Have You Ever Wanted Your Beer to Have a Bit More Kick?

Has the polar vortex been keeping you inside? Have you been wishing for a day over 32 degrees Fahrenheit? Well maybe you just need to start  using the cold to your advantage.

Eisbocks, or ice beers, are beers that have been frozen and then thawed to make them more alcoholic than normal beer. The alcohol thaws fastest, so that is collected and the watery slush is left behind. This makes your beer super fortified. If the name didn't give it away the Germans started this practice back in the 1800's. Its something we continue today, i.e. Keystone Ice, etc. Normally this is done sometime after the fermentation process. Breweries like Brew Dog and Brewmeister in Scotland have used this process to create beers that have higher ABV than a lot of liquors. The current record holder is Sanke Venom at 67.5% alcohol.

I decided I wanted to make my own. A friend, skjellyfetti on IG, did just that, so I followed his lead.

To turn a solid craft beer into a beer liquor bomb of epic ABV, you just set it outside to freeze. It helps when the weather outside is a negative bazillion degrees (-10 most of the day I did it thanks to the snowpocolypse). Once the beer freezes, you bring it somewhere with a standard temperature and let it thaw through a funnel or something else that allows the beer to stand upright and keeps the larger chunks of ice from falling into your glass. The alcoholic part of the beer thaws fastest because it freezes at a lower temperature than water.

Let this thaw until you're left with fairly clear ice in your bottle. Then, what you have left should be a huge alcohol version of whatever you were drinking originally. Note: we haven't added any alcohol or fermented anything extra, all we've done is cut out the watery part of your beer. The part that we separated just gives us more alcohol per sip, providing something between a wine and a liquor with a ton of flavor.

 

I took a Bell's Oracle and a Founders Breakfast Stout and put them out in the Polar Vortex.

The Oracle: I left the Oracle outside for about three hours and it froze pretty solid. I looked for ice in the body of the beer not just the neck. You can see the filtration (above) of the Oracle. We were left with the liquid in the glass and the ice crystals in the bottle. As you can see it was about fifty fifty ice to booze liquid that we've extracted. The extracted beer was basically a hop syrup, almost sticky sweet and tons of hop bitterness.

 

Breakfast Stout: The Breakfast Stout took about four hours and I ended up wrapping a wet paper towel around it, as this helps facilitate the formation of ice crystals according to my scientist friend Parker. When I filtered this out, I got a deep dark chocolaty syrup. It was thick, way thicker than the DIPA. I think this is because the Breakfast Stout was a lower ABV so when we iced it, we got more booze but also more of the sticky sugary elements of the beer. This stuff was good! Wow, I wish I had ice cream to put it over because it was syrupy, sweet and very tasty with a ton of booze.

Now cheer up, this cold isn't all bad!

The Scene: Brew Dog

Brew Dog is to punk rock, what Three Floyds is to heavy metal. It's like one of those SAT questions you had to do in your prep class back in the day. Brew Dog is one of best known microbreweries in the UK and they distribute here in the US if you're lucky enough to find it in stock. They are based out of Scotland and have 13 brewpubs in the UK. It's really a neat idea that no one around here seams to have duplicated. I was shocked when Triton opened up a brewpub in Broadripple.

In Edinburgh, Brew Dog is tucked down a little side street with some great looking, artist-painted graffiti on the side of the building. Walking in reminded me a lot of Three Floyds only it was all punk rock graffiti and natural wood. The bar wasn't huge but it was very open and had plenty of seating.

The Little Lady and I picked a table and sat down. I went up and talked to the bartender (in the UK, always go up the bar when ordering at pubs). They had seven beers on tap, so I got us each a flight of four and then we filled in the last slot with one of their guest taps. I've had a few of their beers in the past, and they do a really solid job.

 

My favorite of the flight was a barrel aged weizenbock called Abstrackt AB:14 from their Abstrackt series

 

The second best brew was Hello, My Name is Mette Marit, and Imperial IPA from their Hello My Name Is series.

Along with the flights, we ordered some bottles of their Paradox. Paradox is their big Russian Imperial Stout, and they had a few different variants. We had the scotch whiskey barrel aged and the rum barrel aged versions. Paradox was good, not quite KBS good, but the different barrel aged options made them pretty fun. They were both delicious, but I was really impressed with the rum barrel aged version. It was neat to see a different barrel used to age the beer.

For food we got their cheese board. The only food options were that and some really fun pizzas. The cheeses and meats on the board were amazing! The big flavors of the artisinal cheeses really paired well with some of the great in your face beers by these guys.

Not for all the beer in England

If you follow me on Instagram or Untappd you may have noticed that the Little Lady and I just got back from London and Edinburgh in the UK. There was a lot of sightseeing and touristy stuff, but even with a busy vacation schedule we managed to squeeze in a beer or two.

First off, cask beer was everywhere! I mean everywhere! I'm pretty sure that gas stations had cask lines. Every single pub or eatery we went to had at least a few beers on cask right next to their normal taps. Secondly, they do not mess around when it comes to cider. There are tons of variety and they are excellent. The ciders are mostly poured over ice to make sure you drink them super cold. According to one of my bartenders, standard beer in the UK is served between 50 and 60 degrees depending on the style of beer. A lot of this comes from history and what they were forced to do. They also believe a proper pour should only have between 1/4 inch of head and 1/2inchof head. For the most part in the US we are looking for at least an inch.

The pubs were all beautiful with awesome looking old wood bars.On the other hand most of the beer in the pubs was just OK. Almost everything in your average pub was done with a very traditional mindset. Now, I'm not bashing traditional beers. Traditions are traditions because people liked them, but with the American craft beer movement we have gotten really used to some outside of the box flavors and different elements in the beer being turned up to eleven. There was almost none of this in the first few places we visited. Luckily I went out to Instagram and a buddy recommended the White Horse.

The White Horse reminded me of Twenty Tap in Broadripple only with a big time UK flavor. They had over a dozen beers on cask alone, and all of them were made by local microbreweries in the area. Alongside the casks they had plenty of force carbonated options and bottles. They had a great selection of Founders and Ale Smith which I thought was awesome. The bar had all of the old world charm that we found throughout the UK in the pubs and ale houses, but with some really inventive and creative beers.

Favorite beers in London were:
KeTo Reporter by Birra del Borgo Porter brewed with tobacco, crazy cool brew
Rekorderlig Ciders by Abro Bryggeri
All of the Aspall Ciders
Pilsner Urquell Tankovna (Unfiltered) by Plzensky Prazdoj

When we went to Scotland either the beer improved or I'd gotten better at finding it. We found a couple bottle shops (liquor stores) that had an awesome selection, but the crème de la crème was hitting the Brew Dog Brew Pub (look for a post to follow about Brew Dog). The pubs were pretty much the same old thing that we had seen in London. Some solid cask ales, but most of them were basic Bitters and really mild IPAs. The hops were very UK and the malts were very strong. We were told at one bar that beers from Scottland have less hops than other beers in the UK because the plant doesn't grow in their climate and the Scottish people have never liked giving England their money. Based on what we drank this held pretty true, as long as you don't count in Brew Dog.

Favorite beers in Scotland were:
Fyne and Wild Cool as a Cucumber by Fyne Ales
Paradox Isle of Arran by Brew Dog
Abstrakt AB:14 by Brew Dog
Good Times by Williams Brothers Brewing Co.

All in I was not really that impressed with the craft beer scene in London. Don't get me wrong, there are good beers there to be found. Here in Indy if you go to a restaurant and pay more than 20 bucks for an entrée you are probably going to get at least a few different local beers. In London, not so much. We went to different a lot of nice places and a lot of dives and when you were looking through the beer selection you found a lot of the same stuff. If not the exact same brewery and beer name, the same styles. The UK's love of tradition makes so much of their stuff taste pretty similar. Now when we did find a good craft beer bar, the beer was amazing. I would put it up against most breweries here in the states without question, and it was on cask which was a fun plus for me. I think we're starting to get some really good mainstream traction with our scene here in Indy, and it seemed like London and Edinburgh are just a little bit behind in the mainstream areas. That being said, the casks were awesome and the cider was amazing. Makes me want to start looking for more craft cider around home.

Cheers!

Bashah

It's always fun to find something that you haven't seen before, especially when it's a limited release and you may not see it again for a while. I was lucky enough to score one of these while cruising around through Payless Liquers on 96th and 37. (If you're in Indy anytime soon, definitely worth stopping in!)

Bashah is a Black Belgian Double IPA made in collaboration with Stone and BrewDog. Normally I run from something that sounds this hoppy, but I like Stone and it seemed well worth the risk. I poured it out of the bottle into a pint glass even though it probably should have been a tulip. My pour was terrible. Not sure why I had so much head, but it happens. Bashah was 8.6% abv.

The poured out black like a cup of coffee that you cannot see through with a light tan head that lasts for a long time (although my totally amateur pour may have had something to do with that). The beer has a sweet coffee aroma with just a bit of fruity hops. The beer was lighter than I expected based on the color, but I think that was the Belgian in it.

The flavor was sweet and roasty. It tasted like someone had figured out how to smoke semi sweet chocolate out back in the smoker. There were hints of toffee and a bunch of coffee. It had a mildly hopped up finish with just the right amount of bitterness and dryness, so you didn't have the lingering sweet aftertaste of some malty Belgians.

I am really not sure what I would call this beer. It looked like a heavy stout, it was bitter like a porter, but it had more hops than a porter. I expected a heavier hop profile since they called it a double India pale ale and it was from stone. It was complex and not something that's part of my normal rotation. The flavors were all so different from each other but they were well  fused together.

All in it was a great beer I would drink again in a heart beat. If I stumble across more of this, I will pick up every bottle that I can find.

I give it a 4.5