Brewer Tim Howard is in a bit of a rough spot – he’s just made a beer he can’t drink.
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Howard, the brewer at the Illawarra Brewing Company, has just released a stout for winter.
Called Shot in the Dark, it’s a coffee milk stout.
Yes, it contains coffee but not milk – like all milk stouts it actually includes lactose.
The idea is to give the beer a creamy sweetness, a little like a cup of milky coffee.
It's that latter ingredient that causes a problem for Howard – he’s lactose-intolerant.
He’s been that way since he moved out of home and started studying at university, though it took him a while to realise it was lactose that was giving him those bad stomach pains – and even sometimes making him throw up.
When it comes to Shot in the Dark, it means Mr Howard can’t sit back and enjoy a glass of the beer he made.
While making it, he did have to sample the brew to make sure everything was going as planned.
That involved taking a mouthful of the beer and then having to spit it out.
“The issue is really with my stomach, so the hardest thing for me in producing it was holding back the temptation to swallow it, because it’s so tasty,” Mr Howard says.
But he says spitting out beer isn’t as sacrilegious as it might seem; in fact, when you’re brewing beer, swallowing every sample could get you a bit tipsy.
“It’s no different to when I’d be making a high [alcohol] beer, I wouldn’t be able to consume that on the job,” Howard says.
“That’s one of four tanks, and if you swallow every single thing, then you could get into a bit of trouble – especially when you’re working with heavy equipment.”