Blending

Magnanimous Brewing in Tampa has built a strong local following for its big-flavored beers, including its barrel-aged imperial stouts. Here, founder and brewer Mike Lukacina shares some thoughts behind their ever-evolving base stout meant for aging in whiskey casks.

The world’s best oak-aged beers begin with careful hot-side considerations. Here’s how some of today’s leading brewers design stouts and barleywines to maximize success inside the barrel, and beyond.

Give those barrels plenty of time before tasting, says New Image founder Brandon Capps, and be open to new possibilities when tasting different components for blending.

When it’s time to pull nails and evaluate components for blending, New Image’s Brandon Capps recommends including tasters who are less familiar with the style, while also ensuring that tasting happens blindly and individually.

Cam Lund, cofounder and brewer at Bluewood Brewing in St. Louis, outlines their multi-threaded approach to brewing, aging, and blending their big barrel-aged stouts—including a few that reach liqueur-like heights of 20 percent ABV or more.

Michael Kane, founder of Kane Brewing, explains their patient and intentional approach to barrel-aging imperial stouts, including the award-winning A Night to End All Dawns—from selecting barrels to tasting and finishing.

The brewmaster of Firestone Walker in Paso Robles, California, lays out the brewery’s methodical approach to blending hops for elevated flavors and aromas in distinctive IPAs.

Getting beer out of the barrels and processing it into brite tanks involves constant monitoring and multiple lab tests at Firestone Walker—and maybe just a bit of tasting and celebration, as Eric Ponce explains.

In moderation, oxidative flavors can add welcome depth to barrel-aged barleywines and other strong ales. One way to get there, explains Firestone Walker’s Eric Ponce, is via careful blending of younger and older beers.

It begins with a recipe designed for barrel-aging, and sourcing the best and freshest barrels possible. It continues with an understanding of how storage temperature affects flavor extraction. Firestone Walker’s Eric Ponce explains.

From idea to grain to glass, Firestone Walker’s Eric Ponce underscores the creative potential of barrel-aging and blending by walking us through the development of Mezca-Limón, a strong ale inspired by mezcalita cocktails.

In this video course, Firestone Walker’s Eric Ponce shares advice and lays out the careful process behind the brewery’s barrel-aged and blended blockbusters such as Parabola and Anniversary Ale.

Informed by the Belgian tradition but rooted in their own places, here are five beers brewed and blended in the manner of lambic and gueuze.

Kevin Foster, based in Atlanta, Georgia, won a gold medal for his gueuze-style blend at the American Homebrewers Association Nationals in 2018. Here, he talks about his year-to-year process for brewing, aging, and blending wild beers.

Try to brew it if you want—many have tried—but few beers belong to their own place more than traditional Belgian gueuze.

Joe Stange, managing editor of Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine® and co-author of Good Beer Guide Belgium, explores how that country’s wilder-side beers have continued to evolve.

The wood cellar and mixed-fermentation director for fast-growing Creature Comforts in Athens, Georgia, dives deep into brewing and blending barrel-aged beer.

With an expansion in the works to help meet customer demand, the owners behind Main & Mill Brewing in Festus, Missouri, will keep their existing brewhouse and expand their experiments.

The brewers from Chicago’s Hop Butcher For the World offer advice on blending hops successfully.

For Fermentery & Blendery Form, it took more than a decade to open their doors, and some of the beer they have aging now might not be ready for another ten years. This Philadelphia spot shows us all why it’s okay to let the beer reveal when it’s ready.