It's Tuesday, must be time to blend something

It may not be a black Tuesday here in Orange County, but that's not reason we can't break out some barrel samples of Black Tuesday ale and figure out just exactly how we want to blend it for this year's release.

This will be the third year that we've released the infamous imperial stout that is aged in bourbon barrels and for the third time, it will have subtle differences in it's composition.  With a beer this big that spends so much time in oak barrels, there are many nuances that are hard to control.  Creating a beer of this style is similar in ways to creating a fine bourbon or whiskey.  The reason that companies like Jack Daniels or Maker's Mark can release a very consistent product is that they distill tens of thousands of oak barrels for every release and blend the majority of them together, creating a standard flavor from year to year.  If, however, you've ever had a single barrel varietal or have had bourbon or scotches from one of the smaller producers, you've probably noticed that the flavor and aroma can change ever so slightly from batch to batch.

As we explained a few weeks back as we blended the 2011 Oude Tart, the blending process is extremely important in barrel aged beers and can help balance the different brews.  While one barrel might be particularly sweet and another be particularly hot (alcoholic), finding the perfect blend of batches can result in great balance and the ideal beer to release.

We were quite happy with the final blend we agreed on today and can't wait to hear what you think!

For further info, visit www.thebruery.com/blacktuesday

twitter hashtag #blacktuesday

Tyler measuring out exact blend percentages.

Gotta try the original one of course.

And gotta try last years while we're at it.

Several different blend variations...which one will it be?!

Blending Oude Tart

Blending beer is an art.

There are certain breweries in Belgium that are world renowned for the beers, often being sited as the best of their style in the world that don't actually brew their own beer.  One large example is 3 Fonteinen brewery outside of Brussels.  They were founded back in the late 1800's as what they called a "guezery" or a brewery that specialized in blending multiple lambic beers from other breweries into the gueze style beer that they would bottle and sell.

Here at The Bruery we obviously spend most of our days brewing our own beer, but we send a lot of that beer away to rest in barrels.  Some of those beers have been aging since our very first months of brewing 3 years ago, while others are of course much younger.  Oude Tart, our gold medal winning (GABF & World Beer Cup) Flemish-style red ale is no different.

Today we brought out samples of several different batches of this beer that has been aging away in oak barrels.  Some of the barrels have instilled a heavy oak quality, some a real funk, some a clean acidity, some a roasty quality, some a more wine-like quality, and many other different enjoyable flavors.  The key to a well crafted oak aged ale, however, is blending properly to get just enough of each characteristic that will make the beer great.

We make several test blends with different percentages of each barrel of beer, constantly tasting and discussing the qualities that we like, dislike and want more or less of.  New blends are made, all of the percentages being carefully tracked so that they can later be scaled back up to a full batch number for the final product.

It's a very fun process, no doubt, but it is definitely tough to keep your palate tuned into the flavors.  And of course, we had a bottle of our first batch of Oude Tart, the one that got all the awards, sitting on the side for us to compare flavors.  Beers brewed with bacterias and oak are very hard to replicate year after year since so much is left to nature.  Hopefully we've created a blend for Oude Tart that will compare or outdo the original batch that we all loved so much when it was released back in 2009.  We think it will.