FBS: Barrel No. 1

Bottles are only available to Forgotten Barrel Society members.

When Wild Mind opened in July 2016, we set out to create unique, quality beers with a funky twist and a heavy emphasis on barrel aging and spontaneous fermentation. Today, if you take a peek behind the glass into our wood cellar you’ll see more than 164 barrels and six French oak foeders — nearly all filled with beers that are waiting until they’re ready for your glass.

We can’t express enough how grateful we are to all of our customers for your support since we opened our doors in South Minneapolis. In 2018, we’ll continue providing great beers in a great atmosphere for family, friends, and dogs alike. There have been some wild beer releases over the past 18 months, but the best is yet to come, especially with the launch of The Forgotten Barrel Society.

A membership program was in the plans from the beginning, but we needed to give the beers time to develop. The society is a way for us to share some of our wildest, most complex beers with some our wildest customers, and now it’s finally time to get The Forgotten Barrel Society going with the inaugural FBS beer release: Barrel No.1.

A year and a half ago, we filled our first-ever barrel with a saison and left it to wait until the day came to share it with our first-ever society members.

Barrel No.1, is a barrel-fermented, barrel-aged saison that waited in that first barrel we filled for more than a year and a half. We check barrels about every other week, waiting for the beer to get tart and funky while also waiting for the yeast to clean up some flavors.

Finally ready, this once-simple saison has a tantalizing nose of apricot, fresh-cut oak, and citrus and tastes even better with notes of red wine, apricot, light vanilla, and rustic funk. The Minnesota oak barrel from Kelvin Cooperage (a Tennessee distillery) provides a hint of oaky flavor to round out perhaps our most complex beer so far. Barrel No.1 is a well-balanced, tart saison that grew from its humble roots to become something truly special.