We are celebrating the release of the 2023 vintage of Substantially Complete by doing a vertical tasting of the all three vintages of our quintessential mixed fermentation blend. Watch as Greg and Doug discuss what makes each beer unique, and the effect of age upon these beers.
Want to do your own vertical tasting? We released a very limited quantity of tasting boxes on our shop. Shop the Tasting Box →
We want to let you know some significant news regarding our restaurant Biera, and Blind Enthusiasm’s Market Brewery; we are closing both businesses at the end of December 2024.
We’ve had an amazing run for the last seven and a half years. However, due to changes to market conditions, we feel the restaurant is in need of a revamp, but we’re not going to be the ones to do it. Our goal is to find a worthy successor with fresh ideas and energy that will continue to serve customers in the existing space.
Until closing, Biera will remain open on weekends for bunch and happy hour, and for dinners six days a week. Biera will be closed for weekday lunches after Friday, November 8th. With respect to our other businesses, The Monolith will continue operations as is. This change will allow us to put a greater focus on its unique brewing program, expanding our current operations with new offerings, including additional tour options and launching a direct to consumer sales business to better serve our customers. The Biera Market will operate until the end of December, close briefly in the new year, and will re-emerge as a new business in the same location selling many of the products it currently offers. We’ll be making an exciting announcement about this early in the new year.
With regard to events hosted in the Barrel Room, we will be proceeding with our currently booked private events until February 15th, 2025. For anyone that has an event booked after that time, we will be reaching out to you directly in the next few days and providing full refunds of any deposits.
We’re proud of the successes Biera and the Blind Enthusiasm Market brewery achieved. Even with the critical acclaim for our food and beer, we are most proud of all the guests we served over the years, and all the people we entertained in our event space. We hope we helped create some special memories for you and your friends and families. Special thanks to all the support of our neighbours in Hazeldean, King Edward, Mill Creek and especially Ritchie.
Finally, we’d like to thank our amazing staff. We’ve had the opportunity to work with so many wonderful people over the years and we are proud to see how much you have grown. We appreciate everything you’ve done for us and the passion you all brought to your roles.
One last reminder that even as this chapter closes, Blind Enthusiasm is not gone. We hope you will continue to visit us at the Monolith and the newly imagined Biera Market space.
Thank you.
Greg Zeschuk
Owner, Blind Enthusiasm Brewing Company & Biera
If you have media or leasing inquires, please reach out to contact@blindenthusiasm.ca
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The beers from the Monolith come with a recommendation that they can be cellared for 10 years. It’s fair to say that we were conservative when we made that estimate and based on the evaluation of the 5 year old beers in our cellar at the time of this writing it’s looking really good they will last much longer. A little known secret is that we’ve kept and faithfully cellared hundreds of bottles of every one of our prior releases for eventual release. This will be taking place at the 5 year point, which is just around the corner for the 2019 releases. We’ve been tasting these and they’re progressing really well; we can’t wait until those of you that missed our original releases years ago get a chance to try these special beers.
So why do our beers last so long in the cellar? There are a few factors that come into play that promote successful long term cellaring, and some of these are quite similar to fine wines. In terms of wine, people talk about the “structure” of the wine being suitable for aging. These are things like levels of fruit, acidity, and tannin – all of these contribute to success when cellaring, Funny enough our beer has many of the same elements – fruit, acid, tannin and we’ve also got a live microbial culture in the bottle. Over time these microbes go into suspended animation but they’re still there and available to grab and oxygen or other interesting chemicals that might serve as food. The processes in the bottle over time are both biological and chemical, with reactions of various types taking place over time to slowly alter the beer.
Our beer’s suitability for long term cellaring also dictates our choice in vessel to hold our beer – we use a crown cap and a cork (like the Belgian Lambic beers) to provide two methods for closure during long term cellaring. If one type fails the other is a backup.
Also, glass is proven inert and acidic liquid like wine and our beers can last for decades in glass, but that’s not the case for cans. Research has shown that the plastic lining of cans deteriorate over time with acidic sources, like beer.
We’re trying to create a special experience with our beers and the ability to successfully cellar them for years is something we aspire to do for your long term enjoyment of everything we make.
Bottle conditioning is the act of adding a source of sugar to a beer before it’s bottled in order to have it develop carbonation in the bottle. Some people add additional yeast to the bottle along with the sugar to ensure carbonation but we only add sugar as our already existing microorganisms are happy, healthy, and looking for more sugar to create alcohol and CO2. The actual carbonation doesn’t take all that long (a couple months) but because of the complex range of microorganisms in our beer another full fermentation is triggered when we add the sugar.
While it would be nice to romanticize blending our beer as an opportunity to sit back and have a delightful drink it’s actually a very serious step in our process to create the best, most balanced beer possible. In many breweries blending is undertaken by one master blender but we see it as a team sport. Doug leads the process, but all of the brewers, many of the staff and sometimes special guests are involved in evaluating different blends to best achieve our targets.
Blending is a definitive act where we use a variety of barrels to create a beer that matches the goal for that brand. In our shop it’s very serious business!
Our blends can be from as few as two barrels and as many as eight barrels. Our biggest tank is 5000 litres, and eight of the 400 litre barrels fills up a tank to a level where it’s got some headspace in case some additional fermentation takes place. This can lead to some pretty big batch sizes and given the geographic breadth we’re trying to reach with our beers it’s nice to have some volume to work with.
By using multiple barrels we can decide to emphasize or balance various elements of our final beers. For example, in the case of Mon Chester we found a bunch of Sicilian red wine barrels gave the beer bright fruity raspberry notes and we decided to emphasize the fruit in the blend and selected barrels accordingly. If we had a beer that was too sharp and acidic in the blend we can add a more neutral barrel to balance it out. We’ve got very specific targets in mind for acid levels and flavour profiles.
In our blending process we do also undertake some scientific analysis of the in-progress beer. Acid levels in particular are evaluated via a pH measurement and a Total Titratable Acid (TTA) measurement. In this way we’ve got both our palettes and hard numbers to verify what we taste in our beer. So, in summary, blending is both an art and a science with a goal of making you the best possible beer.
With a few small exceptions that vast majority of the beer that’s made at the Monolith spends a significant amount of time in barrels. We typically use larger format barrels called puncheons that can be anywhere from 350 litres to 500 litres in size. We used to have from 700 litre puncheons but they were too darned big so we sold them to a friend. Finally we’ve got a handful of large wooden foeders, roughly 1300 litres in size. These are giant vessels that were previously used in Italy for wine production but we’ve done multiple batches of beer in them. Almost all of these vessels are made with French oak, the preferred type of wood due to its density and oxygen permeability. We’ve got a few other types of wooden barrels but those are rare because French oak is perfect for our methods.
For both spontaneous and mixed fermentation we put the wort into barrels very shortly after it’s inoculated. We then wait, and in the case of spontaneous fermentation we wait a long time.
It can be weeks until fermentation begins. Once it begins there’s an initial burst of activity and then a very long, slow fermentation that can literally last for years. One reason for this is our wort is very complex with lots of different types of sugars that require the action of multiple microorganisms often acting in concert to break it down into digestible chunks. We’re done some exciting research that shows just how complex this process is and how spontaneous fermentation is really a team effort. We evaluate the process of fermentation by doing chemical tests on the beer, but also by tasting it. Unlike normal beer that has a very predictable pattern of fermentation our methods are less predicable and require constant care and attention. We have over 400 puncheons in our brewery so that leads to a lot of tasting. Our brewers need to be on top of every single barrel so we know how to create the best possible blends.
We don’t ever use any barrels less than one year old in our blends and can often have beers that stay in barrel for up to four years. Our prized Homage to the Old Ones is made of all four year spontaneously fermented barrels – a real rarity. One thing that also keeps fermentation going long term is the slow ingress of oxygen into the barrel through the wood - French oak has the ideal permeability to keep fermentation going for years. Beer from different ages of barrels usually have different characteristics with the beer from younger barrels being brighter and fruiter than the savory and leathery older barrels. Ultimately these different characteristics are almost like the wide range of paints on a painter's palette, giving our brewers a wide range of flavors to use in their blends.
We can’t be the only ones to be excited to talk about inoculation! Funny enough it’s a key part of our unique process in making beer so it is something we talk about a lot. We’d like to tell you about the two ways we create our beer – read on for the details!
When making beer one of the first steps is the conversion of malt to its constituent sugars and nutrients when is then converted to beer. This initial conversion to sugar and nutrients is done by adding water to malt then heating it to various temperatures to trigger and enhance enzymatic conversion. This is common to all beers though there are many different mashing processes that can be used to create unique beers. We’ll give you a quick outline of the turbid mashing process we use.
