Flying Dog Heat Series Returns With Hot Box Variety Pack

Our Heat Series is a radical exploration of brewing with hot chilies, and it returns this year with the Hot Box variety pack of four brand-new releases. That’s right; all four coming at you at once this year.

The frontrunner, Shishito Rice Ale

The fresh, yet smoky, spice inspired us to change it up. Brown rice over malt. Ale yeast for sake. The shishito pepper is small and slender and while it will turn from green to red upon ripening, it is typically harvested while green. We recommend starting with this and following the path as laid out ahead. At 5.3% ABV these will go down smooth. Best bet, take these with you to your favorite BYOB sushi house and get the spicy tuna.

#2: Cherry Bomb Gose

Sweet cherry meets it pepper counterpart, both balanced by traditional Gose tartness. Perfect trifecta defined. Weighing in at 3500 scovilles, the Cherry Bomb pepper is milder than a Jalapeño. Once combined with the cherry, it is hard to imagine a more perfect union. Make sure you’ve got plenty in the cooler for your next early-spring cookout, at 4.7% ABV, Cherry Bomb Gose will need reinforcements.

Rounding the final turn, Chocolate Habanero Stout

Sweet chocolate evolves into a heat that lingers. The stuff of legends… If you want a serious, smoky heat, look no further than Chocolate Habanero Stout. Hotter than a regular habanero, the chocolate habanero ranges between 425,000 and 577,000 scoville units. You read that correctly, commas and zeroes are in their respective places. But don’t let the big numbers scare you, we added oats, as well as chocolate, roasted and black malts along with cocoa shells so this one has a little more body to help balance the heat. At 6.3%, these will get along great with your standing Taco Tuesday appointments. Pro tip, add the mole sauce.

The home stretch: Experimental Pepper IPA

Hops amplify spice. So what do bold varieties that pack a tropical fruit punch do to the new hottest pepper in the world? Blow your mind. We added a one-two punch of hops with HBC-291 and HBC-431, some old favorites from our Single Hop series, and combined them with the now-hottest pepper in the world. When we started the Heat Series last year, we teamed up with PuckerButt Pepper Company to use their Carolina Reaper. At the time it tipped the scoville scales at over 1.5 million units. It has since been dethroned by the experimental pepper we used to create this masterpeice. If we could tell you anything more about it, we would.

In The Winners Circle:

With our new Flying Dog University course, The Making of a Hot Box on Wednesday, March 1, learn from Brewmaster Ben Clark about the evolution of Cherry Bomb Gose, Shishito Rice Ale, Chocolate Habanero Stout and Experimental Pepper IPA weeks before the Hot Box is released. The class will conclude with a guided food pairing with each of the four beers and includes a Hot Box 12-pack for each student.—-

Bookmark our Beer Finder and start tracking them down in March.