A typical craft-beer will often have three or so different kinds of hops in it. For Salty Nut Brewery's SMaSH Pale Ale series, head brewer Brent Cole wanted to simplify things. SMaSH is short for "single malt, single hop."

"Somebody who's a beer lover may try a hundred different IPAs (India Pale Ales) or something like that, but it's kind of hard for them to pick the different hops out," Cole, 30, says. "I thought would be interesting for people to try it in singularity. And to brew it that way."

Salty Nut will release the second beer in the series Totally Red SMaSH Pale Ale 5 p.m. Jan. 9 at the brewery's taproom, located at 4411 Evangel Circle N.W. Ste. A. A red-hued 4.3 percent alcohol by volume (ABV) libation, Totally Red is fashioned from a base malt with a name worthy of a Cold War-era secret agent: Red-X. The lone hop is Cascade.

"Cascade is a classic hop and a lot people use that but we chose to use it because we really wanted to see what that hop would taste like in a single-malt, single-hop beer," says Cole, who still works his Boeing engineer day job. "It really shines through. It's kind of spicy and citrusy. That plays well with the malt, which has kind of has a sweetness to it, as if you were using a caramel malt or something like that."

Pints at the den-like Salty Nut taproom go for $5. Other beers that should also be on tap at the Totally Red release include the Hop Naughty IPA, Darkness Stout, Mustache Red and the first SMaSH series beer, Totally Zythos, a very light-colored, subtly spicy 4.9 percent ABV pale ale. Cole plans to make a third and possibly fourth SMaSH beer, but just five or six kegs worth of each in the series is produced and available only at the brewery's taproom.

The release event is dubbed Totally Busted. In honor of Totally Red and the return of SN's Busted Nut Brown Ale, which has been out of production since June and now clocks in at 5.5 percent ABV, Cole says.

BN Brown Ale was originally made using a roasted coffee wheat malt, but when their supplier stopped producing that malt, the brewery was forced to try another variety. "It was a good beer people enjoyed it but we wanted it to be closer to our original," Cole says. "We finally found our replacement malt that would meet that demand. To me it's as close to that first batch as it's going to get." The brewer describes the flavor of Busted Nut Brown Ale version 3.0, as it were, as "roasty, bready, full-flavored and complex."

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