Saint Arnold Bishop’s Barrel No. 2 Release Info

The second release of our barrel aged series will be available in pubs and restaurants beginning Monday, February 18. BB2 is an old ale aged in Chardonnay barrels with cherries for 14 months. It’s delicious. And very different from BB1.

This is a beer for people who like their beers a little funkier, while not being a completely wild beer. The Chardonnay barrels came from Saintsbury, our founder Brock’s cousin’s winery in Napa, California where they ferment the Chardonnay in the barrels. On December 3, 2011, we filled the barrels with our Christmas Ale. We then added sour cherries to the barrels and put them up in our barrel room where they rested, fermented, aged and developed for the next 14 months.

Once it was time to move the 54 barrels of beer downstairs for packaging, we noticed that two barrels had a distinct Brettanomyces (wild yeast) character and two barrels had a sour lactic bacteria character. While on their own, these barrels didn’t have the flavors we were after, before dumping them we did a test blend with the rest of the barrels and discovered that the resulting blend was better than any of the barrels on their own. So they were blended in!

Here is our description of the beer: The nose is a combination of sour cherry, oaked chardonnay and a wild yeast character. The taste has cherry and light malt up front, chardonnay in the middle and finishes dry with a distinct tartness. The cherry throughout is a light note, never dominating.Because of the very small amount of this beer that was brewed, it will only be available at bars and restaurants. Your best bet for finding it is places that normally carry our beers.

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