Raise your glass to the beer cocktail
The frothy, imaginative libations are popping up on menus all over town. It's all about mouth feel and showcasing the properties of craft brews, mixologists say.
Say goodbye to the drinker's golden rule, "Beer before liquor, never been sicker." A new style of mixing the two favored forms of alcohol is emerging with frothy force in L.A.'s increasingly sensual drinkscape: the beer cocktail. Novel mixtures of beer, gin, vodka, whiskey, juices, infusions and herbs, beer cocktails are pouring two of the city's most hedonistic obsessions — craft beer and mixology — into a single glass, one that showcases the properties of fine beer rather than shunting it to the side as just another ingredient.
Look closely at the drink menus of the city's finest bars and you'll likely see a beer cocktail peering back at you. Matthew Biancaniello at the Library Bar in the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel infuses gin with Cascade hops and mixes it with IPA, grapefruit juice, lemon and honey; upstairs at the Spare Room, Naomi Schimek makes a winter drink called the Robert Frost with apple juice, Amaretto, lemon juice and Magic Hat No. 9. Jonathan Kleinbart (part of Julian Cox's bar program) has a drink on Playa's menu made with Port Brewing's Old Viscosity, Cognac, egg yolk, honey and sherry. Brady Weise makes one with vodka, Yeti stout and crème de cacao at 1886 in Pasadena, and Aidan Demarest features another at Neat in Glendale with Old Rasputin stout, gin, egg, ginger beer and Tabasco.The list goes on and on...."I think that a majority of this is coming from the huge spike in the popularity of craft beer in L.A. in general over the past few years," says Dave Watrous, a bona fide beer guy and the beverage director at Steingarten LA, which hosted an L.A. Beer Week event in October featuring a slew of decadent beer cocktails created by the Library Bar's Biancaniello (http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/10/entertainment/la-et-beer-cocktails-20120210).
Op de website van LA Weekly las ik over bartender Matthew Biancaniello van Hollywood Roosevelt's Library Bar. Hij: "has created a drink not for frat guys looking to bomb their beer but rather beer aficionados and cocktail enthusiasts.
The Hopping in the Rye, the only beer cocktail at the hotel bar, is made with hops-infused gin (infused for four or five days), caramelized honey, Oroblanco grapefruit juice, lemon juice and an IPA...against one's better instinct of shaking a carbonated liquid, the bartender drops the IPA in the shaker rather than serving it as a float. "When you put in a float, I feel like you're just drinking that beer, but I like that this beer becomes part of the cocktail. It's nice and frothy," said Biancaniello. The result is a creamy, airy cocktail with just a hint of hoppiness on the finish." (www.laweekly.com/restaurants/drink-this-now-hopping-in-the-rye-at-hollywood-roosevelts-library-bar-2381291)
"There are so many seasonal craft beers with so many different flavor profiles that you can mix and match them to create a completely different flavor experience based on a single cocktail," says Weise, who got serious about beer cocktails after replacing the orange peel in a Negroni, a drink that calls for citrus, with Hefeweizen, which has citrus notes. "It's what [noted mixologists] Marcos Tello and Eric Alperin like to call an 'evolving cocktail.'"
But have drinkers really been able to get past the adage about not mixing their beer and liquor?
"It's not counterintuitive at all," says Watrous. "It's a natural progression. It's added a fresh element to cocktails and opened a new window on beer." (http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/10/
entertainment/la-et-beer-cocktails-20120210)
I was thinking last night after a few beers, what would vodka (or gin) infused with hops taste like? Has anyone tried this before? I feel like it would be an incredible combination.
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I have done this several times. It was part of my job as a mixologist/beverage consultant. I have done it mostly cascade hops. It is great if you do the right amounts. I did 2 cups vodka and half ounce of hops for 5 days. I then strained it through a bar strainer so some of the hops made it through. My favorite recipe I did was:
3 oz hop infused vodka
House made sour mix
.5 oz house made simple syrup
3 strawberries
(www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=292414)
I have made a hop infused vodka with my homegrown glacier hops that you can spruce up almost anything to fit your hophead needs….even a full on hop martini. The process is simple, and the possibilities are endless.
The process is very simple, you just take hops and place them in a vessel, say a mason jar. Then fill it 1/2 full (or more. I did about 3/4 full) then let it sit for 4 days or more (I did four days). The hops will absorb some vodka, so you may need to add vodka throughout the process if you used a lot of hops. What I also did, was every day I gently shook the jar to help bring out more hop goodness. I don’t have any scientific evidence on if it dissolves more lupulin, but hey, it worked for me (http://barleypopmaker.info/2011/03/06/the-ultimate-hophead-treat-hop-extract-from-vodka/).
Hophead Vodka, Anchor Distilling’s highly talked-about spin on the classic spirit.
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The hops-infused vodka smells exactly like what it proclaims on the bottle — hops and vodka — and there’s something about that combination that makes my mind run back to many a dive bar I’d encountered before everyone started banning smoking in them.
Hophead is “Hop Vodka,” or “Vodka with hops,” both noted on the label. What’s that? It’s flavored with hops in the same way that gin is flavored with juniper, as a botanical used as an infusion during the production process rather than as a vial of “hops flavoring” that’s poured into the vodka before it’s bottled. It may still be a flavored vodka (which gin is too), but it’s clearly done in an artisanal way that San Francisco’s Anchor can be proud of and call unique.
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With its hot finish and a nod to the bitterness of the hops, Hophead concludes on a confusing and discordant note. It is at once off-putting and inviting (www.drinkhacker.com/2013/02/20/review-anchor-distilling-hophead-hop-vodka/).
What would happen if I added Cascade hops, which give a great burst of floral and citrus to beer, to a bottle of gin? ...15 pellets and a day and a half later it was ready. The aroma was gin plus Cascade. Perfect. Just imagine that background grapefruit pith kick of Cascade. I double strained it to get rid of as much hop trub as possible and my slightly green-tinged hopped gin was ready to drink (www.pencilandspoon.com/2012/03/hopped-gin.html).
Hop Infused Gin
Beer cocktails are all the rage these days. Given the natural progression of the craft beer and craft cocktail movements, it’s not altogether surprising. The primary direction for beer cocktails tends to be a lager or wheat beer to showcase interesting liquor combinations. This works well and the end result are complex cocktails with great flavor profiles ...I let the Chinook hops sit in my gin for 36 hours. I used less than 1/4 of an ounce of hops and about 8 ounces of Bluecoat American Dry Gin. After 36 hours, I strained the hops and was left with a lovely green tinted, botancial-forward, citrus and piney smelling gin. Good stuff.(https://thenobleexperiment.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/hop-infused-gin/).
The hop infused gin experiment is moving forward and I’ve found that there is a substantial difference among different hops. The earthy, floral hops add a much subtler flavor and are, at times, overpowered by the botanicals in the gin.
I’ve also found that the high alpha hops are adding substantially more bitterness than I had anticipated. I had assumed that without boiling the hops, I wouldn’t get a lot of bitterness. But as it turns out, the infusion is adding a lingering bitterness to the finish of the gin. Even after the hop leaf is strained, the remaining small particles continue to add some bitterness, so I think that a cheesecloth strain is necessary.
This new experiment should prove interesting. I have a wide range of hops with different levels of alpha acids and different flavor characteristics that I will be able to taste side by side. I anticipate Cascade to be the best fit, but who knows. The best hop up to this point has been Chinook (https://thenobleexperiment.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/the-hop-infused-gin-experiment-continues/).
I never used Simcoe, but I have used Cascade hops in the past. Cascade is a great varietal for a gin infusion. Other great (similar) hops include Citra (although it’s higher AA) and Nelson Sauvin.
I’ve found that 24 hours is typically plenty of time to extract the flavor components you might be looking for. After that you start to get more bitterness and more off flavors. For a 750ml bottle of gin, I used 1/4 oz of hops, although that will vary based on the type of hop. You don’t need to refrigerate, but it can’t hurt.
One thing that I found in my experiments is that often times earthy, floral hops (English and Euro hops) have a more interesting impact on the gin. The citrus that you get in a cascade hop used in an IPA doesn’t shine through as much as you might hope, often being overshadowed by the strong botanicals in the gin. But the earthy, floral notes of English hops gave a unique twist on the final product. At the end of the day, I’d recommend experimenting with small batches and lots of different hops...The pellets tend to be more potent and can be more bitter and slightly less aromatic, which is why I like the whole cones. If you have more questions let me know. (https://thenobleexperiment.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/the-hop-infused-gin-experiment-continues/).
Hop Flavored Whiskey
Sons of Liberty owner Michael Reppucci...“In the spirits world, when I think summertime, I think gin. I love it, but we don’t make one here because they’ve never turned out well,” he says. “I figure, if I can’t compete with ones that are already on the market like St. George, which I love, then why bother.” His answer to this conundrum was to approach whiskey like a brewer. “I thought, if whiskey starts as a beer—malted barley, water, and yeast—why is there no seasonal whiskey?
(www.bostonmagazine.com/restaurants/blog/2014/03/10/liquid-diet-sons-liberty-hop-whiskey/)
To emulate the botanical elements of gin, Reppucci began experimenting with different varieties of hops to create a “marriage between the beer and spirits world.” Sons of Liberty hop flavored whiskey is brewed like an India Pale Ale, with Cascade hops added in the boil and a secondary, dry-hopping of Citra and Sorachi Ace hops added after fermentation. The whiskey is then lightly-barrel aged to add color and complexity. “I don’t want the same dark, peaty, smokey whiskey that I drink with cigars in the winter,” says Reppucci. “This is intentionally a younger, lighter whiskey with the same citrus notes you might get from a summer beer with a slice of lemon.”....“There’s no beginner’s guide to dry-hopping whiskey, so we really had a lot of trial and error when making this,” says Reppucci. “It’s easy today to chuck a bunch of hops into something, just to be novel or different. But for us it was making a product that was in balance. It drinks like a whiskey, but then at the back end you’re like, ‘My god, that’s an IPA!'”
(www.bostonmagazine.com/restaurants/blog/2014/03/10/liquid-diet-sons-liberty-hop-whiskey/)
Light Beer
Wat te denken van hop infused light bier? Je kan lihjt bier drinkbaar maken met hop (zie www.foxnews.com/leisure/2015/04/06/make-light-beer-taste-better-with-hop-infused-tea-bags/)
Hopwater
A delicious, non-alcoholic craft soda with the floral aroma and pleasing bitterness of hops – Hopwater™ is the best thing to happen to hops since, well, beer! With no alcohol, caffeine, quinine, or artificial ingredients, and only 48 calories per 12oz bottle, Hopwater™ is the beer-lover’s secret crush, and an opportunity for non-beer snobs to partake in the wonders of the noble hop (http://drinkhopwater.net/). Met Hopwater zijn heel veel hoptails te maken...
Koffie
Wat te denken van Kofiie met hop?
Sean Hixon, roaster at The Point Coffee House in Rehoboth Beach, has partnered with Georgetown's 16 Mile Brewery to create the first ever hops-infused coffee.
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The Point Coffee House in Rehoboth Beach and 16 Mile Brewery in Georgetown recently rolled out hops-infused coffee, a definite first for the coffee and beer industry.
“This coffee combines two major movements in this country – coffee and beer drinking,” said Claus Hagelman of 16 Mile. “It’s also another thing for Delaware to hang its hat on, with the state already known for its craft beer industry.” (www.sussexcountian.com/article/20140408/NEWS/140409677)