Rosie (Disgorged)

Y'all remember Rosie right? A Collective beer from last year... Well its making a sort of return this year. You see when we were bottling this one, we felt that the last 6 cases just got a bit too much yeast to release them so we held them back, allowed the beer to age on its own heavy yeast for a good bit longer then attempted a disgorgement to rid the beer of the heavy yeast plug and top with something else. Simple.

As a reminder, here was the description of OG Rosie late last year.

Rosie is a continuation of our play on things made with Gold and cherries.

We destemmed 100% of the fruit to make Rose Gold this year, which is what lends it such a bright candied cherry flavour. However in blending RG we only required the single maceration on the fruit and didn't 'wash' another barrel through. Instead, as we have become keen on, we racked a select barrel of aged beer onto the second use fruit. Much like Hank, Rosie is made with second use fruit and a barrel of Nothing Fancy, our collaboration beer with Jester King brewed in August '18.

The intention behind this selection was to marry the lighter fruit flavours with a barrel that had a little more oak expression in order to invoke memories of some of our other favourite fruit beverages... wine. The resulting beer has Pinot like opening aromas with berries, perfume and spices oak. The palate is creamy and vinous. Delicate fruit, vanilla cake batter, red creaming soda. Oak pushes the palate along in the most delightful way.

Now to pull this off, we had to riddle the bottles, leaving them upside down for the yeast to collect in the neck of the bottle and chill them down. Once the yeast plug was compacted, we removed the cap while the bottle was upside down releasing the yeast before upending the bottle correct way up. This is a champagne method and you can read a whole lot about it online if you are interested. We are not champagne producers, nor are our beers as carbonated as champagne, so our disgorgement was a little more rustic (see here). As there is a loss of volume during this process, the bottle requires to be topped up with something and you can do this dosage with all kinds of things. For this bottling, we topped the bottles with a 600g/l heavy St Thomas beer from 2021 that we had kept back for, you know, posterity reasons. The bottles were topped, re-capped and cleaned before being labelled and are now ready.

In order to distinguish these bottles from the non-disgorged Rosie, we have marked the bottles with a brush of white paint as you can see in the image. We wanted to keep the same label, as this is the same beer, so this as well as a couple of small edits on the information parts of the label will be the only visible differences between the two bottles.

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Rosie (Disgorged) is not an included bottle in the 2021 Collective membership. It is what we call an internal-release (like Green and Gold) of a very small number of bottles only made available to Collective members.

We have 60 x 750ml bottles available for Collective members to purchase on a first come basis from 11am (Sydney time) on Friday 2 July. Due to the very small number of additional bottles available, there is a limit of 2 bottles per person.