Sometimes beer from a particular barrel really hits you. This time it was actually two barrels, and they had both previously held our spontaneously fermented green strawberry beer, Sirens. With very few exceptions, I don’t generally find single barrels to be good enough to release, but these were that good even after only about 6 months in the barrel. We gave it another 6 months and they were even better, but we still thought they’d be improved with a blend, so we found another couple barrels that we had inoculated with one of our favorite blends, Even the Furies Wept, and blended them. The resulting beer is bright and light despite its high acidity, full of stone fruit and lemon character, like a white curtain blowing in the draft from a half-opened window beside a chair on which nobody sits.

Which is quite a coincidence, because that’s also how Margaret Atwood describes Eurydice’s state of being while in Hades when Orpheus comes to get her, on the journey that was the beginning of the Orphic rebirth mythology, which is what Plato refers to when Er describes seeing Orpheus transformed in to a swan in the transmigration of his soul. And that’s why we put swan wings on all of our barrel-aged labels, to represent the transformation that happens in the wood. This is just the first time we’ll be putting Sam Parker‘s beautiful swan on a label – expect to see it on many of our upcoming small blends.

Ah, beer. We’ll be pouring this for our Year Three celebration Memorial Day weekend, and also have a limited number of bottles available during all sessions. We’ll be allocating around 100 per session, first come first serve.

Cheers
-Jason Pellett, brewmaster