Batch 21

I’m a sucker for All In Brewing’s “Hustle”, which is an imperial stout flavored with hazelnut so imagine how happy I was when I found a brown ale recipe with hazelnut! Heaven or hell? Lets find out.

Brewing this beer wasn’t that different from other recipes, except the hazelnut flavoring of course and this proved to be a bit more difficult than I anticipated. I tried to find as many testers as I could to see what they did wrong, what they would’ve changed etc and the majority seemed to prefer to crush nuts and roast them, which brings me to how I did it with cacao nibs in Batch 10. I put all the nibs in vodka to extract most of the aroma and then put everything in the fermenter, nice and easy but because it’s pretty difficult to know beforehand how much flavor will be added and how profound the hazelnut flavor will be people seem turn to other measures. One of those is to use hazelnut extract and even it’s “not real” I decided to go with extract because I wanted strong hazelnut flavor!

The extract is really intense and 2ml was well enough for a clear taste of hazelnut in a 12 liters batch. Bit of a challenge adding it was that most add it while they add priming sugar for carbonation and they stir everything but since I force carbon on keg it wasn’t as obvious because I don’t want to stir oxygen in my beer for unnecessary reasons. But then I realized I roll the keg to make the force carbonation take way less time than the regular days so I’d get the natural stir without risking adding oxygen, win!

Now, how did the beer turn out? One word – WOW. I’m so happy with how it tastes, it’s absolutely delicious with a roasty beginning and ends with a hazelnut & chocolate flavor, sooo good. I’ve no idea obviously how it would’ve turned out if I used real hazelnuts but skipping that flavor lottery is something I’m happy about now, even though I prefer to do it as naturally and raw as possible.

The beer reminds me of Hustle but with a more prominent and distinct hazelnut flavor, perhaps I should try brewing an imperial stout with this hazelnut extract to make my own? Nonetheless, I’ll most likely make this brown ale again, what a treat.