Gingersnap

Origin Story

Created by one of our head brewers in Elk Rapids, Curt Guntzviller, the story behind it's inception is pretty straight forward: "Gingersnap came about when I was at a friends house and they happened to have some homemade gingersnap cookies out. After having several of them and drinking a few beers, the idea came naturally, 'why not make a gingersnap beer?' I looked up a gingersnap cookie recipe and basically followed a similar spice bill when translating it over to a beer recipe." There you have it, cookies and beer; sometimes, it's just that easy. What wasn't easy was actually taking the concept to the brewhouse and physically making this beer. Upon his first attempt, Curt brewed a beer using the so called "gingersnap spices," which, at that time, included cloves that he decided to leave whole. As yeast consumes sugars in fermenters, one of the by-products that is released from this consumption process is CO2. Much of this CO2 is desired and the brewer will attempt to capture it, so it creates the wonderful carbonation that we enjoy so much in beer. However, during the early fermentation process, the yeast cells are consuming so much sugar and creating so much CO2, that a lot of it needs to be vented out of the fermenter. If this excessive amount of gas does not get released, too much pressure could build up and literally blow the lid off of a fermenter. Therefore, whenever a brewer is implementing non-traditional brewing ingredients during the fermentation process, they have to make absolutely sure that everything being put into the fermenter is not big enough to potentially obstruct the blow off tube that allows this dangerous amount of CO2 to escape. Unfortunately, we found out the hard way that whole cloves are definitely too big, and can easily plug up the space where the gas needs to travel in order to be vented properly from the fermenter. Which is exactly what happened during the first attempt at making Gingersnap. As soon as one of the cloves clogged up the tube where the excess CO2 needed to go, the pressure began to build up inside the tank, until the seals around the lid could no longer contain it. As the seal blew, allowing all of the built up CO2 to escape, outside air was able to get in and certain airborne bacteria caused that batch to become infected. Thankfully, the brewers decided that the idea was good enough to try again, and considering that they knew exactly where the source of the problem came from, they figured the risk involved with brewing it again would be greatly reduced. They were right. The end result is a delicious concept beer that tastes just as good as it sounds.