Get to know your beer: Apricot Sky

One of my personal favorite beers of the upcoming fall release, this beer started over a year ago as a petite blonde ale, something that we hoped would be a great blank canvas for fruit down the line.  It started with a primary saccharomyces fermentation in stainless and was barreled down into a mixture of French oak and acacia barrels with a mixed culture of Brettanomyces and Lactobacillus after that. 

We really liked using acacia barrels in this instance because acacia provides some nice mouthfeel and fruity and floral elements without being overly tannic or oaky.  With a light beer like this, it’d be pretty easy to overpower everything else with oak – especially with a longer aging time that we wanted for the mixed culture referment.  

This beer spent about a year in barrel before we felt the flavor profile of oak tannin, brett funk and lacto acidity was in balance with the body and ready to be blended.  Once in the blending tank, we refermented a third time on Apricot – feeling like apricot’s lighter bodied, sometimes funky sweetness would go well with the subtle mixed culture tartness we were seeing in the base beer.  As with all of our brett and wild beers, we bottle conditioned for a fourth (!) and final fermentation before it made it to release.

We love the big apricot aroma on this beer and the really light, refreshing acidity – nothing too bold or overpowering, just a delicious, balanced and refreshing apricot beer!  It’ll go great with your lighter holiday appetizers and salads with fruit before you move on to your hearty main courses and holiday-induced food comas :-)

Cheers!