Last week was San Francisco Beer Week, which meant that there were tons of beer-themed events going on all over the city and the surrounding area all week long.
I did my part to attend as many of those amazing events as possible. One of my faves of the week was an event called Serpents and Stouts at a craft beer bar in San Carlos, California.
As the name implies, the event featured an amazing list of stouts as well as some hands-on time with some pretty epic snakes. I actually held this one (pictured below) after it hung out on the bar for a while.
The stout list for this event was amazing, and I had a number of pretty great beers. My fave from the batch was a collaboration beer between Evil Twin and Lervig Aktiebryggeri, a brewery in Norway.
The beer: Big Ass Money Stout. A beer brewed with pizza and money. Yes, pizza and money. I mean, how do you turn that down?
Besides just being a ridiculous concept, the idea for the beer came when Evil Twin’s Jeppe asked the Norwegian brewery for “local” ingredient ideas.
Apparently Norweigans are all really into a frozen pizza brand named Grandiosa, and many of them are flush with cash, thus a pizza and money beer was born.
The frozen ham pizza is added in with the boil, while the money is added after fermentation similar to how you might dry hop an IPA.
“You put hops in after fermentation to get a really fresh hops flavor. We were wondering if this then would give us a fresh money flavor,” says Jeppe.
You can read a play-by-play of how the beer was made written by him here. I actually had version two of the stout, so yes, they did this twice.
As far as a “fresh money” flavor, I’m not really sure that comes through, neither does the pizza. Instead, what you get is a delicious stout with flavors of roasted malt, chocolate, and hints of caramel. At 16%, you also might want to pair this one with a pizza.