We’re excited to announce Enigmatic Taxa, our collaboration with Perennial Artisan Ales! This past winter during coolship season, Perennial came down to Austin to brew with us. We’ve long been fans of Perennial’s Hommel Bier and wanted to do a riff on it.
The word “hommel” is simply a regional Flemish dialect for “humulus” or “hops”. So in essence, hommel bier means “hoppy beer”. Poperinge is a municipality in West Flanders known for hop growing. Each year they celebrate the hop harvest and brew beers showcasing the regional hops. Popperings Hommel is likely the best known example. You could say that Enigmatic Taxa is two steps removed from its traditional counterpart. Perennial made a beer inspired by classic hommel bier, and we made a beer inspired by it.
For Enigmatic Taxa, we brewed with well water, Texas malted barley from Blacklands, Abbey malt, Biscuit malt, Carafoam, and Zythos, Cascade, and Simcoe hops. We took advantage of the cool winter night air in February and chilled the wort in our coolship. While the wort chilled in the coolship, it steeped with fresh grapefruit zest and juice. The next morning, we racked the wort from the coolship to a foudre with the yeast cake from a batch of Ol’ Oi still inside it. We didn’t add oxygen to the fermentation. After fermenting in the foudre for about two months, we moved the beer to a stainless steel tank and dry hopped it with more Cascade and Simcoe and an experimental hop called “X17” from The Oregon Hophouse. We packaged it on May 15th, 2017, and allowed the beer to naturally referment and mature for about four months prior to release.
Enigmatic Taxa is 7.0 percent alcohol, 30 IBU, 3.7 pH, and has a finishing gravity of 1.001 (0.25 Plato). It will be released on Friday, September 15th at 4pm at our tasting room. It will be available by the glass and in bottles to go. We have 2,700 bottles available (750ml/$14). There’s no bottle limit. Aside from special events, we do not anticipate that Enigmatic Taxa will be available outside our tasting room.
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