With Beer, We Bring On The Braggots!

After more than five years of making meads and ciders, the Alchemist is finally adding beers to the menu! These will not be usual, pedestrian beers… no! These will be special, unusual beers made with select honey to add our own, particular twist on beer. While Smyrna has only one other local brewery, we are fully aware that there is no shortage of exceptional beers around us. But nobody is doing what we plan to do… Our usual bit of mad science.

We have chosen to expand the operation by creating Mandatory Fun Beerworks, a Viking Alchemist Experiment. The mission for our beerworks will be to uncover beer secrets that can only be unlocked by adding honeys. While breweries have been adding ingredients and pushing hops to their limit to reveal floral notes and citrus flavor, there has been a distinct lack of honey-love! We’re going to fill that gap.

Our beers are twists that you cannot achieve with traditional brewing. So far, we have found the honeys to open up aromas and flavor profiles that can be either dramatic or delicate but always unique.

It’s worth trying every one of the beers we put on tap as we go, but the real story will be in braggots! With the addition of beer on tap, we can finally make our own braggots whenever and however we choose to. There will be no other location in Atlanta that has as many and as varied braggots as Smyrna!

Braggot
A blend of beer and mead. These are less common to find, locally, in any quantity. Some bars will create them on the fly by mixing mead and beer, but it’s not the same nor as intended. A proper braggot is the perfect balance of sweet honey, malty flavor and body, and a bit of hop bitterness.

Braggot’s, like cysers and ciders, can often be flavored with spices and other flavors creating a rich experience. A braggot keeps the best qualities of both beer and mead in perfect balance. If you see a braggot on a tap menu, definitely try it. They are fairly rare and worth it, almost every time.

Our Blood Stripe, for instance, is an Irish Red braggot with Brazilian Pepper honey. The honey is gathered from bees that have been pollinating pepper plants. It’s amazing how this small change in the source produces a completely different taste! What we are left with is a surprising spice coupled with the warm feel of honey.

The Alchemist supports exploration and curiosity. As such, we have started a DIY program for our Smyrna guests to make their own braggots. More than 16 meads on tap and 16 specialty beers that means… does some math, carry the one… a perfect 256 different braggots you can make!! And that’s just the start.

Each week, we will be rotating new beers into production and experimenting with more concoctions.