Third Eye Double Astral Might Be the Best Chocolate Beer in the Country
By David Nilsen
Much of the time, brewing a great beer involves executing a familiar concept very well rather than creating an entirely new idea. That’s certainly true for classic styles, but it’s just as true for modern adjunct beers. An Imperial Stout brewed with vanilla and cacao is nothing new, but when done right, it can offer an eye-opening sensory experience. Third Eye Double Astral is one such example.
Kelly Montgomery at Third Eye Brewing in Sharonville, just north of Cincinnati, knows how to brew stouts. While the brewery’s best-sellers are Hazy IPAs and fruited sours (just like at many of the country’s breweries), Kelly has had particular success with his stouts. His brewery’s Higher Purpose Milk Stout won gold at the Great American Beer Festival in 2021 and bronze at the World Beer Cup in 2023, and served as the base beer for three different medal winners at the 2023 edition last month. Other stouts have medaled at the Ohio Craft Brewer’s Cup, and he found award success with stouts at his previous post at cross-town Brink Brewing as well. All of that expertise informed the crafting of his biggest stout to date.
“Every brewery’s got their big, giant stout they do every year,” he says, mentioning Three Floyds Dark Lord and Braxton Dark Charge as examples. “I wanted something that would be super chewy and thick, but I didn’t want it to be egregiously sweet.”
It’s a difficult tightrope to walk, particularly for a beer the size of Double Astral. The beer lands each year between 12.8-13.2% ABV, with some notable gravity figures—it starts out at 1.14 specific gravity (32° Plato) and finishes at or slightly above 1.066 (17° P).
“Our finishing gravity is where some beers start,” he says. “It’s a beer within a beer.”
In typical Montgomery fashion for stouts, Double Astral’s malt bill is meticulous in its complexity. A base of Grambrinus ESB base malt (similar in character to Golden Promise or Maris Otter), flaked oats, flaked wheat, chocolate rye, chocolate wheat, a lot of Munich, and some added maltodextrin for body.
“We can’t do a full 15 bbl batch, because our tun can't hold the grain.”
An Expensive Luxury
Kelly knew if he was going to brew the most expensive malt bill at Third Eye he might as well spend to use the best flavor ingredients to accent all that grain. Double Astral is brewed with a heap of cacao nibs from Cincinnati’s Maverick Chocolate, an award-winning bean to bar chocolate company founded by a former jet engine engineer, as well as Madagascar vanilla beans. Maverick’s nibs also appear in beers from Cincinnati heavyweight MadTree Brewing and a number of other breweries.
“The accountant flipped [the first time] he saw the bill for all that cocoa,” jokes Kelly. He was turned on to the maker’s cacao after visiting their shop at Cincinnati’s storied Findlay Market and tasting their chocolate. “The aroma when they opened the buckets was amazing. I had to have it.”
Kelly and his brewers—Tom Argo and Andrew More—have experimented with different formats and methods for adding the cacao. Originally they tried both nibs and husks—a waste product of chocolate making that is cheaper than nibs while still delivering chocolatey flavor—but the husks contributed astringency and bitterness Kelly wasn’t pleased with. Now they use the most common method of adding cacao by steeping it in the brite tank—sometimes the obvious method is the best one. The beer usually rests on the beer for seven days. The beer is hopped at a very low rate to compensate for the subtle bitterness Kelly perceives from the nibs themselves.
In addition to cacao, the beer uses 5-fold Madagascar vanilla (“fold” in vanilla refers to the concentration of vanilla in the extract—5 is a high number for this, denoting quality).
After Double Astral has spent its time on cacao and vanilla, it usually heads into barrels, despite all the awards landing on the base version.
“This beer was meant and designed for bourbon barrels,” Kelly asserts. “It was always meant for barrel-aging.”
The 2022 barrel-aged version—the most recent available until this year’s comes out in December or January—was aged 12-13 months in a blend of Heaven Hill and Buffalo Trace barrels.
All this excess comes at a cost—literally. It’s the most expensive malt bill and by far the most expensive recipe the brewery makes (Kelly notes the ingredient list runs to 16 line items). Beyond dollars and cents, its costly from a labor standpoint as well. Kelly notes the high risk of boil-over from all that sugar and maltodextrin.
“This makes a mess of the entire brewery,” he says, noting the problem continues into fermentation, when the beer’s sugar content kicks the California ale yeast into hyperdrive. “The next morning the whole floor is just finished. We’ve tried [putting the blow off tube in] drums. We can’t control it. This was my baby, but this is one of the most difficult beers for us to brew, so it’s all hands on deck.”
Winning Ways
Barrel-aged or base, Double Astral is a delicious beer. A wave of silky, vanilla-rich dark milk chocolate pervades everything, and the flavor has a hit of booze but without a hot bite. In the barrel-aged version, subtle but assertive oak, a touch of caramel, and a gentle impression of smoke hem everything in. It’s not new and inventive. It’s just a beautiful execution of a familiar concept.
After grabbing three medals in the first handful of categories at the Great American Beer Festival awards ceremony last month, Kelly and his team had one more to collect. In the Chocolate Beer category, Double Astral was announced as the gold medal-winner. You’ve had this type of beer before, but you might not have had one this good.