The making of Imperial Frappé

This collaboration brew has been a long time in the making. Brewed at the start of this year, when times were simpler and brew days meant getting together to create wild recipes, share expertise and maybe even have a few beers.

Amundsen are all about big, bold flavours and incredible beer, so we knew we’d be able to create something really special when Geoff and Matt flew in from Oslo.

On the brew day we threw around ideas for big flavour combinations and what we wanted this beer to taste like. We must have had a sweet tooth that day - we decided we wanted caramel, chocolate, coffee, brownie and fudge flavours. Maybe we regretted skipping pudding the night before?

We mashed-in with chocolate and crystal malts, and added Muscovado sugars to help give us a rich, sweet chocolate taste.

We doubled-mashed to help hit the beefy ABV we were gunning for, then boiled for a mammoth 6 hours to thicken it up still further. The result is that this beer had a higher starting gravity than any other beer we’ve produced.  Those Amundsen boys thoroughly led us astray!

We aged the resulting beer for 5 months in bourbon barrels, after which we steeped it with 10g/L of coffee from Antonia & Panesar - a local company who roast all of their own coffee just down the road from the brewery. We used their blend No.9, which uses Vietnamese and Brazilian beans. We picked this for its deep and rich coffee aroma, without too many roasty notes that we felt wouldn't sit right in a beer like this.

The end result is Imperial Frappé. Rich and decadent, this stout has complex levels of flavours. Expect notes of coffee, chocolate & salted caramel.

These cans won't be around for long, so make sure you grab yours now.

Find out more about Antonia & Panesar coffee.