The Tale of the Space Cowboy
At the moment, we’ve got a lot in the pipeline with further plans for new beers to bring your way – but we’ve decided to dig a bit deeper and talk about one of our favourite beers we’ve made from the tail end of 2020: Midnight Space Cowboy In Space.
Some of you may remember the OG version of this beer, the humble Midnight Space Cowboy, a 5.3% oatmeal stout we released back in March (not-so phenomenal timing, but it’s always time for a stout). We loved it, and our customers did too. The name fit the beer perfectly, and shortly after having released it we figured we wanted to keep playing around with our astrologically-themed stout. Then came Midnight Space Cowboy… In Space. We liked that name enough that we had to match it with this amped up rendition, a recipe of Alex’s that we all pretty much immediately fell in love with.
At its core, this is simply an adjunct-free oatmeal stout. The malt bill is loaded with chocolate, crystal and Munich malts for that balance of sweet, bitter and nutty flavours, and the oats provide that luxuriously silky smooth body.
Pouring jet black with a fine tan head, it’s got aromas of cocoa powder and dried fruits, and an initial kick of dark chocolate on the palate that moves into treacle and caramelised fruit. You’d be forgiven for wondering if we’d added any of that in, but the simplicity and balance of the recipe is something we’re insanely proud of – while we do still love to experiment with additions to our beers.
At the back of palate there’s a crisp, clean roasty bitterness on the finish, making it a beer in constant balance with itself, making you want sip after sip. There were several moments where we half-jokingly contemplating keeping half the brew for the staff, as it certainly goes down a treat.
The branding and design of the beer, as always, is down to our good friend Thomas Gutteridge, who creates all of our branded artwork and makes us look good. For the original Midnight Space Cowboy, the tap badge was a simple constellation rodeo design that Tom felt echoed the theme of the beer. For "… In Space", Tom knew he wanted to incorporate that original tap badge design, as the original beer had never been put into can, and take the artwork up a notch to continue the series.
“That's how we ended up with a Space Cowboy floating around with his (let's be honest, dead cold) horse in space as the main image, whilst still having a nod to the original design with the stars in the centre.”
Our plans are, given how much we’ve enjoyed the Space Cowboy so far, to continue to develop new recipes for a range of absolutely cracking oatmeal stouts, carrying on through the astrological theme until we run out of recipe ideas and silly names.
Which is, thankfully, a very, very long way off.
Stay tuned to find out what the next instalment will be and where it'll be coming from, and to keep on top of all our latest releases.