Coastal Brew Day Blog

SCOTTISH EXPORT ALE   The world of Scottish beer has been woefully underrepresented in the American Beerscape. Craft breweries will occasionally unleash a Wee Heavy into the world, but for the most part, Scottish ales have been left in Scotland.  We've been know to dabble in the Scottish arts, ourselves. Our Wee Heavy is a favorite of ours, and the famed Scotch is a well regarded treat in these parts (and we like to throw telephone poles like large weirdos, too), but we have never made a normal Scottish pub-style ale. That's essentially what the Scottish Export Ale is. A burlier cousin of the English ESP and Irish Red, this beer is a malt forward, moderately strong beer that acts stronger than it really is.  Scottish beer is generally placed into one of four categories. The lightest is called a Light (TONS of metaphor there), then comes a Heavy, the Export, and the biggest of all the Wee Heavy. Scottish Export Ales, like those from Belhaven and McEwan's, are generally reddi

WEE HEAVY Scotland is a land of rolling hills and lush valleys. Industry and poetry. Warriors and folklore. Sea monsters run with fairies and kings in the tales created untold generations ago. These days the stories of yore are spread from one generation to the next over pints at pubs, or snorts of whiskey on the moors. Beer has been made in Scotland for 5000 years. Archaeological evidence from the barbarian era suggests that fermented grains, along with mead and herbal wine, were stored in clay vessels, and consumed from carved horns.  Now, we all want to drink from a horn like a Pict warrior, but most of us will settle for a clean glass and a dim tavern. Luckily for us, our brewing standards and technologies have far surpassed the wildest dreams of those early clans, and as people started becoming more agrarian and less nomadic, taverns, brew houses, and distilleries popped up across Scotland.  Early beers were made by Alewives, women brewers who controlled much of the non-Monastic b