Imaging the Future
Is/Was Brewing

Imaging the Future - Saison Featuring Piloncillo Sugar - Collab w/ Pat Craddock

Last summer we had the honor of Doug Velicky, aka Beer Aficionado, including us in his silent auction to raise money for Lurie Children’s Hospital. The winner of the auction got to work on a beer with us from start to finish, collaborating on the recipe, process, naming, label art, and everything else that goes into creating the final product.

The proceeds from the auction were used to paint the Medical Imaging rooms at the hospital. These rooms are usually austerely decorated if they’re decorated at all and can be incredibly intimidating and frightening to the children who have to use them.

The winner of the auction was Pat Craddock, a long-time home brewer and CFO of Griffin Claw Brewing in Birmingham. We worked together to create a version of a homebrew recipe Pat had that featured Piloncillo sugar.

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.

We were incredibly grateful to be asked to be part of this project and even more grateful for Pat’s generous donation. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of these beers will be donated to Lurie Children’s in addition to Pat’s winning bid.