Capital Eternal Flame

Capital Eternal Flame

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Brewed by Capital Brewery

Middleton, WI, United States

Style:  Doppelbock

9.1% Alcohol by Volume

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The Eternal Flame is Capital Brewery's 25th anniversary beer and has been in the planning stage for roughly 20 years. Sort of. Sometime in the very late 1980's I was at a Master Brewers meeting at Miller in Milwaukee. And I happened to strike up a conversation with a gentleman who had been in the industry for many years. And he told me he worked at Ballantine when Prohibition had ended and spent decades there. As we spoke he mentioned that when Ballantine first began packaging after Prohibition they had a holding tank that they never emptied. Meaning it was filled when they began brewing again in the early 30's and when they drew beer out of this tank there was always some left back, and the tank would be refilled with the next batch. This was done until the brewery shut down sometime in the late 1960's. Ballantine subsequently has been brewed by a number of different breweries, and is still available in some areas of the country today. My first thought upon hearing this story was wow, the beer has to have some bacterial infection issues due to this technique. The second was, how cool, while you were enjoying Ballantine as time marched on, you still have a tiny amount of the beer that was produced soon after Prohibition. So I filed that away in an area of my brain where interesting conversations are kept and forgot about it. Fast forward to a couple decades later where I found myself in a bar on Washington Island. We were celebrating the annual harvest of wheat for our Island Wheat beer and Capital's President and I were considering a problem I had over a few beers. I thought I over produced Autumnal Fire for that year and we were discussing how to handle the excess liquid (turns out I hadn't, the beer was needed!). One of the options I offered was to store the beer until the following year when suddenly the long forgotten conversation from the distant past exploded out of my memory cores. Epiphany! Instead of trying to solve some mundane problem it was time to do something that really counted, create a new beer! And a few more trips to the tap later a concept was born and now, 2 years later, has become a reality. Sunday, April 17th, 2011 was the 25th anniversary of Capital Brewery's first brew. So of course we celebrated by brewing. We set up the Supper Club Playboy's (playing your jazz and country favorites from the 20's and 30's) in front of the brewing vessels and a few hundred folks stopped by to help us brew. What we produced was a brew of Autumnal Fire, our most notorious product. This has an Oktoberfest personality that has been amplified to Doppelbock strength. We eneded up doing 3 brews of Fire which gave us about 55 barrels of this beer. Over the next couple of days we did 4 brews of something I threw together called "Imperial Fire". This was a Doppelbock with a different formula than Autumnal Fire to which we then added a bunch of candi sugar to boost its strength. We brewed 65 barrels of this beer and both of the beers were fermented and aged 6 weeks of age. We then combined the 2 and now have 120 barrels of the "Birth Beer" version of what is Eternal Flame. We then took half of this beer from the lagering tank in mid-August and did a limited number of cases and kegs, presenting the first version of the Eternal Flame. So what is planned with the remaining 60 barrels of the Birth Beer? First, I need to come up with another Doppelbock to brew and we will brew about 60 barrels of this beer. And when it is a couple months old we will combine it with the 60 barrels we have remaining of the first version of Eternal Flame. We will now have 120 barrels of Eternal Flame - Version #2 hanging around with us for a year. At that time we will package half of Flame 2. We then will come up with another Doppelbock and, you got it, brew it and combine it with the 60 barrels we have of Flame 2, creating Eternal Flame - Version #3. We plan to continue to do this, remembering that no matter how this beer evolves or what it becomes there will always be a small amount of the Autumnal Fire we brewed on the 25th anniversary of Capital Brewery's very first brew. Hence the name, the Eternal Flame. The first Flame is going to remind one of Autumnal Fire as it should. The Fire itself is about 45% of the beer and Imperial Fire is a version of an Oktoberfest/Marzen as is Autumnal. And this is how I felt it should be because Autumnal Fire was the first brew of the concept. Both beers are lucious malt beasts yet I find the Eternal Flame's mouth feel and flavor is not as chewy as Autumanl Fire's. Which makes sense becasue the Imperial brews used a lower amount of specialty malts than Fire, giving us more alcohol and a beer with less body. The Flame still has a great depth of malt richness but it is more tempered, with toffee, brown sugar, dark fruits being descriptors of the flavors I taste. And the beer exhibits a very nice alcoholic warmth. Being a Doppelbock, Eternal Flame has moderate bittering and no hop flavor. It will be interesting to taste how the birth beer eveloves over time and how it will compare to future vintages of this beer when tasted vertically. So how long will we continue to do this? Until hell freezes over, until entropy rules, until Armageddon, or until I screw it up. Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy the beer. - Kirby Nelson, Brewmaster