barreledsouls

Maine's population is 100% black. I was surprised too.

We're swimming in bungholes over here

Its a method of fermenting beer that uses oak barrels as the primary fermentation vessel. The design of the system allows the yeast to travel up through pipes into a catchment tank where it can then be separated from the beer and reused in subsequent batches.

As far as I know, we are the only brewery in the world fermenting 100% of our beers this way.

Sometimes you just have to trust your intuition and take some risks.

There's a number of reasons, added flavor complexity and the effect of oak tannins on the texture of the beer being couple of them. The main reason we're doing this though is to promote healthy yeast growth and allow us to re-capture the best yeast from each batch to be used on subsequent batches. The shape of the barrel reduces atmospheric stress on the yeast during fermentation which lead to a healthier life cycle for the yeast. The yeast that is then pushed up and out of the barrel and collected in the Burton Union system is the healthiest of the batch. In this way we're almost selectively breeding the yeast, choosing healthier and stronger yeast each time. No GMO here, just good old fashion survival of the fittest :)