Hair Of The Dog Brewing Co. Adam Batch #72
About a year ago I ran across a bottle of Hair Of The Dog Brewing Company’s Adam in our beer collection. I had brought it back from Portland several months earlier and plumb forgot that I had it in the meantime. I distinctly remember being awestruck at the remarkable combination of flavors the beer presented: smoke, malt, gaminess, and more malt. At the time it was truly one of the most interesting beers I had ever tasted.
That was a bottle from batch #70. This is one of my favorite things about Hair Of The Dog’s beers, that each bottle indicates what batch it came from (with the exception of Ruth, their pale ale). Their beers are meant to develop over time, and there’s always the possibility of some batch variation. The batch marking is such a great way of giving the beer drinker a bit more information about what they’re drinking, and if they have bottles from other vintages they can compare them against one another. For a while, Hair Of The Dog’s website included a table indicating the brewed on and bottled on dates for both Adam and Fred. Sadly it is not up to date any longer, but you can view it here.
So I was excited to try this new batch of Adam, especially now that I had tasted it once before and was a bit more aware of what to expect from it. Even better, not too long ago I came across a homebrew recipe for Adam. It’s for a 10-gallon batch and was actually given to the author of the Homebrew Chef website by Hair Of The Dog founder/brewer Alan Sprints himself. What’s remarkable about this recipe is that it calls for 62 pounds of malt for 10-gallons of beer! The beer itself comes in at 10%, so those 62 pounds aren’t going to waste.
This bottle of Adam pours a very dark brown with amber highlights and a creamy tan head that forms two fingers thick and drops down to a thin, persistent layer. The nose is rich with molasses, smoke, raisins, and baking rye bread. The palate has a mild astringency made up of hop bitterness and darkly roasted malts. There’s lots of effervescent carbonation supporting a velvety texture. Flavors of molasses, smoky, caramelized barbecue, and dark rye bread, and a much more prominent smokiness than on the nose. The finish trails away with whiffs of smoke, followed by some more smoke, and then some astringent roasted grain flavors, and then again some more smoke.
The beauty in this beer is in how the smoky intensity builds throughout, from nose to finish. I found the smokiness to be much more prominent in this batch than I had in the previous one, which I enjoyed a great deal. In fact, the combination of pungent smoke, molasses, and dark rye was pretty great, and very enjoyable as I worked my way through the glass.
So were the different prominence of flavors that I picked up in Adam this time around a case of batch variation? Or was it just a different day, different time for my palate? Doesn’t really matter I suppose, but given how close the two batches were in time (#70 vs. #72), and the consistency of pro brewers, I have to give more weight to the notion of palate variation than batch variation. But who knows really.
Bottom line: a great, unique beer experience. Go drink one. Slowly. Let it really open up in the glass.
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