Steppiing up generation 2 of Gigayeast Saison II from gen1 yeast cake with hops.

It’s time that I brewed a second beer to put into the clean Rum Barrel I picked up at the beginning of the year. It currently has v5 of Makkurokurosuke RIS. I’m extremely excited for this one. All of the barrel-aged RIS have been phenomenal, this one won’t be anything less. Before I can rack the RIS I need to have a replacement beer brewed to minimize the amount of time that the barrel remains empty. In the previous barrel, I cleaned it out and filled it with vodka. While that worked out just fine I don’t want to waste any time since I need to get a 3rd beer in and out before this Winter when I’ll brew a second batch of Woxbic, the Woxford lambic-style beer.

I struggled with what exactly to put into a 11 gallon Rum barrel. Previously I’ve brewed a Strong Scotch and a Robust Porter for whiskey barrel. I’ve also put a barleywine and shortly a Belgian Quad, so I was looking for something a bit different. I started thinking about what flavors go well with Rum and several mixed drinks came to mind. I’m not much of a liquor drinker, but when I did dabble, I really enjoyed Rum and Coke and Rum with Orange Juice; a screwdriver if Google is to be believed. I really liked the idea of mixing fruity hops with rum and then a solid dry beer finish. It also helped that I had a large slurry of Gigayeast Saison II from my last saison.

This will be the same grain bill (but bigger) as for Tajín, but with a few choice hop replacements to really focus on citrus, fruit and spice. I used Summer in previous which came out really nice. I swapped Fuggle for Willamette as I was out and still wanted some earthy, spice. Meridian is fruit gold so I wanted some of that. Galaxy is another really fruity flavor. Finally, some Apollo for that orange, tangerine citrus.

This should ferment out cleaning in less than a month after which I’ll rack and bottle the RIS and add this beer into the rum barrel for a month or so. It’s a lighter beer which means it won’t take as much contact time to pull in the rum flavors.

Enjoy Dai Tajín!