The stout matrix

   

http://draftmag.com/the-stout-matrix/

Practically black and forever brooding, stout’s claim to fame is its swirls of cocoa, coffee, char and cola notes extracted from roasted malt. But the style’s ever-expanding with fruit, barrels and hops shining new light into our favorite dark brew.

1. Cocoa conspires with all that dark roast to elevate chocolate stouts to confectionary status.

2. Coffee stouts give a double jolt: The first from real coffee (beans or cold brew!) in the batch, the second from some bonus booze.

3. Beans in the brew give vanilla stouts a floral, high-pitched sweetness.

4. Real bivalves—meat and shells!—lend a distinct brininess to oyster stouts.

5. Funky, fruity Belgian yeast gives Belgian stouts a strangely alluring sweet spice.

6. Blueberries, pineapple, squash; there’s no limit to the sweet stuff brewers will slip into a fruit stout.

7. Smoldering smoked stouts spark a little campfire (via smoked malts) in every sip.

8. Sturdy malts make stouts good for wood. Barrel-aged stouts nap in new vats or ones that once held rum, whiskey or wine; they emerge mature and high in alcohol.

9. A little lactose in the brew gives sweet stouts velvety creaminess and a milky-sweet smirk.

10. Oatmeal stouts augment roasted barley with sweet oats for a chewy, crazy-creamy mouthfeel.

11. Intense roast, complex malts and high alcohol make imperial stouts some of beer’s biggest boozers.

12. Sessionable dry stouts are a step up from porters—and fish ‘n’ chips best friend.

13. Bitter U.S. hops color American stouts with subtle greenness.

14. Like foreign extra stouts but sweeter, tropical stouts dial up their fruit and molasses flavors.

15. Assertive roast headlines foreign extra stouts, but ABVs under 8% keep them manageable.


Want to brew your own stout?  Brew Boss has the system for you!
Cheers! www.brew-boss.com

Do higher-ABV beers get rated higher?

It's a general rule that Americans prefer bold, highly hopped beers. But do we also have a tendency to enjoy styles with higher ABVs?

KATE BERNOT 

It’s a general rule that Americans prefer bold, highly hopped beers. But do we also have a tendency to enjoy styles with higher ABVs? Does this fly in the face of the session trend?

I’m sure there are varying opinions, but it’s all speculation until someone crunches the numbers. Thankfully, there’s a person who did just that. He’s Scott Janish, a homebrewer and general beer enthusiast whose uses data to help tell some interesting stories about beer (both his and others’).

He plotted the average ABV of a beer style against its average BeerAdvocate rating (the average of all the beers in a style category), and found that, for the most part, higher-ABV beers do receive higher ratings. Styles like eisbocks, quads, and Russian imperial stouts are on the high end of both the ABV and average score spectrum, for example.

The outliers are notable, too; goses and berliner weisses tend to score high despite their low ABV, and American malt liquors score low despite their relatively high alcohol content. Give his full graph a look, and even play around with the data set for yourself.

Cheers!  www.Brew-Boss.com

Rockin’ Beergarita Recipe:

Rockin’ Beergarita Recipe:

Sure to become another classic, this Beergarita recipe is a fun way to have a beer, and to toast – or “Parrot” – a classic mixed drink. In Spanish it might be called a Cerveza Preparada – prepared beer. We’ll just call it a Beergarita.

8 servings
Beergarita Recipe – What you need:
(2) 12 oz. beers. (Use a light lager, or for authenticity, a Mexican lager)

BTW, the Mexican lager is based on the recipes that Austrian and German brewers produced after arriving in Mexico in the 19th century with other European immigrants.

Beergarita Recipe

• 8 oz. tequila
• 2 oz. orange juice
• (1) 12 oz. can frozen limeade concentrate
• 8 Lime slices
• 1/2 Cup salt
• One or two pints ice cubes

What you do:

1. Pour ice in a pitcher.
2. Add tequila, orange juice and frozen limeaid.
3. Stir well and thoroughly.
4. Pour beer over ice – very slowly. It will foam up so a slow pour is essential.
5. Pour salt on a small plate.|
6. Rub a lime wedge around the rim of the glasses.
7. Dip glasses upside down into the salt plate to coat the rim.
8. Fill glasses with Beergarita.
9. Garnish with a lime slice.

Cheers!