Say hello to Bramblin’ On My Mind – the latest specialty release from our Barrelworks wild ale cellar, recently featured in our beer club and now available for a limited time online and at all Firestone Walker locations.
Bramblin’ On My Mind was co-fermented with fresh marionberries at an audacious ratio of three pounds per each gallon of beer. From the berry to the bottle, Bramblin’ On My Mind summons the jammy bouquet of a freshly picked blackberry basket, followed by rich, opulent berry flavors and oak tannins.
The story of this beer begins with SLOambic, one of our very first wild ales that actually predates the founding of Barrelworks in 2012. The first SLOambic was produced in 2009, back when our wild ale program was a fledgling and rogue effort out of our main brewery campus in Paso Robles.
The original SLOambic – all 250 gallons of it – was made with a little-known local blackberry called the olallieberry, and it became an instant classic. Within a few years, our wild ale program had grown to such an unimaginable scale that it necessitated its own dedicated facility, located a safe 90 miles down the road in Buellton. We called it Barrelworks, our cathedral of barrels dedicated to all things wild.
Over the years, we have recreated this beer using different blackberry variants, and now Bramblin’ On My Mind lands as a unique interpretation of the original idea – essentially an ode to the classic SLOambic.
Enter the marionberries (another blackberry cultivar) that were liberally included in the fermentation mix, infusing the beer with luscious fruit flavors. The beer was matured in oak barrels for 24 months prior to blending and bottling, but out of the glass it still tastes “100-percent berry to bottle,” as the Barrelworks crew puts it.
Treat yourself to this uniquely fruited wild ale whose roots run deep at Firestone Walker.