Welcome to another edition of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Roger Adamson. I do beer marketing and education. I'm Pat Brophy, director of Spirit Sales. I'm Kristen Ellis. I do wine education and marketing. I'm Greg Versch. I do communications. Guys, are you ready to drink some beer? Yes. Always. In today's beer world, a lot of people are interested in mainly three main styles of beer. Ooh, can I guess? IPAs, IPAs, and barrel-aged outs. No, sloppy IPAs. We're going to use the word adjuncts in this podcast. Oh, yeah. Yes. IPA, first and foremost, is the all-encompassing crushing style that everyone's a little preoccupied with right now. Correct. Barrel-aged outs are also very popular. The last category, which a lot of brewers would argue shouldn't really be a style of beer because really it's more of a flavor profile that encompasses all sorts of different styles, would be the all-encompassing sour beer category. We're going to drink some beers today that are definitely sour, but we're going to mainly focus on two of the most classic Belgian styles of beer that a lot of breweries are trying to emulate, pay homage to, and there's good reason for that. We'll get to that. Cool. Cool. Lambic and Guze is going to be what we're focusing on today. You may have heard of these before. We often get asked a lot of questions for Barrel to Bottle about the spirits, beer, wine that people chase, things that are impossible to come by. There's really beautiful products out there, and unfortunately, sometimes people get a little too preoccupied with the ones that they can't get. Do we call these unicorns, right? Categorically, yeah. Alien ghost whales, unicorns, you name it. When it comes to sour beer, probably the most requested beer is Cantillon. I happen to have Mr. Pat Brophy here with us, who is a big Cantillon fan. You want to speak a little bit to Cantillon? And it's Mystique? Well, it's arguably the most traditionally brewed, commercially available, broadly commercially available beer. It's a Lambic brewery in Brussels, and it is very steeped in tradition. So currently, it's run by a man named Jean Van Roy, and he inherited the brewery from, I believe, his father-in-law. And it's traditional equipment, you know, 100-year-old equipment, 100-year-old methods, you know, naturally fermented in a cool ship in the attic of the brewery. You know, it's fermented and aged in oak. So the good thing is, I've had the pleasure of enjoying a couple different bottles of Cantillon with Brophy. And the good thing for you listeners out there is that while Cantillon does make excellent beer, there are some equally delicious Lambics and Guzes that are readily available on our shelves that get overlooked, which is kind of a travesty. So part of the idea today is going to be to taste through some of these, explain how they're made, what makes them interesting, what makes them special, and you should go out there and try them. Absolutely. There's a lot of great alternatives and great options that are just as good. You know, I have the pleasure of getting to go to Europe once or twice a year, and I always bring Cantillon back with me, much to the chagrin of my wife who gets stuck with the overweight baggage bill. From all these bottles of beer I bring back from Europe, but the stuff we have here, honestly, you taste them side by side. It is just as good. All right. So let's talk about the name Lambic Beer. Lambic takes its name from the region in which it is famously brewed, the Lambic region surrounding Brussels, Belgium. Lambic is pretty unique in how ancient its brewing process is. It's probably our closest connection to the beers of yore that were essentially spontaneously fermented. We think today of our breweries the focus on QC and being able to brew a beer consistently and have clean and replicable flavor profiles. This is the complete opposite direction. We're letting all sorts of different bacterias and wild yeast are going to be the components that make the magic here. One of the key processes in this uses some pretty unique ingredients. Lambic beers are made with up to about 40% unmalted wheat and undergoes this really long and complicated turban mashing process that produces this really dextrin-rich wort. This is important because the process of making a really complex and beautiful lambic or goose beer involves this step-by-step process where different varieties of yeast and bacteria slowly work away at the beer and change it over time. So once they mash this wort, they end up putting it into a coolship, which is a very critical word for a piece of equipment for this style of beer. So when you ever talk to anybody who's gone to Belgium and visited, this is kind of one of the amazingly interesting and unconventional mystiques. It's essentially this really long, shallow vessel that takes its name, coolship, like it kind of looks like the hull of a boat, a really shallow one. The wort is poured in there to cool, it's cooled overnight, and they open up the slats and whatever the brewery or building is to allow the ambient air to just rush over the wort. So you're literally getting whatever is in floating in the air at the time, is what's going to be deposited into the wort, and those are going to be the key components that are going to start fermenting this fermenting process. Therein lies the variation because those components are different virtually every day. Well, and it's also the terroir, though, too. I mean, it's, you know, the air in Belgium is going to have some, yeah, you're going to get different bugs, but it's going to have some kind of consistency to it, and different than Washington State versus Texas versus rural Illinois. Part of the theory behind why this style of beer was so popular around the town of Brussels is that that area used to be populated with a bunch of fruit orchards, and those fruit orchards provided a home for all these different bacterias and yeast. All the beer for a lambic or a goose is fermented in wood. Again, wood is a huge part of this process because it provides a home for all those microflora, and it's those different wild yeast and bacteria that are going to give the beer so much character. Before we get to talking too much without trying beer, let's open the first one here. So, I already popped the cap off of this, but one of the unique things about this style of beer is that they're often packaged with both a bottle cap and a cork. One of the reasons why is that typically, these are some of the most highly carbonated beer styles out there. So the first beer that we're gonna be trying here is a beer from Lindemans. And Lindemans is a very interesting story. As popular as Lambic and Goose is right now in some of the beer circles, it wasn't that long ago that this beer almost died out completely. There's a reason for that. The flavor profiles to some of these sours are quite adventurous. There can be very much an acquired taste. They can be bracingly sour. They can be funky. The words horse blanket are a common descriptor. Dirty socks, you get that in different degrees and at different levels. It wasn't uncommon in Brussels for these types of beers to be served with a bowl of sugar cubes. If you so desired, you could sweeten up the beer to your liking. Sometimes they'd also serve them with syrups, much like a Gozo would be served. But there conversely are fruited lambic varieties where they'll add a different fruit, be it raspberries, cherries, peach, pear, and they'll also add sugar as well. You have a beer which at its base is still extremely tart and sour, but you'd never know it because of this balancing out with the sweetness of the fruit. What we're trying here is one of the most famous fruited lambics. It's from Lindemans. It's called Framboise, the French for raspberry. You can see it's a very beautiful ruby hue here. The stemware for this beer is quite beautiful and elegant, very tall, skinny, fluted style much like a champagne glass. Go ahead and give this a taste. If you're looking for a sessionable beer, these lambics are famously very low in alcohol, almost in like 3 percent range. So if you're looking to cut back and reduce on your alcohol intake, these are very, very low in ABV. Hey, Champagne Lover, you like this? It's sweet. It's a little sweet. The acidity is offering a good balance to that. I mean, they describe it as rich, round, fruity. It's a good little glass of dessert, I feel like. If you've ever made a champagne cocktail with Coeur Royale, with Cassis, or more often than not, people don't really use Cassis. They use a raspberry liqueur like Chambord. Chambord, yeah. So this in a way reminds me of that. But again, it definitely has some sweetness to it. This is what makes the appreciation of lambics somewhat challenging because when people try lambics, they may have one of these sweetened lambics and let's say they're not really into sweeter things and this drinks almost like a cordial dessert wine type of flavor when in fact, if you were to get a traditionally made lambic without that sweetness on the back end, they can be exceedingly dry and very refreshing. Lindemans chooses to do this because they were faced at a climate where people didn't want those really sour beers anymore. They were having trouble selling them. Lambic brewers were closing down. It was all but a dying style. So Lindemans wisely pivoted. You have to sell what the people want and people wanted sweeter beer. That doesn't mean that you need to give up what you love. And what we're going to try next is a beer from Lindemans that is a goose. A goose is a blend of Lambic beers that are aged for different periods of time. Typically it's one, two and three year old Lambic all blended together. Aged in wood? Aged in wood. Fooders? Indeed. So big wooden vessels of varying sizes. Some of these fooders are as old as 100 years old. These wooden vessels again are the perfect climate for the right kinds of bacteria and yeast. That's key to this. Lactobacillus and Pediococcus. Yep. That's actually only two of several. They've analyzed Lambic beer before and found as many as 80 different organisms at work. What's truly amazing is that this isn't the wild west when it comes to all these different microbes. There's actually a method to the madness. So when they're brewing this beer, it actually has a decent amount of hops added to it. But the hops that are added are aged before they're added. They're actually sometimes as old as three years old. Normally, you would never want to use hops that are that old. They're going to lose their bittering potential. They're going to lose their aroma. They're going to develop an off-putting aroma that's almost cheese-like. The Lambic brewers are fine with that because really all they're looking for is the anti-microbial properties of the hops. So as much as we're saying we want all these different types of microbes, that's kind of the amazing like mixture of art and science of this, is that they want some of them but they don't want others. So the hops play an important role. Also, the brewing season of Lambic is only part of the year. It's around 140 days that they brew. They avoid the summer months. During the summer months, too much stuff is growing out there. Too much stuff is floating around in the air. And you'd end up with a beer with too much spoilage. Lastly, when you have these big wooden barrels, it's really amazing how this fermentation progresses over time. So, enterobacter is kind of one of the first things that starts working away at the beer. Some different saccharomyces, the clean yeast strains, get worked to after that. Then, pediococcus starts working at it, and that's going to really produce some of that bracing lactic acid bacteria. Then, pedio, though, sometimes can, in turn, produce kind of a really thickness to it. Sometimes, they almost refer to the beer as ropey. So, you see beer poured out of the footer that's just almost slimy looking. But then, once again, perfectly, there's just another organism. You look at the Britannomyces yeast strains, go to work then after a period of time, and they start cleaning up the beer, and it goes from being this ropey, kind of messy, diacetyl laden beer into something that's completely different. So, I don't want to go too deep into the nerdiness here. We probably already have gone way deep, but... No, this is fascinating. If you're into beer and you're into science, this is probably the best example of how beer is a mixture of science and art. Because there's so much science behind this, a lot of which they're still trying to completely figure out and understand. So, if you have an interest in science, this is one of the best styles to dive deep into because there's so much to learn and it's quite fascinating. So, this pours really carbonated. Is that just how it is? Is that standard? Lambic, true unblended lambic is almost unheard of in the US. There's very few examples of it. For the most part, these beers are bottle conditioned and they're bottle conditioned to a very high carbonation level. So, that's part of the desire mouthfeel of the beer. And even the word goose, they don't quite agree upon what the origins of that is. But one of the theories is that it's a reference to geyser. So again, like that these beers really pop and they have a lot of effervescence. But what do you guys think of this beer as far as the... I think there's a lot going on in terms of layers of complexity. The first aroma I got was like total barnyard, like driving through the farms in Wisconsin, cow s*** like. Yeah. It's got that horsey funk to it. That blew off. And then there was a little bit of a fruity. Then that kind of changed. And it was a little bit like dank, a little bit like marijuana. Like there's a lot coming out of it every time I go back to it, even out of this tiny little champagne flute we're drinking out of. Yeah. It's pretty complex. Yeah. Like brie rind and like citrus fruits. Yeah, I agree with that. These are really great styles to pair with cheeses. They pair really well with, the acidity works well with high fat cheeses. I think we need salt, like we could use some popcorn just because I think it would bring out the fruitiness of the mid palate a little bit because it's still pretty bitter. So sorry, the crackling that I just interrupted you with. I wanted to keep the train rolling here. So that means Roger's gonna rub it in our faces that we can't figure out what he's pouring in. Yes, folks, we're going to blind taste some beers here. Let's see. Are you gonna give us any sort of guidelines or, okay? That I'm completely out as to what the hell. Well, it's under cork and cage, so that tells you that it's probably a sour. There you go. It pours a lighter red, like a deep pink. Oh, you sneaky dog, this is a cider. I was thinking it might be a wine. Or it's- Don't pull upon, Tony, that can't be a cider. It's a wine or a cider? What's a dry, rosé, sparkling wine? But it's flavored with something, it's got a lot of rose petal quality. This is a Mission Trail cider, Roger? No. Oh, is it a sea cider from Vancouver, BC? It is not. Is he in the right wheelhouse? No. Didn't think so. This is a beer, right, bro? Is it a fruit and beer? No. I told you, it's a wine. So one of the things about Lambic and Geuze is that its audience is very small. We're talking about a niche community of people that get interested in this. Part of the reason is that when people start trying these, there's a lot going on in them and it's something that their palates aren't necessarily accustomed to. And again, when you pointed out how highly carbonated these are, they share a lot more in common with sparkling wine. Why don't you tell us the name of the wine? So there is a movement right now for wines that are Pet Nat. Oh yeah, it's a Pet Nat. What? Spontanea Rosé from, where are these guys from? It's a Tenzing wine. Was that Petulant Naturale? Correct. It's a Pet Nat, yep. Method Ancestral. So it's kind of interesting that one of the movements right now in wine that a lot of people are geeking out about is actually very similar to the world of spontaneously fermented Belgian beer. So if you're curious about that style of wine, I think that the Belgian side of the beer aisle, specifically in the Lambic and Guze area is something that you should check out. What's the varietal of this that we're talking about? Oh. It says Wine of France. That's like, it doesn't even have a geographical indication. It could be anything. I thought it was just a really super earthy cider. Like I wasn't because I didn't- Totally. Well, my brain didn't think that a wine would enter, so I just put it out of my, you know what I mean, realm of possibilities. But that sucks. That's not good. Besides that you don't like it, at least, I mean, I assume maybe you can get where I was going with it. We can see the same wild similarities. Your point is definitely made. Sorry, I'm making it about me. But no, I think in terms of the bitterness and the flavor profile, and even the kind of, it's a little bit lighter, I think you could easily sell it that way. Lindemans, again, one of the readily available options, if you're interested in lambic and goose, they make, the goose that we tried was cuvee Rene. They do a variant on that, what they use cherries in, so it's the cuvee Rene Creek. Those are the two old style Lindemans offerings. Yeah, those are the most traditional offerings from that brewery. The rest of their beers are gonna be the more modern, sweetened, fruited versions. If you're interested in the more old style method of traditional lambics and geuzes, our next producer here, it's spelled B-O-O-N. So you would think it's pronounced Boon. It's actually pronounced Bone, like B-O-N-E. But I get a feeling that we had a chance to meet Frank Bone and we asked him, and he kind of said, ah, whichever way. So he's so used to hearing Boon that even he says he doesn't care. He's given up on the correct pronunciation of his own name. Poor guy. So one of the questions you may ask is, okay, so if I'm looking for this, how do I know if it's going to be sweetened or not? Traditionally, if it says Geuze, it's not going to be sweetened. But the other way that you can know is if it has the designation Oude, so O-U-D or O-U-D-E, which just means old in French or Flemish. So this is the Geuze Mariage Parfait from Bone. As it says on the label here, it's a traditional Belgian Oude-Geuze, 100% spontaneously fermented. It's aged for a minimum of three years in oak barrels. It's re-fermented in the bottle, highly carbonated, made a huge pop. As far as the ABV goes, you're looking at 8%, so this is on the higher end. When you go ahead and give it a try, I'd argue one of the interesting things about this, you might get maybe a touch of a spirited character in the finish, but it's still a little bit surprising that this clocks in at 8%. What is it when it goes into bottle from barrel, what percent, three or four kind of thing? No, it would be pretty close to eight, about eight in the seven, seven something range. It's not gaining a ton because remember, you still have contents under pressure, so there's only a limited amount of sugar that they can have in the bottle for that secondary re-fermentation because these are rated to sustain a tremendous amount of Right. I'm just wondering what the jump is. I think it's probably pretty- Maybe like one percent? One at the most, I think. I could look into that. It's a good question. That's what it is for champagne. It's generally 1.2. I would imagine that's probably it. One of the other interesting things about this style, since it's so amazingly well-fermented and there's so many different, yeast have a limit as to how much they can ferment, but then there's also bacterias that can keep that fermentation going. There's so little residual material in these that they last almost indefinitely. Yeah. I have a problem with this beer. This beer is incredible, and I hoard it in totally unnecessary quantities in my basement. There are cases of various Mariage Parfait vintages in my house, and some of them I might not open for 30 years, and they're going to be phenomenal. This beer is the absolute king, I think, of any beer available on a Binny's shelf 365 days a year. This beer is just unbelievably lights out. It stands shoulder to shoulder with any other Lambic, and it's phenomenal, and it's available all the time, and it is reasonably priced. So let's talk about how it tastes now, and then let's talk about how it's going to taste in 30 years when you get around to drinking it. When it really is, ood. See what I did there, Pat? You like that? Kristen, take a look at the best buy date. I'm going to read that for everyone. Best before April 13th, 2036. That is because this is a 2013 vintage marriage parfait, which means it was bottled in 2016, and beer can only legally have a written on a dated shelf code in Belgium of 20 years, and that's why it's dated to 2036. You can have them much older. I had, in 2013, I was in Belgium, and I had a 1983 marriage parfait Creeck, and that beer at 30 years old was still showing bright, ripe cherry notes, but it had gotten considerably more funky and horse blankety and stuff. This, I'm not that big of a fan. Really? It has a nice minerality to it that I think that is just so refreshing. These beers are just, there's something you want to savor, but you end up drinking them faster than you think because they're so palate cleansing. Not for me. I don't want to savor any of it. I mean, there's like a- I mean, it's not like I hate it, but I'd never buy it with my own money. Right. I'm not clamoring for this. It's fine. I know that, Pat Roefe, I know that I'm trashing the world's greatest beer, available 365 days a year on Binny's Shelf. It's like a little bit of apricot note, and then like this grainy thatchy note, and then this horse blanket note wrapped around it, and maybe I just haven't developed the particular taste for that profile. I've hinted to that these are somewhat challenging and they're not necessarily something that you grow to appreciate immediately. Pat and I have both drank quite a bit of these beers. So, it's important to take a couple steps back. So, if this is something you've never had before, or you've only had occasionally, one of the ways that you could think of it is like some types of foods, be them washed rind cheeses, some more adventurous charcuterie, some cold aged meats. Hey Roger, fair enough. It's a very well made alcoholic product, and I think that this kind of goes through most categories, especially wine and beer, is it travels. So there was a citrus, and there was a savory, then the citrus comes back again, and then you get that bitter, then the barnyard, and then the finish is fruity. So when you pay attention to that, I think that that's a mark of a thoughtfully made beer. Also with these beers, because they are so acidic though, it can be challenging for some people, some people might associate them, oh, it's giving me heartburn, and totally get it. But that's why these beers actually beg to be paired with some cheese or some charcuterie or something. I mean, it tones down the acidity. Really high fat food, so they're classically paired with things like Doc Goose, charcuterie, pate. And that's going to tone down the bitterness a little bit. Some of those fruit notes will come out, I think, be a bit more exaggerated. And guys, there's nothing that any of us love and talk about that we completely appreciated on day one. Everything is a matter of degrees and comfort and experience. For sure. Are we going to talk about this broccoli wine you're blinding us on? Are you blinding us on another bubbly? So yeah, I brought essentially a really, really bone-dry brute. Oh wait, what's that varietal W set? I'm sorry, what did you call me? What are we, MW? What are you? Yeah, right. I'm sorry, the varietal is for champagne? Well, what's this? Is it just champagne? I mean, it could be. This is Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. I'm not quite sure yet. You're not going to say it's also as Pinot Meunier? No, I'm not, because I don't think it does. It could be a bone-dry Prosecco? It has some of the pear, no? I think it's traditionally made, but I can't really smell it out of this thing. Anyway, I'm going Chardonnay. Reveal. It's a Pet Nihut. It's a Cava. It's a Perieta Giurello Macabeo. All right, there you go. What? Chardonnay. Yeah, it's super dry. Super dry. It's Roger punking us with another bone-dry oddball sparkler. But, dude, a very good, very good bottle of Cava. Revento si Blanc, like this is lovely. And this is a Blanc de Blanc. Wine drinkers, I'm officially courting you to come and try this sparkling style of Belgian beer. I think that everything you've poured us so far, wine drinkers would appreciate. Typically, Lambic and Geuze style beers are gonna be from Brussels, Brussels Adjacent. American breweries are starting to try their hand at these styles of beers. Usually, they don't have, I don't know if I should say the audacity, but they usually don't call them Lambics or Geuzes. Some people do, or somebody says, it says Lambic-inspired or Lambic-style. I brought in a beer that I feel is Lambic Adjacent and shares some similarities. It's a beer that I'm very proud of, because Pat and I had a chance to play a small role in developing it. It was produced by Firestone Walker. It is Paw Prints, and it is a bottle-conditioned sour made with pawpaw fruit. If you're unfamiliar with the pawpaw, we've talked about it a little. Wait, if you're unfamiliar with the pawpaw, I'm not surprised. Yeah. You're normal. You may have heard it called other names such as- Say the thing you like. The Hillbilly Mango, the Banango, the Indiana Banana. Hoosier Banana, Quaker's Delight. Hillbilly Mango and Quaker's Delight are obviously the best names ever conceived for a fruit. Firestone Walker is doing some, in my opinion, some of the finest barrel-aged sour-esque beers in the US. And there's some great care and attention and cellarmanship is part of the reason behind that. One of the things we were talking about all the different microbes at work in these styles of beers, one thing that you're always for the most part trying to avoid is the Acetobacter going wild because the by-product of that is acetic acid and you But here we slap a label on it and market it as Whales Bro. Yep. So Brophy and I have tried quite a few pretty disastrous American sours. But the people that are taking the extra effort, the extra care, doing things like topping off casks in order to limit the oxygen exposure to prevent things like this vinegarification of the beer from happening, that's really neat to see. And this Paw Prince beer, I think it highlights the very tropical, strangely tropical, for a midwestern natively grown fruit, really sings in this beer. It has pineapple nose, mango. Yeah, so a pawpaw is, looks kind of like a cross between a mango and a banana. It's got this yellow color. It's kind of got a, it's a very, it's a mild, more custardy flavor, and it's got little black seeds in the middle of it. And when they ripen, they are, they fall down and they immediately start to rot. So, I mean. You have like three days from when they're ripe to when they're rotten. And there's only a couple processors of pawpaw fruit in the Midwest period. There's not a lot of growers. We had, Roger actually had to find somebody, found one person that was processing it into a puree and flash freezing it, so we could actually brew a beer with Firestone with this after, you know, after the three days of ripeness had passed. So pretty cool fruit though. The pawpaw trees flowers smell like rotting meat. What? Well, all right, but there's this real turn of fruit. And it smells like ass. And we made a beer, but the thing is, the beer itself is delightful. The fruit is delightful. I mean, these are all secondary. They wouldn't have called it Quaker's Delight if it was not a delightful tasting fruit. Is it safe to say, though, this is the first really sour sour we've had all day so far. I mean, really, like really, this is the sourest to me. I think it's because of the fruit. The raspberry one was sour, but not like this. This is sour. I think it's Firestone Walker's profile. It's super tart. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, the acidity is more pronounced in this. I would agree. Yeah. Okay. I'd say more mango, though fruit lends it more of a mango or more of a banana quality than a mango quality. If you revisit the Cuvee Rene though, famously, Frank Boon doesn't like very acidic beers, and he's actually gotten into some heated arguments about this, even with Cantillon in particular. Part of what I think draws a lot of people to the Cantillon brand is that within the Belgian producers, when you talk about a goose, the blending portion of it is very important. They'll have all these different wooden vats of beer, but they're not going to develop in the exact same way. It all comes down to blending to develop the product as far as what you want the flavor, aroma, and especially the acidity to be. Frank Boon prides himself on these beers that are sour and acidic, but they still have some level of balance. Whereas, I think part of the appeal is that Kantian famously, of the Belgian producers, theirs is a little more on the acidic side. Yeah, it tends to be a little more acidic. Certainly, as some of the varietals age, a lot of people like to age fruit lambics for a long time. A lot of lambic producers will tell you that a fruit lambic is designed to be drank now. And they're only going to get more sour over time. There's an apricot variety of canthion that gets famously more sour as it ages to the point where you have one that's five years old or something and there's no tooth enamel left when you're done drinking your glass. Right. I like this beer. It's very tart and refreshing. It's very good. They use hops too, right? Yeah. I mean, there's a pronounced banana and a little bit of apricot fruit quality, but then there's a little bit of evergreen underneath. Yeah, like a mint or winter green, sort of. Some of that could even be from the wood. You might be perceiving a resonance. Maybe, yeah. Good job. Yeah, this is a great beer though, and we have plenty of this. It's available at I think all stores still. But yeah, the Firestone Walker Paw Prints, about 12 bucks a bottle. So it's not cheap, but you are paying for naturally fermented, oak-fermented, bottle-conditioned, fruited beer. You know, it's a laborious beer to make, and you got to pay for that. Makes sense. But it's a gorgeous beer. Yep. Indeed. Well, that was a little bit of a walk down. Again, like I said, this can be a... You can nerd out as much as you want about sour beers. And this is just part one of the multi-part sour series. It's funny because these beers are so flavorful and concentrated and high in acid that when you get to that kind of more delicate cava, the Blanc de Blanc, it's almost impossible to taste it. You're like, this is traditional made bleh. That's all I know. Folks, that brings us to the Q&A portion of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Write your questions to us via email, comments at binnys.com, or hit us up on social media, at Binny's Bev, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, for your chance at a $20 Binny's gift card if we answer your question. This week, a question comes from at young skunk on Instagram, favorite barley wine? Question mark. Well, at young skunk, that's barely a question, but. Just cause you put a question mark on something does not make it a question. But of course, I have a favorite barley wine. I don't cause I don't drink a lot of them. So the only ones I really ever had are the goose ones every year. And they're pretty good. When they make them. When they make them, yeah. The 2016 barley wine was pretty good, but it's not something that I order. So sorry, don't have a favorite. Don't know. Barley wine was my favorite style of beer when I first got into beer because it was all about being extreme. All right, so I got a couple options with barley wine and sadly, I don't think you can really get two of them anymore. I really love Victory Old Horizontal from Downington, Pennsylvania, American style barley wine, like big hop character, big malt character. Yes. That's why my favorite is Bourg Wiemeth by Three Floyds. Not only is it huge and gloppy and hoppy, but also it's a tradition because you can usually get it right around that big football game. I've enjoyed one or two during that big football game. I barely made it to the end. I love Adnum's Telly Ho because every time you raise a glass and have a sip, you get to yell Telly Ho and totally confuse your kids while you're drinking Barley Wine. Confuse your kids. Your kids know what's going on at this point. But so for a Barley Wine, you can actually get, it's hard to beat Sierra Nevada Bigfoot, definitely on the hop hop hoppy forward American style spectrum of the Barley Wine. But it does age beautifully. Roger's actually seen some and had some really old Bigfoot bottles that again came out of this cavernous hole of beer. I'm never going to get around to drinking in my basement. The bourbon barrel aged version of Bigfoot when they do it is quite good because it adds some sweetness to balance out that huge resinous character. Roger, what's your favorite? I would have to go with Central Waters. Central Waters does a bourbon barrel aged version of Barley Wine that's phenomenal. Yeah, it's absolutely phenomenal. It's an incredible price too of four packs, like 15 bucks. Pretty hard to beat. It's sellers well. It drinks well fresh, but it's sellers really well too. Cool. There you go, Youngskunk. Thank you for the question. $20 Binny's gift card coming to you. Everybody else, write your questions to us at comments at binnys.com via email or hit us up on social. At Binny's, be on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Roger, thanks for sharing the sours. Yeah, absolutely. This is only part one. In my multi-part series on sour beer, so that you can suffer through it with me. Now, we'll talk about, these are some of the more traditional ones. We'll talk about Flanders, the Burgundies of Belgium. Oh, yes. We'll also discuss Kettelsaurs, which to many is a dirty word. We'll talk about those. We'll talk about Goes, Goeses, not to be confused with Gueses. Yeah. Gues versus Goes is going to be really edgy. More to come. More to come. Cool. Thanks, Roger. My pleasure. So until next time. I'm Roger. I'm Pat. I'm Greg. I'm Kristen. Keep tasting.