Before he moved to Mexico to become head brewer at Cervecera Hércules, Josh Brengle cut his chops in Tampa, brewing for Cigar City.
With his Irish background—including cousins who live in Ireland today—an export stout was an important style for him to brew. A surprise gold medal at the 2024 World Beer Cup only bolstered that importance.
With just one beer remaining in the competition, Brengle was packing up his things for the night at the watch party in Mexico when he heard them announce, “Gold, Pueblito, Cervecera Hércules.” He compares that moment to a favorite sports team’s last-second, comeback victory.
Here, he shares the story and process behind the beer that won gold at the world’s most prestigious beer competition.
The Soul of a Stout to Quaff
Brengle’s early drinking days were filled with pints of Guinness, creating lasting memories. “I grew up drinking the nitro can, the regular draft, and the bottled stout from the supermarket,” he says. “This was a beer that teaches you right away the [impact] nitro has on a beer.”
That nostalgia was top of mind when drinking a tropical stout that he and the team had previously brewed at Hércules. “The beer was good, but it was a bit sweeter, stickier, and fruitier,” he says. “It had a lot of caramel malts, and you would think it was the last beer you might want to drink on a tropical island. … The traditional tropical stouts that you would find back in the day, like Lion Stout, were a little less sticky, a little more refreshing.”
Brengle’s goal, then, was to design something more drinkable than the tropical stout’s 8 percent ABV. He set out to create what would eventually become Pueblito.
“The goal was coffee roast,” he says. “We wanted the roast to come out significantly but not be super acrid.”
Balance would be critical, and he says that brown malt came to mind immediately. “The idea to push the coffee notes—different types of coffee, different toasts—that’s where the brown malt came in,” he says. “You almost get a kind of tannic coffee flavor from it. It’s such a unique malt.”
Brengle used the brown malt to add lighter coffee notes to the beer, while Briess Victory adds a supporting toast element. “I’m just trying to keep the roundness, the fullness on point as a background support, without the beer finishing sweet,” Brengle says.
Hércules waits until vorlauf to add roasted barley from Weyermann for color and smoother roast flavors, without over-extracting. Brengle says they usually use Thomas Fawcett’s roasted barley, but the supply chain in Mexico can get slow: “If we don’t order it way in advance, we might not get it,” he says. His fellow brewers at Hércules told him they’d used the Weyermann before in similar beers, and that it works great and tastes fine. “I was highly skeptical,” he says. “Why would we use German roasted barley?”
In the end, it did indeed work great. Weyermann’s roasted barley is a bit lighter in color than Thomas Fawcett’s version, so they add a little more of the Weyermann to make up that difference.
Pueblito’s base is Maris Otter, staying true to the British Isles, but Brengle says that may not be the most important part of the grist.
“I don’t know how much difference it’s making in the final beer,” he says. He suggests that Vienna could be a reasonable substitution, especially if you can avoid oxygen on the hot side of the brewing process. And some Munich might be fine, he says, since the bit of toastiness from that malt might give something valuable back to the beer.
“British pale malts [would also] work,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be Maris Otter. That’s kind of turned into a namesake; the marketing of [other British malts] is just so far behind Maris Otter. I would even venture to say that a good pils malt or two-row would be totally fine in this beer.”
Hops and Fermentation
Brengle says they achieve Pueblito’s bitterness with a single hop charge.
“We usually lean towards more complex bittering, lower-alpha and a rougher bitterness,” he says. “But we were so focused on malt [here], the coffee notes and everything.” The beer comes out to 50 IBUs calculated, but Brengle says that after filtering or fining, it probably drinks like it’s in the lower 40s.
RVA Chiswick, known as a Fuller’s strain, is what Hércules typically pitches for its Irish-style beers. “This is a cleaner-fermented beer, so we’re not looking for a lot of yeast contributions,” Brengle says. Given the stout’s ample malt character, he says they could have used a Chico strain, and it probably would have gone unnoticed.
They ferment Pueblito at 64–65°F (18°C) throughout primary fermentation. After it passes a forced diacetyl test, they bring it down to 50°F (10°C) for a few days, then drop to 41°F (5°C) for a few more days, then down to zero (32°F/0°C). That slow step-down “helps us if we’re going to re-pitch the yeast, since the yeast doesn’t love crashing, and it doesn’t like pressure either,” Brengle says. They then condition the beer at 32°F (0°C) for up to two weeks.
The Bottle as a “Mini-Cask”
Hércules packages the beer at a fairly typical 2.5 volumes of carbonation. What isn’t typical is how it reaches that level of carbonation.
“We add the first runnings of the beer directly to the brite tank,” Brengle says. “We took everything we learned from weissbier—some of those smaller, traditional breweries still use the first runnings.” That speise, as it’s known in Germany, is just another intangible. “I don’t know what it does, but along with everything else, maybe it’s something that stands out. Maybe a judge or consumer can’t put their finger on it, but they might say, ‘Wow, this is really nice.’”
That speise component adds a couple of hours to the process, but it hardly seems to phase Brengle. “We already spend a lot of time on these beers, [between] the recipe and the process and everything else, so we’ll just follow it home; it’s no big deal,” he says.
In Brengle’s view, drinking Pueblito from cask elevates the experience. “I wish we could send a cask to World Beer Cup, but obviously that’s impossible.” So, instead, he devised a plan to bottle-condition Pueblito. “We’ve done that with some of our weissbiers, our wild beers, and some Belgian styles, so I [figured] we could send them a ‘mini-cask’—just a bottle, but it’s bottle conditioned.”
At bottling, fresh yeast meets the sugar from the speise, and natural carbonation is the result. It can also lengthen the beer’s shelf life. “It’s not just the beer experience for the judge, but a freshness thing,” Brengle says.
Mexican breweries can be at a disadvantage when shipping beers to make deadlines for competitions based in the United States—such as the World Beer Cup. They have to ship beers up to four weeks earlier than an American brewery does.
Bottle conditioning, then, “was like a weapon” for Hércules, Brengle says. The hope is that a judge’s final impression is similar to what it would be if they could drink it on cask. “It’s just immaculate on cask,” he says.
In the end, several rounds of judges agreed.
