Quick Tips to Boost Your Adjunct Effectiveness

The four main ingredients in a beer — barley, hops, yeast, and water — aren’t the only things getting into most beers anymore. The rise of adjuncts means many different takes on a similar beer style and breweries have been working at perfecting the use of those new ingredients.

For Skip Schwartz, the Innovation and Wood Cellar Lead at WeldWerks, he’s like a kid in a​ nearly literal candy store.​

​”The coolest part about working at WeldWerks is that nothing is off-limits for us,” he said. “We take pride in that fact and love to try new things and figure out the best way to bring out those flavors in beer.”

Sharing ideas can help improve beer all around and a few brewers discussed their favorite adjuncts and how the brewery uses them and gave some tips.

Phil Roche, the Head Brewer for Ecliptic, said the Portland brewery does a lot of interesting things with adjuncts, but using extracts isn’t one of them.

“Flaked Oats, Flaked Wheat, Fruit purees, cocoa, coffee, coconut, vanilla are all adjuncts we use,” he said. “We don’t use extracts.”

READ MORE: Ah, Nuts! Creating Solutions for Adjuncts Hard to Work With

For coffee additions, Roche said Ecliptic makes a cold brew with sterile, de-aerated water.

For cocoa, they use a product called Cholaca which is made of cocoa and water while ground vanilla beans do the trick for them.

Coconut was brought up by both Roche and Schwartz.

“We get toasted coconut flakes,” Roche said. “The toasting reduces the amount of oil in the coconut.

“That being said, the toasted coconut might be the most troublesome to deal with.”

Schwartz said coconut has been one of WeldWerks’ favorite adjuncts over the years.

“We put [it] in almost every style of beer we make … from IPAs, to sours and of course, Stouts,” he said. “Over the years we have tried to do all sorts of different things with our coconut — some worked and some really didn’t.”

Recently they got custom-made adjunct tanks with false bottoms and extra side ports that the WeldWerks team uses to recirculate on top of whatever adjunct they have in the tank.

“When using this tank post-fermentation with a blend of raw coconut and toasted coconut, we have found this to be the perfect blend to create the best coconut flavor in the final product.”

Photo courtesy WeldWerks

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