The Official Beer of Squirrels

The hardest part of of the brewer's craft is designing a flavor profile that can't be truly tested until it's finished. When you're cooking food, you can season as you go along. Salt, acid, and other seasonings can be added or muted to best suit your desired final product. Once you have it flavored properly, you can eat it. With beer, you must make your best guess 10-20 days before you'll be able to see how the beer actually tastes. Only with practice, experimentation, and a good feel for ingredients can a brewer transform grains, hops, and yeast into the the beer of his dreams.

So I want to make a nut brown. A nut brown is the beefed up descendant of English brown ales like Newcastle. There really isn't going on in those old-style beers. Essentially, they are made of pale malt with a speck of dark caramel-y malt for color and sweetness. Now add some more complexly flavored malts and you have yourself a nut brown.

For my beer, I'd like, if possible, to have flavors of almonds and hazelnuts. It isn't easy to get that nutty flavor into a beer, though. You certainly can't use actual nuts.

But I want to put real nuts in my beer!

No. Nuts contain a pretty good amount of fat. Fat is the enemy of beer. Fat becomes rancid quite easily, resulting in a beer that tastes like dirt, funk, or garbage. Sugar, alcohol, and certain chemicals present in hops can help stave off rancidity, however the risks involved actually adding fatty ingredients to beer are too severe for most brewers. Instead, one must use specialty grains to create the flavor characteristics desired in a nut brown or any other beer. For the inexperienced such as myself, a malt guide can be quite helpful. This one is nice. It indicates in very simple terms what flavors different types of malts can be expected to lend to a beer. It also has useful information about the fermentable starch content and expected color of different grains. The main determinants of the finished qualities of a particular malt are the ways that the grains are grown, germinated, and kilned (emphasis on the kilning process - time, temp, and moisture produce drastically different final products). Here's what I used:

• 1.5 lbs American Two-Row Pale Malt
• 3/4 lb. Belgian Biscuit Malt
• 3/4 lb. Belgian Victory Malt
• 1/3 lb. American Six-Row Pale Malt
• 1/4 lb. American Chocolate Malt

The pale malts are the standard base malts. The six-row was used to boost starch conversion (and clear out some surplus from past batches). The Biscuit Malt provides a little bit of color and, yes, a biscuity flavor. It's not quite nutty, but it does give some of those toasty notes that you'd expect in a nutty beer. The Victory Malt was to provide the bulk of the nutty flavor. The Chocolate Malt is also a bit nutty (though its flavor is predominantly eponymous), but its primary purpose is for color. It wouldn't be much of a brown ale if it wasn't brown, eh?

Standard Brewing Process.

For the hops, I wanted to use traditional English hops, which hopefully would provide a mellower flavor than, say, super-citrusy American hops or the mega-spice of Saaz hops. I added 1 ounce of UK Kent Goldings hops at, 1/4 oz at a time, for 60, 30, and 10 minutes of boil and the remaining 1/4 for cold hopping. I also added 1/2 ounce of Fuggles, half at ten minutes of boil remaining and half for cold hopping. The beer cold hopped in my fridge for three days before the usual fermentation.

• OG - 1.054
• FG - 1.012
• ABV - 5.6% (at time of measurement. I suspect it has since strengthened)
• IBU - 23

Appearance: It looks exaclty like a good iced coffee - viscous and inky. The pictured glass is flat because it has been sitting in the fridge for too long. The other bottles have all poured a thick, tan head, with small bubbles.

Smell: It smells quite a bit like roasting coffee. It smells exactly how you'd expect a nice stout to smell.

Taste: The nutty flavors are not as pronounced as I'd like. There are definitely almonds and a hint of hazelnut. The coffee flavor from the chocolate malt is quite present, as is the biscuity flavor from the biscuit malt (seriously, it's like licking a biscuit). The flavor is balanced, coating the entire palate and going down smoothly.

Mouthfeel: It started off pretty viscous, but has gotten lighter with age, as the residual sugars have fermented into alcohol. The bubbles feel pretty nice. It was a bit too thick at first, but it's just right these days.

Drinkability: I'm the kind of person who cares to drink a significant amount of dark, heavy beer (which doesn't mean that I don't from time to time). It's kind of like with wine, where you can drink endless tart whites (such as Sauvignon Blanc, for the standard American drinker, but especially the Spanish treats like Albarino), but you wouldn't really want to drink endless, heavy, oaky reds (though, again, fun and pleasant on rare occasions). That said, I'd drink two of these, but probably not three.

Since creating this beer, I've read that roasted (unmalted) barley is great for adding not just a roasty flavor but a nutty flavor to a beer. Next time, I'd probably use some of that and less biscuit malt.

Prost!