Today we brew The Karaoke Kid pale ale. This is the fourth iteration of this ongoing ramen friendly beer project we're engaged in with our good friends at Tonchin Ramen. We kicked this project off with an extensive tasting of their menu alongside a variety of our beers, across many beer styles. We discovered that the best pairings were both malty beers and hoppy beers (and fyi - fruited sour beers in this pairing were no bueno).
Thus was born the original recipe, a malt-forward pale ale with some heavy handed hop additions. We designed this brew with a robust malt bill layering in Caramel 40 (caramel and toffee), Melanoidin (honey, intense "malty" aroma), Biscuit (toasty, biscuity), and Vienna (almond, hazelnut, light sweetness) on top of a richer "pale ale" base malt. These particular malts gave this beer a beautiful spectrum of malt flavor ranging from bready, to biscuity, bread crust, honey, light toffee and caramel, and a gentle malty sweetness. We balanced this big malt bill with a generous addition of German Magnum hops for bittering and layered in some Idaho7 and Centennial hops for some citrusy, mango, pink grapefruit, tangerine, light tangy pine hop flavor and aroma to help compliment the intensely delicious flavors of Tonchin's ramen.
On top of all that, we fermented this with our house hazy ale yeast strain to integrate some fruity esters and a slight haze. ABV on this guy is coming in at 5.5%. We released this beer at Tonchin's Manhattan location in February of 2022 and it was a huge success!
We have since riffed off of this original recipe, fine tuning the malt and hop bills. In this 4.0 version we've got an American two-row barley base with Caramel 40, Melanoidin, Honey, and Vienna specialty malts. We also swapped out the Idaho 7 for HBC 586 (a new varietal that we are super stoked on) and swapped out the Centennial for the powerhouse hop, Citra. We're looking for the signature mango, guava, lychee flavors and aromas from the 586 and citrus, grapefruit, passionfruit, melon from the Citra.
Look for this version 4 to drop in about 3 weeks. We can't wait to try it!
Cheers!