Back in 2012, we threw the most recent rendition of our Small Batch Festival here at Odell. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Small Batch, it was more or less a big ole’ party at the brewery. Akin to your typical backyard afternoon social, but with an extended invitation to the whole neighborhood. As brewers, we supply the brew, and with the goal of offering things that we had squirrelled away a few kegs of here and there. One such brew was “Totes McGoats”, a project that I had the good fortune to work on. It was, to my knowledge, the brewery’s first foray into wine hybrid brewing. We used Riesling grapes from the Western Slope of Colorado, and a blend of staves suspended in a tote added to a wheat based beer. This was the genesis of what would later become Amuste, and returns full circle to you today as Jaunt. The only difference is, we didn’t use a tote, but a stainless fermentor with the staves suspended in it. That, and we played a little with the malt, and stave combination. So it’s not exactly the same, but hey, we are craft brewers after all and as such, are never satisfied. Riesling grape adds a distinct light tree fruit note, as well as a delicate aroma of perfumed honeysuckle and touch of acidity to the finish. The oak staves provide a background balance in the form of light vanilla, almond, and Dr. Pepper-esque characters, with a lingering tannin structure. Sadly we’re not able to bring back Small Batch this year. Hopefully, those of you who were able to attend in 2012 (and those who were not), will get a small taste of what Small Batch was.

– A Quality Guy

“01001001 01100110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01110010 01100101 01100001 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00101100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01101011 01101001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01101110 01100101 01110010 01100100 00101110. It’s binary code for, ‘If you can read this, you are my kind of nerd.”  (Eli Kolodny is the QA/QC manager for Odell Brewing).