Drink Up, The End is Nigh

Some people prepare for a coming apocalypse by buying guns, building bunkers and stocking up with a five year's worth of food. Some brewers don't prepare so much as celebrate with new beers made specifically for the occasion. I gather that none of those beers hold a candle to the beer that Trinity  and Black Fox decided brew up and use to usher in the new era. Like any real apocalypse-fearing-planner, preparations for this beer started quite a while ago, I believe we first got wind of it before the Saison Festival in April.

The two brewers have planned and brewed their second Cultural collaboration. The first was called Double Rainbow, a beer that used two adjunct ingredients that correlated to every color in the rainbow and had a double sake fermentation process. The beer turned out really nice considering all the 14 crazy things that went into the beer. Now, about two entire years later they plan to release "Little Death Ride" in bottles (and one keg) on 12/21/2012. Of course there will be a party too, complete with a zombie/end-of-days costume theme. Here's some information about the beer:

Little Death Ride is crafted with indigenous Mayan ingredients in celebration of the end of the 13th Mayan B'ak'tun. This blood red 'Super Saison' is brewed with red Aji chiles, Annato seed, tomatoes, Anasazi bean, fresh maize, pumpkin, cacao nibs, honey, hoja santa, wild white cinnamon, and aged on clay.

Wowzas! I have to admit there's a few things that really seems wild about this beer and I'm looking forward to trying it. I've only had one beer with beans in it before...that was Colorado's Pagosa Brewing Ancestral Ale, brewed to celebrate Chimney Rock's conversion to a national monument. The beans were part of a whole list of non-traditional (for beer) ingredients and flavorwise, they were discernible in the beer. I've never had a beer aged on clay, but I have read about how Cantillon aged some special Lambic beer in ceramic Amphoras. Not even Cantillon was sure what would happen to that beer, and I've heard no word about what the ceramic contributes to the beer. So having a beer aged with clay sounds great to me! I'm also pretty pumped about trying hoja santa, which is part of the peppercorn family and has a peppery and black liquorice profile. The annato seed is often used for food coloring, perhaps is what contributes the blood-red color of the beer, and has profiles of nutmeg, nuts, and slight pepper. Really this sounds like it will be a ton of fun.

Unfortunately for me I'll be in another state, and hopefully the world doesn't really end. Some people say we'll come to another level of evolutionary consciousness. I like that option a bit more than the former. Really though, scholars seem to agree that this is just the end of a calendar, the way that 12/31/1999 was the end of a century long calendar.

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