“If you’re a brewer and you’re not making things that you really want to make, or things you want to experiment with and learn more about, then what are you brewing for,” asks James Herrholz, Chief Creative Officer for Corporate Ladder Brewing in Palmetto, Florida. While some may feel “forced” to brew crowd-pleasing adjunct-laden stouts, Herrholz signed on for the challenge, and approaches the style with zeal and a drive to make the very best. Over the past six years, he’s seen incredible results from this dogged and open-minded focus—three GABF medals, including a gold in 2022, while the brewery has maintained its spot on Untappd as the highest-rated brewery in the state of Florida.
In this episode, Herrholz maps out their approach to pastry stout (barrel-aged and not), and along the way he touches on:
- using three primary base recipes to adjust for sweetness, roast, and caramel depth
- building ranging malt bills with as many as 15 to 18 different malts
- using SRM as a proxy for bitterness when considering dark malt impact on recipes
- managing the impact of dextrose in adjunct ingredients
- splitting different malts between multiple mashes while using long boils to increase Maillard flavors
- promoting attenuation through oxygenation, over pitching, and staging sugar additions
- maximizing extraction through “spinning” while adding adjuncts in bags in brite tanks
- flavor and aroma variations in vanilla due to origin and crop year variations
And more.
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