Name: Back To the Salt Mine!
Brand: Adroit Theory Brewing Company
Availability: InStock

Adroit Theory Brewing Company is not shy about the chocolate on this one. The brewery suggests Back To the Salt Mine! might be the most chocolate-forward beer it has ever made, and describes it as dripping with baker's cacao over a rich, thick mouthfeel.

Baker's cacao is the important detail. Unlike the sweetened chocolate most dessert beers reach for, it is unsweetened, and it carries a hard bitterness along with the deep cocoa flavor that makes it attractive in the first place. Used at volume it can dry a beer out and leave it tasting austere.

Which is where the other half of the name earns its place. Salt suppresses the perception of bitterness, and in doing so lets sweetness register more clearly without any additional sugar. It is the mechanism behind salted caramel, behind salted fudge, and behind the pinch of salt in a brownie recipe. Pairing a salted fudge character with an aggressively cacao-forward stout is a functional decision rather than a flavor flourish.

The brewery frames the release as a meeting of its two habits. It is known for stouts, and it is known for over-the-top creations, and it notes that it is always satisfying when the two converge into a single beer.

The title is a working-life idiom, the phrase for heading back to the daily grind. Adroit Theory generally files its beers under bleaker headings, so an office joke is a lighter turn than usual from a brewery whose catalogue tends toward the funereal.

Back To the Salt Mine! is available now at the Purcellville taproom in pours and crowlers, with 15 crowlers filled.

Editor’s Take

Salt is the most underrated ingredient in dessert and the only one that works by subtraction. It does not add a flavor of its own at these quantities. It goes in and quietly turns down bitterness, which leaves sweetness sounding louder without anybody adding sugar. That is why salted caramel took over the world and why a pinch goes into every decent brownie recipe.

Point it at baker's cacao and it has something genuinely worth doing. Unsweetened cacao is a fiercely bitter ingredient, and a beer described as dripping with the stuff is handing salt the largest job it is ever likely to get. The name is a workplace idiom about trudging back to the grind, which I suspect was chosen for the pun, but it turns out to be a fair description of what the salt is actually doing in there.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.

Back To the Salt Mine! Puts Salt to Work on Baker's Cacao

Adroit Theory reckons this might be the most chocolate-forward beer it has made, and it is dripping with baker's cacao. The salt in the salted fudge is not decoration - against unsweetened cacao it has a job.

Source & Editorial