Making a Winter Warmer

With the weather getting colder we decided we would take our first crack at making a Winter Warmer. Having never made one of these, we turned to the internet for inspiration. Of course, the style Winter Warmer is pretty loosely defined, so we quickly ran into information overload. It seemed the easiest way to make a Winter Warmer was to is take a recipe you already have and make it slightly darker, more alcoholic, and spice it. Unfortunately, the recipes we have developed and tested so far are either for hoppy beers (don't combine well with spices) or stouts (hard to make a darker version of those). So this is a brand new beer for us, using lessons learned from some of our earlier, less refined beers. What we ended up with was Marris Otter for the base malt, some chocolate and crystal malt for some flavor, and CaraPils to add to the body. This should give us a nice malty base to add spices to.  For spicing we kept it pretty tame and went with some of the standard winter spices, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and all-spice.  We added the spices right before flame out and then they were filtered out going into the fermentor.

We were a little worried that this method of spicing was ineffective as we didn't smell the spices in the beer in the fermentor or taste it in the gravity sample we took.  So two weeks later when we tried the beer for the first time, we were pleasantly surprised by how the beer turned out.  There was a subtle but effective spice nose and flavor, that went well with a somewhat chocolaty flavor in the beer.  We still think the recipe needs some tinkering, but its a great start.  We were happy enough with it (and disappointed enough with one of our other batches) that we brought the beer to a Holiday Party hosted by my parents, and it was well received.

Whats on Tap:

• Svarog # 01 Russian Imperial Stout
• Manitou # 03 New England IPA
• Dog Bone # 03 American Pale Ale
• St. Bernard # 01 Winter Warmer