By: Erik Lars Myers
The beverage market has been evolving. No longer are we in a world of beer drinkers, wine drinkers, and cocktail drinkers. Today’s savvy beverage consumer drinks all three. This provides a unique opportunity for breweries; beer has such a wide palette of potential flavors that it is possible to create a beer to mimic a cocktail to attract a wider audience of potential drinkers.
However, doing so takes more consideration than throwing a few specialty ingredients in the kettle. It is an exercise in thinking outside of the box. As an example of how this might be approached, consider a beer designed around the classic bourbon cocktail: The Old Fashioned.
Breaking Down Flavors
What makes an Old Fashioned taste like an Old Fashioned? Hint: It’s not just the bourbon. Like any other drink, what makes a cocktail taste good is the full complex array of ingredients. In this case, bourbon, orange, cherry, simple syrup, and bitters. To break that down even further, the prominent flavors in bourbon – derived from alcohol, esters that survive distillation, and wood contact – are a blend of complex fruitiness and vanillins that include descriptors like vanilla, cinnamon, coconut, burnt sugar, and cocoa, among others.
It is impossible to perfectly replicate all of this in a carbonated, fermented (not distilled) beverage, but the idea isn’t to perfectly replicate it so much as it is to bring the drinker as close as possible given the medium.
When designing a beer like this one of the easiest traps to fall into is to start with a style, but it’s a disingenuous starting point. Any beer that is true to a particular style will, by definition, not taste like an Old Fashioned. Instead, disregard the notion of “style” and build the beer around the cocktail’s flavor profile. If, at the end of the day, there is a need to apply a “style” to it for marketing purposes, simply reverse engineer from the ingredient selection. The Trade and Tax Bureau only requires that it be designated “Ale” or “Lager.”
Malt Selection and Mash
Many of the flavors and colors present in bourbon are present in malt. It’s easy to choose a base malt – a simple 2-Row Pale – that is merely a source of fermentables, but it’s worth using something with more robust and complex malt character. Consider a floor malted Maris Otter, Mild Malt, Vienna, or Munich malt, or even a combination thereof, to select for a toasty, complex sugar base. One of the important ingredient additions to an Old Fashioned – simple syrup – is one that you can begin to manage through malt selection and mash management.
Bourbon picks up its color through wood contact, but here caramelized and roasted grain are the source. Additions of higher SRM caramel malts can add residual sugar and just the right amount of color. Be wary of roasted malt additions. While small amounts of roasted malt might impart excellent color and some of the cocoa or smoky complexity of barrel-aging, too much of a burnt/roast characteristic would be wholly out of place. In addition, many roasted malts tend toward a red or ruby hue rather than the warm orange/brown of bourbon.
Slightly higher mash temperatures, 154F – 156F, might be tempting for malt complexity but remember that while alpha amylase promotes dextrin formation, the long complex sugar chains that add great body to a beer don’t necessarily taste sweet.
Hop Selection
While hops don’t feel like a good fit for a beer like this, hops are an important addition to every beer. In this case, not only can they create a balanced base beer, they can also be used to add flavor complexity to the final “cocktail.” Consider that an Old Fashioned is made with a dash or two of bitters, and so a low residual bitterness is not misplaced. An initial boil kettle IBU addition of 10 – 20 IBUs seems like a good starting point, but leaving hops out of the boil otherwise might be a good idea.
Next comes hop character. There are many classic hops with orange and other citrus flavors: Centenniel, Cascade, Citra, Amarillo. However, some of the new hop strains that are marketed for Hazy IPAs might be well incorporated here. A small (0.25 – 0.5 lbs/bbl) whirlpool addition of Julius, Hydra, or Caliente hops can add complex characteristics of tangerine or clementine that would pair beautifully with citrus fruit additions.
Water Chemistry
A low Sulfate to Chloride ratio (0.8 – 1.0) seems like a good starting point in designing water chemistry for a cocktail-inspired beer, accentuating and promoting malt characteristics. But bear in mind those dashes of bitters that go into a good Old Fashioned. In this case, a slightly higher Sulfate addition could be more appropriate: enough chloride to keep malt prominent, but not so much as to dampen the bittering effects of small hop additions.
Yeast Selection
There are three ways you can approach yeast on a beer like this. One is to choose as neutral a yeast as possible – an American Ale yeast, for instance – and let the rest of the recipe do the lifting.
Another is to choose a specific yeast with fermentation characteristics that match the flavor profile that you’re trying to create. English ale yeasts with strong ester formation, and perhaps high alcohol tolerance, can be of great use especially as many of them also keep a fair amount of residual sugar around – an important consideration in the “simple syrup” portion of this recipe.
Finally, a third, less predictable (and reproduceable) route, would be to blend yeasts for fermentation. Using a combination of a cleaner English or American ale yeast with a small portion of Belgian Abbey or even Hefeweissen yeast could potentially add a complex ester palate with subtle, fermentation-based cherry (Abbey ale) or banana (Hefeweissen) notes, as long as the strains are all STA-1 negative.
Perhaps more reliably, a brewer could split the wort, ferment each portion with different strains and then blend back together for a final product. Of course, this comes with the added complexity of requiring more fermentation space and more lab work to guarantee a stable and reproduceable final product, so it should be entered into with care and deliberation.
Spices, Fruits, Other Additions
Perhaps the easiest step in designing a beer around a cocktail is approaching the ingredients that are added into the cocktail itself. An Old Fashioned orange and maraschino cherry garnish is perhaps the most obvious and easy part to replicate by adding bitter orange during the boil, or Luxardo or maraschino cherry juice into your fermentation. The difficult part is doing so with balance in mind – this isn’t, after all, an orange beer or a cherry beer, but a beer built around another, balanced beverage. Restraint is called for.
What might be easier to overlook are additions that can add to the spirit characteristics of your finished beer. Again, bourbon characteristics are complex. Spice additions at the end of your boil, or during fermentation, are opportunities to add in flavors to increase that complexity: vanilla, coconut, cinnamon, black or white pepper, cloves, allspice, or any wide variety of other flavors, in very small quantities, can lend an enormous amount of complexity to the finished body and profile of your cocktail-designed-beer.
Barrel Aging or Spirit Flavors
Of course, the easiest path to creating a spirit-flavored beer is by aging the beer itself in a barrel that once housed that spirit. However, when doing so, consider that time and oxidation will dull the subtle nuances of the original beer. If barrel-aging is in the future for the recipe, consider relying less on hop or fruit additions, or make judicious flavor additions after it’s been taken out of aging. Be wary of over-aging where wood characteristics might overshadow the original beer.
Finished Beer Considerations
Carbonation level will make an enormous difference in how this beer is perceived. While a beer designed around a French 75 might be light and spritzy with high carbonation levels, this beer might benefit from carbonation on the lower end of the scale, in the 2.1 – 2.3 volume range.
A brewery with the right capabilities might even consider cask engine or serving via nitro for a smoother experience..
Serving the Final Product
In the tasting room or brewpub, don’t miss the opportunity to treat this beer as the special product that it is. Sloshing it straight down into a shaker pint glass is fine, and certainly will move money over the bar, but part of the experience of a good cocktail is presentation and the opportunity also exists here. Maybe this beer is served in a goblet with a twist of orange on the rim. Maybe a high-ABV, barrel-aged version of this beer is served in a rocks glass with a Luxardo cherry garnish.
No matter what, presenting the customer with a unique experience will help them appreciate the craft and care that went into designing the recipe and help them make the connection to the original beverage.
A beer designed around a cocktail will never be that cocktail, but it does give both the producer and drinker the opportunity to appreciate and explore the wide array of possibilities available to a well-practiced and thoughtful brewer in the nuanced palette of craft beer.
About the Author
Erik Lars Myers is an award-winning professional brewer and lover of beer. He has written two travel guides about beer and written and edited multiple books about homebrewing.
