Love you, too Twisted Pine!
If there is only one thing better in life than a good story, it is a good beer, but when you have both, life becomes divine. That’s Twisted Pine’s Big Shot Espresso Stout in a nutshell.
Twisted Pine Brewing Company has been in business since 1995 and Big Shot Espresso Stout has been our most award-winning beer ever since. As a matter of fact, Big Shot’s bronze medal at the 2012 Great American Beer Festival made Twisted Pine the most award-winning brewery in Boulder County that year. Of course, everyone on the production side wants to brush off their shoulders and take credit for this amazing distinction, but really it’s mostly due to Gerry.
That’s right, Gerry.
Gerry doesn’t work for us. He’s hardly ever in the same building as us. Gerry is as much a legend as he is a mystery…kinda like Bigfoot. Gerry is the master roaster for The Unseen Bean, Boulder’s finest coffee house, and he provides us with the shade-grown, fair-trade Peruvian coffee that defines our Big Shot Espresso Stout. Roasting coffee beans is as much a combination of art and science as brewing beer, and Gerry’s keen senses of smell and sound ensure that our beans are roasted to perfection every time. As brewers, we rely on smell and sound while crafting beers as well, except in our cases, we also have the fortunate sense of sight to determine if our beers look the way they should. Gerry, on the other hand, has been blind since birth. That’s really why Gerry is part legend and part mystery. The acuteness of his fully-functioning senses is so infallible that our Peruvian coffee beans produce the same smooth, rich, and roasted aroma and flavor in our Espresso Stout every single time. And that’s why Gerry’s unseen beans are the best.
Having a great roaster is the first step to producing a tremendous coffee beer, but the second most important aspect is the process of introducing the coffee to the beer, or rather, what fuels that process—crack juice. The politically correct term for crack juice is “cold coffee drippings,” but let’s not beat around the pine tree, and call it by its real name. After cold-steeping our impeccable unseen beans, we remove the bag of coffee grounds and place it over a bucket to greedily collect the crack juice.
If you happen to be a caffeine fiend like most of us in the brewery, you can appreciate the value of a couple of ounces of cold coffee slowly emanating from a sack of some of the finest beans on the planet. If you’re not a caffeine fiend, try our Big Shot Espresso Stout, and I guarantee you that it will win you over to the dark side—of beer and/or coffee alike.
This stuff is the real deal Holyfield.
Trust me.
Every time we bottle Big Shot, our productivity increases by at least 10%. I may not have the data to back up this claim, but it certainly feels that way…on crack juice anyway. All jokes aside, as we run around the brewery on hyper-speed, completing one task after another, the key to all this is still Gerry and his finely honed craft.
So, the next time you enjoy our Big Shot Espresso Stout, cheers to Gerry and the incredible story behind this wonderful beer!