Bite Sized: Hi-Wire Brewing 10W-40

Welcome to Bean to Barstool Bite Sized, where we spend about 5 minutes with some of our favorite people from craft beer and craft chocolate. Today we hear from Hank Marshall and Peter Batinski at Hi-Wire Brewing in Asheville, North Carolina.  Hi-Wire brews an Imperial Stout line called 10W-40, made with French Broad Chocolate cacao, Dynamite coffee, and Ugandan vanilla, as well as a range of other flavor ingredients to evoke specific flavor concepts like Vietnamese coffee, blueberry crumble, or chocolate taco. Listen in as Hank and Peter talk about the base beer for 10w-40 and how they work with coffee, cacao, and vanilla.

You can find out more about Hi-Wire Brewing here.

You can listen to my entire interview with Hank and Peter here.

Check out David's book Pairing Beer & Chocolate: A Guide to Bringing the Flavors of Craft Beer and Craft Chocolate Together.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hey everyone, welcome to Bean to Barstool Bite-sized, where we spend about five minutes with some of our favorite people from Kraft Beer and Kraft Chocolate. Today we hear from Hank Marshall and Peter Batinsky at Highwire Brewing in Asheville, North Carolina. Highwire brews an Imperial stout line called 10W40, made with French broad chocolate cacao, dynamite coffee, and Ugandan vanilla, as well as a range of other flavor ingredients to evoke specific flavor concepts like Vietnamese coffee, blueberry crumble, or chocolate taco. Listen in as Hank and Peter talk about the base beer for 10W40 and how they work with coffee, cacao, and vanilla.

SPEAKER_02 0:48

So the base beer is uh kind of like a big roasty chocolatey stout, kind of thinking old school stout, but making some room for kind of all your adjuncts and whatnot. So you're kind of appealing to folks that will, you know, enjoy a big stout, but also you know, some additions here and there of fruit or extra chocolate or some other wild flavors that we can add in. Yeah, so we've got the cacao nibs, so that's the main chocolate. We've got Ugandan vanilla and a dark roast from a local coffee roaster.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

And is that always the same coffee roaster or does that switch around?

SPEAKER_02 1:22

Uh about 99% of the time, it's gonna be dynamite, which is kind of the base recipe. Um, if we're looking to switch it up, we've done that in the past on things like the Vietnamese coffee variant, where we did a cupping with uh another local roaster and kind of dialed in for a different profile.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

So you guys do so many different variants on top of this base beer. What is it about the base 10w40 that you feel like is such a flexible platform? What makes it distinctive that allows it to work for so many different flavor profiles?

SPEAKER_01 1:52

You try Tenda by itself, it's a just a damn good milk stout. It's it's chocolatey, it's not too chocolatey, it's roasty, it's not too roasty. So we have all these things to play off of. And those initial malt and beer flavors are really like kind of soft. And so that allows us to work off of it into other dynamics. Because you know, one beer we were gonna talk to you about right here is this we have a chocolate taco tenda. If that was too roasty, that beer wouldn't work, you know.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

So you guys work with French Broad Chocolates there in Asheville, well-known bean to bar chocolate company. Tell me a little bit about your relationship with them uh and how that works in the space for uh using their stuff for your beer.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

French Broad is always willing to do custom this, custom that, whatever we want. And that's like the benefit of that relationship is does this beer need a certain flavor from a certain kind of chocolate? They're there to make that happen. Like that's the beauty of that relationship. And their level of knowledge is unprecedented.

SPEAKER_00 2:55

Like and do you always use the same nibs from them or the same products, or do you use a blend or whatever they have available? How does that work?

SPEAKER_02 3:04

So the the nibs that we get are are made to order, so it's kind of whatever's coming down the line at the time. And there's, you know, we're not getting a ton of nuance from the nibs, so we're not looking for any kind of specific other than kind of the chocolatey, that nutty uh profile that they're giving off. So typically, you know, whatever they're they're processing in the moment for the nibs portion uh is good with us.

SPEAKER_00 3:25

So there's not really like an origin selection process where you're picking a specific bean for a specific version or anything.

SPEAKER_02 3:33

There is not an origin selection process now.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

Sure. Let's talk about how you use the cacao and the other adjuncts in this beer. How do you infuse those flavors when you're brewing the beer?

SPEAKER_02 3:44

So once the beer is finished, transferred into Bright, we're actually recirculating the finished beer on the nibs and on the coffee. So it's in a hopback style vessel. It gets about a four-hour resurfac, and just you know, in a fine mesh bag and circulating through, and that's where it's picking up all its flavor. The coffee is ground, so picking up a little bit more flavor from the coffee than you would if it was whole bean.

SPEAKER_00 4:08

And you're doing those both at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 4:10

That's correct.

SPEAKER_00 4:11

You don't find that one you know does that quicker or slower than the other? You just put them both in for the same amount of time?

SPEAKER_02 4:18

Yeah, they might, you know, pick one up faster or slower, but the way we've got the the target profile set right now is is the way that we've done it forever. So we were finding that you know you get a nice balance of the chocolate and the coffee with doing them together, and one's not going to be more stringent than the other, or pulling a different flavor profile. And you guys said you're doing whole bean now, we're doing we're doing uh ground. Ground, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

And does that timing get changed at all based on what the finished version of the beer is going to be if you want more intensity or less intensity?

SPEAKER_02 4:50

Traditionally, if we're looking for more or less intensity, we'll you know remove some of the volume, but the timing stays the same, kind of based around the volume of beer in the tank, whereas the volume of the chocolate or the coffee as well will be changed if we're looking for more or less intensity.

SPEAKER_00 5:05

And then you mentioned vanilla. Is that going in at the same time, or when are you adding that?

SPEAKER_02 5:09

Uh so the vanilla is whole bean vanilla. Um, they're hand split by the brewers, and that is steep in the whirlpool throughout the entire whirlpool process. So it's hanging out in there until the knockout is finished. So that's all extracted hot side.

SPEAKER_00 5:23

You can find out more about Highwire Brewing in the show notes. You can listen to my entire conversation with Hank and Peter back in episode 57. I'll share that in the show notes as well. The music today was by my dear friend Anna P. S. My name is David Nilsson. Thanks for listening to Bean to Barstool Bite-sized.