On Monday August 27, we will have 3 bottles available for sale on our website. For the time being, we plan to have one bottle release per month with multiple beers available, rather than multiple releases per month with only one or two bottles.
Extra Thai Rack is a Saison featuring the holy trinity of ingredients found in Thai cuisine: Lemongrass, Kaffir lime leaves, and Galangal root. This beer is incredibly aromatic and is the perfect beer to pair with spicy Thai food. Lemongrass and Kaffir lime provide intense citrus, while Galangal root provides a lightly spicy finish and cleanses the palate.
The concept for this beer was brainstormed by Dan and is something Matt and Dan talked about creating for months, before finally freeing up some time in the brew schedule. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of creating this beer was sourcing enough fresh Kaffir lime leaves, and we almost had to take this beer in a different direction. After about a month of searching, we found a wholesaler in West Palm Beach that helped us make this concept a reality.
Kamikaze Goldfish is a golden wild ale that is dry hopped with an abundance of whole leaf Amarillo. This is our most heavily dry hopped beer we have produced, as it was dry hopped at a rate of over 3 pounds per barrel. Amarillo is one of our favorite hop varietals, and the notes of citrus and orange marmalade pair beautifully with the tropical esters and acidity produced by our mixed culture.
For this label, we were fortunate to work with our friend Adewale Adenle. Wale is one of our favorite resident artists at BACA across the street from our taproom.
Fresh Off the Farm with Peaches is our golden wild ale refermented with local organic peaches. Back in May we traveled to Natural Sweeties farm in San Antonio Florida, which is about 45 minutes North of Tampa. Four of us spent the day hand picking nearly 800 pounds of peaches to create our most fruit forward beer to date. Once we got back to the brewery, we spent nearly 8 hours processing all the peaches by hand. To prepare the peaches, we lightly rinsed them with filtered water and then used an apple corer to cut each peach into 8 segments. Cutting the peaches into 8 segments provides more surface area than simply cutting the peaches in half; creating more surface area results in more flavor and juice from the fruit. We included the skins and the pits from the fruit because we want the essence of the whole peach.
We have been wanting to make a beer with stone fruit for a while, and last year we tried sourcing peaches, nectarines, and apricots. We found a supplier, but we were not satisfied with the quality of the fruit available, and we ultimately decided not to use the fruit in our beer. Florida isn’t well known for the quality of its peaches. Our growing season for peaches is very short in Florida because the peaches ripen when the weather gets hot. This year, we had an especially mild winter and cooler temperatures (for Florida) persisted later into Spring than normal. Cooler temperatures coupled with plenty of rain allowed the peaches to grow larger and juicier than is typical for our climate, resulting in high quality fruit. Dan and I are thrilled with this beer and we hope you enjoy it as much as we do!
By Matt Manthe
August 11, 2018
