(That's "moh-lay" as in the Mexican spice/dish, not the critter)
Way back in April, we got together with our friend Wes Harris and put on a little event, involving the consumption of a beer (our first Naked Mole Rat), some delicious pork bellies smoked with spent grain from said beer (Wes's meat-smoking genius in action), and side dishes brought by various and sundry friends. It was a huge success, and the porter got some pretty rave reviews. After a few months of pestering, we've brewed it up again. A slightly different, hopefully even better evolution of the original recipe.
Brewday was Sunday, when Carly (@TwoSpoonsPhoto) was hanging with us and taking pictures, hence the dramatic uptick in photo quality.
This particular beer starts with a basic American Porter base. Standard 2-row brewer's malt, roasted barley and chocolate malt for rich roastiness, dark caramel malts for a bit of sweetness and body, and a little black malt for just a hint of burnt flavor. Cluster hops for a bit of floral/spice character. Neutral American ale yeast, finishing around 6-6.5% ABV. The real heart of this recipe, of course, is the spice blend. We use chocolate, cinnamon, and (most important) three kinds of peppers to approximate a real mole blend (which usually has upwards of 15 ingredients and takes hours to make). Chocolate comes from cacao nibs, peppers from our garden, and cinnamon from a jar (we don't know how to grow cinnamon). We've been growing the peppers in the backyard garden since March, and they've been putting out huge yield from July until roughly now (we're expecting to finally lose them in the first freeze this weekend). For the mole porter, we've used cayenne (fresh), jalapeño (cherrywood smoked), and ancho (cherrywood smoked) peppers.
Fresh peppers go in at the end of the boil, smoked peppers, chocolate, and cinnamon soak in grain alcohol for a week or so to sanitize and extract flavor, then get added to the fermenter.
We'll ferment this beer for about three weeks (including time to condition with the spices added), keg it, and it should be making an appearance sometime in mid November. Cheers!
Naked Mole Rat mole porter recipe (for our fellow brewers):
http://www.brewtoad.com/recipes/naked-mole-rat-v2
-WrongSide Brewing