Coastal Brew Day Blog

BOURBON MOLASSES PORTER   This isn't the first porter to be featured in this pages. In fact it's the third. Our standard Porter and our Holiday Ale each have entries that you can take a look at for more information on Porters. What makes this version of our Porter different is the addition of both molasses and bourbon.  The first thing that makes this beer different than the other Porters that we have made is the bourbon. Now, we've aged our Belgian Stout with bourbon soaked oak chips, but this is the only beer that we make that has bourbon as a direct ingredient. When we designed this beer, we wanted the bourbon flavor to be an accent on the overall profile of the beer, not dominate it or add any further alcohol content. To do this we came up with a new solution. Instead of simply pouring a bottle of bourbon into our beer at any point, we decided to make it an addition to the secondary fermentation. Before doing this addition, we had to find a way to eliminate any alcohol ...

DUNKEL  German for "Dark," the Dunkel is another in a long line of classic German styles. It has taken numerous iterations over the centuries, so the origin point isn't really known. On its face, the Dunkel is a dark lager, easy to drink and flavorful, like a robust version of the Helles. Similar to Altbier and Doppelbock, the Dunkel has acted as a catch-all genre for darker German beers for quite some time.  One thing that differentiates it from other ancient styles is its place in history. The Dunkel was the first beer to be fully codified under the Reinheitsgebot. The Reinheitsgebot is the famous German beer purity regulation that determines what can actually qualify as beer. It includes the famous list of approved ingredients of malt, hops, water, and yeast. Yeast was added later once brewers began to understand the science of fermentation and yeast cultivation, as well as advancements in sterilization hindered the use of wild, naturally occurring yeasts during an ope...

Mutt Beer  Mutt beer. Refrigerator Beer. Whatever you want to call it, this is the beer you make when you have a bunch of spare specialty grains in random quantities and you want to clear out the cupboard. We've all done it to some degree of success or another.  These beers take any number of forms. We've made them where they turn into rich reds, roasty browns, and even unintentionally smoky porters. Because these beers are normally one-offs, you can really experiment with your grain bill to get rid of some older malts before they can get stale.  Older malts can go stale when air gets to them. If a seal on a bag or bin isn't the best, then oxygen can invade the container and your grains will become stale. One way to check is the simple bite test. Eat a grain or two and if they are still nice and crunchy, then they are good to go. If they are soft and bland, then they are shot and should be discarded.  Building your recipe around a specific ingredient highlights that ...

Belgian IPA   What is a Belgian IPA, you ask? Easy, it's essentially an American IPA fermented with a Belgian yeast strain. It's also one of the newest beers styles around. Emerging from homebrewers and craft breweries in the early 2000s, it hasn't really grown in popularity as quickly as other IPA variants, especially in Belgium where it is almost never consumed. The Belgian IPA has its roots in the old gruit beers of the Middle Ages. The herbal mixture had a many uses, from flavoring the beer to being a preservative for exported beers. The gruit tended to have an aroma and flavor that is similar to the hops that we use today, which are stronger than the varieties that were available in the 1500s. As hops became more and more popular, the gruit beers faded away, and new styles were developed. Among them was the IPA, which we have talked about before. The American IPA came along relatively recently, and even later mass experimentation has evolved the style into new and inte...

STOUT  We've talked about Stouts in these pages before, with our Coffee Stout entry a few months ago. The beer that we are brewing today is the classic Stout recipe we have been making for over a decade. Stronger and heftier than a classic Stout (think Guinness), this recipe leans towards the Extra Stout version of the beer. Loaded with dark malt and flaked barley, our Stout dark and roasty, perfect for Winter's cooler temperatures.  Ok, now onto the beer itself. This one is jet black, as all stouts should be, with heavy notes of coffee and roasted barley. That coffee flavor also injects itself into the aromatics, pairing with resin and earthy pine from the hops, along with subtle floral notes for the classic rounded Stout aroma.   The original Stouts that we know and love today were created by the Guinness company in the early 18th century. Originally a porter brewery in Dublin, Ireland, Arthur Guinness started playing around with his recipe and eventually stumbled ...