Voices of San Diego Beer: Kyle Harrop, Horus Aged Ales

Most casual beer fans have never heard of Horus Aged Ales, but it’s an all-star operation among the most fervent fermentable fans and whale hunters. Owner Kyle Harrop has logged thousands of miles cementing relationships with breweries nationwide and beyond through collaboration barrel-aged brewing projects that have built his reputation, brand and Horus’ bottle club, The Convocation. Members of that faction quickly buy up the exotic collab creations Harrop and his fellow artisans cook up, but even Horus, with its enviable consumer demand, has not been immune to the effects of the pandemic. In the first of our Voices of #SDBeer series of pieces penned by members of the San Diego brewing industry, Harrop discusses how his business has been effected by COVID-19 and gives readers the exclusive scoop on the beers he plans to release this year and beyond.

The Pandemic Spares No One

COVID-19 eliminated keg sales from my business. That may not seem like a big deal, but when you are as small an operation as I am, it was a major blow. Between regularly dropping kegs off of my proprietary Disney beer, Happy Hawk (imperial coffee stout with hazelnuts), at Disneyland, and sending various kegs to festivals, special events and tap takeovers across the world, it was a major part of my business. Also, all 47 of the remaining collaborations I had committed to this year will be postponed until it is safe to travel again. 

Another major change to my business due to the coronavirus has been having no public sales this year. In other words, every beer I have bottled has been exclusively sold to my bottle club members. I hope to change that this fall and offer at least one beer to the public before the end of 2020, but it has been in everybody’s best interest to keep pickup days as small and safe as possible from an attendee perspective. 

I had plans to throw another beer festival in some form in 2021 but have curbed those aspirations because of the pandemic. Maybe 2022 for that since festivals take a very long time to coordinate. The HOOTenanny festival we held in 2019 was one of the more rewarding days of my life. Even though it took eight months to plan and was done in just four short hours, it was worth every minute of planning and went incredibly well for my first crack at a festival. I don’t know what a future beer festival of mine will look like, but I will not hold back. It’s important for San Diego County to get to mingle with the best breweries in the world in our beautiful backyard.

On the bright side of everything we’re all dealing with right now, I have been able to spend more time with my family than ever, which is great because we had our newest addition arrive this March. Also, I got to really focus on what I want Horus to be and become for years to come.

Beers to Brighten a Bleak Year

The French oak barrels full of imperial stout that were reserved for my two draft offering favorites—Deepest Shade (imperial coffee stout with hazelnuts) and Hazel Beam (imperial coffee stout with hazelnuts and cacao nibs)—will now be used for the second bottled version of Double Dose instead. The sudden forfeiture of keg sales forced my hand, but it will end up being a good thing in the long run, as Double Dose (imperial coffee stout with chocolate, hazelnuts and vanilla) was a fan favorite when a very small batch of it was released a few years back. I have just been terrified to make it again because of its cost and risk. It is a beer with more adjuncts in the tank than liquid, extremely and ridiculously expensive to make, but my members are patiently looking forward to that one this holiday season. Also, I have already put more barleywine and stout into bourbon barrels this year than the previous three years of Horus combined, which I am giddy about.

A project that was important to me this year was doing at least a dozen single-barrel whiskey barrel picks then aging imperial stouts in those barrels. I wanted to be the first brewer that has done anything like this, and it has been a blast so far. As a brewery, I am not legally allowed to sell any spirits, so they are instead sold at my longtime friend Jazz Patel’s store, El Cerrito Liquor in Corona. He sells the bottles of the whiskey that comes out of the barrels I select, and I get the freshly dumped barrels to fill with beer. It has been a great learning experience about distillation processes, varying yields depending on barrel locations and temperatures, and how even slightly different mash recipes can result in major differences in the finished product of a whiskey versus a beer. Most of the time, we have no idea when the bottles and barrel will arrive after selecting our favorite barrel, so it was a nice surprise to start off the year with five offerings in a single week. The yields have varied from as few as 66 to as many as 248 bottles, and the distilleries typically don’t tell us those final numbers until the week before they are delivered, which makes it a suspenseful adventure each time. 

So far this year, there have been six whiskey picks.: Taconic Bourbon, Old Scout Bourbon, Sagamore Rye, Old Elk Wheated, Smoke Wagon 8 Year Bourbon, and Whistlepig 15 Year Rye. The six remaining picks are even more exciting in my opinion and consist of the sequel to my very first pick last year, which was Cooper’s Cachet from Four Roses, W.L. Weller Full Proof Bourbon, Balcones True Blue finished in Buffalo Trace barrels, Balcones True Blue finished in Four Roses barrels, Old Forester Cask Strength, and Nashville Barrel Company. It’s the first time the latter’s whiskey will be sold in California. I was also supposed to select barrels from Blanton’s and Willett this year, but due to the pandemic, it is looking like that will hopefully happen sometime in 2021 instead. Those will be especially exciting as those are my two favorite bourbons when I can get my hands on them these days. I also have batches of two collaborations I did with my good buds at Miami’s J. Wakefield Brewing containing different varieties of coconut and marshmallow resting in Blanton’s bourbon barrels.

We just finished bottling the third of four offerings in the Tea Bird series I collaborated on with my buddies at Stave and Nail Brewing in San Marcos. This set of four barrel-aged sours will feature a different tea and showcase each variety’s effect on not only the aroma and flavor of the beer, but its beautiful appearance in crystal clear bottles. The color of these beers is very interesting. While one looks like lemon-lime Gatorade, it tastes like a Belgian-style sour ale full of rice and oats that spent years in wine barrels with both of our respective house yeast cultures. I will be releasing this as a set when they are all done bottle-conditioning.

After that, I’m taking my first crack at a Neapolitan-style imperial stout using strawberries from Cyclops Farms, my favorite cacao nibs from Ghana, and some incredible Mexican vanilla beans. I am really excited to finally use fruit from Cyclops in one of my beers, because they are just a few blocks away from where I live in the Fire Mountain neighborhood of Oceanside. I also really want to try to brew a version of this beer at some point using freeze-dried astronaut ice cream and possibly even incorporating coconut in that one along with the chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla.

In the next year, we’ll have the Horus version of one of my favorite collaborations I have ever been a part of. It’s called Distraction’s Grasp (imperial coffee stout with hazelnuts, toasted coconut, and vanilla beans) and was brewed with American Solera in Tulsa. We’ll also release the second half of my collaboration with Toppling Goliath in Iowa, a very special project with Rancho Bernardo’s Mostra Coffee, a stout packed full of Oreos brewed with San Marcos’ Mason Ale Works, my third collaboration with the hip-hop duo Run the Jewels, and maybe a few new iterations of the Goshawk series of imperial coffee stouts. Last but not least, some barrel-aged surprises, the barrel-aged version of Coconut Crown (pastry stout with multiple iterations of coconut), some more non-adjunct bourbon barrel-aged stouts, and whenever the barrel-aged barleywines are ready—sooner than later—they will make their debuts. And rewinding all the way back to 2017, the last remaining liquid from the very first brew I did under Horus is still resting in oak to this day. I will keep the particulars a surprise, but it is a big beer and it is in a barrel from my favorite of the Antique Collection series from Buffalo Trace. It is tasting great, but I am going to let it ride and see how such an extended time in such a special barrel can continue to transform it even more.

I have had something big in the works for several months now. Again, like several other things, COVID-19 has made figuring it all out a challenging obstacle course, but we are all getting closer to the finish line. When this big thing comes time to launch, you will hear about it first here on San Diego Beer News®!

Horus Aged Ales is located at 4040 Calle Platino, Suite 120, in Oceanside but is not open to the public. It is only open on designated bottle pick-up days following online presales.