December 23rd, 2014
31 Beers of December – Day 21: Yazoo Embrace the Funk Indomitus Dolium Ale
@YazooBrew @BeerMakesThree
To celebrate the Holiday Season, we have teamed up with beer bloggers and craft beer enthusiasts around the country to host the fourth annual beer bloggers advent calendar. This is the season of sharing and we intend to share our love of beer with you.
During the 31 days of December, we will be sharing our favorite regional/winter seasonals/holiday beers with the help from our fellow beer bloggers. We hope that you tune in every day, to hear our stories and share our holiday cheer.
Yazoo Embrace the Funk Indomitus Dolium Ale
Blogger: June & Kendall Joseph
Website: www.beermakesthree.com
Twitter / Facebook / Instagram: @BeerMakesThree / https://www.facebook.com/beermakesthree
/ http://instagram.com/beermakesthree
About Kendall & June: We’re beer lovers from Nashville, TN. Good beer is taking off in the South! It’s an exciting place to be a beer lover, with new breweries launching all the time.
Beer: Yazoo Embrace the Funk Indomitus Dolium Ale
Brewery: Yazoo Brewing Company, Nashville, TN
Website: http://yazoobrew.com/ and http://yazoobrew.com/beer/embrace-the-funk/
Twitter: @YazooBrew
Beer Details:
-Style: Old Ale
-ABV: 10.1%
-IBU: 20
-Aged in Cognac barrels with Brettanomyces, and a fresh dose of Brett prior to bottling
-A collaboration with Rocky Mountain Barrel Company, who provided the rare French Cognac barrels.
Commercial Description:
A collaboration with our friends at Rocky Mountain Barrel Company, this English Old Ale is aged in rare Cognac barrels from France. Dark Ruby in color with warming cherry and dark fruit notes. A secondary addition of classic “Old World” Brettanomyces strains will continue to evolve in the bottle.
Why we selected Indomitus Dolium:
Yazoo made our Christmas season a bit more joyous with their release of the Embrace the Funk (ETF) Indomitus Dolium ale. We’re really enjoying this beer and think it’s one of the best from the new ETF series. Many of the ETF beers are bottled in 750ml bottles, but the Indomitus Dolium was bottled in 12oz bottles, so we were able to pick up a six-pack.
Although Nashville had a few brewpubs, Yazoo was the first production brewery when it opened in 2003. In 2012, Yazoo started working with Brandon Jones, a top-notch homebrewer who specializes in sour/funky beers, to create the Yazoo ETF series of beers. They released their first bottles on Jan. 26, 2014, a Flanders Red, called Deux Rouges. Their Cherry Deux Rouges was released at Yazoo’s Funk Fest in May 2014. It went on to win a Bronze at the 2014 GABF in the Wood & Barrel-Aged Sour Beer category. Not bad for a brewery that’s only been in the sour business for two years. All the ETF beers share a common label, designed by Nashville’s Black 13 Tattoo shop.
Indomitus Dolium pours a deep red, nearly brown. It’s unfiltered, so it’s a hazy pour. It has aromas of fruit, funk and a touch of sour. However, when we taste it, we don’t pick up the sour, just flavors of fruit, funk and malt. Being an Old Ale, we notice a malty-sweetness. It’s rich in the middle, but not cloyingly sweet like some Old Ales can be. There’s also some caramel and nutty notes and the fruit is a berry mix. The Brett character is more fruity, than funky. There’s a funk, but we get a lot of strawberry. It has a medium mouthfeel, very lightly carbonated, and the sweet in the middle fades to a nearly dry finish. Indomitus Dolium is complex. There is a lot going on, but in a good way. One thing you don’t get is heat or alcohol, it’s very smooth. That could be dangerous in a 10.1% beer!
I asked Brandon Jones, Yazoo’s Wrangler of Funk, to tell us more about Indomitus Dolium. Here are some excerpts from that conversation:
“My friend Skyler at Rocky Mountain Barrel Company and I had been talking for a while about doing a collaboration. We had never heard of a Barrel Broker/Brewery collab before. We talked about what barrels were available and what each of us enjoyed about the spirits that were previously in those barrels. We both especially liked Cognac and the nutty, toffee, caramel notes…
We both agreed on Old Ale. I think this is a slightly misunderstood style of beer. I wanted to go historical on this beer. When they brewed these beers in the 1800’s they were aged in Oak which did harbor Brettanomyces. To mimic this I pitched our Brett secondary as it went into the barrels after a couple of days of Stainless fermentation with our house English Ale yeast…
I released these beers at a certain time so as these bottles age in a person’s “stock” of ales (just like what would historically happen) they will evolve…
The name Idomitus Dolum was Skyler’s idea… its Latin for ‘Wild/Untamed Casks’.”
Thanks, Brandon! We’ve got a few bottles cellared away and can’t wait to see how the Brett changes the beer over time. If you’re ever in Music City USA, stop by the Yazoo Taproom in the Brewery District. Indomitus Dolium will be gone, you can be sure to find another great ETF beer on tap, as well as all of Yazoo’s non-infected beers.
About Beer Makes Three:
Hi. We’re June & Kendall from Nashville, TN. We blog together about our shared love of beer. Our goal is to evangelize and educate our readers about the great world of beer, especially Southern beer. Contact Kendall at kendall@beermakesthree.com or June at june@beermakesthree.com. June is also the founder of the Nashville chapter of Girls’ Pint Out, you can follow them at @nashvillegpo. Please ping us if you’re ever passing through Nashville.
About Yazoo Brewing Co:
Yazoo Brewing really started with a homebrewing kit bought from the back pages of Rolling Stone in 1993. I was a cash-poor college student living in an old farmhouse in Virginia, and brewing my own beer seemed a little less illegal than the pot-growing operation my other housemates were involved in. I was amazed that I could make something that actually tasted like beer at home! I kept on brewing, even when my wife Lila and I returned home to Mississippi after college, and then when we moved to Nashville in 1996.
In October 2003, we opened the doors and began selling kegs of Yazoo Pale Ale, Dos Perros, Spring Wheat, and Onward Stout to local bars and restaurants, quickly gaining an enthusiastic local following. We replaced the Spring Wheat with our Hefeweizen after winning a Gold Medal for the hefeweizen at the 2004 Great American Beer Festival, and started bottling our beers in 2005. Other local favorites like our Sly Rye Porter and our Hop Project rounded out our line-up of beers. In 2009, we managed to brew Tennessee’s first ever legal high-gravity ale, Yazoo Sue, after managing to get a distillery license. Our little brewery grew and grew, until we couldn’t fit any more equipment in the building.
After six years, we had outgrown our original brewery, and in 2010 decided to purchase a building for a new brewery in the Gulch, at 910 Division Street. With the addition of a new 40 barrel brewhouse, and lots of room for bigger tanks, we were able to continue to grow. Yazoo beer can now be found in most of Tennessee, Mississippi, and northern Alabama. We are the proud brewers of Gerst beer, reviving a brand that was once a Nashville legend before Prohibition, and also brew the ‘Hap and Harry’s’ beers for our partners at R.S. Lipman, our first ever distributor here in Nashville. We’re excited to be riding the wave of good beer that is sweeping across the Southeast! Cheers!
Visit the brewery online at http://yazoobrew.com