Fourteen barrels of neutral French oak represents the next course for this 5-year-old Toronto-based craft brewery, Halo Brewery.

“The first beers in our barrel aged Wild Construct series represent over two years of hard work”, said Founder and Head Brewer Callum Hay who started acquiring and filling barrels in September 2019. “We’re currently aging each barrel for 1-2 years before letting the characteristics of the barrels determine how we blend and what fruits/adjuncts we combine them with before bottle aging them for an additional few months.”

To date, two of the beers in the series have been released in the barrel program’s inaugural year: Primer and Prelude. Primer is a 2-year blend of barrel aged golden ale re-fermented on yuzu purée. Prelude is a golden ale blend of three barrels each aged for 16-20 months and refermented on fresh Niagara peaches. A third barrel aged golden ale, Precursor, is currently being dry beaned on locally roasted bourbon barrel aged Ugandan coffee beans and is slated to be released in early 2022.

“The name itself is a play on the contrast of order and chaos in nature.” Hay explains about the name, Wild Construct. “The ‘order’ is the initial conditions imparted by the recipe, microorganisms, and environment. The ‘chaos’ is the explosion of complexity that arises once those microorganisms get to work.”

Each barrel is treated with a unique set of wild yeast and bacteria captured from spontaneous and wild ales made by breweries all over the world, that Hay has been meticulously harvesting, growing and blending for years in anticipation of a barrel program. Using the solera technique, these barrels will be refilled and continue aging on the developed yeast and bacteria in each one, releasing a unique set of complex beers each year. 

Photo courtesy of Halo Brewery