Family 2025
Family 2025 Southern Imperial Stout. Brewed by Spotty Dog Brewers in Hobart, Tasmania.
Family is our celebration of the mammoth effort that goes into producing independent beer in Australia. It celebrates the friends, family and investors who helped build the dream of Spotty Dog and this year, a bunch of them even helped brew it! It's our acknowledgement of the countless hours of dedication our team puts in and a naughty little treat for that effort.
And yes… we put it in 500ml cans. Because there's no better feeling than opening a big old Southern Imperial Stout in the depths of Tassie winter and sharing it with whoever you call family.
Now to some specs… we decocted the bejeezus out of it to get extra malt character (virtually unheard of in an ale), we didn’t sparge (rinse) the grain to make sure the starting gravity was massively high, to give us that high ABV, and we added all the dark roasted grains in the lauter tun, to give colour and malt flavour without adding too much tannic bitterness.
It pours like crude oil. On the nose there’s blackcurrant and hedgerow with a whiff of toast, on the palate it’s thick and unctuous and deeply roasted - just this side of burnt. Roast caramel, treacle, golden syrup, dark, dark fruit and even darker chocolate notes with a background of coffee and the lightest of spicy esters. A lingering, very bitter finish. Not for the faint hearted.
Details:
Yeast - Nottingham, it’s big and english and gets in and gets the job done without fuss but leaves a faint whiff of britishness if you look for it. Also, it can survive 10.6% alcohol.
Malt/Grain - A whole lot to encourage complexity and layer flavour, mostly from our mates at Voyager (craft maltery in Griffith). Some light toasted grains, some lower modified grains for body, some deep dark roasts for deep dark roast vibes.
Hops - Topaz, for bittering, it’s nice and neutral, and a huge dry hop with Bramling Cross - a UK hop that’s unapologetically uncool, and smells like earth, hedgerow and black currants. It’s f****** sick mixed with the dark malt character and english yeast esters.
