About The Beer: Dark & Sunny

By Greg Carlson

Let us make something clear from the get-go: a tropical stout is *not* a stout brewed with tropical stuff. There is no coconut or pineapple or mango or passion fruit in Dark & Sunny or any other tropical stout brewed to style. If we brewed a stout with coconut, we would call it a coconut stout, but we didn’t, so we don’t. But, as a style, the tropical stout is much more interesting than a coconut stout (Sorry, Norm).

Like most things in Western civilization, the story of the tropical stout starts with colonialism. As the British Empire, let’s say, “expanded,” into several tropical regions in the 17th-19th centuries, they would export homeland-brewed beer to their shiny new colonies, with a particular focus given to the export of porter. Yes, even to tropical climates. Throughout history and to today, porters remain popular in many places near the equator, even if American beer drinkers are quick to associate them with cold, wet weather. 

At this time, the term “stout” was used only to denote a higher strength porter, with “foreign export” being used to denote even higher strength and more strongly hopped stouts, brewed with the intention of keeping the beer preserved over the long ocean voyage. Hence, the foreign export stout was born.

Eventually, colonists opted to adapt the stouts to be brewed locally, substituting in local ingredients to limit the amount of pricey imported ingredients they needed to brew the beer. In the West Indies, brewers would often look to the local sugar cane industry and add sugar or molasses to bolster the strength of the beer. And cut back on the hops since the beer didn’t need to keep on a boat for a long time, and you’ve got yourself a brand new style of beer - the tropical stout!

To make Dark & Sunny, we tried to stay true to the style’s history, and shot for an export-strength stout porter, brewed with molasses. Before we get to the “here’s how we did it” section of the blog, I’d like to recommend an excellent article by Anja Madhvani that takes a deeper dive into beer’s historical and contemporary entanglement with colonialism: https://www.sourcedjourneys.com/post/india-pale-ale-a-name-to-be-reckoned-with

Here’s how we did it:

Since the tropical stout is ultimately rooted in English brewing, we start with a blend of hearty, characterful English malts - a split of Golden Promise and Maris Otter for the base, with a hunk of Aromatic malt to help check the “sweet, fruity” box in the BJCP style guidelines. From there, we call a bit of an audible and use Valley Malt’s chocolate wheat as our dark grain. This gives us the lovely roasty coffee and chocolate notes we need, but as a huskless grain, the wheat imparts much less bitterness than one might get from a roasted barley (see Blackstone for an example of that roasted barley bite). More on why that’s important in this beer later.

We tailor our mash to create a highly fermentable wort (seems unusual for a stout, hmm?), then perform a longer boil than normal, in part to coagulate as much protein from the wheat as we can (this will help with clarification later on), and in part to bump up whatever wort caramelization we can (not much!). We also add a particularly modest amount of hops for the sole purpose of imparting a particularly modest amount of bitterness.

As the boil reaches its end, we add the pièce de résistance - the molasses! Molasses is available in a whole variety of colors and levels of sweetness, refinement, and intensity. For Dark & Sunny, we go with the blackstrap variety, which is the darkest, least sweet, and most by-producty variety. In other words, the perfect option to stand out in a big, rich stout.

For a product so closely associated with sweetness, blackstrap is actually only around ~50% actual sugar, and has the most bitterness of the molasseses (molassi?). If you’ve been following along, this is why we elect to work with a less bitter roasted malt and only a relative smidgen of bittering hops.

From there, we proceed with our regular fermentation process - lager process, that is! Because tropical stouts are most popular in areas where light lager breweries are the most common, lager yeast and fermentation can be considered the norm for the style. So that’s what we do!

What results is a rich, bittersweet stout, with an aroma of coffee and chocolate and notes of dark fruit, and the distinct flavor of straight blackstrap molasses. We can confirm porters and stouts are in fact sneaky refreshing on a hot summer’s day, but if you find that too hard to believe, you can certainly believe it’s a treat to sip on a cooler summer’s night. Enjoy!