East End Gratitude–Delayed! Completely Flat

You may be wondering what the story is with our latest round of Gratitude Barleywine… and by "latest", I mean this is absolutely the latest we’ve ever released this beer. And it’s still not ready for release yet. Why?

Quality issues. One of the most enjoyable quality checks we make here is the step where we crack open a couple of bottles, check to see how the well bottle conditioning has worked, and verify that the beer’s carbonation level is within spec for what we are shooting for. Well, this time it wasn’t quite so enjoyable, since the beer is almost completely flat.

It’s a challenging environment for the yeast to work in, given that it’s an 11+% beer, so we’re looking at our options to see what we can do to get it to carbonate properly. One of the more painful options we’re considering is to re-brew this batch completely, which will of course take more time, and probably mean the loss of this entire batch… but we’re not quite ready to go down that path just yet, until a few less drastic options are explored more thoroughly.

So, I don’t have much of a time estimate for you, except to say… Not any time soon. Sorry it’s not better news.

Cheers – Scott