Today XO is a blend of barrels aged for three years or more. It is one of the two beers we originally set out to make when planning the brewery (along with our rye-malt and American oak leaning Running Beer). It is about the purest expression of what Mills Brewing is and the closet we come to making a G***ze.

The blend for this second iteration of Today XO was made from worts produced in the heady pre-pandemic days of March and October 2019, using traditional turbid mash methods. The non-traditional grists contained barley, oats, maize and wheat in varying proportions. We change the recipe every brew to give us a range of blending options when we come to construct the final beer. An extra large quantity of aged hops were added to each boil to preserve the beer over the extended ageing in barrel.

The worts were left in our coolship for two nights to be double-inoculated with wild yeast and bacteria, before fermenting in small and large neutral oak barrels. The average beer age at bottling was 41.2 months. The resulting beer was conditioned in bottle for a further five months prior to release.

The beer is dry with balancing bitterness, juicy acidity and a pleasingly snappy astringency from the large hop addition. The nose is delicate with herbal, citrus, nutty and woody notes.