It’s been a while since the multiple award winning Big Island Brewhaus has put out a new beer in bottles. We’ve been lucky to get a steady stream of Overboard IPA, White Mountain Porter, Golden Sabbath, Holy Humulus (new batch coming very soon) and now we can look forward to the release of Red Sea of Cacao.

Red Sea of Cacao is slated to be released in bottles for the first time in early January 2015. This beer hasn’t been seen very frequently outside of the Waimea, Hawaii, brewpub and it’s an exciting addition to Big Island Brewhaus’ bottle lineup. This is a very unique beer that is brewed with chocolate, Hawaiian cacao, red sea salt, molasses and pink peppercorns that is best described as a salted caramel chocolate bar in a glass.

Red Sea was first brewed back on December 31, 2012 and was a collaboration with Jim Mills, owner and brewer for Caldera Brewing from Ashland, Oregon, Daniel Russell (Big Island Brewhaus Head Brewer) and Thomas Kerns (Big Island Brewhaus Owner.) Kerns notes, “Since then we have brewed it several times and so has Jim in Ashland.  The idea was to use local sea salt along with local cacao.  We use pink Hawaiian sea salt (Alae) in the boil.  We add the Big Island grown & roasted cacao to the beer after fermentation much like dry hopping with hops. The cacao is roasted on the Big Island by Makua Coffee.”