An imperial stout aged in an ex-bourbon maple syrup barrel, conditioned on candy cap mushrooms.

This is the next beer in the Temporal Void Series, an exploration of strong barrel-aged beers. Maple Horizon is the second and final bottle releasing tomorrow, November 13th at noon at @containerbrewing. 10.97% 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.

You're probably saying "Tristan what the heck?!? Mushrooms?!?" but you've just gotta trust me, I can explain. Candy cap mushrooms are like no other 🍄 you've ever tasted. They're like a delightful combination of brown sugar and sticky maple syrup with a very mild complementary earthiness. Super unique and interesting, and an ingredient I've been trying to get my hands on for a while!

The barrel came to me from a syrup provider in Vermont, it had a bunch of crystalized sugar inside and all over the barrel. #funfact, the syrup actually dries the barrel out due to its low moisture content which causes syrup to leak between the staves and crystallize on the outside of the barrel! So, I cleaned the barrel up and filled it.

Important to mention: maple is a really tough flavour to get in a beer, because maple syrup is almost entirely fermentable simple sugar. If you've ever had a beer that was a big maple bomb, you're probably tasting extracts (very common these days in brewing) OR the beer was stabilized before packaging via pasteurization or sterile filtering. I'm not really an extract kind of guy, and don't have a good way to pasteurize or the money for a sterile filter... so I needed to find another way to kick the maple up a notch once the syrup from the barrel had mostly fermented out. Hence the 🍄.

It's definitely maple-y, both on the nose and the lingering aftertaste. The stout base is the same as the Dimensional pair from last month - more roast-y, chocolate-y, and bitter than the other stouts I've released.