My buddy won a chance to do a small batch of a beer with a local brewery, and I get to help him this Monday. I'm not sure how much influence I'll have but I figured I'd reach out to the beer nerds here if there are any suggestions on styles of beer. Clearly I don't want to do anything basic.

The brewery is Unknown Brewing here in Charlotte (http://www.unknownbrewing.com/), and they have the usual suspects in terms of their standard beers. I am less aware of what they've done in their weekly small/pilot batches but an initial thought I had was a gose.

Any thoughts/suggestions?

As far a I'm concerned, the darker the better. Less people will want to drink it, more for you. A coffee stout, perhaps?

Or how about a coffee porter? That might be interesting. I've actually never heard of that.

Good luck, it should be fun!

Cold-Brewed Coffee Porter.

Hmmm... Short of just dumping "something interesting" into an otherwise normal recipe (and there's nothing wrong with that), I'm not sure how well that brewery knows HOW to make something wacky like a gose.

If it were me, I'd probably have them scale up one of my recipes to see how well it would taste if I had the kinds of controls they have. I've got a great basic 6.2% saison that could be tinkered with, a good 7-8% stout that pairs well with extra ingredients, and a DIPA that would cost them a TON of money to make but is pretty damned good.

A classic extra-dry Irish stout.
About 7% ABV.

Do an Altbier, not enough of these around.

Do a kolsch, because I like kolsch. Especially in the hot months here, which is most of the year. Yesterday was 84.

Also, if anyone is looking for a coffee porter, real ale does one. And my new favorite coffee stout is the sputnik from Austin Beer Works because they used coffee that I would actually drink.

Alts and kolsches are great. Never had an American one that was as good (plain, simple, refined, quiet, clean, and the malt must be perfect) as the real German ones. Alts are almost like more refreshing browns.

Thanks for the suggestions thus far.

- Agreed that it's probably a long shot for them to know how to brew a gose or just be willing to brew it as a small batch by a bunch of bros. If they do know how to brew it, I'm sure they'd be saving it for a real recipe.
- Another local brewery, The Olde Mecklenburg Brewery, brews an altbier as their flagship beer that is from what I understand pretty faithful to the German beer. They may not be so keen to do that.
- The coffee stouts/porters, irish stouts, and kolsches are good to keep in mind. I honestly have no idea what level of input we'll actually have - are we just picking some random ingredients to throw into a normal recipe or will it be more collaborative than that. We will be there from 9am-3pm, so we'll see.

Keep any other suggestions coming. Thanks bros.

So the small batch is something that your buddy gets all the beer from or is it going to be a small batch release for the brewery?

Seems like there would be a couple of different approaches:

Brew something you want to learn about that think they do well (maybe a DIPA if they do those well and you and your friend are interested in learning about different hop varieties and the process involved)
Brew something you like and can't get much of or something unique by adding some adjunct flavors.

In any case, I don't think I would try to push too hard for a style that they aren't that comfortable brewing but I would want to do something a little more involved than just a simple pale ale, golden ale, wheat, porter, stout if possible unless it was to scale up/improve a homebrew recipe like Squirg suggested.

If you decide to steer towards a DIPA, here's what I'd say out loud:

- Grain bill is a 6-to-1 ratio of american pale 2-row to canadian Honey malt
- Starting gravity should be about 1.085 / 20.4 Plato / 21.3 Brix ... (you never know what scale they use)
- Yeast should be Nottingham if they have it
- Bittering hops should be absolutely minimal and clean for the full boil duration, Admiral or Chinook or whatever they've got, but you only want to add like 10 IBUs with the bittering addition, because you're going to wallop the fuck out of it in the last 5 minutes
- T-5 minutes, you want to add substantial quantities of Amarillo (most important variety) and either Simcoe or Sorachi Ace, if they have them
- T-3 minutes, same as above
- Flame out, same thing as above... so it gets to be a lot of hops. That's expensive and messy, so they may balk.
- MOST IMPORTANT PART = the hop stand / whirlpool hops. Here again you want a shit ton of amarillo, and you want to circulate the wort through it between 200 degrees F and 160F, then pull the hops out below that temp. This step is what makes this not taste like everyone else's DIPA, in combination with seriously limiting the bittering hops back at the beginning of the boil. Thick, resiny good flavor without the normal amount of bitterness. Further aided by the latent residual sweetness from that honey malt, and it balances like most DIPAs can't.

If they wanna dry hop it, awesome, but it's not necessary if they've done everything above. I don't know the volume you'd be brewing so I can't say what amount of hops to use, but as an example, for a 5 gallon batch of this it's generally 16 to 24 ounces of hops total, which costs me close to $40 alone.

It's the latter. They do a small batch release every Sunday I believe.



I'll see what the other guys are thinking, but those are good approaches to think about what we want to do.

Thanks, lots of great stuff here.

I honestly am not sure if we are just cheap/free labor lugging around sacks of hops and barley under the guise of "brewing experience with the brewer" but I'll keep all of these suggestions in mind for Monday.

It depends it you want to make an impression, or just have fun/do something crazy.

It it's totally for fun, just make something with ingredients you'd never be able to get on your own or, like Squirg says, something to scale up.

I've never had a goze, but this thread had me looking it up which led me to this:

http://www.thrillist.com/drink/nation/c ... craft-beer

Gose might be a lot better than he's giving it credit for, but his comparisons at the end are pretty funny anyway.

I read the URL and that's as far as I got with that.
Thrillist is terrible.

not any more terrible than a man willing to bump their article under the guise of disliking their article


you diva

Have fun. None of us homebrew or anything like that - it was just a silent auction item that my buddy won and invited me to. We'll see how crazy they let us go with the ingredients.

also a shitty lager

you have shit taste so embrace it

fuckhead.

As it turns out, my shit taste had no impact on the beer they were brewing so it didn't matter anyways.

Thanks for the suggestions though.

So you just showed up and lugged grain sacks and shit? No input whatsoever?

put them on a balcony then jump off of it

D'oh.

We got to name it, and technically they said we could choose what beer to brew but they already had a recipe ready to go for this elderberry pale ale. I guess if we had come in with a recipe ready to go they may have let us have more input but that wasn't the case. We really didn't know much going in, as you can probably tell.

On the plus note, the beer is being released this Sunday so I'm curious to see how badly we screwed it up!

Awesome. Full report, desk, morning.