New Beers and New Merch

Pre-orders for this weekend’s release are available now. Pick-ups for Rings of Light, Molé’d, and Sideways start 7/10 at noon, with all three on draft. We’re excited to bring back Rings of Light (our all-Citra DDH pale ale) for the first time in 2021. Then there is Molé’d, a 10% ABV Mexican hot chocolate stout (with ancho and guajillo peppers, cacao nibs, vanilla beans, and amburana wood). Plus our first hard seltzer, Sideways with a vibrant fruit flavor and magenta color from Cabernet Franc grapes!

We also have bottles of Fellow Feeling (a red sour wine-barrel-aged with black currants and red wine grapes) and Guava Salzig (mixed-ferment gose with pink guava)!

Lastly we’ve got a whole new range of new glasses, shirts, coozies, and bags to choose from! Take a look next time you’re in the tasting room!

What is Hard Seltzer Anyway?

What counts as what is an alcoholic beverage is a bit tricky in the US. As a brewery, we can make beer (obviously). Fruit beer is fine too as long as 51% of the fermentable stuff (sugar) is from grain. Hard seltzer is treated as beer because the definition allows for grain substitutes, including sugar. 

That allowed us to get creative with Sideways and get just under half of our fermentables from the Cabernet Franc grapes. A few more pounds and the definition would flip to wine. Like everything we brew we wanted to make sure our seltzers are something we can stand behind and be proud of, using real fruit rather than “natural” flavorings is part of that. Real fruit is more expensive, labor intensive, and variable, but we think it is worth it! 

We’re working on other seltzers as well, tapping test batches on occasional Saturdays when we have a free tap line. We appreciate all the feedback we’ve gotten both online and in the tasting room!

Rings of Light

Our original pale ale is back! We tweaked the recipe slightly for this seventh batch of Rings to be less malty and more hoppy. We cut the amount of toasty Golden Naked Oats in half, and added Citra Cryo to embiggen the hop aroma. The result might be our favorite batch of our favorite pale ale with loads of citrus and melon aromatics, along with a little dankness!

Molé’d

This is likely the last imperial stout you’ll see from us until September. It’s a scaled-up version of our “Mexican Hot Chocolate” stout variants. The base is extra smooth thanks to Chocolate Wheat malt and reduced hop bitterness. It received 15 pounds of dried chiles (ancho and guajillo) that Mike toasted in an old homebrew pot. They are low-Scoville peppers, so Molé’d isn’t intensely spicy, just a little tickle on the back of the throat. Their piquancy is balanced by cacao nibs and Madagascar vanilla beans. We then aged it on amburana, a Brazilian wood with rich buttery baked good aromatics. The wood also brings a little dark fruit to enhance the raisin and fruit-leather notes from the chile peppers.

Sideways

We were inspired by the lightly-tart, spritzy, moderate-alcohol wine style piquette. We selected Cabernet Franc grapes from the Rattlesnake Hills area of Washington state. More important than the sugar, they add a delightful dark berry flavor and vibrant color. We gave it our own twist, fermenting with a strain from Berkeley Yeast that produces intense passionfruit aromatics. The result is fruity, snappy, and refreshing!

Guava Salzig

We decided to bottle this third batch of Guava Salzig because we wanted to keep the original recipe including Brettanomyces (wild yeast), which we can’t run through the mobile canning line. It’s our idea of a perfect summer sour, dry, tart, and tropical! We gave the label our can art-style because it is a beer that we intend to be stored cold and consumed fresh. The lively fruit flavor will fade, and may develop unexpected aromatics (we’ve never cellared it so we really don’t know)!

Fellow Feeling

This barrel-aged sour is a companion to one of our favorite releases from 2020, Stained. For both beers we aimed to pair wine grapes (in this case Cabernet Franc and Pinot Noir) with a beer and fruit that accentuates their existing character. Black currants are sharply acidic, and have a distinct and somewhat divisive flavor that is difficult to describe. You might be familiar with it from cassis (black currant lambic) or the liquor crème de cassis. The base is a blend of red and amber sours brewed in late-2019 with a hefty 8.9% ABV. Stained was all about the raspberry-vibrancy of a young Merlot, while Fellow Feeling is more ponderous, rich, and vinous like an old Burgundy.

Where to Find Our Beers

You’ll always find the best variety of our beers at our tasting room, but we are sending a bit more out to local liquor stores. We’re also selling at a number of farmer’s markets and local festivals!

7/10: Clarksville Commons Farmers Market

7/11: Sykesville Farmers Market

7/17: Sagamore Spirits Whiskey on the Waterfront

7/17 Braglio Farms Watermelon Fest

7/18: Reisterstown Farmers Market

7/24: Clarksville Commons Farmers Market

Upcoming July Release

In a couple weeks we’ll have this month’s IPA and DIPA release including Exaggerated Truth (DDH with Cashmere), Cloud Palace (DDH with Citra and Simcoe Cryo and dosed with steam-distilled hop oil), and Spoiler Warning (a sour IPA with Strata and Nectaron).

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