For day 5 of American Craft Beer Week, here’s a look at our year-round dark beer, Charm. Charm is a robust milk stout. Clocking in at 7% ABV, it’s got some bigger stout qualities, but is still fairly drinkable.
The idea for Charm began when we realized we really needed to have a year-round dark beer, but maybe not something over 10% like most of the stouts we were brewing. The first batch of Charm did not turn out the way I had planned due to too much extraction on our dark grains, but after some retooling, it’s on the right track.
Charm has a big, chocolate flavor with pretty much zero roastiness. The beer has a fairly thick body, with a heavy addition of milk sugar. It’s like chocolate milk, but not sickly sweet. When wintertime hits, we’ll start releasing some cans of this beer for distribution.
Today, we’re releasing cans of the first of the Charm variants. For these beers, the can labels all get charming photos of people from our crew. For each beer, the person on the can gets to pick a candy that we age the beer on. For our brewer Ryan’s version, we used Reese’s peanut butter cups. Mckinnen is Charleston Chews, Lee is Butterfinger, Brad is s’mores, Dylan is Heath, and I’m Twix. We plan on running through our whole staff so everyone gets a can!
Crooked Run Brewing 