Dirty Money

Origin Story

Dirty Money has now become one of many beers that we have successfully brewed using the final runnings from some of our largest batches brewed in Elk Rapids.  What would have normally ended up as discarded usable wort, because there wasn't enough space in the kettle for all of the extracted runnings from a beer requiring two times the regular amount of grain.  The brewers decided to cut down on our waste water and maximize on our brewing investment by placing it into an auxiliary kettle to brew an entirely different batch of beer.  Seeing as we now brew anywhere from 4-6 of these "side" batches a year, they have steadily become a way for the crew in ER to get creative with some smaller scale experimental "Bellaire-like" batches.  Being composed entirely of the final runnings from both malt bills, the majority of the richest most flavorful malt has been removed, resulting in a beer that's much lighter in overall body with noticeably different flavors and appearances from the original beer in which they came.  This allows for the fun use of some non traditional brewing ingredients and other types of style crossing to make up for some original flavors that may seem lacking due to the malt potency differences.  This time, it was Crut's (ER Brewer Curt Guntzviller) turn to take a creative stab at the final runnings left from a batch of Apashia: Old Ale that was brewed entirely for barrel aging.  Described as a hoppy Irish Ale, Crut used an array of well known bold flavored American hops (Summit, Cascade, Simcoe and Citra) and then the unconventional addition of a traditional Irish Ale yeast strain, to see how the interesting combination would play out.  At first the results produced a beer that most agreed were too harsh on the palate to enjoy, and many thought the batch would have to be dumped.  However, Tony's patient approach to things prevailed and he decided, in typical T$ fashion, to let the beer "mellow" to see if some good old fashioned aging could ultimately lead to some enjoyable consumption.  Needless to say, the believers were few and jokes began to surface leading to a proposed name of, Dirty Money.  Suggesting that Tony, or T-Money as we all know him, was fighting a lost cause in trying to save a bad or "dirty" batch of beer.  In the end, and after 3 months of conditioning in a serving tank, the final outcome was a surprisingly balanced light bodied beer with pleasant traces of malty sweetness intermixed with an assortment of hop flavors, and a slightly larger than expected bitterness.