How an Amish Sugar Shack Led to a Decadent Beer
By David Nilsen
“Yo, you can't take pictures of the Amish themselves,” Austin Jevne’s friend told him as they approached the maple sugar shack at night. It was a cold March evening on a rural Wisconsin farm, and the co-founder of Forager Brewing and Humble Forager Brewing was here to see maple syrup being made.
The farm belonged to the Millers, an Amish family who has made maple syrup for five decades on this one little plot of land, tapping over 1,800 trees. The Millers don’t use electricity, and it was dark when Austin and his friend arrived at the shack. They pulled out their phones and turned on the flashlights.
“We pulled up to it and there was just this building with sparks flying 60 feet into the air,” he recalls. “It was this really beautiful setting on this cold spring evening in Wisconsin.”
Austin was at the Millers’ farm to source maple syrup for several beers, most notably the beer that would become Sugar Shack Diaries. This 12% ABV Imperial Stout is brewed with maple syrup, Mostra coffee, Ecuadorian cacao, and Mexican vanilla.
“We went inside and it was so foggy you barely could see your hand in front of you, because they didn't have a venting system for the shack,” he explains. “We're walking through this misty room and all of a sudden these two little Amish girls just kind of appear out of nowhere sitting in a corner in the pitch black. Then one of the sons opens this large door to the fire pit feeding area and it just illuminated the whole place with this really beautiful orangeish glow through the fog.”
The experience inspired Austin to begin using the Millers’ syrup in his beers due to the love and energy the family puts into their craft. He’s also used raw maple sap from the farm in place of brewing water in some beers.
Cacao, Pancakes, and Memory
Syrup isn’t the only agricultural ingredient used in Sugar Shack Diaries. Austin uses single origin cacao from Chocolate Alchemy, receiving raw nibs and then roasting them in-house immediately before brewing. For this beer, he uses Ecuadorian nibs from Costa Esmeraldas
“I think a lot of people think cacao adds pretty much exclusively chocolate flavors to a beer, which it obviously does, but it also can add a bunch of other nuanced flavors that come from the variety of cacao that you're using,” he explains. Forager and its distribution sister brewery, Humble Forager (a necessity because of antiquated Minnesota alcohol laws), brew numerous high concept Stouts with cacao, vanilla, and other adjunct ingredients, and Austin likes showcasing the unique opportunities these ingredients provide.
In Sugar Shack Diaries, he’s bringing together both tropical—cacao, coffee, vanilla—and northern—maple—ingredients
“It's a conceptual thing at Humble Forager,” he says. “We like to take these flavors that are built into our lives in different avenues that aren't necessarily beer and try to come up with a way to make a beer taste like that using authentic ingredients.”
He and his team draw inspiration from the culinary world. He looks to chef friends and, perhaps surprisingly, French pastry books to look for unique flavor interactions. He also draws from his own memory of growing up in Madison, Wisconsin. There was a pancake house called OHOP (“Original House of Pancakes”) that sold chocolate chip pancakes.
“We'd always walk there before our middle school classes with a bunch of friends on Fridays and get pancakes,” he recalls. “[Sugar Shack Diaries] kind of brought me back to that moment in my life. It’s kind of inspired by a breakfast experience of drinking coffee and having pancakes.”
Humble Forager adds the maple syrup to the beer twice—once during the whirlpool at the end of the boil to provide fermentable sugar, and once after fermentation is complete to provide some residual sweetness and aroma. The beer is then flash pasteurized to ensure that sugar will not ferment.
Analog Communications and a Snowy Evening
Despite providing the marquee ingredient to Sugar Shack Diaries, the Millers have not tasted the beer inspired by their family pride.
“They don't drink, but they have some neighbors who do,” says Austin. One of those neighbors is actually his only way to communicate with the Millers. Allan Miller doesn’t have a phone. Austin calls Allan’s neighbor, who leaves him a note. Every couple days, Allan goes to this neighbor’s house, goes through his notes, and makes whatever calls he needs to. While he and his family don’t drink, they’ve shared Austin’s beers with the neighbors. The response has been mixed.
“I think being in the small town farmland of Wisconsin, you've got a lot of people who have never experienced a beer like that and don't really consider that beer,” he observes. “But then some people think it's really, really incredible and are excited to have had something that they didn't know existed before.”
Sugar Shack Diaries pours thick and dark with a lovely espresso crema foam. The beer teases aromas of burnt caramel, maple sugar candy, and bourbon maple syrup, and the coffee doesn’t really come through till the sip, combining with the maple to taste like what I imagine a maple macchiato would taste like. The chocolate is a dark undercurrent running beneath it all, and the mouthfeel is as luxurious as Austin indicated. Sipping on this beer, it’s not hard to imagine the night scene he described, with sparks flying into the air and the fire making the fog glow orange. A version of this scene is depicted on the label.
“The label design of that was actually a photo I had taken of their sugar shack,” he explains. He gave the photo to Nin from North Star Art Studio, who does Humble Forager’s labels. “I thought she did a beautiful job of capturing a still snowy Wisconsin evening with all the lights, that misty feel. The inspiration really came from this experience I had meeting the Miller family and wanting to expose our customers to their beautiful products and their beautiful land.”