Sour Barrel Aged Beer 101 -- Cellaring & Aging

We've recently been dissecting the laborious process of making sour barrel aged beers and the process of keeping them happy. Now that we've looked at the brewing and lab work required for these beers, it's time to address cellaring and barrel aging.

After these beers are brewed, they are racked into barrels that fall under the scrupulous watch of our wood cellarmen. These barrels are stored mainly in two off-site warehouses and taken back and forth to the brewery building as needed for filling, emptying, and hugging. Our team spends many hours babysitting these barrels to make sure they (and their precious cargo) are content.

When we brew batches of sour beer for aging, we won't see them again for many months, or even years. On top of that, a percentage of beer evaporates from these barrels each year, so we actually end up with less beer than when we started. This means we're making beer that is not being sold immediately, some of which is very moody, expensive and vanishing into the air!

It takes building relationships with wineries and coopers to get these barrels, not to mention some funds to afford storage space for them. And since we love to get crazy with ingredients at times, getting large quantities of fruit (including weird ones) to add to these beers can certainly tally up some costs.

But we believe this is all worth it to make the beer we love. Lots of you had questions about our sour barrel aged beer, so we addressed the cellaring & aging side of things in this post.

Sour Barrel Aged Beer 101 -- Challenge Accepted!

Do you remember a time before you knew about sour, barrel aged beer? You knew what beer was (an awesome beverage), you knew what sour tasted like (remember warheads?) and you knew other delicious beverages came out of barrels (hello wine).

While our fondness for this style is quite apparent in our portfolio, and your support of our experimentation has enabled us to continue to develop new twists on our sour line up, we often hear a demand for even more variety and availability of these tasty treats.

So in the spirit of sour barrel aged beer month, and to quell your awesome curiosity, we want to look closer at three parts of the process of making these beers and explore the risks, pampering special attention, and extra time it takes to make sure our sour barrel aged beers grow up to be happy, healthy 750 mL babes.



We'll look at each part of the process a little deeper, using some questions submitted by you via our Facebook & Twitter, in the following posts about:

A Look Back on June, Fruited Beer Month

Our very own Tasting Room now has official themed months! This means each month we'll be focusing on a particular beer genre with special events, tappings, archive keg releases, educational activities, new beer debuts, unique casks, randalls, flights and more.



Our first themed month focused on Fruited Beer for all of June. While we love our beers as they are, we came up with some great randalls that you guys helped us pick out. We brought out a good amount of archived beers and one-offs, like ISO:FT and ORB, and we had some great new beer releases for Society members. Read on for a review of what we were up to in June.