Frostitita
We're kicking off our 2024 cycle of barrel-aged stouts with a blend composed primarily of 1 year-old beers that are all blooming fast. In general, we don't really start tasting beers from the wood cellar until they've spent 9-12 months in cask, and it's around this point in time in their maturation cycle that some casks start to really pop. Just as frequently, there are some casks in these cohorts that remain too young, green, closed, or aggressive. Sometimes it happens with casks from the same distiller with the same pedigree, re-filled by us with the same beer and then stored-by-side for months on end. How do those differences come to be? It's the mystery of barrel-aging.
Fortunately, we found that a few threads of these beers-- especially ones in some Union Horse Bourbon casks and some classic Heaven Hill Bourbon barrels were especially ripe. They expressed a good bit of roast, some green woodiness, even a hint of underripe banana and nougat. We loved the body and oak-expression in these casks and paired them with some 2- and 3-year old barrels that amplified the perception of spirit and sweetness in the blend. On paper this looks like a straight-shooting imperial stout in whiskey barrels, but selecting the right blender casks to achieve that balance required a deft touch. Cheers to a new year of exciting beers coming from our wood cellar.
Shasta Taffy
Shasta Taffy is a blend that we put together with our friends from Salt & Straw Ice Cream. We have worked on numerous projects with Tyler and his crew at Salt & Straw over the years, but this was the first time that we had had the opportunity to work on a blended stout together. What's even more fun is that this beer is really a two-stage collab: the first is the beer itself. The second will be an ice cream based on the flavor profile of our barrel-aged stouts with each component of Shasta Taffy being used in a mix-in or chocolate element in the ice cream.
When we sat down to blend this stout, we let the Salt & Straw crew drive the bus in terms of flavor profile, and not surprisingly, they wanted to create a beer heavy on classic chocolate and vanilla notes but without using either of those ingredients. How much choco-vanilla could we drive from the beer and casks alone? We began with a blend of roughly equal parts of two-year old Chocolate Stout, two-year old Export Stout, and one year-old Imperial Stout. We selected casks that were heavy on notes of caramel, ganache, and cacao nib, leaving roast and char to take a background role. These weren't casks that were overly sweet: in fact, we found that some of our favorite barrels were relatively dry, allowing malt and oak artifacts to express more clearly. After an initial round of blending, we wanted to make some subtle touch ups to the perception of wood and spirit without compromising the choco-vanilla balance that we had found. Ultimately, this led us to skewing the blend a little more heavily in favor of the older Chocolate Stout and selecting some additional casks with prominent clove and vanillin notes on the palate. The result is a beer that is decadent and dessert-like but drying and lighter than you might guess.
We love creating these blends, and it is even more fun to go through these creative processes with our friends. Enjoy this beer and go try some of Salt & Straw's ice cream made with it too!
