Avery Brabant-First of Avery’s Barrel-Againg Project!

I might as well add some details now... this is Andy Parker, one of the brewers at Avery. I’ve been doing a lot of the work for our barrel program, most notably Brabant (which, incidentally, is both a region in Belgium and a breed of large draft horse).

Ernest is correct... Brabant is a different monster than the Brabant Originale (recently renamed in order to minimize confusion). The "Originale" was an early experiment in a single neutral wine barrel where we took some finished Old Jubilation and added some bretts for a secondary fermentation. It was a decent beer, but it was mainly important as a starting point for what flavors we liked (and didn’t like).

The bottled Brabant is a beer brewed specifically for this project and has almost nothing in common with Old Jubilation. The grist includes darker malts, but we were looking to avoid any roasted or astringent flavors... we wanted the flavors from the yeast and the barrels to stand out. It was fermented entirely with two different strains of Brettanomyces... therefore, no Saccharomyces and no sour-causing bacteria. The strains of Brett that we are using can lend a slight tartness from a very small amount of acetic acid, but I don’t feel like they produce enough acidity to make a "sour beer" on their own. It seems like there’s a common misconception out there that Bretts=sour. More often it’s that sour-causing bacteria are used in conjunction with Bretts to create sour beers. There are a lot of amazing sour beers out there already, but very few beers made solely with Bretts.

In any case, Brabant was in steel tanks for a few days, then transferred into thirty Zinfandel barrels from Norman Vineyards, which is where the majority of the fermentation took place. Adam Avery started chatting with Norman Vineyards a while back when he realized that they make an Old Vine Zinfandel called Mephistopheles. They shipped the barrels out here just after emptying them and they still had plenty of red wine and oak flavor left.

So to summarize: Brabant is a 9.3% abv dark unfiltered beer, fermented entirely with Brettanomyces and aged in Zinfandel barrels for nine months. It does not resemble any beer style that I can think of. We’re calling it a "wild ale" because of the Bretts, but "wild ale" encompasses a lot of different flavors and beers... it seems more like a vague description to me than a beer style.

The current plan is to move Brabant from the barrels into a bottling tank next week, then put it in 12 ounce bottles at the end of the month. We tossed around the idea of champagne bottles, but it was prohibitively expensive... we didn’t like the idea of adding several dollars to every bottle in the store.

I don’t know which states will be getting it just yet... I’m just a brewer. Much of it will depend on how much beer we actually have, and we won’t know that until next week. We’ve estimated that we’ll end up with something like 500-600 cases, but the angels might have taken a larger share than we think. We shall see...

Andy Parker
Senior Brewer
Avery Brewing Company

Thanks for the info, this sounds interesting.

Originally posted by after4ever

Originally posted by LtDan
I am all for this fad. Hopefully it will lower the cost for consumers if more brewers jump on the bandwagon.

How so? Not to be a smartass or anything, but barrel-aging seems like one big fixed cost, made of many parts:
Buying barrels from distilleries or wineries (or, occasionally, French coopers)
Shipping those barrels to the brewery
Paying real estate costs for storing the barrels while they age (usually on-site at the brewery, but usually quarantined from the mainstream brewing efforts to avoid inadvertent innoculation. This means building, buying, or leasing a separate barrel room)

None of those things will respond to supply and demand variables. They’re all fixed by other market forces. I think we’ll always have to pay more for BA beers.

Originally posted by Rekrappy
+++boatload of useful information about the beer+++

Originally posted by after4ever

Originally posted by Rekrappy
+++boatload of useful information about the beer+++

I *love* it when we get posts like this.

It’s probably not good to admit such venality, but this post alone will make me: seek out the beer, understand it better, and probably like it a little more as a result. Cool.

Originally posted by Ernest
Ditto. Major kudos to Andy for the awesome details! I kinda suspected that the base beer was no longer Old Jube, so it’s nice to get confirmation of that. I’m quite looking forward to trying this next month...many of these barrel/experimental beers they’ve been doing have been very cool indeed.

Originally posted by FrumptyDumpty
They had this on tap during GABF 2007. Its the jubilation with brett and is very good.

Originally posted by BlackForestCO
I want to come down to Boulder and ruin your life. Oh, and try this beer.

Your mullet alone ruins all life.


No, no, no Mullets only improve life. For everyone.

And in response to the parts of this thread relating to the cost of making barrel-aged beers... besides all the easily calculated costs of the barrels, the shipping to get them here, and so forth, the labor involved is huge.

Keeping up on even thirty barrels alone can be a big job... since these will all be blended back into a single tank hopefully next week), we’ve had to take a lot of readings on every single barrel. We needed to make sure that they all finished fermenting, make sure that none of them went acetic, and so forth. Plus the aforementioned real estate costs. Plus the labor involved in driving all those barrels from the barrel-aging room to where the Brabant will be pushed into a tank. Plus the driving to another room for some minor cleaning and refilling. Driving full wine barrels of beer around with a forklift can be harrowing and time-consuming, even with ratchet straps and such. Our brewery consists of a handful of small industrial spaces linked together by a lot of broken pavement, so it’s going to take several days and at least five employees (about half of the production staff) just to get the beer out of the barrels. And that’s with some decent equipment.

It’s difficult to even calculate an exact cost on this sort of thing. Even if you have a self-contained barrel-aging facility and a lot more barrels. it still takes a lot of time to do anything at all.

Anyway... it’s fun to put the information about Brabant out there so anyone who is interested can take a look. Whether it’s received well or not, people can look back and try to figure out why they liked it or why they poured it down the drain. We’re excited about all-Brett beers because there are so few of them out there... a couple of years ago the Avery crew just kept clustering around Tomme’s booth at the GABF because he had Mo’ Betta Bretta on. There can be delicious flavors in Brett strains that get covered up when sour bacteria are involved.

Then again, I love sour beers, too. Fortunately, there’s room for everything.

Andy Parker
Senior Brewer
Avery Brewing Company

Originally posted by Ernest

Originally posted by BlackForestCO
I want to come down to Boulder and ruin your life. Oh, and try this beer.

Your mullet alone ruins all life.