I had originally planned to make this into a new style of breakfast beer. Instead of the standard thick, sweet, stout that goes well with donuts, I wanted to make a smoky base beer and finish it with maple and orange. After the beer finished fermentation, I took a bit to play with, added a touch of maple syrup and some orange infused vodka (1 ounce of fresh zest into half a cup of vodka) and wasn’t blown away by it. I really didn’t like the maple component, but the orange worked really well. It melds well with the backend sweet malt finish and rounds out the smoke profile a bit. Instead of adding all the orange to the keg, I add about a teaspoon of the vodka to a pint glass and then fill it up from the keg when I’m feeling like it.

I did a similar thing last year with this base recipe, adding star anise to it by making a anise infused vodka, but I added that all straight to the keg. It was a beer brewed to honor a friend; he likes cigars and Jagermeister…so I thought a smoked beer with licorice notes would do well by him. And it really did.

I really enjoy this base, but after brewing it twice, I do think a few things can change. I think the smoke level might be just a touch muted, it’s well balanced as is, but I think the maltiness of the beer could hold up to some more smoke. That means I can drop the pilsner malt completely and do 7 pounds of smoked malt. Along with that, I’ll do 1.5 pounds each of the Vienna and Munich, which will bump up that melanoidin component a touch. One of the reasons I do a 120 minute boil on this is to build those melanoidin compounds, which play super well with the smokiness. I figure if I bump up the smoked malt from ~60% to ~70%, I’ll want that extra layer of complexity to sing with the smoke.