Has the company that’s taking over the world added a new strand to the range of technological innovations and start up acquisitions that have made it one of the highest valued companies on the planet? Well sort of.
To get things in perspective, Google appears to be funding a few of it’s employees who are fans of craft beer. There’s almost a type of symbiosis there; a stereotypical, hairy, perhaps slightly overweight real ale fan isn’t a million miles away from a hairy, perhaps slightly overweight Google coder. But good luck to them anyway.
The beer project is actually being undertaken by Delaware micro-brewery Dogfish Head.
Dogfish Head is fairly well-known in the States, having been featured on the Discovery Channel series Brew Masters and has been in existence since 1995.
The input by our band of craft beer loving Googlers seems to have been to suggest a range of diverse ingredients from around the world and then try to work them into the recipe. Without expanding on what the following ingredients are, here’s a list: Australian Wattleseed, Belgian syrup, chocolate malts, Green Rooibos from Africa, Myrica Gale from Europe/North America and South American Amaranth. Also rumoured to be part of the recipe is honey from the Google Hive Plex which, of course, we all knew existed.
The brewery says that the taste will be based on the Belgian Dubbel, a style which can be traced back to Trappist monks. Dubbel was a much stronger version of the Trappist’s original brew and now tends to come in between 6% and 8%. The Dogfish website suggests a final ABV of 8.1% which is certainly nothing to be sniffed at. The name is a little odd – URKontinent – and the brew will unfortunately be a limited edition number but if you visited the Great American Beer Festival in Denver last weekend you may have been lucky enough to try some.
Check out the promotional video: