Every year around this time breweries come out with their
Christmas offerings, beers loaded with ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg and other
spices designed to evoke a certain “festive” spirit of the holiday season. I
think most people like these beers come December, but wouldn’t want to drink them
throughout the winter, let alone the rest of the year. My goal here was to
reimagine Christmas beers as something seasonal and warming, without
overloading the beer with spices.
One image that sticks in my head when I think of Christmas
is “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” (feel free to sing along). Incorporating
nuts into beer is a delicate proposition I’ve been working on. While nuts do
have significant amounts of carbohydrates (good for beer), they tend to be high
in proteins and fats (bad for beer). Chestnuts are that rare breed of nut that
is relatively high in carbohydrates and low in proteins and fats, making it
ideal for brewing. It’s rare in another respect, in that many trees in the US were
wiped out by a chestnut blight in the early 20th century, resulting
in a relative scarcity.
The chestnut itself, contrary to my prior assumptions was
more sweet than starchy, and thus roasting resulted in more “cooked sugar”
flavors, i.e. caramel/molasses than “baked bread” i.e. malty/toasty ones. While
not planned, I hope this will add an interesting complexity to the beer. The
actual nut character when preparing the chestnuts was quite impressive as well,
evoking a strong peanut-y aroma, the kind that tells the primitive hunter-gather
mind that this is a valuable food resource capable of sustaining the body, and is
therefore irresistible to us.
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| The chestnuts were roasted, pealed, soaked, and then added to the mash. |
Rounding out this recipe is spruce (nothing says Christmas
quite like the smell of fresh spruce) and mint (my “festive” compromise). This
is a big beer (coming in at around 7%) with abundant sweet, malty, and nutty
flavors; just the thing to stay in and hibernate with all winter long. Brew
date 12/5/2012.
