If you thought that the cans that are now showing up all around town, and in the taproom at Urban Artifact were exciting, well… hold on to your beer glass, the brewery is letting loose with the first of their bottle releases.  I can hear your excitement through my keyboard, and worry not – I have all the details about this first Urban Artifact bottle.

About Thoroughbred

If you are a regular visitor of the Northside taproom, you’ll no doubt be at least slightly familiar with this beer.  The beer was one of the very first available when they opened their doors in April of 2015.  In fact, it was their first barrel aged beer ever.  This second “edition” of the beer takes all that deliciousness that you could find in the first, and beefs it up even higher.

The beer is a bourbon barrel aged Imperial Amber Lager, with Brettanomyces Claussenii.  It’s designed to pay homage to the bourbon itself, with a grain bill that is built to blend “impeccably” with the bourbon barrel’s character.  What you get is a 9.1% ABV beer, with ph of 3.9.  It’s flavors run the gamut of bourbon, oakiness and vanilla.  The Brett brings a subtle tropical fruit character with some papaya and coconut notes present.

The Bottle Release

This Friday, December 16th at 4pm, the brewery will unleash these guys into the wild, along with a limited number of Thoroughbred branded tulip glasses being sold to go along with the beer.  Bottles will run 14.99 plus tax and there will (of course) also be live music in the taproom… so stick around – grab some bottles, grab some cans – do your thing!

The most exciting part about this release is that is signals a new start to what Urban Artifact is known for.  The brewery has already started making waves locally with some of the fun stuff they’ve been putting out in their taproom, it’s extremely exciting for me to start to think about the possibilities now that we can start bringing bottles to share with people, or building stashes of their beer in our own cellars.

It’s hard to predict what will be next – but I’m fairly certain that those of us who missed out on joining their ‘Explorer’ club, where you got to preorder some of their first bottle releases, are going to be kicking ourselves very soon about it!

Make sure you head over to their facebook event page, share it with your friends – make plans.  This is good stuff!