Austin, Texas based Adelbert’s Brewery, the award winning brewing operation known for its Belgian style ales, just announced the release of the first in a series of fruited beers. The new brew is Passion Fruit Sour, set for distribution on February 10, 2017.
This latest Adelbert’s beer uses real passion fruit in the recipe along with several strains of house yeast. The beer is then aged in oak barrels for 18 months, which helps the beer impart a woody character as well as develop tropical, fruity sour notes. Adelbert’s founder Scott Hovey explains that this new series of releases are complex and ever- changing.
“Every batch in this series will taste unique. We use a blend of several barrels for each sour. Some were inoculated naturally while others were inoculated with strains we chose. We don’t use a standard house yeast strain or base beer recipe. We change what we put into the barrels each time to give more complexity to the blends,” said Hovey.
Passion Fruit Sour will be the first beer to launch from this new series and it will be followed by Raspberry Sour and Blueberry Sour. This won’t be the end of the series. Adelbert’s brewers are hard at work, testing out other flavors and deciding which are best. Once the desired taste and other expectations are met, Adelbert’s will announce them to the public on its social media feeds. As Hovey emphasizes, taste and quality matter more than anything and his brewery will not release any beer that doesn’t measure up to Adelbert’s tough standards.
“We select the barrels to blend for each individual batch based on what tastes best at that time. In fact, we already dumped 20% of the barrels aged because we didn’t like the flavors that developed,” Hovey said.
Look for Passion Fruit Sour in bottles in Adelbert’s own taproom. And be sure to follow Great Beer Now as well as Adelbert’s Facebook and Twitter pages for further updates.
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