Vague Recollection — 2017 Syrah & Sangiovese

Today we’re excited to release Vague Recollection — 2017 Syrah & Sangiovese, our farmhouse ale aged on the pomace from Syrah & Sangiovese grapes.

As our followers know well, we’re fans of taking the byproduct or “waste” from one beer and using it to make another. We do this with “spent” raspberries, cherries, blackberries, and blueberries, and in 2016 we started doing it with wine grape pomace. The pomace is what’s leftover after running wine grapes through a crusher/de-stemmer (skins, stems, and seeds).

Wine grapes going into the crusher/de-stemmer

Crushing/de-stemming

Wine grape pomace

One of the things we like about this technique is the subtlety of the resulting flavors and aromas. Whereas beers like Cerveza de Tempranillo and Bière de Blanc du Bois are more hybrids of beer making and wine making, Vague Recollection is firmly in the beer camp. Aging on the pomace creates a really nice texture and delicateness to a very well attenuated base beer.

2017 Vague Recollection was packaged on October 24th, 2017. It’s 6.0% alcohol by volume, 16 IBU, 3.5 pH, and 1.001 specific gravity (0.25 Plato). It will be released when our tasting room opens today, December 22nd and will be available by the glass and in bottles to go (750ml/$18). We have about 6,500 bottles, and there’s no bottle limit. Aside from special events, we do not anticipate that Vague Recollection will be available outside our tasting room.