BARREL SERIES

Don’t Worry About the Fireplace

Our final barrel-aged stout for 2024 offers a classic Kentucky hug with nods to the apple orchards of Oregon and the small-family farms of Uganda. Don't Worry About That Fireplace plays in the realm of refined pastry stout: we combined big-bodied stout, porter, and barleywine aged in a mix of brandy and whiskey casks with the goal of marrying the fudgy notes of the porter, the dark fruit from the stout, and a punch of caramel from the barleywine. The initial blend definitely pushed us towards a luscious dessert beer.

We count ourselves incredibly lucky to call Caittin Bartlemay and her team at Clear Creek Distillery friends.

They make world-class spirits and liqueurs, chief among them is their apple brandy. The aromas from the barrels and from the beer that we age in them transports us straight to the height of fruit season in the Northwest and, more exotically, to the farmhouses of northern France where world-class apple brandy was born.

A long-aged milk stout in these barrels formed the centerpiece of this blend, and we built the rest around it

The spirit notes from those barrels played beautifully with some higher age-statement whiskies, but to really tie the room together we had to bring in something to up the body. We thought it would be extra luxe and decadent if we could introduce a cake-like note, either from malt or some other ingredient to ground the spiritu-ousness a bit. Enter some ground vanilla from Uganda that rounded the beer out with a beautiful custard note and a silky mouthfeel. The finished beer balances all of these elements -- notes of fruit, spirit, vanilla, and chocolate -- all in each sip.

A Sweater for an Octopus

A Sweater for an Octopus, our fifth blended barrel-aged stout release of the year and one of our two Black Friday debuts, veers into some uncharted territory for us. It's the first time we have used tea as an adjunct for one of our barrel-aged stouts. We came by the tea addition honestly: we had settled on a 12 cask blend that we found cohesive and very pleasant, but we feit that the beer needed something more. We wanted to play up some of the jammy, blackberry notes that we found especially unique in the blend, and we also wanted to bring in a little more structure, like tannin or oak or bitterness or roast, to the finish.

The challenge was that we couldn't find another cask to accomplish that for us without altering the overall character of the blend too much. That's when we turned to the idea of tea. Rooibos would accentuate the berry notes, and a skosh of black tea would add a little depth of earthiness and tannin to the beer. After a few rounds of benchtop trials with different teas, we settled on two single-origin teas from Smith Teamaker.

As always, the adjunct ingredients-- the tea, that is-- dovetail with the rest of the beer rather than dominate it. Enjoy this beer, and seek out the unique attributes that those teas are adding. Frankly, we hope that finding where the barrel and beer flavors end and the tea begins makes for a good challenge.

Somebody New in the Old West

Some things take time to hit their stride. Like, the whole enterprise of barrel-aging beer is based around the idea of waiting for things to be ready, that what tastes fine today will taste great tomorrow. But even with our years of experience aging beers, we still get caught off guard. Case in point: the imperial rye stout that we brewed early in 2023. This hit barrels in March, and like well-behaved and patient brewers, we waited 10 months before tasting it. The beer was gnarly, y'all. Too hot, too green, too much char, just aggressive. We were legit worried that it wouldn t calm down.

Hallelujah: we were wrong! Another few months of aging, and poof. Suddenly the barrels were tasting chewy, fruity, sorta chocolate-forward, with balanced spirit and rye malt notes. One of the great fortunes of blending barrel-aged stouts the way we do is being able to wait for certain beers to go through their awkward adoles-cence. It was a whole new something and made for some primetime blending. All the rye stout casks needed were some companion beers that would bring some depth of sweetness. We sought out additional casks to add in notes of burnt sugar, honey, cherry, vanilla and salted caramel. Some stouts with lactose, wheat, and oats added heft to the mid palate, and suddenly we were jamming: we had a zippy blend that months earlier would have been too far before its time.

La Maison du Bang!

Our newest barrel-aged release features casks from some of our favorite Oregon distillers, including Clear Creek and Stone Barn Brandyworks. Three barleywines of different ages make up the majority of the blend--some were held in apple brandy casks, while others rested in specialty Bourbon and walnut liqueur barrels.

We loved the idea of creating a late summer

release that evokes the coming fall, and the blend of dark beer, with brandy and nocino artifacts does just that.

A blend of beers aged in three different spirit barrels can create a ton of complexity but also poses a chal-lenge: how do you retain the nuance of each of the threads when blending beers together? We strove to achieve a delicate balance between the expression of the spirits; this meant leaning into some softer beers and a quieter Bourbon expression overall. We found ourselves tinkering with individual casks in the blend more than usual, in order to maintain that depth of spirit flavor. To complement the base barleywines, we layered in darker beer that was smooth and velvety, chocolatey but roast-free. Even the stout that we did use as part of blending lends more chocolate and oak than traditional roast to the finished blend. Cheers!

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!