To help celebrate our One Year Anniversary Tour we will have a special one-off beer at each stop on Febuary 7th. Red Brick will be serving the Beast, a barrel aged Belgium strong ale. Red Hare will serve us a cask of Orange Dream Cotton Tail Pale Ale. Then SweetWater had us come make this Blood Orange IPA cask with them for our tour.

Our first idea was to make a Blood Orange Happy Ending Stout. Happy Ending is one of our favorite beers so we wanted to do a little twist on it. After doing a test taste, we realized that the Happy Ending is too big a beer for the blood oranges to be really noticed. Thanks to SweetWater’s head brewer, Nick Nock for taking time to help us make this cask!

So we tested the blood orange juice with a few different beers. First was with their IPA. This gave it a tart finish that we found very good and surprising. Next we tested it with Johnny Hash. This gave us a very sweet smooth tasting beer. In the end we decided to take a mix of both IPAs, and do a 70/30 mix of IPA and Johnny Hash.

So our next step was to fill the cask with both IPAs. We needed to leave a little room at the top of the cask to prevent a blowout from too much fermentation.
Then we added the blood orange juice. We had no idea this was even available, but they had it in stock at our local Whole Foods.

Our final step was to pitch some yeast into the cask to help it ferment. There will be about 9 days of fermentation in the cask for this beer.

And here is our cask now that it is completed.

Join us this Saturday, February 7th for your only chance to taste this beer. Tickets are available but are selling quick.