Feature Beer Friday: Homebrewed Peach Hoppler Milkshake IPA

By Eric Ducote

Hello everyone, and welcome to my first homebrewed edition of Feature Beer Friday.  Normally I'd never feature a homebrew because it's not something that most people reading this would be able to try, but this instance is a little different.  This beer was brewed by my team for the Iron Brewer competition put on by Brasseurs A La Maison that was intended to take place last weekend.  Unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our club's control the event had to be canceled, but there is still hope that it will be back later in 2018.  The event has been put on the last 5 years at Tin Roof Brewing to benefit the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank, but ATC rules prohibit a brewery from hosting a special event.  Don't worry though, there's a good chance the event isn't dead, but the late cancellation did mean that I had a whole keg of our beer to drink as it's going to need to be re-brewed in order to ensure maximum freshness when the even returns. 

The Peach Hoppler banner. 

As you can almost certainly tell from the banner above, my team (consisting of myself and Mandi, Brenton Day, Brandon Thomsen, and Marcus Rutherford) was assigned peaches and cinnamon toast crunch as the mystery "iron brewer" ingredients, and we decided to turn that into a peach cobbler IPA, named Peach Hoppler.  We used a box of cinnamon toast crunch in the mash per 5 gallons, added a lot of hops in addition to some lactose, and then finished it off with even more cinnamon, some vanilla, and the peaches.  The result is a peach and cinnamon inspired milkshake IPA, bursting with citrus hop flavors that compliment the peach and cinnamon toast crunch and are supported with a slightly sweet milk and vanilla base, not unlike the ice cream complimenting a peach cobbler.  

A pour of Peach Hoppler.

This homebrew turned out really delicious, so I sincerely hope that we will get a chance to put on a take 2 of Iron Brewer to share this with a lot of the readers out there, and also more importantly to raise a lot of support for the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank.