Nightbreed

During the times leading up to Christmas, we let the darkest days of the year inspire us to brew more black beer, and something we hadn’t yet brewed was a clean Imperial Stout in cans that would be packaged straight from stainless steel, without it first going through a bourbon barrel.

We put the malt bill together with the idea of creating something complex, with good roastiness but trying to keep the astringency and acidity of black malts under control. To do so we layered a considerable amount of different kinds of dark caramel malts, and topped everything up with generous amounts of both roasted barley and a very dark torrefied barley malt in its de-husked version.

To compensate for the roasted barley character, we aimed to have a high amount of residual sugar left in the finished beer, that ended up being at around the same sugar concentration you would find in a soda (yes, that is pretty high). The result is a pretty thick stout that landed at 9,1% ABV carrying notes of espresso coffee, coffee grounds, hints of bitter cacao and a touch of dried figs. It is worth mentioning that this is a 100% barley Imperial Stout: this means that we didn’t use any added malt extract or sugars of any kind. The high concentration wort was obtained by a “double mash” brew, where a second grain infusion is made using the sweet wort from the first infusion instead of water, reaching sugar concentration otherwise unachievable with a single infusion.