We are excited to announce that Wildflower Good as Gold Blend #1 will be available at our cellar door and online (at 2pm) on September, 7 2018.
Good as Gold is a bit of a dream beer for us. Its a 50/50 blend of barrel aged Gold with fresh Gold that has just completed primary fermentation. This composition of aged and fresh beer is what we had originally intended for our Gold. It didn't end up like that though, as Gold is 100% barrel aged.
We love the fresh fermentation esters and bright hop character we get in our young fermentations. This is what we focus on in beers like The International & As It Were (coming in November). But we can't hide that we also love the apparent funk, creamy mouthfeel and complex fermentation flavours of aged beer. We dont think of this blend as being a best of both worlds, but more an attempt (and this is only the first one) to marry these flavours harmoniously. One of the beers that really got me thinking about making mixed culture beers at all was BFM √225. It was the first biere de coupage I tasted and still remains a little bit of a mountain for me. Good as Gold may be made in the same fashion as and with a lot of inspiration from √225 but has a distinctively Wildflower feel.
Good as Gold Blend #1 has poppy nose of zesty citrus and cellar funkiness both lifted by subtle notes of star jasmine blossom. The palate bursts with energy. Lively and crisp, it is dominated by citrus and clean bitterness. Less complex and more compact than Gold but with the same wonderful creamy mid palate and lingering funk. Refreshing, moreish and dangerously drinkable... our Table beer has a new contender for staff favourite knockoff.
The base beer is brewed entirely with New South Wales cereals: Single Origin (S.O.) Moree, NSW grown Gairdner ale malt and North Star, NSW grown Spitfire S.O. raw wheat thanks to Provenance Malt. It is made with filtered Sydney water and Motueka (NZ) and Saaz (CZ) hops. Finally, it was fermented with our house culture: brewers yeast, foraged wild yeast and naturally occurring souring bacteria native to New South Wales. It was bottled on May 30 2018 and naturally conditioned through refermentation for 14 weeks. At bottling it was 5.0% ABV, 25 IBU and 1.0°P (FG= 1.004 SG).
Like all our beers, Good as Gold Blend #1 is best enjoyed when decanted off a settled natural yeast sediment at cellar temperatures (10-12°C).
