Something is brewing in Santa Barbara County; some of the area’s most creative and fearless culinary minds have hopped on the beer bandwagon, making beer condiments, beer desserts—you name it!
“Really, the sky’s the limit,” said Kady Fleckenstein of Figueroa Mountain Brewing Company. “We feel like you can do anything with beer.”
Fig Mountain’s first such creation, beer hot sauce, debuted last year. The Buellton-based brewery teamed up with The Chilli Pepper Co. in the Santa Ynez Valley to produce hot sauces made with their Hoppy Poppy IPA and Danish Red Lager.
“Nothing makes more sense than to make hot sauce with beer,” she said. “The food you eat with beer obviously pairs really well with hot sauce. Also, quite a few beers go really well with spicy food, especially IPAs and some of the hoppy beers we like to make.”
The sauce is served and sold at Fig Mountain’s taprooms in Santa Maria, Arroyo Grande, Los Olivos, Buellton, Santa Barbara and Westlake Village, and through their online store at figmtnbrew.com.
Earlier this year, McConnell’s Fine Ice Creams in Santa Barbara started churning out beer-flavored butter brittle ice cream incorporating Fig Mountain’s Davy Brown Ale.
“I like the idea that you can drink the beer and eat the ice cream or you can just put the ice cream directly into the beer,” Fleckenstein suggested. “For me, that’s huge!”
That’s not all—Stafford’s Famous Chocolates handcrafts a special line of chocolate truffles and caramels using Fig Mountain’s Davy Brown Ale.
“I think they’re very good and I love to eat them,” said Stafford’s co-owner Ben Taylor.
After a bit of research and development, Stafford’s discovered that reducing down the ale on low heat to make a thick beer concentrate eliminates most of the water.
“That really helps because the enemy of chocolate is moisture, or water. We’ve been very successful with that, because that gives it a stronger flavor; you get more of the hops, you get more of the barley, more of the caramelness,” Taylor said.
Davy Brown Ale already has chocolately notes, “so it compliments really nicely the milk chocolate that we use,” he added.
Taylor hopes to create a new variety of beer chocolate later this year, with a Fig Mountain stout or porter, maybe in time for the holiday season.
“I’d love to try it!” he said.
Fig Mountain offers the hand-dipped chocolates before major holidays. Go to staffordsfamouschocolates.com, or find them seasonally at Stafford’s stores in Los Olivos and Porterville.
Distiller Ian Cutler is also getting in the spirit, releasing his first un-aged whiskeys distilled from local beers.
Calling them “fun little collaborations,” he makes 10 to 20 cases at a time for his Brewer’s Series at Cutler’s Artisan Spirits distillery in Santa Barbara’s Funk Zone.
He made silver whiskey with saison beer by Santa Barbara’s Brewhouse, bringing out the banana fruit character of the beer.
Cutler also distilled Fig Mountain’s Davy Brown—enhancing the ale’s roasted chocolate notes.
“We’re putting out a whiskey that has just barely touched the barrel,” explained Cutler of his side project. “It’s more a raw expression of the underlying beer that it’s being produced from.”
For more information on the distillery, go to cutlersartisan.com.
Firestone-Walker Brewing Company keeps racking up awards, recently winning the title, “2015 Mid-Size Brewing Company and Brewer of the Year” at the Great American Beer Festival.
The renegade brewers at Firestone-Walker’s Barrelworks division in Buellton like to think outside the box.
They specialize in a wide variety of wild, oak-aged brews and sour ales, but they also like to mix it up with their wine country friends, producing hybrids as part of their Feral Vinifera series.
One year ago, Barrelmeister Jeffers Richardson and Masterblender Jim “Sour Jim” Crooks co-fermented sour blonde ale with grenache gris juice courtesy of Casa Dumetz winemaker Sonja Magdevski.
“We had a good time stomping on the grapes, I Love Lucy-style,” Crooks said.
In May, I tagged along at the Barrelworks brewery with the three collaborators, witnessing Magdevski’s first sampling of the wine hybrid in the cellar.
“To taste this—oh my god—I’m so happy right now! The finish, the mouthfeel, the lingering—everything about it is unbelievable and it’s totally wine-like,” she exclaimed. “Winemakers would freak out!”
The golden 50/50 blend, with notes of creamy butterscotch and hazelnut, spent about a year in oak barrels.
“There is a flavor that’s unmistakable,” Crooks said. “That graininess, that yogurt thing, that’s all natural lactobacillus that came in on the grain.”
The trio didn’t have a clear idea of the end product; this was an empty canvas.
“Jim and I set out to really push the envelope on this one,” Richardson explained. “The idea with these co-ferments is to blur the lines between beer and wine. We’re exploring. This is pretty uncharted territory.”
“To be a little bit selfish, this is for us to learn about wine; for us to learn what’s in these winemakers’ minds, because they’re artists,” Crooks added.
“The beauty of it for me is just the experimentation,” said Magdevski, who handcrafts grenache, syrah, viognier, and other wine varieties for her Los Alamos tasting room. She also owns and operates Babi’s Beer Emporium, next door (casadumetzwines.com and babisbeeremporium.com).
Hybrid collaborations offer her an exhilarating creative outlet.
“This is a greater sense of freedom,” she said. “All bets are off! Let’s see what we’re going to discover!”
The hybrid made by the brilliant Barrelworks boys will be bottled this month and released by the end of the year; find out more at firestonebeer.com.
Sun wine and food columnist Wendy Thies Sell is inspired to always think outside the box. Contact her at [email protected].
