From the Beer Writer: Stone Brewing hosts many top-tier events, but one of my favorite is the company’s American Homebrewers Association-sanctioned AHA Rally and its associated homebrewing competition. Every year, some of the county’s most talented, ambitious recreational brewers submit their beers for judging by a panel of Stone employees, including key members of the brewing team. Each year’s winning beer gets produced on Stone’s system and distributed nationally (which now means to all 50 states). While Stone is known for innovating, the company has a defined style of bold and largely hoppy beers, so it is always fun to watch the brewers tackle beers that, for the most part, don’t fit the typical gargoyle-shaped mold (read: insert-type-of-IPA-here). This year’s winning entry, Paul Bischeri & Patrick Martinez / Abnormal / Stone Neapolitan Dynamite, once again goes against the grain in a delicious attempt to bring the primary flavors of Neapolitan ice cream—chocolate, vanilla and strawberry—to the forefront in an imperial stout. Freshly poured, the beer comes across slightly creamy on the palate with big cocoa and a touch of vanilla, but as the beer warms up, the latter makes itself more known along with strawberry fruitiness. It’s for sure a beer that would not be part of the Stone portfolio were it not for this contest, and the quaffable embodiment of why this event is such a brilliant component of Stone’s heritage.
From the Brewer: “The AHA brews are always a good challenge for us to scale-up. I think it’s great experience for the homebrewers as well to see how a small recipe gets magnified to production. This beer had a lot of ingredients. Our goal is always to be as faithful as possible to the original recipe, but at the same time it needs to be realistic on the big scale. The biggest ingredient challenge here was the strawberry addition. They used a lot of strawberries, and if we would have scaled it up to be exactly the same, we would have depleted the world’s supply. But seriously…it was too much to use on a big scale. We were able to play with a couple of different addition points and got some strawberry purée—which was all real fruit, of course—that was really intense and came through nicely. Strawberry in general is a tough one to get to come out in beer and it really does come through here in equal measure to their original beer. That’s always the coolest part of this gig: when we have the homebrewers try the scaled-up version and they are stoked. So, the day we tried it with Paul and Patrick was awesome because they were really happy with how it came out. I think the beer is great!”—Jeremy Moynier, Senior Innovation Brewing Manager, Stone Brewing