A blend of Belgian-style Quads aged in French VSOP brandy and vanilla brandy barrels.

This iteration of the "Fractals" base beer combines two quads, similar in profile and complimentary to each other.

First, the base beer. A quad (maybe even a quint? Does such a thing exist?) brewed in the winter of 2021. The largest grain bill to ever fill Container's mash tun, consisting entirely of European pilsner and pale malt from Malterie Franco Belges. I wanted to take a historically accurate approach to the base beer and avoid crystal malts - the colour of the beer comes entirely from dark candi sugar and the long boil - 8 hours! I also added some raw sugar in the form of piloncillo and jaggery. The piloncillo came from Mexico and El Salvador and is essentially raw cane sugar. The jaggery came from India and was made from a mix of date palm and cane sugar. The base beer fermented with a yeast strain cultivated from a European Trappist monastery known for this style of beer.

For most of the Void beers I have been really focused on spirit-forward barrels, but for the quad base I wanted to do something different. I set out to source barrels that would be complimentary to the more ester-y nature of the quad. This led me to the apple and cherry brandy barrels (Endless Fractals and Cherry Fractals) and the tawny port barrel used in the blend for Relative Dimensions.

For this blend, I chose two complimentary brandy barrels - one from France that held VSOP brandy, full of floral and stonefruit notes, and the other from the US, that held a grape brandy infused with vanilla.