Bottles of Geezers will be released this coming Friday 15th at Belmont Station when they open. There will be a special draft tapping of Geezers at 5pm that day, along with other Gigantic beers.
We will tap Geezers at Gigantic on Saturday 16th.
We bottled 120 cases.
Geezers was the brainchild of Carl Singmaster. He had tried some hop dusted chocolates, really enjoyed them and wanted to see if it could be reproduced in a beer.
For the beer, Van and I decided to make it a golden, rather than adding chocolate malt or debittered roasted malts. We wanted it to look like any IPA, but surprise people with the chocolate aroma and flavor. It’s hopped with Amarillo, Cascade, Centennial, Crystal and Simcoe. To add the chocolate flavor we “dry nibbed” the beer. We got in touch with Holly at Mana Chocolates www.manachocolate.com and told her what we were up to. She brought us custom roasted cocoa nibs from Peru and Venezuela.
That’s where we learned the nuance there can exist in nibs. The Peru was very citrusy and bridged the gap in chocolate aroma to the Venezuela, which had that very nice, fine, high end chocolate aroma. We also added some of the cocoa nib husks, which have an aroma similar to powdered cocoa.
The resulting beer is very nice and highly drinkable, with both citrusy hop and chocolatey cocoa nib aroma and flavor. It’s slightly beyond golden in color, because it picked up some color from the cocoa nibs.
It is best imbibed at around 45-50F. When it’s too cold, the chocolate aroma is really masked. You have to warm the beer to “open it up”.
