Running Down the Unmarked Road of Milkshake IPA
Peter Kiley, head brewer of Monday Night Brewing in Atlanta, Georgia, has a lot of opinions when it comes to milkshake IPA. Since it’s not a fully formed style, he enjoys playing with the parameters and bringing a little bit of childhood joy to a pint.
Peter Kiley, head brewer of Monday Night Brewing in Atlanta, Georgia, has a lot of opinions when it comes to milkshake IPA. Since it’s not a fully formed style, he enjoys playing with the parameters and bringing a little bit of childhood joy to a pint.
MILKSHAKE IPA IS NOT a classic beer style, so everyone is allowed to have an opinion. When it comes to milkshake
IPA, first you have to give hats off to Tired Hands Brewing Company (Ardmore, Pennsylvania) who put it on the pedestal for all of us to look at. It’s now the kind of beer with which all of us get to play around and allow it to be what it is, but also what it could be.
Because of the name, it leads you in a direction that is not inherently beer. So you need to find a way to reconcile both the dessert thought and the beer thought. Lactose is obviously a big part of this. You need a lot of it. We also use vanilla. That’s a good base of the flavors you want in this kind of beer, and then you can build out from there.
Right now, we’re making a bunch of these beers for our Adult Summer Camp program. So we have one that is mint chocolate chip, one that is peanut butter, and one that is strawberry vanilla. Honestly, like a lot of brewers, I never thought I’d be adding things like chocolate and mint to a beer, but here we are. Basically I think these beers work best when you’re kind of inspired by those ice cream–parlor flavors you enjoyed as a kid.
When we make these beers, we have one base recipe, and although there aren’t too many set guidelines, we basically stay within the guardrails. We’re doing lactose on the lower end, but still a lot—maybe about 8 to 10 percent. Some people are going as high as 20 to 30 percent.
Since its an IPA, you want to make sure that the hops are coming through, but you don’t want the IBUS to be too strong because that will take away from the experience. For me, it’s no more than 50 IBUS on the kettle-addition side, and we add most of them in the whirlpool because that’s where we get more character and unlock aromas.
A massive amount of dry hopping is where to get the best hops experience, I’ve found, while still letting the other flavors shine. You want to know it’s an IPA, but you want your brain to have this trick while you’re drinking it. The trick is in the creaminess of the mouthfeel and the vanilla character but also in the added ingredients.
We found that we get the best results by adding the fruit and the other flavors to the base beer post fermentation on the cold side. And you don’t have to be limited. You can be as creative as you want to be. Being crazy as shit is the point of these beers.
Work with the ingredients in different ways. See what happens when you use whole ingredients, or when you chop them, or prepare them in different ways. There are so many different kinds of the same ingredients that what you use and how you use it can dramatically change the finished beer.
But, you need to add the ingredients post fermentation. If you do it before, then you lose a lot of the key flavors and aromas that you want in the finished product.
One thing that I really do like about these beers is that they are an experience. As I said earlier, the name is going to remind you of something even before you taste it, so you need to deliver on that. When people come into the brewery, I want them to taste these beers, and it’s not about the quantity, or getting drunk; it’s about the quality of the experience. Producing this “dessert” but making sure it’s still a beer is paramount. We’re beer makers first and foremost, and we can’t lose sight of that, no matter how crazy we get with the ingredients.
A cellar team can really shine with milkshake IPAS. We’ll make a 30-barrel batch of our base and then split it off into four or five tanks. Our cellar team has the chance to get creative with ingredients and amounts and to spend time learning what works, what doesn’t, and what is going to taste great.
Packaging is tricky for us. I need to ask myself whether the beer is something that we’re willing to can, and usually it’s not something ready for distribution because there can be volatility. But sometimes it makes sense because some of these beers, I don’t want in my draft lines. It comes down to what a brewer or brewery feels comfortable with.
If you’re making these at home, be brave. This is where you can flex your creative muscles and try something outside your wheelhouse. Try unique combinations. But you need to document your methodology. There’s so much going on that in order to replicate what works or fix what doesn’t, you need to make sure you’re taking notes. It’s the old saying: the difference between science and messing around is taking notes. Even when you’re working with a style that isn’t a style, you need to make sure you know how to reproduce recipes.