Nuts! And Christmas Beer.

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 20^th 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.

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.