Trillium Brewing Company (2019)

Enough with the fucking lines already

 

All the breweries do this. The base gets put to sleep for a year in barrels to absorb the woody flavors, and the spirit the barrel was holding prior to beer (unless they are using neutral barrels). The beer then gets blended, and you need to add sugar to reawaken the yeast for bottle conditioning.

Some breweries like say toppling goliath will select the very best barrels that are a cut above the rest and make KBBS. But even that beer they add the ingredients post barreling.

If it's not your thing, that's fine and good. More for me. I happen to love it, and trillium is not doing anything different than every other brewery making barrel aged beer. The sugar is necessary to awaken the beer from its slumber.

Saisons and wilds are different, but they have bacteria that will continue to ferment and even eat the dead yeast to keep fermentation going. But alot of breweries even with this style kick start that process with fruit after the barrel treatment. Especially when it's in season.

Stouts dont use that bacteria, they sit still for months absorbing flavors. They need the additional sugar.

 

Had BA nam and Cinnamon raisin bun SBS today. I didn't bother with BA nam bottles because I thought the base was a sweet muddled mess. My fav trill pastry stout was coffee cake followed by tiramisu, whether or not that is the base is still up for debate. That said BA nam blew it away. Was a legit bourbon soaked s'mores. Choc, marshmallow and graham cracker with hint of coconut.
Did get the cinnamon raisin but was missing either bigger barrel or more vanilla. The cinnamon was fantastic exactly like i remember coffee cake but the raisin notes dominated the rest. Honestly it was not enjoyable getting through the 10oz pour of cinn raisin and I savored every sip of BA nam.
The raspberry berliner is also fantastic but would be ideal in warmer weather.

 

Looks like the malt is different on Cinnamon Raisin Bun than Coffee Cake so I guess it’s a different base beer with the same cinnamon and vanilla ingredients, minus lactose and coffee, plus brown sugar. I tried it on draft and thought it tasted just like a cinnamon raisin bun. If you like that sweet cinnamon raisin vanilla taste it’s a pretty good one.

 

Wow. Tons of misinformation here. Those beers are not bottle conditioned, there should be no live yeast in those bottles, and no sugar is added for packaging purposes. No one is bottle conditioning clean pastry stouts.

Regardless, I think the post your responding to was talking more about the addition of the sweet flavorings/extracts. I took his post to imply that trillium essentially makes the same stout base, ages it (or doesn’t age it) and then dumps in sugar-y extracts and charges through the nose for it.

 

They are absolutely bottle conditioned.

There is no live yeast because once they achieve the carbonation level they are after, they pasteurize the beer by bringing it up to 140 degrees and killing off all the yeast so it does not continue to ferment.

 

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say trillium does not bottle condition 13+% barrel aged stouts. Funny to think they could.

 

I can't recommend it enough, honestly.

 

How can you be so sure that trillium would do something as ridiculously stupid as risk off flavors by refermenting in a bottle - especially after adding countless adjuncts - if it were even possible to successfully bottle condition beers of this size?

 

Does Trillium pasteurize?

 

Cycle went in depth about the process after thier infected batch of brewgarithim bottles. They dont have the equipment one of the bigger breweries can afford so they hand load the bottles into a brew kettle and raise the temp until bottles explode.

Thier practice was very rudimentary, and they had thicker gauge bottles when they first started doing this. They went cheaper and got smaller gauge bottles that were exploding at 132 degrees and not killing the yeast completely.

But most breweries don't document the process. They felt the need to after thier bottles were contaminated. And these beers are all high abv.

https://www.cyclebrewing.com/pages/our-process

Goose Island 100% does this now as well after thier 2015 outbreak.

Hill farmstead does this as well.

It's common practice.

 

None of this has anything to do with bottle conditioning. You know you can pasteurize force carbed beer, right?

 

That cycle link is worth a read, cool to see how open about their process they are.

 

Why would they go through the trouble of loading bottles into a boil kettle? They could pasteurize the batch before bottling and force carbonation and avoid that process completely.

 

Got it. So not only do you you have no understanding of how commercial pasteurization works, or how beer is packaged, you didn't even read the cycle link that you posted. That makes a lot of sense.

Trillium bottles are definitely not bottle conditioned. To the best of my knowledge they are not pasteurized. Not that any of this matters because the post that started your campaign of misinformation had nothing to do with bottle conditioning or pasteurization.

 

Fight! Fight! Fight!

 

I'm fine with being educated on the process. If I'm wrong, do tell. I enjoy learning.

 

Sipping on BA Nanaimo currently and I'm really impressed. The barrel aging has definitely elevated the beer and as someone before more said its like "bourbon soaked s'mores". Don't get coconut but that's fine with me. Probably my 2nd favorite BA dessert stout they've done, after Tiramisu.

 

RE: Bottle Conditioning - these 13% stouts are not environments that promote yeast activity. Your yeast isn't going to referment shit if you tried to bottle condition thanks to the high ABV. Even if you got a yeast strain that could ferment (champagne yeast), now that's going to add new flavor components to your product, especially when it's interacting with whatever adjuncts you just added. It's about 100,000% easier, more reliable and safer to force carb these beers or otherwise carb prior to packaging.

RE: Pasteurization - No one is loading bottles into a kettle and flash boiling them like cycle did - admittedly out of necessity. You said they would pasteurize in line prior to packaging, but also that they would pasteurize in bottle after reaching the desired carb level from the proposed bottle conditioning. This would be completely unnecessary and would serve only to damage the beer. In the unlikely event that Trillium is pasteurizing these beers, they would either be doing so in line prior to packaging OR in a tunnel post packaging - not both. Both methods are described in that cycle blog. Regardless, this would be done to kill any activity of microbes picked up in the barrel, from the adjuncts, in packaging, etc. and not because the beer was bottle conditioned.

 

I have zero idea if Trillium bottle conditions or not, but you absolutely can bottle condition high abv stouts. Pitch the same healthy culture that brought it to 13%, add priming sugar, give it a couple of months.

Boom. Roasted.