Nearly 3 years ago we purchased some wine barrels from a PA winery and filled 2 of them with our then current scratch beer, Triple. With the addition of brettanomyces and extended barrel aging Splinter Gold was born. This past fall, we filled our van with wine barrels from Allegro Vineyards in York Co. After careful consideration, we have decided to fill most of them with, you guessed it, Triple. The beer was brewed 2 weeks ago. The wine barrels have been prepped. Splinter gold will begin to take shape late next week. Be patient, last time it took nearly two years.
March 26, 2010
March 24, 2010
Troggen Roggen
Hey, Scratch #28 is currently on tap at the brewery! As Tim mentioned the other day in his blog post, #28 is a Roggenbier, a pretty uncommon beer style commercially produced by only a handful of breweries. It’s essentially a German wheat beer made with a portion of rye malt, which gives the beer a nice spicy dimension. If you’re familiar with the Scratch beers, you know we can’t get enough rye, so this style was a natural for us.
For our interpretation, we took our Dreamweaver base recipe and substituted about half of the wheat with rye, added a bunch of Munich and Vienna malt, tossed in some spicy and citrusy German and American hops, and fermented it with the Andechs weizen yeast strain. The result is a really flavorful, yet dangerously drinkable German ale that offers a fresh take on the traditional Hefeweizen. (read more…)
March 21, 2010
You gotta have hops!
Quick update on Scratch #x:
After just over a week of us being forced to draw almost daily samples and (gasp) drink them, we’ve decided the beer is ready to rack. So far, we have a gold/light-amber pale ale base with nice hop bitterness, spicy-fruit yeast character, and the barrel-aging coming through as oak, hints of vanilla, toast, and tea. (read more…)
March 13, 2010
(Don’t Call It A) Belgian Pale Ale
Don’t know about you, but this recent run of nice weather has me in the mood for a nice, lighter, hoppy beer. No, I’m not talking about Sunshine Pils in this particular case, although I have to say the early-season Pils we brewed for the World Beer Cup is in fine mid-season form. I’ve missed that beer, and I think it’s gonna be a great addition to the Troegs Anthology summer variety pack. Mmm Pils…
Anyway, the pale hoppy beer I’m talking about will be another in our experimental Scratch line-up, this time combining a pale base beer, a healthy amount of earthy/floral hops, an abbey yeast strain, and Pennsylvania oak. Oh, and it’s going to be bottle-conditioned (like most brewers I heart bottle-conditioned Belgian-style ales). Hopefully that’s enough interesting components to whet your beer appetites. I know it’s got me psyched. (read more…)
