Brewers looking to Cocktails and Tiki culture for Inspiration

Some brewers will do anything for a little inspiration. A trek through the mountains, a “business trip” to Belgium… but some find it closer to home, neat or on the rocks. The art of brewing a cocktail beer lies in the brewer’s ability to translate. A good translation, in language, requires a sense of colloquialism and a cultural relationship. So too with the translation from highball to schooner; the demand for authentic replication is high because of the specificity of cocktails’ flavor profiles. 

Beer drinkers can now enjoy cocktail beers in any genre, from “-Ritas” at the gas station to barrel-aged sippers available only to brewery club members. As a trend, cocktail-type beers have been around for over a decade, and have also followed the resurgence of Tiki cocktails in recent years.

Really, there are no rules. If we’ve learned anything from brewers in the last few years it’s that anything food-grade goes. One might argue that smoothie beers are pretty much cocktail beers, but for the purposes of this article we will stick to beers from two specific breweries, Firestone Walker and Alesong Brewing & Blending, that distinctly recall well-known cocktails. 

Eric Ponce came to Firestone Walker by way of Goose Island and its giant warehouse of Bourbon County barrels, with a brief stint at Logsdon Farmhouse Ales in between. He runs Firestone’s “clean” (that is, not wild ale) barrel aging program, and was brought on about 5 years ago with the task of diversifying barrel-aged beers from the annual Parabola, Stickee Monkee, and Anniversary releases. The Southern California brewery just released two new brown-box specialty ales inspired by cocktails: Mezca-Limon and Tequila Barrel Sunrise. Ponce’s inspiration behind Mezca-Limon is telling:

“I lived in Alaska, and a friend named Marco had family in Jalisco. He’d load up his Tacoma once a year, and the town would donate clothes and goods. He’d drive down with a handful of small barrels, get them filled with mezcal and tequila, and try to bring them back up to Alaska. He’d get pulled over on the way back through Mexico because he had a nicer Tacoma, and have to give away barrels, so he’d only make it back with a couple barrels. 

Firestone Walker’s Eric Ponce

“I’d go over to his place to have mezcal or tequila, and I asked, ‘where’s the lime and salt?’ He said you don’t need that to appreciate it. I asked him about cocktails, and he introduced me to the mezcalita: mezcal, orange juice, lime juice, glass rimmed with tajin, and some agave syrup; how much syrup depends on your taste. That’s what I envisioned when I designed this beer.”

To create Mezca-Limon, Ponce brought in 80 mezcal barrels, which is a feat in itself. The business of barrel brokerage is wily and insular; Ponce’s time in the industry has provided him with a friend who is a barrel broker and knew he wanted mezcal barrels. His friend made a trip to Mexico where he bought used barrels from around ten family-run mezcal producers. 

The barrels themselves are even trickier. All of them are ex-bourbon barrels that were used by the Mezcaleros for many years. They can arrive warped, with gaps between staves or bung holes drilled into the barrel’s head instead of the side. Luckily, Firestone employs welders who rectified those with stainless straps over a rubber stopper so that the barrel could be used more efficiently in a rack, and the beer transferred under pressure without risk of the bung popping and pouring beer everywhere. 

“You can visually inspect, and you can get some leaks,” Ponce said casually. “The majority of them did leak for a while, maybe a day or day and a half, then they sealed up and I topped them up.” This, it seemed, was the least of his worries.

Mezcal differs from tequila in many ways, primarily because of the type of agave used and the location it’s grown, and it typically has a smoky component. “Tequila can only use blue agave; mezcal can use 30-40 types of agave. Honestly, there’s maybe 10 that are used. Depending on what agave plant they’re using, that’s going to influence the flavor. One might be more herbaceous, or have blackberry or raspberry fruit aroma. And elevation, whether it’s grown in the lowlands or highlands, affects the flavor. They may be bigger, a little more sweet, or smaller with more minerality - that’s the terroir. There was a lot of diversity [in the barrels]. I’m tasting what I imagine Mexico to be.”

At first whiff, Mezca-Limon is sweetly smoky with a deeper-than-orange orange aroma. Imagine sifting through odd bottles at a bar and coming across an old Carpano Antica vermouth (disclaimer: I have an unusual obsession with beers that smell like vermouth). It has serious depth, and there is no discrepancy between aroma and flavor. The smokiness rises as the beer warms and coats your palate with a decent amount of residual sugar, but keeps a Covid-safe distance from rauchbier. The mezcal and orange bitters barrels walk arm-in-arm. I would hazard a guess that the very small amount of bitterness actually comes from the chili peppers. What would this beer be without each of its carefully selected components? Just a weird barleywine.

Ponce went about building Tequila Barrel Sunrise in a similar manner, with bench trials using a pipette to track exact percentages in each blend. The tequila sunrise cocktail utilizes grenadine, poured carefully over a spoon so it sinks to the bottom of a chilled mixture of orange juice and tequila and looks like a sunrise. There’s a song about it. 

Grenadine, until it was mass produced into oblivion, was colored red with pomegranate juice. Ponce’s first blends used pomegranate juice, but it turned out to be too tannic and not acidic or red enough. So he turned to a favorite non-alcoholic beverage: jamaica tea. Jamaica is the Spanish word for hibiscus, a plant with bright pink flowers that lend their hue and a distinct, vitamin C-laden tartness when infused in water. 

“I made a concentrated tea to sanitize it, and kegged it and ran micro on it to make sure it was clean. Then went back to benchtops, made a blend that I was really happy with.” The beer portion includes a strong ale aged in extra-Añejo tequila barrels (the “extra” implies that the tequila lay for three or more years in oak), as well as beer aged in orange and cherry bitters barrels, which Ponce acquired from a friend in Kentucky. 

“I want people to get the visual stimulation, aroma and retro nasal,” says Ponce. “I want people to say, ‘I drank this, and I closed my eyes and thought I was drinking a cocktail.’ I want it to be representative of the cocktail.”

Matt Van Wyk of Alesong Brewing & Blending has a similar goal when helping develop cocktail beers with his team. He also wants the beer to taste like a beer. “We make beers that taste wine-like and cider-like, but in the end you know it’s a beer. I’d love to say that a cocktail beer should taste more like a cocktail, but in the end we’re making beer. If it takes someone back to a memory, ‘oh, it takes me back to drinking on a beach in Sausalito,’ that’s great.”

It’s hard to ignore the heist of bling bestowed on Alesong by professional beer judges in its five years. Yet, many of the beers don’t fit a traditional category, and wind up in catch-alls like Experimental Beer. This is due partly to the way they blend their beers; a handful of cocktail beers available in late June were an excellent example. “Cocktail beers are interesting,” says Van Wyk, “but we approach them the same way we do as other beers we make: shoot for balance, hit the flavor and aroma aspects.” 

Alesong’s French 75 is based on a refined WWI-era cocktail that combines dry, herbal gin with lemon juice, a dash of simple syrup, and champagne. The beer version is a saison aged in gin barrels with lemon zest and fermented with brettanomyces yeast. While Firestone’s Mezca-Limon veers towards full-on cocktail flavor and texture, Alesong’s French 75 is still very much “beer.” A bright, tart impression that follows the intention of the cocktail leads to a dry, bitter finish. It is also fairly spritzy, and carries a leafy, herbal earthiness and tannic quality that both quenches thirst and calls for another sip. 

Whether it’s baking, brewing, or stirring up a drink, one must consider all the aspects of taste: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. Ideally, harmony is achieved and balance is perceived according to intent. While happy accidents happen, informed decisions are more likely to hit a target. 

Van Wyk and the Alesongsters collaborated with pFriem Family Brewers to created two classic whiskey cocktail beers: Old Fashioned (pFriem’s release) and Manhattan. In order to mimic elements of the Manhattan cocktail with beer ingredients, “we blended in a non-barrel-aged hoppy red rye beer that was fermented on cherries, so that was the garnish. We used hops that would mimic some herbal characteristics. We tried to find a balance that mimics the balance of a Manhattan.” And while the beer isn’t an exact replica, the intent is clear, especially in the nose, in the way the alcohol carries the aroma out of the glass. If a nose could have legs...

Sweetness is an essential component in most cocktails; simple syrup is a staple bar ingredient, and fruit juices and liqueurs also bring sugar to bear. “When you have mixed culture beers, you have a dry beer or else you have bottle bombs,” says Van Wyk. “There’s no way for us to add the sweetness of a paloma without using a pasteurizer. That’s different with the bourbon barrel beers; you can mimic the sweetness with higher finishing gravity.” 

The paloma he refers to is Market Paloma, brewed exclusively for Market of Choice stores. The classic tequila, lime, and grapefruit soda recipe is emulated by barrel-aging a sour ale in extra añejo barrels (twice, actually, as the first round of barrel-aging didn’t quite get it there) with grapefruit juice and lime zest. It’s got the pucker, the citric-floral appeal of grapefruit juice, and an aroma of tequila without any of the burn. 

Brewers and mixologists use a similar lexicon, and have a world of ingredients in their arsenals. These examples of cocktail beers and their producers represent a deep understanding of the brewing and blending processes, and a respect for another genre of alcoholic beverage. Though Bukowski might disagree, the secret ingredient here is fun. Though they never specifically said it, Ponce and Van Wyk clearly enjoy the nuanced challenges of making malty magic, a sleight-of-barrel, a most pleasurable deception.