Opal Noyaux

6,0 % abv

Opal Noyaux is a blend of two Dutch gerstes macerated on Opal plums and their kernels for a couple of months before being bottled on the 29th of December, 2021.

After trying some plum sours in the past year, I really wanted to try and create one myself. A good friend of mine has some very tasty Opal plums growing in his backyard, and I was very pleased I could use a part of his yearly harvest for my plum beer.

The base beers are, as you know by now, two Gerstes with an average age of 13 months, one being 11 months and the other one being 15 months old. These beers had a very pleasent acidity and a moderate level of funkyness.

The plums I used for this blend were quite small. This has a couple of effects. First of all, you get more flavor from them, so that’s a great start. The fruit intensity of this blend was about 225 grams of plums per liter. These plums also impart a lot of color because of the amount of skin compared to the amount of flesh. The result is a kind of a darker pale gerste with intense plum notes.

It also has some almond-notes in the aftertaste, which come from the kernels, or pits, from the fruit. They were macerated seperate from the fruit to maximize surface contact and thus flavor. Because of the small size of the plums, you have more pits per kilo of fruit, so more flavor aswell. In my opinion, it turned out pretty decent 🙂