Space Bear
For those who were are the Texas Craft Brewers Festival this past weekend, you may already know about Space Bear. For those who were not, we have a very exciting beer that we debut at the festival and will be releasing kegs at the pub on the 24th of October and a limited bottle release will be announced later this month.
Space Bear is project that we started back in early 2016 when we sat down and talked about using our already inoculated barrels(Aberrant anyone?) and filling them with a special base beer to then age and sour. We knew we wanted to take a stab at a turbid mash using raw wheat and pilsner malt, we also knew that we wanted to use aged hops to mock a base recipe of a lambic/geuze. Once we figured out the “what”, we had to move on to the “how”, which proved to be slightly more challenging. Fortunately for us, the folks at Jester King Brewery are some of the kindest, most helpful people on earth and they had a significant influence on the way we approached this beer as well as sending us off with some awesome/skunky aged hops and a freshly emptied barrel!
The brewday was a long and sweaty one, but we ended up executing a modified turbid mash on our single infusion mash tun. For those who don’t know what that means, just think “Stirring, waiting, stirring, waiting, sweat, stirring, waiting, waiting, waiting”
Once we had the wort made, we knocked out into a stainless steel tank and pitched our house yeast strain for primary fermentation. Once fermentation was almost complete, we transferred the beer into the 4 inoculated barrels and let them sit. As months went by, we tasted, analysed and took notes on how the beer was developing. After a little over a year of aging in these oak barrels with a number of wild yeast and bacteria strains, we did some blending tests and decided it was time to keg this baby up. We then dosed the blended beer with dextrose sugar, filled kegs and bottles, and let it naturally condition. All in all we are pretty pleased with the end result and can’t wait to share this project with everyone. We will be releasing the kegs on October 24th and the limited bottle release will be announced later this month. Come on out and get some while it lasts, this is a limited release!