TRUE BREW BREWING UP SOME Christmas Cheer At Big Rig JEFF O’REILLY
When you put some Christmas in your glass an angel gets its’ wings! Having just completed the hands-on “brewing” part
of my third “nearly annual” collaboration with Big Rig’s Brew Master Lon Ladell and the brewery’s first full-time employee/champion brewer/all around good guy Cody Munro I look back as one would do in a cheesy made- for-TV-holiday-movie at how this festive brew became a tradition and how we saved Christmas once again. To paraphrase Buddy the Elf “The best way to spread Christmas Cheer is to grab yourself a Christmas beer”. It was about four and a half years ago the Big Rig
Brewery first opened and I can’t exactly recall when Lon and I first met – but I do know that we became fast friends and shared a lot of laughs. At the 2013 spring launch of their now legendary award winning Scotch Ale I was tasked with naming the ceremonial cask concoction that contained a full 26er of Singleton single malt whiskey in its 5L wooden shell. I immediately stepped up with “Scotchy Scotch” Scotch Ale (a nod to Ron Burgundy) and much hilarity ensued, and not just because of this incredibly delicious hi- octane nectar, but, because that seems to be what happens when you go to a beer launch and tap a crazy keg of liquid fun! It was that inspired night that I asked Lon if he could brew a Gingerbread Porter ... and maybe make “some kind of crazy” Christmas-y cask of our own, and just like that I was on the docket signed up to do my first commercial brewing collaboration ... another fantastic decision born through good friends, good fortune, and a healthy dose liquid courage. Sitting together during the early recipe creation stages
of the process each time we looked at some basic ground rules. The beer had to be fun. It was going be inspired by Grandma’s very best holiday baking - not only were we striving to recreate the colour of gingerbread we really wanted to nail the taste as well. We wanted the beer to be somewhere between 5.5% and 6% alcohol by volume (so warming and approachable) and above all else NO NUTMEG! The process has not changed very much even in our
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third batch as we really wanted each year’s version to be a little different – we were extremely happy with Version 1.0, and learned a lot through a brewing mishap in Version 2.0 that led to a sweeter than anticipated outcome ... and yes ... we still hate nutmeg. This article won’t allow me to get into the specifics of
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Photo By JEFF O’REILLY
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