Easy does it when it comes to adding chili peppers to beer. This is a stunt that many craft breweries have attempted, usually as one-time I-dare-you-to-drink-this type releases. The beers are sometimes fiery hot, making them fun to drink — or fun to prod a friend to drink — if not anyone’s lasting favorite.
Kevin McMahon, a Novato craft beer enthusiast and homebrewer, doesn’t really like any of them.
“They’re usually way overpeppered,” he says.
So McMahon is doing what he believes few, if any, commercial brewers have yet done: mastered the art of brewing with peppers. McMahon made his first homebrew in 2013. A year later, he added jalapenos to a beer. He was brewing an emulation of Russian River Brewing Co.’s famed double IPA Pliny the Elder, following a recipe about as elaborate and finicky as they get in the homebrewing world. The recipe, which the brewery shares with the public, calls for specialized hop varieties added to the boiling beer wort in precise portions at precise intervals. It was exactly the way that Russian River makes its double IPA — except that, as a last-minute touch, McMahon threw some jalapeno peppers into the boiling beer wort.
“It’s one of the most sophisticated beer recipes there is, and I wiped it off the map with an addition of jalapenos peppers,” says McMahon, who is a member of the Marin Society of Homebrewers. “All that subtlety of flavor you get in Pliny the Elder was gone.”
But the addition created something new, a beer so good that McMahon has essentially been working on perfecting it ever since. He has made five more beers in the same model, with slight tweaks each time to the pepper additions. Whereas he used to add the peppers in the boiling stage, he now adds them post-fermentation, just prior to bottling or kegging. And where he once used whole peppers, he now steeps them in vodka or everclear to create a fiery hot pepper tincture, which he adds cautiously to the otherwise finished beer.
He also began using serrano peppers instead of jalapenos in 2015 after, he says, a local brewer who had worked with peppers, Phil Cutti of Headlands Brewing Co., vouched for the hotter of the two as more consistent in flavor and heat.
McMahon has also boosted the alcohol level of his spicy double IPA a notch to create a burlier backbone to better handle the spiciness of the beer, and he also recently tried a batch with grapefruit rind grilled over cedar wood.
McMahon says there is an art to making good pepper beers.
“And a little science, but mostly art,” he says.
However, it seems to be something more akin to a sport for many brewers, at both the commercial and the homebrew levels.
“A lot of them run at it too quickly, and the goal is to burn their friend’s face off with their beer,” McMahon says.
Commercial brewers often overplay unique novelty ingredients “so that people know they’re there,” he adds. With pepper beers, this often means beers as hot as spicy salsa. Consumers tend to try them once, then never again, says McMahon, who has talked with many beer drinkers about their preferences.
McMahon calls his peppered double IPA Premonition — seemingly a riff on Russian River’s barrel-aged and Belgian-style beer series, with names like Consecration, Damnation and Supplication. But McMahon tells another story: He had just upped the portions of malt in the beer to create more alcohol. But this was also likely to create a messier, frothier boil. In homebrewing, it is considered a small household disaster when a 5-gallon batch of beer overflows the crock pot. It creates a sticky, sugary residue that is nearly impossible to remove from the stove and floor.
“I had a feeling it was going to overflow,” McMahon says. So he bought a propane stove to use outside, in the yard, in case of an overflow — and when boiling the wort, it happened: The beer swelled out of the crock and over the sides. The beer, it seemed, was a Premonition.
Speaking of which, McMahon has a vision of opening a beer garden, something he hopes to do in the next two years. He believes Marin County is rich in good beer but slightly lacking in great places to drink them. A beer garden might help fill that void, and it would almost certainly be the only place around to have a Premonition.
Alastair Bland’s Through the Hopvine runs every week in Zest. Contact him at allybland79@gmail.com.
