This is a new beer for us... one really driven by Luke. Many of y'all would have had the chance to meet Luke, but if not, Mr Hipper has been working alongside me since July 2017. Coming to us from the wine word, Luke had come fresh to Sydney from the Mornington as the assistant winemaker at Kooyong/Port Phillip Estate. His background in cool climate wine, excellent palate and even better work ethic have contributed more to Wildflower, our house character and blending style particularly, than I could recall in a week. For some time, he has been urging me to blend fruits... for all of the St beers so far we have worked with single fruits and while this has its benefits in highlighting the purity of a certain varietal or orchard... Luke reckoned that, especially in the case of St Phoebe (raspberries), the overall beer could do with some rounding of the palate. So, seeing as how we will not be releasing a wider raspberry beer at all this year... (St Phoebe this year is with plums, and likely will be for some time to come as we still cannot source fresh raspberries in a sustainable way), 2020 was the perfect opportunity to play around with blending raspberries with both blueberries and boysenberries. The former to add a sweetness and the latter to boost the natural juicy berry character of the raspberries. All 80kg of fruit was blended in tank in late October 2019 and we racked barrel 1760 of 21 month old Gold onto the fruit cake for maceration and refermentation which lasted until December 2019 when we bottled the cuvee. We decided against blending this one down, just to watch how these fruits interplayed at full force overtime. We tasted this bottle with our mate Jesse Kennedy, owner of Poor Toms Distillery and he pulled out a huge fruit cup aroma with a smooth backend aroma coming from the blueberry sweetness. The flavour to him was walking through a berry field. Overall, its a heavily fruited beer that to us shows some balance and use for mixing up fruits. While it is drinking just like juice now, we suspect to see the reward of the mixture in 6 to 8 months time. The label for Titaness is a small section of the huge doors at the back of the brewery. Different parts of these doors are responsible for 3 (so far) of the labels for the '20 Collective. The name draws from Phoebe, who in Greek mythology was a Titan (thus Titaness) and grandmother to Apollo and Artemis. She is also a crazy and fun three year old red head who is Chris' daughter. ----- Each member will receive 1 x 750ml bottle of Titaness as part of their membership. We have an additional 120 x 750ml bottles, as well as 12 x 1.5 litre magnums, available for Collective members to purchase on a first come basis from 12pm (Sydney time) on Wednesday 6 May. There is no limit on 750ml bottles but a 1 bottle limit per person on the magnums.
