Is/Was Imaging The Future

Piloncillo is an unrefined sugar from Mexico that has wonderful notes of baking spice, burnt caramel, and hints of rum and smoke. Most of the time when sugar is used in the brewing process it is there only to add simple sugar to ferment out and leave no trace but piloncillo is so beautiful and complex we wanted to do the opposite, we wanted to use it as the featured ingredient. To do this we added a large amount (roughly 18% of the total fermentables) during fermentation. This had the dual benefit of not volatilizing some of the more delicate flavors and aromas of the piloncillo (adding it during the boil, the more traditional way to add simple sugars to beer, would nuter some of the essence of the piloncillo) and increasing ester production from our house saison yeast.

Adding this large of amount of a sugar as dark as piloncillo also had a wonderful effect on the final color of the beer. It went from a pale straw yellow when we knocked it into the fermenter to a deep amber color, all from the pigment in the sugar.

The resulting beer is a beautiful balance of bright floral notes, strawberries, and rooibos tea with richer notes of toffee, caramel, all spice, cinnamon, burnt honey, and bananas foster.