Swirl Stout

Origin Story

No stranger to pushing the limits of extreme beer styles, Swirl Stout is yet another amazing notch head brewer in Bellaire, Ryan Hale, can add to his impressive "brewing belt". With an impressive list of new stouts already slated for this year's annual release party, Ryan came up with an idea that may steal the show or at least earn some "best in show" remarks when it comes to non traditional ingredient usage, flavor prominence, and overall balance in the finished product. How he continues to keep knocking out so many fun new beers, I'm not sure, but we can at least get a glimpse at where this one came from: When thinking about ideas for stouts one of the first things that came to mind was ice cream. I have had beer flavored ice cream so why not do the opposite, an ice cream flavored beer. So instead of going super crazy and trying to make a multi-colored beer like superman or actually throwing cookie dough into a batch to recreate two of my favorite flavors I took a more rational approach. The swirl or twist ice cream brings me back to my childhood and I thought those two flavors would work wonderfully in a stout. So when doing research on how to make chocolate ice cream, most recipes use cocoa which we didn't want to use because it is very hard to work with being a powder that turns to cement in a fermenter. So I went with Cacao nibs which is the raw form of the bean before it's ground up and mixed with sugar to make cocoa powder. So that mixed with vanilla and milk sugar and we get Swirl Stout, hope you all enjoy. - Ryan Hale