Brewvine: MiddleCoast Brewing Company Seasonal Drinks

On November 1^st, in Traverse City is releasing three new winter beverages statewide.

Whitney Amann and photojournalist Jeremy Erickson got a sneak peek at the seasonal drinks in this week’s Brewvine.

“We really wanted to stay away from the traditional holiday spiced ale that everybody does,” said head brewer Deven Larrance. “It’s been done, it’s been done well, but it’s been done, we wanted to come up with a new concept something different.”

The out-of-the-box, winter beer came up with is based around the story of Washington crossing the Delaware and is the counterpart to one of their flagship beers “GW’s Little White Lie”.

“We created the ‘Hessian Revelry’ which is a German dunkel with toasted pecans and so we wanted to celebrate both sides of the story. So we have GW and we have the Hessians, who thankfully, on Christmas Eve maybe drank a little bit too much beer and as they say we’re in their revelries, a little bit too much, and so on Christmas morning when George Washington attacked they were not in any position to put up a fight,” said Deven. “So we’re celebrating the fact that Germans like to drink beer and they make excellent beer.”

Toasted pecan isn’t the only seasonal flavor that MiddleCoast has brewing.

They’re also releasing a couple of their low calorie hard seltzers inspired by some of their favorite yuletide treats like peppermint bark.

“There’s no sugars left in there but we still have that really nice chocolate and peppermint flavor,” he said. “The other flavor we have is gingersnap, we tried to design a seltzer that tasted like a gingersnap cookie. So we have a touch of ginger touches cinnamon in there and then to get that cookie flavor, we used macadamia.”

With a recently upgraded brewing system, they’re hoping to have a steady stream of new beers and seltzers in the works all year long.

“With the increased fermentation capacity, we’ve been able to crank out a lot more seltzers especially but beer as well,” said Deven. “We’ve been using up all of our tanks to keep the seltzers running because they’ve been so popular and such a great seller. So by adding the 30 barrel fermentation tanks, we’ve been able to put really focus on our beer again as well as the seltzers.”