115: Cycle Brewing’s Doug Dozark on the Choices That Matter When Barrel-Aging (and Pasteurizing) Beer

Over the past decade, Cycle Brewing (St. Petersburg, Florida) has made a name for themselves with big barrel-aged stouts. These stouts make up more than half of the brewery’s yearly production, and are so important to the brewery that they custom-designed a brewhouse with a massively oversized mash tun (more than twice the capacity of the kettle) in order to brew they efficiently. In this episode, owner and head brewer Doug Dozark walk through everything from recipe design to blending process, touching on hot-button subjects like using sugars in high gravity beers (“If you can get over some of the preconceived notions about adding sugar, and just think of these as materials, and different colors on your palette to paint with, it opens up a lot.”) to caramel components in the malt bill, to the ideal age for bourbon barrels, temperature for barrels, and one of the most controversial positions of all—his love of pasteurization.
Many factors impact the flavors and stability of high gravity, adjunct-laden beers, and here Dozark shares his experience, and dispels the myths, surrounding the dark art of barrel-aging imperial stouts.

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