, “Selling this one.”
This problem points to the biggest challenge in adopting ethically sourced, single-origin cacao usage in craft beer: visibility and return. Most consumers are not aware of quality and ethics concerns in cacao or the existence of bean-to-bar chocolate, so the increased cost of purchasing cacao in this way may be difficult to justify for some brewers. Why spend more if there isn’t an immediate, tangible reward for doing so?
TELLING A BETTER STORY
As with many aspects of selling beer, consumer education is key. Craft chocolate now is where craft coffee was in the 1990s and 2000s, and where craft beer was even earlier. Those industries grew up somewhat alongside each other, so it’s now natural for a beer consumer to read the phrase “washed process” on a coffee beer label and have some understanding of what that means. Getting there with cacao will take time, but brewers can capitalize on one universal appeal with this ingredient right away: story.
I see a lot of breweries talking about ingredients and working with specific farms, and I think cacao can enter that category. I see storytelling being a way that brewers can make their products distinctive. You can sell the beer not just on the source of your core ingredients, but on the source of your cacao and other spices. That sourcing matters.
— Michael Ervin, Ethereal Confections
“Any time the words chocolate or cacao and education come together, I think about origin, and I think about people,” says Skeffington. Human beings and their stories and struggles, the land they live on and work, and the pride that goes into their craft are all relatable and appealing factors of the cacao-sourcing process that can instantly draw a customer in. And being able to feature the name and logo of a bean-to-bar chocolate maker can help as well. Ervin at Ethereal Confections sees an advantage for brewers not only in the quality of traceable, single-origin cacao, but in the opportunity it provides for marketing.
“I see a lot of breweries talking about ingredients and working with specific farms, and I think cacao can enter that category,” he says. “I see storytelling being a way that brewers can make their products distinctive. You can sell the beer not just on the source of your core ingredients, but on the source of your cacao and other spices. That sourcing matters.”
Jess Reiser at Burial agrees. “French Broad has allowed us to collaborate from a brand standpoint also,” she says. “We had to think about taking two different brands and meshing them into an image that translates across consumers. That can attract people who don’t normally drink beer or don’t know who Burial is.”
Chocolate’s childhood nostalgia often leads to the tasting experience being governed by whimsy and curiosity, and—like many fans of a niche interest—bean-to-bar chocolate lovers are excited when new people discover their area of passion. If a brewery works with a bean-to-bar maker’s cacao, that maker’s fans will likely try the brewery’s beer for the first time, which is thrilling at a moment when craft beer appears to be struggling to find new audiences.
Then there’s the benefit of using cacao that wasn’t harvested by enslaved children, and from which farming families can make a meaningful living. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but, well … I don’t have to be. The simple fact is that labor abuse and child exploitation are rampant in the cacao world. When we talk about “craft” in chocolate, we need to be honest about what’s at stake.
Words by David NilsenIllustrations by Ben Chlapek Language
Forget wine. Beer pairings are where it’s at for holiday feasts. When done correctly, beer pairs more favorably with food and can enhance the entire meal in ways wine cannot.
How can you pair wisely during the holidays? Let’s start with some general guidelines.
General Guidelines for Beer Pairings
Consider the elements of the dish and the elements of the beer.
Match intensities (in other words, fight flavor with flavor).
Find ways to match similar flavors and profiles (roasted with roasty).
Find ways to balance out elements (sour with sweet).
Remember the importance of carbonation. It does a nice job of cleaning the fat from your tongue and keeping your palate ready for the next taste.
The hops will stand strong with the spices and emphasize those flavors. The caramel maltiness balances the heat while matching the sweet pepper flavors. The carbonation and hops both fight through the fat on your tongue.
Herb-roasted turkey
Elements: bright herbs, earthy herbs, sweet and smoky caramelization, salt and fat
Beer Style: Belgian-Style Pale Ale, like Alesmith Lil’ Devil, or a Saison, like Blackberry Farm Saison or Funkwerks Saison
Hops, yeast and fruitiness play well with and cut through the bright and earthy herbs. The esters will intertwine with the herbs as well. Something with a good malt profile will sing well with the caramelization. The carbonation will take care of the fat so you can keep tasting everything.
Ham
Elements: Sweet glaze, sweet and smoky caramelization, meaty umami richness, salt and fat
The caramel and toasty malt flavors match well with a brown sugar glaze and the umami richness. The moderate bitterness helps keep that sweetness of the ham in check. The dryness, higher alcohol content and medium/high carbonation help keep your mouth ready for more.
Beef roast
Elements: roasty charred flavors, umami richness, earthiness and pepper, salt and fat
Beer Style: Robust Porter, like Deschutes Black Butte Porter
Bitter malts play well with the roasty charred flavors of the meat while the caramel sweetness comes in just in time to save the day. Hop bitterness helps curb the richness and fat, as does the carbonation. Tones of chocolate make things really interesting and play with the earthiness of the meat.
Elements: herbs, savory, bready sweetness, earthy flavors, pepper, salt and fat
Beer Style: American Amber Ale, like Bell’s Amber Ale or Anderson Valley Boont Amber Ale
Biscuit flavors go well with the bready sweet and savory elements. The malt and hops balance each other in the beer and let the stuffing’s herbs do their thing.
Sweet potato casserole
Elements: Earthy sweetness, sugary sweetness, roasted caramel, butter and fat
Beer: Vienna-Style Lager, like Great Lakes Elliot Ness or August Schell Schell’s FireBrick
A little sweetness from the lager goes well with the big sweetness of the potatoes and marshmallows. The hops make their presence known just enough to keep the sweetness and richness in check without taking away from the gluttony that is sweet potato casserole.
Elements: sticky sweetness, roasted caramel, toasted nuts, salt and fat
Beer: Coffee Stout, like Sante Fe Java Stout
You want something that’s not inherently sweet to keep your body happy, but you still want that sweetness. The bitterness of the malts and hops push against the sweetness of the pie — in a good way. The roasted malts pair with the roasted, toasted nuts. You want that higher carbonation to cut through the fat. What is better than pie and coffee?
Rich chocolate cake
Elements: chocolate, cocoa, roasty flavors, malt, sweet and fat
Beer: Imperial Stout, like Great Divide Chocolate Yeti, or Clown Shoes Chocolate Sombrero (the Ancho chiles make an awesome contrast to any rich chocolate cake)
Richness meets richness on just about every level here. The cake’s sweet chocolate and cocoa notes are tamed by the imperial stout’s bitter chocolate and cocoa notes. The fruity esters bring out the fruitiness of the chocolates. The high alcohol does a good job of balancing the sweet and fats, but is really just a great way to end the evening.
Lemon or lime barsand other citrus desserts
Elements: Intense citrus, fruity, tangy, sour, sugar and fat
Big and in-your-face desserts need a big and in-your-face beer to keep up. The overly sweet dessert is tamed by the hop bomb, which is not harsh but rather refreshing, zesty and interesting. The fruity esters and malty sweetness help keep the party going. The alcohol cuts the sweet and fat on your tongue and also helps you end the night nicely. You won’t really want to taste anything after all of these flavors.
Add nutrients to apple juice and aerate. Pitch yeast. Allow to ferment out at 65 °F. Add passionfruit pulp and allow to ferment out again at 65 °F. Rack to keg, force carbonate to 2.5 vol CO2.
