Baltimore’s DuClaw Brewery Releases Vegan Beer Made With Oat Milk 

This month, Baltimore-based DuClaw Brewing Co. will release two new beer styles formulated with oat milk instead of lactose—a dairy-based ingredient often used by breweries to impart creaminess in beer styles such as milk stouts. The two new limited-release styles are: Oatshake Double IPA (8.5 percent ABV) made with Citra & Mosaic hops that features a “pillowy” mouthfeel and The PastryArchy Oat Milk (8.5 percent ABV), an imperial stout with notes of coffee and chocolate. “Putting oat milk into beer sounds new, but it’s really just extracting the liquid from soaking oats in water,” DuClaw Director of Brewery Operations Chris Wood said. “Those are two ingredients we use frequently, and options were limited to purchase oat milk at high volumes since it’s a newer product, so it made sense for a brewery of our size to give it a shot in-house.” It took the brand two tries to get the oat-based beers right and a “marathon day” of cleaning oats out of its tanks but the end result was a creamy, vegan formulation that Wood is proud of. “And now we know how to do it,” Wood said. DuClaw’s beers are distributed in 19 states and Washington, DC, along with Canada and France. In recent months, oat milk has gained popularity across various sectors, with Endangered Species launching oat-based vegan chocolate bars; Starbucks, Dunkin’, and Peete’s Coffee adding the plant-based oat lattes; and Nesquik releasing GoodNes, an oat-based version of its popular chocolate milk beverage.