It looks really small and unimportant, but there’s some really important stuff going on here,” Firestone Walker Brewing Company co-founder David Walker said about Barrelworks, the new cellar and rare-beer tasting room that opened to the public in January in Buellton.
After a private tour and eye-opening beer tasting with Walker, I’m convinced that experiencing Barrelworks should be on every discerning beer drinker’s (and even wine aficionado’s) must-do list while in the Santa Ynez Valley.
I returned to Barrelworks a few weeks later with my husband in tow, and it was love at first taste for him, too. Now he’s equally enthusiastic about what’s happening inside the Firestone Walker building.
“There are two things going on here: First, we want to showcase our barrel beers, and those are those we make up in the brewery in Paso Robles and are the big, bourbon-barrel-aged beers,” Walker told me of Barrelworks. “And the other half is wild beers.”
Wild refers to the wild yeasts “willfully and enthusiastically” introduced to the brews, producing an enormous range of fascinating flavors.
“These things are wild! They are feral. We call these feral beers,” Walker said with his British accent and a laugh. “You could stick them in a corral, but they’d still be feral.”
Barrelworks is a new, 7,000-square-foot cellar housing all of Firestone Walker’s barrel-aged wild beers and a tasting room that also showcases the brewery’s myriad high-gravity strong ales.
“The first time many of these beers will be tried by the public is right here in the Barrelworks tasting room in Buellton,” Walker said, even though the brewery has been quietly working on the wild beer program for many years.
There are currently 18 rare beers on tap at Barrelworks, with a rotating selection. Three-ounce servings range in price from $1.50 to $3, and six-ounce servings are priced at approximately $6.
Beers are served in tulip glasses: “You drink them like a glass of wine—really complex, and usually high in alcohol,” Walker explained.
These wild beers are created by secondary microflora fermentation in the barrel, in the Belgian “sour beer” tradition, and aged in a variety of American, French, and Hungarian oak barrels inherited from such wineries as Opus One, Halter Ranch, and Chamisal.
For example, a rambunctious beer named Rufus with Brett is a strong wild ale aged for five years in bourbon barrels “with a little Brettanomyces,” described by the brew master as “funky and boozy,” with 11.5 percent alcohol by volume. It has a big bourbon aroma and complex caramel, vanilla, nut, and fruit flavors.
Moving on to the high-gravity beers, Firestone Walker’s Imperial Blonde Ale named Helldorado is actually quite heavenly. The blonde barley wine beer has vanilla and lavender honey notes and “a rich, boozy, honey liqueur character and loads of smooth, sweet toasted malt.”
Firestone Walker’s English barley wine beer, called Stickee Monkey, is brewed with Mexican turbinado sugar and aged for a year and a half in heavily charred, American white oak bourbon barrels. It’s a heady 15.6 percent ABV.
“It was a very sticky beer to make because of all the sugar,” Walker said—hence the name.
“I could put Stickee Monkey in a keg and take it to San Francisco Beer Week and there would be a line outside the door of the pub where we were going to sell it,” Walker said. “There’s that much of an interest in these styles of beers; from us and from other brewers.”
Another Firestone Walker stunner is the 2011 rich, dark-chocolate Russian Imperial stout named Parabola, one of the few “rare beers” by Firestone Walker that’s bottled.
“This beer has a cult following around the world,” Walker said.
International judges love Firestone Walker beer and beer master Matthew Brynildson, too. The brewery has won Champion Mid-Sized Brewery four times at the most prestigious beer competition on Earth, the World Beer Cup.
“No [other] brewery has won it more than once; we’ve won it four times,” Walker said. “To me, that says a lot! If international brewers from around the world can taste our beers and give us that award, it must say that we’re doing as well as any brewery in the world in terms of making good, complex, interesting beers.”
Walker and co-founder Adam Firestone believe now is the right time for the public—locals and tourists visiting the Santa Ynez Valley—to discover their extraordinary Barrelworks brews.
This wine lover found it absolutely exhilarating to have such a unique and rewarding tasting room experience after all these years of visiting wineries.
“It’s almost as if the barrels provide a platform for the wine palate to walk into the beer palate,” Walker said. “So it’s a little bit like a conduit; to bring in those thoughtful palates onto the beer-side … .”Barrelworks is open to the public Friday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. The new beer tasting room is at 620 McMurray Road along Highway 101 in Buellton.
I suggest stopping in to taste the new frontier of beer, and make sure to have reservations to dine at the adjacent Taproom, too—the popular restaurant fills up fast on the weekends. The food, service, and atmosphere are most enjoyable. The halibut fish tacos, fish and chips, and the Taproom burger are standouts—paired with more Firestone Walker craft beer, of course.
Sun food, wine, and occasional beer writer Wendy Thies Sell still loves to be pleasantly surprised by food and drink. E-mail her suggestions at wthies@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Feb 28 – Mar 7, 2013.