The Brewer: Brad Mall with Oak Highlands Brewery
The Beer: Chump Change (winter seasonal)
Imperial Black Saison
ABV 9.8%
IBU 28
Oak Highlands Brewery has been open and serving their Lake Highlands community with delicious beer for nearly two years. Brad Mall (formerly a lawyer) and Derrin Williams (a geologist by trade) founded the brewery after several years of home-brewing together. If you’ve had Oak Highlands beers, you know why they are already a shining star. With distinguished style offerings, outstanding drinkability, and a precision in delivering unique flavor profiles, these dudes deliver the goods.
I sat down with Brad to talk about their beloved Chump Change. Brad is a man that does not mince words. He wears his assertive prowess like a velvet smoking jacket, smooth and charming, yet full of fire and driven by purpose. Here is what he had to say about their World Beer Cup winning black saison.
The story:
“I started making beer in 1991 in my dorm room in college. I met Derrin about 15 years ago, and we were talking at a party about brewing beers. He had just gotten into it so we started talking about brewing beer together. We made a few batches and then we decided to start entering some competitions. We started winning a bunch of competitions, and one of the competitions that we entered was Martin House’s Riverside Shootout the first year they did it.
You brew your recipe with their ingredients. They had two yeasts available, an ale yeast and a saison yeast. At that point in time, five or six years ago, Saisons weren’t that prominent. When we did the competition, we wanted to do something that was crazy. Let’s do something off the wall, and infinitely drinkable that’s also not really a style. And at the time we came up with this recipe, there were some breweries making a Black Saison, but there weren’t any guidelines to go by. It wasn’t really a style. It’s just a very dark black beer that does not drink like a very dark black beer.
You get the traditional coriander, grains of paradise and orange peel on the backend, but also some nice roasted notes on the front. It balances spectacularly well. So we did that, and we had probably one of the worst brew days in our history. We had a stuck mash, which means our day went from 6 hours to twelve hours. But we fermented it out, and it was fantastic. We didn’t win, but we took top five. So it’s funny that our world beer cup winning beer started out in a home-brew competition.”
Sadly, you probably won’t find any Chump Change right now. It’s come and gone. But what you might find is the whisky barrel version that was released at the brewery on March 4. Please hurry.
