Cheesy

I totally get a cheese and beer pairing but a cheesed up beer? Well Oregon’s Rogue Creamery has collaborated with  Crux Fermentation Project  in Bend on limited-edition, lambic-style ale brewed at Rogue Creamery’s cheesemaking facility.  And it didn’t utilize the ingredients of any cheese.  It was the cheesemaker’s famous blue cheese, Rogue River Blue.

Crux filled up their Coolship portable vat with uninoculated wort, drove that Coolship to the Creamery.  Rogue River Blue cheese was pitched into the beer wort and overnight inside Rogue’s facility the yeast and the went to work.  

Two years later that beer is now ready.  I will be following reviews on Untappd to see what the tasting experience is like.

Wish I Could Get It – Diamond Rain

We head to Astoria for a super limited coastal coolship combo of Fort George Brewing and Brothers Cascadia Brewing. Diamond Rain…

“In 2019, Brothers Cascadia Brewing parked their coolship in our courtyard and we brewed a collaborative wort, inoculating it with local wild yeasts and bacteria. The beer sat in oak in our cellar for over three years before we split it into two batches, adding copious amounts of Blackcap Raspberries to one, and blending both with a one-year-old mixed culture saison. We bottle conditioned the two blends for almost a year  and now, four years after the initial brew, Diamond Rain is ready to fall.”

Refraction

One of these days, I want to ride along with wort as it is passed from one brewery to another to see what that journey is like. I assume Refraction went via land or rail and not air.

That wish aside, I hope a few bottles of this collaboration between Russian River and Brooklyn Brewery makes its way to SoCal bottle shoppes

Spontaneous Shirt


I saw this posted somewhere on Facebook and instead of just liking it, I thought to myself that this would be a great shirt for all the L.A. breweries that have coolships to add to the Brewers Guild merch choices. Or maybe Hopped LA can add it to their roster.

F-Wow

On top of the Firestone Walker Lager news, there are two other big tidbits that you might not have heard of from their Buellton based Barrelworks.

1. Barrelworks has been draft and bottles only but is hoping to roll out cans in 2018.

2. A coolship is being assembled at Firestone co-founder David Walker’s vineyard in the Santa Ynez Valley. Imagine the yeasts and microbes that are in the air in that area!

Kudos to San Luis Obispo.com for the news.

Burbank Terroir

Following on the heels of an experiment in wild yeast for the Turning One Saison, Verdugo West is now tapping into older techniques with a custom built coolship (koelschips in Belgian) for a long-term beer that we won’t be able to see until 2019 or beyond even though it was brewed on 2/13/18.

I will delve deeper into coolships and Los Angeles over on Food GPS in a week or so. But for now, some photos of the what the beer looked like on Day 1….

The look from above on the turbid mash.

The wi-fi enabled heat sensor and the steam trails.

The menu board, where the wild ale experiment will not be seen for a while.