The Creative Process: A Winding Path
The creative process is an interesting enigma. It can vary from acute bursts of inspiration to long and meandering journeys with endless diversions. In my personal experience, the best ideas tend to come together through some combination of both – with moments of intense inspiration generating new trails that one then wanders down to see where they lead.
Much like the analogy would imply, the process is rarely straightforward. There are moments when progress is obvious, and others where you feel like you’re completely lost. It’s a process that requires constant evaluation, re-orienting, and commitment to see the end through.
The last several years, I’ve found myself stumbling about on a journey that’s been anything but straightforward. To be honest, I’m not even entirely sure where it began, but I can recount some key themes as well as some stand-out moments that influenced the journey.
Chasing the Elusive Barleywine
I suppose the idea began to take shape over the many formative years of my experience entering the craft beer industry. Very early on, I became interested in a style called barleywine – one that, while theoretically well-defined by the guidelines of the BJCP, I’ve found to manifest in about as many forms as one could imagine.
Some of the key elements, though, are these: alcoholic strength, intensity of flavor, a focus on malt character, and an emphasis on aging. When I was first getting into beer, I remember seeking out some of the most famous examples of the style being produced in America at the time – two that come to mind are Stone Old Guardian and Lost Abbey Angels Share. If you’ve had both of these, then you already know they’re about as similar as ice and fire.
The former is a classic example of American barleywine, having the characteristic features of caramel, bread, and malt sweetness, but with a pungent throughline of resinous American hops punching through the whole of the experience. The latter, on the other hand, leans in the direction of the more historied English style barleywine, showcasing endless layers of malted barley complexity presented amidst an intensity of sweetness that, upon first tasting it as a somewhat novice beer drinker, caused a memorable double-take.
Having tried many more examples of the style over the last 10-12 years, the most common throughline I can note of the best examples is simply that of being striking – something memorable that redefined how I thought about the style and even the medium of beer as a whole.
Early Attempts and Lessons Learned
Early in my professional career, I began my attempts to create a barleywine of my own that would elicit a memorable reaction from those who partook of it. My leanings from the beginning were towards those of the English style, emphasizing the characteristics of malt flavor, caramel sweetness, and layers of dark fruit.
I remember how I used to write recipes back then – they were so incredibly over-complicated and wrought with the enthusiasm of the excited amateur. I probably brewed every dark beer with 10-12 different specialty malts. This isn’t to say that there’s no place for that, because there still exist in our portfolio a handful of beers that have earned that complexity organically. But lacking then the experience I have now, these attempts were a perfect example of too much energy and not enough patience and practice.
Unsurprisingly, the results of these early attempts were usually good, but not great. After many years of producing barleywines that just never quite scratched the itch, I eventually began to take steps back to simplify and to refine. I started to learn more about where these flavors I assumed to understand so quickly when I was younger actually emanated from, and what I learned took me by surprise.
The Secrets of Time and Oxygen
My initial efforts had centered around ingredients – constant experimentation to find that missing piece of the puzzle that would deliver the flavor I was certain was just one recipe change away. As I had the opportunity to try more examples of the style, to read the histories of their origin and process, and to also find counterparts in cousins to the style such as dessert wine and vinegar, the picture began to form a bit more.
As it turned out, there were really just two ingredients that I had been seeking all along: time and oxygen. Typically thought of as the enemies of beer quality, barleywine has this beautiful relationship with both, where the best examples of the style seem only ever to improve as they interact with each other.
A Happy Accident
As luck would have it, I ended up making one of my first striking examples somewhat by accident. Fun fact: it was actually the first beer I ever brewed for New Image. When I made this beer in the summer of 2015, I was optimistically targeting a November opening for our Olde Town brewery. At the time, we were contract-brewing at Funkwerks in Fort Collins, and to this day, this brew apparently remains memorable – not for any reason other than what would turn out to be an absolute nightmare of a lauter.
The grist was 80% Maris Otter and 20% malted rye, and of course, it had a lovely starting gravity target of 28 Plato. If you’ve ever worked on a brewhouse, you already know why this was such a nightmare of a day. Fortunately for me, I had the experienced hands of the brewers at Funkwerks to help me get through the brew day – long as it was, otherwise unscathed.
The intention was always for this beer to go into barrels, though I did not intend at the time to open with a nearly 1 year old barrel-aged beer on our opening draft list. This beer was named for its emphasis – Wood. While the version that was on our taps when we opened was certainly a nice beer and a unique offering for a new brewery to say the least, it had yet to be fully realized for its potential.
The Forgotten Barrels
Initially, I filled 8 casks with this beer, emptying 2 for this initial release and another 2 at about 18 months for another release. The 18-month version was a step closer – I remember when we first tasted that one. I believe we released that for GABF in 2016, and it was a huge hit when it was released.
That was also right about the time that we started to really blow up for hazy IPA, and my whole world turned into a tornado of insane growth and expansion – from our tiny brewpub in Arvada to a sizable distribution presence in the Colorado market. During that time, those last 4 casks were forgotten in the corner. They actually moved 2 times in those years – once from Fort Collins to Arvada, and from there to the facility that would become our production facility and where we recently opened our second taproom location in Wheat Ridge.
A Striking Rediscovery
It wasn’t until 2018 that I found these again – we were finally tidying up some of the forgotten corners of the brewery and found these casks laying in wait. I thought for sure there was no way they were still good, but we tapped them anyway. What came next was one of those acute moments of inspiration.
As I lifted the glass to my nose, I was immediately immersed in waves of dark fruit, layers of toffee, and whisps of strong spirit. When I went to taste the beer, the viscosity blew my mind – it was so dense, the alcohol intensity was insane, and the fruit and toffee flavors from the nose absolutely stuck to the palate. When we pulled that beer out of the barrels, it had been on the wood for 1000 days, and it showed.
Releasing that beer was a wonderfully mixed emotional experience – the loss to evaporation (see Angels Share) had resulted in an abysmal yield. Of the 55 gallons that went in, only 30 were returned. We had a handful of half-barrels at the taproom, but this beer was gone in the flash of an eye. What’s more, I had no other projects aging in barrels at the time to replace this, so I had this terrible realization in that moment that I’d be yet another 3 years older before I’d have the chance to recreate this elusive object that had been a goal of mine for maybe 6 years at the time.
However, the pain of this realization taught me a lesson, and in no year since this happened have I failed to fill barrels with barleywine.
Refining the Recipe and the Process
Before brewing this beer again and re-initiating the aging process, I took some time to reflect on where I hoped the next version would go. I did some research around aging beer and made sure that the next version would be built to handle the time that would be required to reach maturity.
When the weather cooled again that winter and we had the time to brew big barleywines again, the next generation of Wood was conceived. This new version was much like its elder, composed mostly of Maris Otter base malt, but with a touch of some medium crystal and chocolate rye that I had come to love over the prior few years. That generation went into barrels in early 2019, where it was left to rest until it had transformed.
We brewed another generation of this beer in late 2019 and pulled nails on a single cask of the first in the beginning of 2020, just to see how things were going. As expected, the beer was lovely, but very much still in the beginning of its journey, and as we were collectively about to find out, it wasn’t the only thing about to embark on a long journey.
A Twist of Fate
Shortly after the second generation of barrels were filled, the insane whirlwind that has been the last nearly 3 years began to unfold. Needless to say, these barrels yet again went into a corner where they got lost in time for a little while, only to be revisited about once per year when I happened to peruse the cellar again.
Over the next 2 years, these beers continued to transform and take on characteristics of age – an effect I could surely relate to, as the events of those 2 years certainly added more than their weight in time to my own emotional sense of age. A lot happened over those 2 years, and I won’t side-track too much, except to speak to the changes and experiences that would continue to inform where this whole story is meant to go.
We all got locked inside – at first, there was a sort of excitement to it, and like many of you, I opened a few more bottles from my cellar at the outset than maybe was wise in retrospect. But 2 weeks turned into 2 months, and then so on and so forth – you all know the story. I opened a lot of bottles from that cellar and quickly got burned out trying to finish 16 ounces of massive barrel-aged monsters by myself.
A Fortuitous Rediscovery
Somewhere along the way, though, I re-acquainted with a dessert wine that I had initially met during a study abroad in 2012 – port. This turned out to be a nice little indulgence for the winter of 2020, since I could serve only a few ounces at a time without committing to an entire bottle.
This realization sparked a new thread of interest, and I found myself exploring many different types of dessert wines – ranging from the Iberian sherries and Madeiras to the European ice wines. For a minute, I all but stopped drinking beer for the love of this new-found format and found myself enjoying room-temperature snifters of these luscious and intense wines through the coldest months of that winter.
I was enamored by the layers of dark fruit, the caramel and toffee notes, and the decidedly non-vinous flavors that had resulted from the oxidative aging these wines had undergone. I failed for many months to even see the parallels to the style I had nearly forgotten at this point – that was until I went through the cellar again to select some barrels for our 5th anniversary beer.
A Moment of Inspiration
Now early 2021, those casks I had so eagerly filled in 2019 were beginning to come of age again. I pulled some nails on the oldest among them to see how they were coming along, and again, I was hit with a wave of inspiration. Much like the day in 2018 when those aromas first came pouring forth from the glass, I was utterly enraptured.
Though now 3 years later, I had a lot more context and noticed things I had missed the prior tasting. Having come fresh off of my dessert wine kick, I now saw the throughlines – the dark fruit, caramel, toffee, and interestingly, now seemingly wine-like characteristics of the beer in my hand. So began another wave of acute inspiration.
I started to taste this beer side by side with some of the wines I had on my shelf and slowly but surely, I began to center in on some key parities between them. Of the wines I had been exploring, there was one that stood out as reflecting the most back from what I adored in this barleywine – it was a bottle of solera sherry. I began to read about the history of sherry and its production process. The solera method was fascinating and such an incredible practice in patience and tradition.
At the same time, I meandered into the world of Madeira and became equally fascinated by the way in which this archaic, historic practice of aging fortified wine in hot ship hulls had been forcibly re-imagined in a modern world of manufacturing. Amidst reading through countless brand auto-biographies, research papers, and process guides, I discovered the estufagem process – a form of rapid oxidative aging created to mimic the original Madeira aging process that occurred in ship hulls.
A New Vision Takes Shape
With all of these new ideas buzzing through my mind, a new thread began to emerge. My initial journey began first and foremost with flavor as the centerpoint, but now a new layer had been added. I wanted to emulate the format that I had grown to love about dessert wine – creating something shelf-stable that could be enjoyed on my own terms in a volume that made sense.
The many harmonies from what I had tasted in my matured barleywine to what I had enjoyed from these sherries and Madeiras gave me the sense that this was possible, if I could just figure out the right method. So in early 2021, we took some barleywine that was slated for barrels and diverted a portion of it to a special tank that was designed to expose beer to a controlled amount of oxygen and heat.
The purpose of this tank was to emulate what was being done with the estufagem process for aging young Madeiras – the result of this process being a product that has taken on the aging qualities of something that would have taken 3-5 years to develop, achieved however in a comparatively brief period of 2-3 months.
I started this process without a fully formed idea for how everything would come together, but I was intrigued to see the result. About 3 months later, I was able to test the initial result, and yet again, it was striking.
A New Manifestation of an Old Friend
One of the first things I noticed this time around was the color. The barleywine that had gone into this tank was a single-malt beer, brewed with a Munich-type malt from a producer in Colorado, Troubadour Maltings. It had gone into this tank around 10 SRM – a glowing golden color. But when I went to pour it off the sample port, it came out at something like 25 SRM. I realized that I had noticed the same color change in the barrel-aged variants, though it had been less noticeable and surprising on the 3-year timeline than it had in 3 months.
I noticed a few other things immediately as well. This beer had legs – thin streams of liquid cascading down the sides of the glass every time the liquid was roused onto the walls of the glass. Upon taking in the aroma, I noticed that all of those characteristics of age were already present – toffee, almond, honey, dried fig, and dates were exploding from the glass.
When I went to sip the beer, the first major disparity from the barrel-aged companion became evident. Where the barrel-aged version had concentrated due to evaporation, this liquid had not. Because this beer was resting in a closed tank, the water had no chance to evaporate, and so while all of the oxidative characteristics were there, the viscosity remained constant.
The mouthfeel was noticeably more similar to the sherries and Madeiras that I had been enjoying than the barleywines that had aged many years in barrels. You wouldn’t call this new beer dry, but certainly not thick or cloying either. It had a different kind of sweetness to it, with more of the impact of ethanol being present in the resulting composition.
The Next Phase of the Journey
By the time I was trying this, I had already sourced a handful of sherry casks for extended aging, and the entirety of what was pulled from this experimental batch was racked into those casks so that a much slower solera process could begin. Well, come back to those later.
We had reserved another length of single-malt barleywine from a second batch that was also sent into barrels, that we used to refill the tank with a small amount of the liqui
