Carrot Cake Dessert Ale – KROC Collaboration

What has carrots, bread-like ingredients, spices/vanilla, with hint of frosting and tastes like a Carrot Cake?  The next KROC collaboration, of course!  The Carrot Cake Dessert Ale is an idea from Porter Royer of the KROC club (kroc.org, check out the new site!)  The beer had 4lbs of shredded carrots was double spiced and double vanilla’d.  To emulate the frosting we added one pound of lactose sugar, which is unfermentable and lends a slight tangy sweetness.  

This was also a first for both Royer and I, as we’ve never done a beer made with carrots before.  The only other instance that I’ve heard of was Twisted Pine’s “Roots”.  Since carrots do not require mashing, we added them directly to the fermentor to see how much sugar and flavor we could actually get from them.  The dessert ale came in with 7.1% and 24 IBUs.

You’ll have to see for yourself as the beer is released at 4PM on Saturday March 9th.  Porter will be around to answer questions as well.

Prost!