The Beer Experts Have Expressed Their Polite Silence on Habenero Chili Stout

You'd think after the last three batches of home brew that ranged from barely drinkable to down right awful, I should just give up brewing altogether.  But then, there have been times running where long term fatigue and multiple injuries lead to pain and frustration for weeks and months on end.   It happens to a lot of runners, and you need just keep working through the difficulties and find ways to correct the problems to eventually come through it a wiser runner than before.  So in that spirit, I just kept at it with home brewing.  Of course, it is also possible the culmulation of all those slight jolts to my head with each running footstrike over 30 years has resulted in a certain level of  brain damage which clouds my judgement.

So whether motivated by positive thinking or simple brain dysfunction, I decided to brew a Habenero Chile Stout feeling slightly confident I'd isolated the source of the contamination that soured my last brews.  You may reasonably ask "Why on earth would you brew something like that?".  I would like to answer the strong, roasty flavors of stout and stimulating Habenero chiles are part of my personality, vision, and creativity as a brewer.  But the more honest answer is that agressively roasted malts and hot chiles are great at masking any off-flavors lurking around in the brew. 

For the recipe, I used Randy Mosher's Black Ship Pirate Stout from his excellent book Radical Brewing.

5.5 lbs Amber Dry Extract
1.5 lbs Black Patent Malt
1.5 lbs Dark Molassess
1.0 lbs Dark Crystal Malt
5 gallons distalled water

1.0 once Willamette Hops (90 minutes)
2.0 onces Styrian Golding (30 minutes)

After mashing and sparging the grain, the resulting wort and powered extract was boiled for 90 minutes.  With five minutes left in the boil, I added this spice mix:

1/2 tablespoon fresh ground pepper
1/2 tablespoon commercial chili powder
1/8 teaspoons Habenero chile powder

English Ale Yeast was used to fermet the brew, which was racked to a secondary in three weeks, and then bottled two weeks later.

The idea was to replicate Mexican chocolate, with a little heat mingling with the roasty chocolate flavors.  I'd say this came close.  You can certainly detect the heat from the Habeneros.  Its strong, but I didn't find it overpowering, and it takes front stage to a complex roasted malt background.   I'll also add that the heat from the chiles mellowed after the bottles had aged after 3-4 weeks.   I thought it was and interesting and unique beer, but then since I brewed it, I'm bound to be biased. 

So I took a bottle to this month's Bay Area Beer Bloggers meet-up and bottle share to see what experienced beer drinkers in the Bay Area Craft Brewing community thought about at.  I've known Brian Stechshulte for nearly a year and being that I am a graduate of The Ohio State University, find him to be an inspiration as he's overcome his education from the University of Michigan to become a decent, productive member of society.   (We don't need to talk about last weekend's Ohio State-Michigan game.) I don't recall what he said about the Habernero Chile Stout or if he even tried it.  For some reason, he seemed more interested in sampling from bottles of 2009 and 2010 vintages of the always excellent Deschutes' Abyss sitting on the table, as well as all the other stouts available that night from highly renowned and hard to find breweries than something from a hack homebrewer who insults his alma mater on a regular basis.  Imagine that.

Next up was John Heylin who remarked "The chiles are noticeable, but not that hot.  It's smokey."  Colin James, who graciously hosted the bottle share at his apartment agreed "You can certainly taste the chile powder".  Both Chuck Lenatti and I noticed a metallic taste.  There are know-it-alls who claim "metallic" is an off flavor, but it actually provides a mysterious complexity to the brew.   Beyond that, the silence was a little telling.  Nobody came out and said "I don't like this" or even "this sucks" something people often think, yet rarely say, but nobody said "this is good" or "I like it" either.    Never the less, I'll take this polite awkward silence as a ringing endorsement from the Bay Area Beer Bloggers of my latest home brew.

Yeah right.

Running can't be bottled. This home brew shouldn't be.

One of my biggest mistakes was making a really good home brew. Well, actually my mistake was making a pretty good home brew, and then sharing it with a few other people. Now I have way too high expectations to meet as for the all subsequent brews I make. Even worse, there's no real way I could ever reproduce that home brew ever again since brewing involved about five "oh shit" moments during a rather chaotic afternoon in the kitchen. The beer was from a recipe from Randy Mosher's book Radical Brewing called Black Ship Pirate's Stout, and for Randy Mosher's sake, it's probably good he didn't actually witness me brewing his beer. But somehow, all the flavors came together wonderfully and upon my first taste, I had my first "Damn, did I just brew this?" moment in home brewing. And since a few friends really enjoyed it, there were plenty of requests for my next home brew.

My next home brew I decided to call Brandon's Maple Brown Ale, a tribute to my son and his love for pancakes with maple syrup. And indeed, this home brew involved the requisite five "oh shit" moments and was yet another chaotic day in the kitchen. I used way too little water for the grain mash, creating a brown, jiggly, gelatinous gunk and zero malt extraction. So I poured pot after pot of water at 180 degrees over it to release the malt, sparging the beejeesus out of this mess in order to get something the yeast could feast on. Something weird happened when I poured the maple syrup into the secondary fermenter, the fermentation never really got going, and I had to shake the carboy a week later to jump start the fermentation again. The good news is that I will never be able to reproduce it, since my first reaction upon tasting it was "Damn, did I just brew this crap?". The beer has grown on me a little since, and I now call it an acquired taste, which is what brewers say about their beers when multiple consumption of the beer is required to build up a tolerance to it.

Perhaps in a brutally logically way, this is a fitting tribute to my son Brandon, since he has autism, and something didn't go quite right in his brewing process. But he's suffered enough, and brewing an odd-tasting beer in his name to add insult to his injury was certainly not my intention. I am dutifully distributing bottles of Brandon's Maple Brown Ale to all my friends who asked for it, with a gentle warning of what is in for them if they try it, and that they won't be hurting my feelings if they pour it down the drain. But there will be other home brews which will be better, and one of the best things about home brewing is that you can share your brewing success with others quite directly.


On the other hand, running success can be difficult to share with others, and certainly cannot be bottled. There's no way to distill my best races and runs and give them to others. But since these moments involved gastro-intestinal distress, burning sensations in both the lungs and legs, and I smelled rather awful afterwords, it's doubtful these bottled running moments would be particularly popular or welcome. There's a reason more people like drinking beer than running.

Aaarrr! Black Ship Pirate Stout is a Keeper of a Recipe

Talking like a pirate is one of those things that's pretty entertaining for about 20 seconds, and then gets really annoying pretty quickly after that. So I won't attempt to write like a pirate, and spare you the tedium of reading something barely readable. Of course, most pirates were probably illiterate, or wrote in languages barely recognizable today. And they probably didn't go around saying "Aaarrr!", either.

So I'll get to the point and tell you the Black Ship Pirate Stout, from Randy Mosher's great home brewing book, Radical Brewing is an absolute keeper of a recipe. It's my first "Damn, did I brew that?" moment in the six batches I've made since starting home brewing a year ago. Here's the recipe, from page 200 of my copy of Radical Brewing.

Black Ship Pirate Stout
5.5 lbs Amber Dry Malt Extract
1.5 lbs Black Patent Malt
1.5 lbs Dark (Blackstrap) Molasses
1.0 lb Dark Crystal Malt

2.25 ounces Willamette 90 minutes
2.0 ounces Styrian Golding 30 minutes

British Ale Yeast

At end of boil, add 1.0 ounce crushed coriander, 1.0 teaspoon of allspice, and 0.5 teaspoon of ground black pepper. Post fermentation, zest of an orange or tangerine soaked in vodka for 24 hours, and added at bottling.

Some additional comments:

-There's an all grain recipe for this as well in Radical Brewing. I just haven't taken the all grain plunge yet.
-I actually ended up using Fuggles as the 90 minute bittering hop, as a substitute for the Styrian Golding, since that's what they had at my local home brew store. I used Tettnanger hops at 30 minutes, since I picked up the wrong package. Mosher describes Tettnanger as a great aroma hop for wheat beers, so I was a little concerned how this would work out in a completely different brew. I say it worked out all right.
-I used orange zest for this recipe, but would like to try tangerine next time,.

My greatest fear brewing this was that all the different additions, the molasses, four ounces of hops, and the different spices would produce a harshly bitter and cluttered brew. It actually turned out surprisingly smooth and drinkable, with a slight sweetness and spicy zip, the molasses noticeable but hardly overwhelming, and everything blending nicely into all the roasted malt. The orange zest gave it a really nice citrus aroma.

Talking like a pirate gets old really fast, but I could drink this all day.