Blackhawk Black Ale

New Belgium Brewery makes a great beer called 1554 Enlightened Black Ale, and I had seen quite a few posts of people who were going to make a clone of the beer.  This idea appealed to me and I decided to make my own black ale.  I already had my Phat & Tyred Ale recipe, which has started out as a Fat Tire clone, and I decided that instead of copying one of the existing recipes I would use the same grain bill and yeast, but simply darken it up with chocolate and black patent malt.  For hops, I decided to use columbus because I had used it a few times and really enjoyed the aroma.  The resulting beer turned out just fantastic.  There is something about 1554 that is not quite there in my beer, but I still considered Blackhawk Black one of my best.

Batch #2 was slightly different.  I cut down on the chocolate malt and instead of 4 oz Crystal 75, I used 6 oz Crystal 120.  This should give the beer a little more fruity raisin taste which may bring it closer to the 1554.  I also replaced my flavor hop of columbus with saaz to give the hop flavor a less citrusy character.  The bittering still comes mostly from columbus.

Batch #3 was an all-grain recipe.  Because of the fact that my all-grain batches have been so much lighter in color, I decided to add more dark malts to make sure it was back to a black.  I also went back to using columbus in the hop flavor. It turned out wonderful and helped the Hawk's win the 2013 Stanley Cup.


If you would like to read more about BlackHawk Black on my blog, you can follow the BlackHawk Black label.