We start sour March off with the huckleberry infused sour from Buellton’s (and Firestone Walker’s) Barrelworks division.
Huck Yeah! pours a vivid red color. Tart & fruity and buttery aroma. Same notes in the flavor as I take my first sips. Not super sour. Just a bit tart. My dad would have liked the name. Bit bubbly which I think adds to the beer. Huckleberry comes through. Almost like eating a handful of berries. A slight wine barrel note at the end.
ONS – Firestone + Barrelworks
Now, that I have talked up Firestone Walker so much, you may be wanting to have some of their beers. You could go to Venice and the Propagator restaurant but if you wanted something tonight, well Beer Belly has you covered with a One Night Stand (ONS) that spans sours to hops to Nitro and the year 2015.
Check out the list below: (My picks are highlighted)
2015 Parabola • Sucaba • Bretta Weisse • Krieky Bones • Bretta Rose (bottles) • Velvet Merkin • Luponic Distortion • Nitro Merlin • Easy Jack • Double Jack • Opal • Pivo Pils
Where (and when) the Wild Things will be Released
If you thought tickets to the Firestone Walker Invitational were hard to get and worth every penny then how about the special Barrellworks beers? One new one is coming out shortly, Agrestic which has been seen in the past but is now coming back in 375ml bottles. Believe it or not it is a weird spin off of a DBA base. Just with a bunch of what FW calls “a proprietary collection of microflora.”
Then of course aged for a bit and blended just so to the point where even super beer geeks are wondering what sort of magic they do. But that is not all….
Feral Vinifera
Feral Vinifera is an ultra-limited release also being liberated on September 20. Feral Vinifera was born of a collaborative effort with local grape growers and winemakers in Barrelworks’ backyard of the Santa Ynez Valley. Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin Blanc and Orange Muscat grapes were co-fermented with wheat-based wort, then inoculated with proprietary wild yeast to create this trailblazing hybrid.
SLOambic
SLOambic is Barrelworks’ foray into the funky world of lambic style beers. It was inoculated with brettanomyces lambicus, brettanomyces bruxellensis and lactobacillus, then infused with ollalieberries to create a distinctively, dry, cidery, fruity, vinuous and oh-so sour beer. November release date TBA.
El Gourdo
El Gourdo is what happens when the local pumpkin patch calls the barrelmeisters on the day after Halloween, asking if they want some orphaned gourds. Not only did the barrelmeisters take the leftover pumpkins last year, they roasted them in a pizza oven with brandy staves, bay leaf and walnuts before tossing them into a base wheat beer for secondary fermentation prior to oak barrel aging. We’ll just leave it at that for now. November release date TBA.
Reginald Brett
Big, malty, and alcoholic, this hefty brew is supported by a firm oaky backbone and slight tartness from its time in French oak barrels in the discreet company of a certain B. Lambicus. Scandalous! Release date TBA.
FoodGPS Teaser – Bloggers at Firestone
Thanks to the largesse of the folks at Firestone-Walker, our humble band of L.A. Beer Bloggers caught a bus at Union Station early on a Saturday morning and made the trek to Paso Robles to partake in the beer culture created by David Walker, Matt Brynildson and the rest of the F-W crew.
I will use words in tomorrow’s FoodGPS post to paint a summarized picture of the weekend, but here are the final set of photos from that epic journey….
Journey to the Center of the Barrel – Part 3
The last stop on the grand tour of Firestone-Walker that the brewery sent us humble L.A. Beer Bloggers on was in Buellton at the new in 2013, Barrelworks.
And at this stop, after another grand lunch with some really fresh and hoppy Pale 31, we had to do some (gasp!), actual work. OK, that was bit dramatic but we did get to try our hand at blending a sour beer.
We were given four beers to play with and let loose to create our own sour masterpiece.
My partner-in-crime for this experiment was Craig Berry from LA Beer Blog . We found a free spot and had to figure out how to blend the following:
Component #1 – Saison-Lil with Brett and Lacto in from an Opus One barrel
Component #2 – Saison with just Brett from a Viognier wine barrel
Component #3 – Saison with Brett and Lacto from a Viognier wine barrel
Component #4 – Bretta Weisse from a retired Union barrel
We then had to find our favorite by blending different percentages of each beer. Since I am a novice at this, it was a bit like playing Battleship. Guessing which beer should be in lower amounts and which beer needed more and then having to go back and trying again.
We came up with five different blends and liked the last couple attempts better so we were learning fast. But more importantly, I now know how hard it must be to do this and I have even more appreciation for “Sour” Jim who heads up the program. To figure out which blend is best is not easy.
Roll out the barrel and send it down the 101
A little organization going on at Firestone-Walker. Probably a New Year’s resolution.
“Firestone Walker Brewing has begun the creation of its Barrelworks in Buellton, an existing facility with some room for expansion an hour south of our Paso Robles brewery
Matt Brynildson recently banished (ed. seems rather harsh to me) the rare feral (a.k.a. sour) beers from the Paso Robles brewery and they are now showing up in Buellton under the watchful eye of Jim Crooks (Sour Jim).
This is not a new brewery nor a new brewhouse…..stay tuned, it’s going to be wild and funky…”
So it looks like sour fans won’t have to drive as far north.