Thursday, February 23, 2012

TWCP and Schlafly Bourbon Barrel Quad

Schlafly and The Wine and Cheese Place Bourbon Barrel Aged Quadrupel

only 204 bottles made!!

Schlafly and The Wine and Cheese Place Bourbon
Barrel Aged Quadrupel

only 204 bottles made!!

We are very proud to release the first in our series of Barrel Aged Beers. This is a very unique program where we supply local breweries with a Bourbon Barrel and they age a beer in it for 6 months or more and bottle the beer exclusively for The Wine and Cheese Place. To our knowledge, this is the first and only program like this in the country to have a retailer buy a full barrel of Bourbon to sell and then re-use the barrel to have our own full barrel of beer to sell!!! These are one of a kind, very rare and limited beers.

Read about our barrel aged program -- click here

The Wine and Cheese Place Barrel Aged Beer Collaboration #1

The Wine and Cheese Place is extremely excited and proud to announce the first release in an amazing series of barrel aged collaboration beers with local Missouri breweries....

We have recently been selecting and purchasing our own barrels of Bourbon. We taste through a number of barrel samples and then choose which barrel we like the best. The Bourbon distillery then bottles the Bourbon for us with our own label and normally would clean and ship the barrel to us for display. But, we thought, why waste this perfect vessel for display purposes, why not use it to age a delicious beer? We asked the Bourbon distilleries if they would not wash, clean, or do anything to the barrel and just ship it to us as is -- they all said yes! The Wine and Cheese Place Barrel Aged Collaboration Series was born.

The first in the series is with Schlafly -- St. Louis' original craft brewery....

The Wine and Cheese Place Collaboration #1 with Schlafly
The St. Louis Brewery, Schlafly, paved the way for craft breweries in St. Louis. Without Schlafly, the booming St. Louis Craft beer scene that we are currently experiencing would not be happening right now. When this Collaboration Series first germinated, I approached Dan Kopman of Schlafly first because of everything they have done for us and for St. Louis beer scene. Dan and Schlafly were on board and the wheels were in motion on the collaboration series.

The Life of Buffalo Trace Barrel No.15
Here is the barrel the day it arrived to The Wine and Cheese Place in Clayton, MO on August 5, 2011. We also got in 22 cases of Buffalo Trace Bourbon that were aged in this very barrel we hand picked after tasting through 5 barrels. This is barrel Lot 03 A 06 - Barrel #15.
We will officially call it Barrel #15

Here is a picture of one of the bottles of Bourbon that came out of Barrel #15.

Barrel #15 only enjoyed the comforts of our Clayton store for a few hours (and a few photos) as I loaded it in my truck and delivered it directly to Schlafly's Tap Room downtown because we did not want the barrel to dry out at all.