Learning from Las Vegas
Learning from Las Vegas combines five distinct stouts and three distinct types of wood treatment. It had been a while since we had had the opportunity to incorporate a smoke-forward whiskey barrel into one of our blends. Longtime Breakside fans may remember our collaboration with Single Hill from 2022, Let Your Indulgence Set Me Free, which featured some lower gravity stout that had been aged in a Westland peat whiskey cask. We thought it was high time to revisit the peated casks in our program and build a blend around them. The casks in question came from our good friends at Clear Creek Distillery. The peat and phenol character from those casks was intense, but we were pleasantly surprised to find that some young-ish Chocolate Stout was rowdy and edgy enough to balance them out. Notes of smoke, char, cherry and leather dominated the palate. To add more depth, we included some barrels of stout and barleywine aged in former dark roast rye whiskey casks from Stone Barn Brandyworks. Unlike many rye whiskeys that emphasize floral and grassy aromas, this one teemed with flavors of chocolate, pepper, and char. We had a pretty characterful start between those two threads and sought a handful of casks that we thought would bring more richness to the palate, tame some of the rougher edges of the young stout, and offer an integrated wood-malt-alcohol expression. Fortunately, we had recently identified a small cohort of older mixed whiskey barrels-- all more than 2 years old-- that were late bloomers and deemed too good to use' in a different project. They ended up being the perfect foil to bring the blend home.
The name of this beer pays homage to the seminal essays about architecture and the American buitt landscape by Denise Scott Brown. It offers a holistic vision for thinking and talking about the built environment around us, for valorizing the everyday and vernacular artifacts of our culture, for an open-minded and curious anti-utopianism. What exactly does this have to do with blended barrel-aged stout? Not a ton to be honest, but it is a great read. Maybe we could spin a yarn about how Scott -Brown's critique of modernist architecture shares some kinship with our freeplay-approach to blending bar-rel-aged strong beers, but that would ascribe a little too much intellectual gravitas to stout-making. Then again, that's what the haters said about looking too closely at Las Vegas....
Against Interpretation
"In place of hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art" wrote Susan Sontag in her seminal 1964 essay Against Intepretation. Good news for us: food and drink scratch the itch for indulgence and hedonism more than other arts. We could yap all day about to justify our work, but perhaps that is unnecessary and even counterproductive. We present this blend with minimal explanation, a commitment to experience and pleasure only. Please enjoy. Or don't. But do not analyze.
The Year of Magical Thinking
The first blend of 2025! We kick off a new year of stout blends with a new theme and fresh eyes on what we want to use from our wood cellar in the year ahead. As has become our unofficial tradition, our first release for the year is a classic: Kentucky Bourbon barrels and imperial stout. Even within this space, blending the most basic, iconic, and ubiquitous of barrel-aged offerings, there is still plenty of room for play.
In 2023, Finders Keepers emphasized muscular roastiness, uncommon in fashionable stouts today.
In 2024, Frostitita drew from a set of casks that prioritized oak and spirit influence over matiness.
For The Year of Magical Thinking, we turn back to some of the lingering casks from batches that contributed to Frostitita. With another year of age to them, the oldest casks in the blend have integrated more, with the express oak and spirit notes giving way to a more classic caramel and dried fruit expression.
The four batches in this blend were brewed over a five month period in early 2023. We found ourselves attracted to the casks with a familiar and welcoming Bourbon character: toffee, vanilla, honey, brown sugar.
This spirit expression melded beautifully with the chocolatey notes from our imperial porter, the complex carameliness in our black barleywine, and the rich body of our double export stout.
