Barrel-Aged Black Saison flows from Greenbrier Valley Brewing Co.

You might want to check your local craft beer specialty outlets soon to see if Barrel-Aged Black Saison is flowing from their taps. It’s a limited release you won’t want to miss.

Barrel-aged Black Saison is the offspring of Greenbrier Valley Brewing Company’s head brewer Brian Reymiller. It’s probably the most complex, complicated, multi-layered beer ever brewed commercially in West Virginia.

Trying to fit this beer into a specific style category is like playing beer-style Whac-A-Mole. Just when you think you’ve hit it, another flavor pops up.

It’s a beer that won’t be pinned down.

• made with lots of toasted malt and a good dose of dark specialty malts
• hopped with German Mandarina Bavaria
• fermented with Belgian saison yeast
• kettle-soured
• half aged for 18 months in Smooth Ambler Old Scout Bourbon barrels
• a blend of 50% barrel-aged and 50% freshly-fermented black Saison.
• tastes of malt, caramel, vanilla, whiskey, dried fruits, sourness, spice, earth, and tannin.

What flavors do you taste in GVBC’s Barrel-Aged Black Saison? Where does it fit on your beer style chart?

BA Black Saison nearly 2 yrs in making

Barrel-aging a commercial beer for a year and a half prior to release is extremely uncommon in the craft beer industry. Why? Because of the cost of tying up beer for that long.

To make money, small breweries must turn product. The typical craft ale today is just a few weeks from manufacture to market. Rarely is a beer given the luxury of sitting in a barrel for more than a year. Most barrel-aged beer you see today is aged no more than six months.

It’s not because you can’t make some great beer with longer aging, but it’s just so expensive to do it. And it’s hard to recover those high costs in the sale price.

Brian Reymiller’s black beer love

You get the feeling the Reymiller just likes black beer. At GVBC, he has a lot of experience brewing black beers. Mothman Black IPA was one of the brewery’s two original offerings. Shortly after GVBC opened in 2014, Reymiller was so pleased with the initial batches Mothman that he was inspired to take the black in a different direction.

But a Black Saison? That’s pretty unusual.

“I’d never done it before,” Reymiller answers. “It sounded like fun. So why not?”

“We make a lot of hop forward beer. Our flagships are all hop-forward. So to branch out from that we use our seasonal beer.”

A bold and ambitious plan

The bold idea came together in his head. He took a typical Saison malt bill, but added plenty of specialty malts designed to give a deep black color without adding the dark-roast coffee/chocolate flavor (Briess Midnight Wheat and a Carafa® from Weyermann).

He ran off 17 barrels of wort from his mash and then kettle soured it with lactobacillus for 48 hours. This gave a pronounced sour dimension to the wort. Next, the wort was boiled and hopped early and late solely with premium Mandarina Bavaria hops from Germany.

The boiled wort was then fermented with a straight-forward Belgian Saison yeast to a typical Saison strength of 6.2% ABV. The finished beer was pumped into an array of freshly emptied  Bourbon barrels, where it sat for the next 18 months.

“That’s something that typically doesn’t happen with Saisons,” Reymiller says of his barrel-aging experiment.

As the beer aged, he tasted it regularly to keep up with what was going on.

“When beer ages in these bourbon barrel it goes through an odd process,” he explained. “In the beginning, it’s very strong whiskey flavored. Then the beer starts to mature a bit and the whiskey goes away and the barrel character comes on. That’s what we were aiming for with this beer. We wanted more of the vanilla and some of the tannins that you get from the oak.”

As they say in the industry, a beer’s taste tells you when its ready. It’s not something you can rush. So month after month passed.

“We weren’t in a big hurry to do anything with it,” Reymiller says.

A barrel sample tells when beer is ready

Then this winter, a barrel-tasting told him it was ready. The year and a half old beer was so rich and intense that Reymiller realized he could use it as the spice in a blend.

He brewed up another 17-barrel batch of beer with the same malt bill but did not kettle sour this batch. It was fermented dry with a different strain of Saison yeast to provide even more complexity to the beer. Then, he mixed the two batches together, conditioned them a while, and kegged it. They ended up with a little less than 200 one-sixth barrel kegs to sell.

To maximize the number of West Virginia beer fans getting to try this delicacy, GVBC decided to keg the entire batch, rather than bottle or can it. This will put the beer on tap statewide and allow all craft-beer-centric accounts to get some.

When asked it if was the most costly beer GVBC has ever made, Reymiller answered, “Without a doubt.”

In addition to the Lewisburg area, it should be showing up first in the Huntington and Charleston markets.

About the brewery

Greenbrier Valley Brewing Company, founded in 2014, is located in the Airport Industrial Park/Maxwelton, just north of Lewisburg, WV. It is one of the state’s larger breweries with a 20 barrel brewhouse  and its own canning equipment. BrilliantStream.com named GVBC its 2015 West Virginia Brewery of the Year, and GVBC’s Devil Anse IPA was named 2015 Beer of the Year.

Its tasting room is currently open on weekends, but will open other days during the warmer months. Free tours are available by contacting the brewery in advance.

Visit the Greenbrier Valley Brewing website