[12/29 Update: “LB is fermented entirely with the brettanomyces from 3 Fonteinen and several wine yeasts, plus whatever was living on the berries. There is no saccharomyces cerevisiae in the process for this beer.”]

(Ithaca, NY) – From the makers of Ithaca Brute, ranked #51 on Beer Advocate, comes another sour ale. Expect Ithaca LeBleu to be ready soon as it just received label approval this week and was ready to bottle as of early December. Unfortunately, only 150 cases or so of the brew will be available. To put that into perspective, that is more or less 12% of the recently released batch of the limited Brooklyn Black Ops. The brewery’s Jeff O’Neil said that the beer would mostly be available in-store; it was unknown just how much would go into distribution.

Here is the scoop from the brewery’s blog three weeks ago: “In other huge news, we’re having our first ever day of simul-bottling- with one 3-man crew doing about 150 cases of LeBleu and the other rocking out 1,000 case equivalents of CascaZilla. ‘LeBleu’ you say? Yep, it’s finally ready to bottle. It’s a blend of 8 different wine barrels of aged sour beers from 2007, 2008 and 2009 each spiked with 50 lbs of fresh, hand-crushed local blueberries this past August. It is a really unique beer, and each of the barrels brought it’s own element to the blend. It’s very sour and dry, brilliantly red colored with a beautiful cap of pink foam and has that unmistakable blueberry aroma. I sampled each barrel and the overall blend while transferring them to the bottling tank, and the sum of parts is really pretty special.

For those curious about the name, it’s for our old friend (and 2nd IBC employee) Bret LeBleu. He and his wife Catherine and daughter Audrey moved back to Ithaca this year, and it’s great to have them around…what with all of the brettanomyces and blueberries it just was a natural fit with the beer. Next Friday, we’ll be bottling Twelve…the highest gravity beer we’ve brewed to date, and after a couple of weeks of conditioning, these 2 newest additions to the Excelsior!”

Packaged in 750’s. Also be on the lookout for Ithaca Twelve 750’s on store shelves very soon. It appeared at the brewery this past Tuesday, on sale for $10/bottle.