Hess releasing "Torulus," their first barrel-aged beer.

Not infected, just bad. Also I was saying Hess doesn't have a track record good or bad, so charging 25$ off the bat is kinda ridic.

 

The price, while steep, reflects the size of the operation I figure.... I dont mind helping out the "little" guy come up.. if they are $2~$5 bucks more than I expected, so what. Kinda of like a boutique winery...however in this case a boutique brewery, more power to them. Having said all that...prices in this world dont tend to come down or revert to a previous lower price after the operation/production grows...so if one day they have double or triple the brewing/fermenting capacity, I suspect/expect the prices to hold or "gain weight."

 

Cough, Matilda, Cough

 

I forgot about that as I was focused on the BA stout side of things, fair enough. However, they did issue a recall for the faulty batches, which not nearly enough breweries have done.

 

I would expect that Goose Island plates samples from each barrel prior to blending, in order to weed out any contaminated barrels. When you're that size, you just can't let something like that slip through and possible compromise hundreds of barrels of beer.

I would be very surprised if Hess has any sort of micro program, though they could easily send a sample to white labs, just down the road. In any case, it's silly to even talk about infection in a beer that hasn't even been tasted yet.

 

The point is Hess has brewing procedures that are HIGHLY problematic but their beers sell out so fast off flavors don't have time to set in. For anyone that brews, you do not clean plastic with green scotch brite pads. All those little scratches can harbor bacteria. Any homebrewer knows this. BUT if you sell the beer so fast the bugs don't have time to set up shop, then no problem. Maybe they did an ultra good cleaning/sanitizing job before they fermented the beer...then who knows, it could be ok. Bugs can also come from the wood and that's just a plain old crapshoot for any brewery. However, if they detect some off flavors what they do next is a business decision.

A few years back Alesmith had the very early signs (something only Peter could detect) of infection, instead of bottling it where the tickers who'd sit on it for 5 years then bitch and moan, he did a draft only release and I'd suspect 97% of the population couldn't detect any off flavors. Same thing with a release of Abyss.

So who knows, but bottling a 1st time barrel aged beer out of that facitily is a ballsy move.

I'm still waiting for En Fermintist from Hess. A beer so green its still fermenting. Natural carbonation!!!

Note, when Hess moves to their Big Boy brewery, all my above gripes should go away.

Note II: Don't ferment beers in plastic.

 

anyone crack open a bottle yet? reviews?

 

Had the blended version yesterday at wood shop. It is very nice just the right amount of bourbon and the rye added a nice little spice note. I would recommend trying it

 

Tried last night, review posted.

 

The night of the release I picked up my 3 blendeds. A buddy who was only interested in the straight picked up his bottle and got a purrowler fill of the Ex Umbris and we did a side by side of all 3. Granted not all three beers were from the same format, but here are my thoughts.

Purrowler of Ex Umbris: Delicious as usual. Only gripe is it wasn't Ex Umbris Nitro

Torulus Blended: Honestly...its not different by a big margin from Ex Umbris...at least at this point in time. We were doing some maths about how many ounces of the straight batch were made available to blend and I think the percentage of blend is a little on the low side. Still, very good. After a while it eventually warmed up enough for the bourbon notes to shine through. Super smoothe overall but I'm gonna put mine away for a while, or see who would be willing to trade (I guess consider this a FT post if you are clammering for it.) The fact that Ex Umbris standard isn't bottled or canned (yet) gives this a decent advantage. I don't know anything personally about infection or their cleaning methods, but barring infection setting in, this would be worth laying down to let the bourbon come out a little (assuming that's how it will work.)

Torulus Straight: Um, yeah. I think we have a huge winner. It could be that we just knew how limited this beer was and how much of a crapshoot it was to get...but this beer was awesome. Everything I love about Ex Umbris, with a whole other dimension of bourbon. Not overpowering, but definitely huge bourbon. I would suspect most of the bottles will get drank by their original purchasers (and I highly encourage you to do so!). Maybe some of you have SO's who were also winners of the Torulus 100% crapshoot online so you have the luxury of opening one and aging/trading one. I think that fact alone will make this harder to come by.

Cliffs Notes: Blended was good but needs to either sit a while or let it warm up a long time. Straight was phenominal. No infection notes at all.

Side Note: Another friend decided to bring out his Stone 2010 BBA IRS Russian Roulette beer. We lost Sounding more and more like instead of one bullet in the revolver, you're playing with five.

 

I was able to try blended and unblended yesterday (thanks!). Not bad beers by any means but pretty run of the mill, especially considering the price.

 

I opened them both at woodshop side by side. I was very impressed by the straight version, very characterful without being over the top boozy. The blended version was very good, but didn't stand up to the straight one.

 

I got some of the blended version at Woodshop. It was good but I would have been disappointed if I had purchased bottles myself.