Chicagoist's Beer Of the Week: Off Color Brewing Scurry
By Jason Baldacci in Food on Jul 12, 2013 8:20PM
A couple weeks ago, we wrote about the new Off Color Brewing opening for business. Today, we're taking a more in depth look at one of their year-round selections.
Scurry is Off Color's resurrection of a dormant German style of beer called kottbusser. It's very close to an altbier, but it's brewed with honey, molasses, and oats. It pours a beautiful, ruby-amber in the glass, and we catch a little honeysuckle on the nose. On the palate, there's a touch of malty sweetness and molasses up front, but the finish is quite dry. Throughout the mid-palate, there are wonderful notes of bitter toffee and orange zest with a hint of floral perfume that we can only assume comes from the honey, possibly with a little help from the hops. The overall malt profile is reminiscent of graham crackers or pie crust, and the whole beer is capped off with vibrant, soda-like carbonation that makes each sip easier. All in all, at 5.3 oercent alcohol content, Scurry is a quaffable, yet complex and malt-forward beer that should teach any IPA-crushing beer nerd that their favorite beverage isn't all about hops.
When a beer is brewed with honey, it can make things a little confusing for the drinker. You see honey on a label or on a bar menu, and you immediately think the beer is going to be sweet. More often than not, though, honey beers lean towards the dry side of the spectrum. Honey is actually very fermentable, so the sugars it lends to the mix actually get consumed by the yeast along with the sugars from the malt, and it ultimately lends to the alcohol content of the beer. There can still be a perception of sweetness even after the sugars have fermented off, since the honey does flavor the beer as well, but most beers made this way, like Scurry, will finish dry unless the brewer chose to leave some residual sugar behind.
For the moment, Off Color's beers are draft-only, so be sure to check beermenus.com to see who has Scurry on tap this weekend.