Dank drink

Naughty Monk Brewery Offers the Area's First CBD-Infused Beer

A small batch of the beer debuted at Oak & Stone on Saturday, but the recipe is now stuck in legal limbo.

By Giulia Heyward April 22, 2019

Naughty Monk Brewery's CBD-infused Mindful Monk beer

Move over, Batman and Robin. There's a new duo making a name for itself around town. Lakewood Ranch's Naughty Monk Brewery recently teamed up with the CBD shop Mindful Medicinals to create Mindful Monk, a CBD-infused beer. Mindful Monk debuted at Oak & Stone's University Town Center location on Saturday (yes, 4/20) and is hyped as being the first of its kind in Sarasota.

Cannabidiol, otherwise known as CBD, is one of several chemical compounds found in cannabis. CBD does not produce the same effect as THC, another compound, does. In other words, you can't get high from it. What it can do is aid in everything from chronic pain to anxiety, which explains why CBD shops have been popping up all over Sarasota.

Mindful Monk isn't trying to replace your nightly prescription. Instead, it's a novelty IPA that boasts 9.1 percent alcohol and a reported 15 milligrams of non-psychoactive phytocannabinoid. "It's got a nice, citrus smell and a very bitter, dank aftertaste," says Curtis Dille, the head brewer at Naughty Monk. "It's also very sweet, with a high alcohol per volume."

It took Dille three hours to come up the recipe, and a month of work alongside assistant brewers Daniel Hogan and Kyle Reynolds to create the first 31-gallon batch. The collaboration originally came about when a representative at Oak & Stone put Dille in contact with Mindful Medicinals. Half of the batch was shipped over to Oak & Stone for their 4/20 bash, while the remainder stayed at Naughty Monk, where it retails for $6 a pint.

But how long customers will be able to purchase the beer is up in the air. Naughty Monk received a cease-and-desist from the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, a division of the U.S. Department of Treasury. Earlier this month, breweries in Fort Lauderdale and Boynton Beach received the same letter. "It was our understanding that we needed to get recipe approval for any beer that got put in a bottle," Dille says. "We weren’t packaging this at all, so we did not think we needed recipe approval. Now, we can't brew another batch until they know what ingredients we are using."

Dille is hopeful that Mindful Monk will appear in your neighborhood pub sooner rather than later. He says Naughty Monk is pushing the envelope when it comes to using CBD in beers and that the brewery is going to keep innovating. "We are definitely going to seek recipe approval," he says. "We're headed in the right direction."

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