(Houston, TX) – Saint Arnold Brewing sent out a newsletter update today with a few words on DR10…

“It’s up to you as to whether you vote first, then go get DR10 or do it the other way around, but if you vote first, do it early. And whatever you do, don’t sample DR10 and then vote!

Divine Reserve No. 10 is an English Barleywine, and an alcoholic one at that! It was inspired by Chris Landis’ winning entry in the 2010 Big Batch Brew Bash homebrew competition. This is a beer that not only will age well, but we are recommending aging it. It is clocking in at 11% ABV and could use some cellaring time. When enjoying it, we recommend serving it at around 60¬∞F. This really brings out the malt and fruit character in the beer (there isn’t any actual fruit in the beer). We were concerned that we had overhopped the beer when first tasting it in the fermenter, but the hop bitter has mellowed quite a bit. Having said that, it is on the hoppy side for an English Barleywine.

This is the first Divine Reserve that we have brewed on our new brewhouse and it provided some technical challenges. Brewhouses are designed for brewing 5% ABV beers and we had to get quite creative in how we moved the wort around in our brewhouse to be able to brew such a high gravity beer. Also, we had hoped to make a much larger batch of DR10 – our goal was to make about 50% more than we did of DR9. Instead we only netted about a 20% increase. Thus, the supply is going to again be tight, and much tighter than we hoped it would be. We apologize for this and are already planning some changes to our brewhouse piping that will facilitate us making larger batches of Divine Reserve in the future.

By the way, while the release date is November 2, that doesn’t mean that every store will receive their shipment that day. Some stores have delivery days that will result in their receiving the beer later in the week.”