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ROCKET-SLED

Black Project Spontaneous & Wild Ales Announce Release of Two New Beers

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Black Project Spontaneous & Wild Ales will release two new beers on April 22, 2017 at 12pm.

ROCKET SLED and REHEAT will join the expanding list of bottles that Black Project has released over the past three years. Customers looking to buy a bottle should expect to wait in line at least an hour before the release. Most customers arrive at 11am, but some show up much earlier, often several hours before the release to setup chairs or blankets.

This year, Black Project has been able to increase production, with one or two new beers available for sale each month. In 2014, when the brewery first started selling bottles in secret under the former, Former Future Brewing Company, each release would be limited to a single bottle every three months. This limitation on production was caused by a small 4BBL (barrel) system and the size restriction of the taproom. This limited availability is also exacerbated by the fact that each beer takes 8-10 months to ferment in oak barrels and then may spend several more months refermenting in stainless steel fermenters with fruit or to be dry hopped. In October, the brewery expanded into the space next door by leasing an area that they dedicated to 100 new oak barrels and a custom-made copper coolship.

While each bottle release is still extremely limited, sometimes only producing 100 bottles for sale, customers should expect to get a bottle if they are in line before 12pm.

ROCKET SLED is the first beer fermented with 100% coolship-caught microbes and then dry hopped with Mosaic and Simcoe Cryo Hops. Cryo Hops™ is a concentrate luplin powder that doubles the resin content, creating a super “juicy” hop character. The base beer is 100% wheat, made using only coolship-caught microbes. This beer is low alcohol and lightly tart, which is refreshing and full of complexity. ROCKET SLED showcases Mosaic and Simcoe, with an exquisite hop-forward aroma. The use of Cryo Hops allows Black Project to create a super dry hoped sours, without any leafy hop flavor, creating a unique combination.

“Cryo Hops™ represents the most innovative technology in hop processing. It uses a proprietary cryogenic separation process which preserves all components of each hop fraction, producing two simultaneous co-products, LupuLN2™ and Debittered Leaf.

LupuLN2 is the concentrated lupulin of whole-leaf hops containing resins and aromatic oils. It is designed to provide intense hop flavor and aroma, enabling brewers to dose large quantities of hops without introducing astringent flavors or vegetative cone material. During early R&D trials, brewers specifically cited ‘juicy’ and ‘resinous’ characteristics. LupuLN2 offers twice the resin content of traditional whole-leaf and hop pellet products, and should be dosed at approximately half the amount by weight.” -YCHHOPS

REHEAT is a variant on the brewer’s popular wine-hybrid beer series. SUPERCRUISE and MACH-LIMIT start with wine grapes from locally-sourced, family-owned vineyards in Palisade, CO. Once the grapes have been destemmed and crushed, Black Project allows the juice to rest for a few days – developing rich color and depth of flavor – before finally transferring the juice to neutral oak barrels along with our base Golden Sour.

After emptying a SUPERCRUISE barrel, REHEAT is added back into the barrel to referment and age on the remnants of the SUPERCRUISE series. Instead of rinsing and steaming the barrels, Black Project adds fresh coolship wort on top of the 2-5 gal of SUPERCRUISE “dregs” (yeast and souring microbes). Subtle, mild grape flavor comes through with an interesting fermentation profile owing to the active wild yeast that is still present and hungry from the SUPERCRUISE refermentation.

Both beers will be bottle conditioned in 750mL cork and cage brown bottles. ROCKET SLED will cost $22 per bottle and REHEAT will cost $26 per bottle.

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About Black Project Spontaneous and Wild Ales

Black Project is the passion project of James Howat, owner, brewer, and blender; and Sarah Howat, owner and operation managers; of what was formerly Former Future Brewing Company. The brewery began production in January 2014 and won two bronze medals for their coolship ales (Category: Experimental, Subcategory: Wild Ales) at The Great American Beer Festival in 2014 and 2015. In 2016, Black Project expanded production with a small addition to the property which allowed for the expansion of their barrel program. This allowed the brewery to evolve from Former Future Brewing Company to only serving Black Project beers. In 2017, Black Project hopes to produce 250 BBL of beer and increase distribution.

Every Black Project beer is fermented with microbes captured from the local environment via a coolship or foraged from nature. We believe this creates a beer that is unrivaled in complexity. Our beers are intended to have a sense of place, or terroir. No matter how hard one tried to, our beer cannot be replicated outside of our brewery. In fact, our microbe cultures are purposefully allowed to evolve from batch to batch, creating variations and interesting twists from different releases of the same beer.

We are meticulous about designing recipes and processes that will allow nature to take over and create beers unrivaled in their beauty and complexity. Through experimentation and research, we are continuously developing new and different techniques for use with wild and spontaneous fermentation.

We are not and do not have any intention of being a Lambic brewery. We use science and experimentation to find which processes and ingredients we want and often use that in parallel to traditional Lambic producers, however, other than the use of a coolship, we maintain no strict adherence to tradition for tradition’s sake. Spontaneous fermentation is merely a starting point and core of our process, from there our research and development extends much beyond the scope of the great Belgian brewers and blenders.