An apple brandy barrel-aged Belgian-style Quad.

This is the next beer in the Temporal Void Series, an exploration of strong barrel-aged beers. Endless Fractals is one of two bottles releasing this Sunday, November 13th at noon at @containerbrewing. 12.24% abv. 500 bottles available with a limit of 4 per person. Please BYOBag - ideally cloth and reusable. As with previous Void sales, this is a single day pop-up release.

This is the first Belgian-style quad released from the Void series, so I picked one of my really unique barrels to showcase the base beer. The apple brandy barrel was an ex-wine French oak barrel, one of the only French oak barrels in my Void cellar. It has such intense notes, I knew it would be a fun pairing with the base beer.

Unlike a lot of modern quads, I chose not to use any crystal or toasted malts in the recipe, and to instead focus on very high quality Belgian pale and pilsner malt. I added some dark candi sugar, a staple in Belgian brewing, to this historically-accurate foundation. I also added a healthy dose of two different raw cane sugars - piloncillo and jaggery. These are produced by similar processes, essentially boiling sugar to remove the water. The piloncillo is made from sugar cane juice and came from Mexico and El Salvador, while the jaggery is made from a mix of cane and date palm sugar and came from India.

A lengthy boil of 8 hours helped concentrate and caramelize the wort. It was fermented with ale yeast from a European monastery that is world-renowned for this traditional style of beer.

The resulting beer has Big Apple Energy™ with the base beer expressing a bit of bubble gum, clove, dark fruit, and banana. But the star here is really the apple brandy barrel - it's insane how powerful that eau de vie is. It reminds us of those caramel apple lollipops.