We are excited to announce that Wildflower Gold Blend #23 will be available at our cellar door and online (at 2pm) on Friday 4 October 2019.
Note: For those keeping track, I've decided to release Gold Blend #23 this month ahead of Blend #22. For a while now, we have been choosing blends to release not by number but by readiness and for the first time this month, readiness does not coincide with package date, so the 'younger' (4 months in bottle instead of 6 months) blend of Gold will come out first. I like choosing the blends this way as each blend seems to benefit from slightly different conditioning times. Blend #22 will likely come out at our next release in December.
This is a six barrel blend, one of our larger ones, which is making a strong case for doing this due to the complexity of the resultant beer. It opens with sweet spice aromatics reminiscent of earlier Gold blends and North African spice and cardamom notes. The palate is balanced and complex with a fresh meyer lemon energy up front that moves into a moreish, creamy finish.
Gold is a blended, barrel aged Australian Wild Ale. Blend #23 is a blend of six barrels - 1701 (13 month old Gold), 1706 (8 month old Gold), 1751 (5 month old Gold), 1835 (12 month old Gold), 1867 (9 month old Gold) and 1769 (11 month old Gold).
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 18 July 2019 and naturally conditioned through refermentation for 11 weeks. At bottling it was 5.0% ABV, 25 IBU and 1.2°P (FG= 1.004 SG).
Like all our beers, Gold Blend #23 is best enjoyed when decanted off a settled natural yeast sediment at cellar temperatures (10-12°C).
